Future Theory: A Handbook to Critical Concepts 9781472567352, 9781474219716, 9781472567369

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Future Theory

Also Available from Bloomsbury Conflicting Humanities, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy Thinking in the World: A Reader, ed. Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova

Future Theory A Handbook to Critical Concepts Edited by Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Patricia Waugh, Marc Botha and Contributors, 2021 Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Clare Turner Cover image: Temple IX © Chitra Parvathy Merchant c/o Smithson Gallery. Photo by Jo Hounsome All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Waugh, Patricia, editor. | Botha, Marc, editor. Title: Future theory : a handbook to critical concepts / edited by Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020051014 (print) | LCCN 2020051015 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472567352 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472567369 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472567376 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social change–Philosophy. | Future, The–Philosophy. | Progress–Philosophy. | Change. Classification: LCC HM831 .F88 2021 (print) | LCC HM831 (ebook) | DDC 303.401–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051014 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051015 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-6735-2 ePDF: 978-1-4725-6736-9 eBook: 978-1-4725-6737-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction  Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha Section 1 Rethinking Change 1 Memory  Enzo Traverso 2 Community  Mick Smith 3 Remainder  Andrew Gibson 4 Paradigm  Patricia Waugh 5 Movement  Esther Leslie Section 2 Boundaries and Crossings 6 Threshold  Matthew Calarco 7 Periphery  Paulina Aroch Fugellie 8 Exception  Justin Clemens 9 Migration  Mieke Bal 10 Privacy Alexander García Düttmann Section 3 Ruptures and Disruptions 11 Catastrophe Jean-Michel Rabaté 12 Event Mark Currie 13 Revolutions Aleš Erjavec 14 Interference Emily Apter 15 Irreversibility Claire Colebrook Section 4 Assemblages and Realignments 16 Fragmentation Maebh Long 17 Hybrid Roger Luckhurst 18 Network Graham Harman 19 Dissemination Jon Adams 20 Institution Simon Critchley

vii viii xiii 1

41 53 77 93 115

129 143 159 175 203

213 225 237 253 263

281 297 311 321 333

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Section 5 Horizons and Trajectories 21 Climate Timothy Clark 22 Decolonization Nelson Maldonado-Torres 23 Resilience Sarah Atkinson 24 Hospitality Derek Attridge 25 Risk Marc Botha 26 Hope Caroline Edwards Index

345 361 383 397 411 433 449

List of Figures   2.1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, frontispiece by Abraham Bosse, 1651. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain   2.2 Haeckel’s diagrammatic representation of a siphonophore (of the genus Physophora). His key reads a΄: air-bladder or swimming-bladder at its top end; m: swimming-person or swimming bell; o: opening of the bell; t: sensory-persons or tactile polyps; g: egg-forming or female persons; n: nutritive-persons or eating-polyps’   9.1 Roos Theuws, Gaussian Blur   9.2 Roos Theuws, Gaussian Blur   9.3 William Kentridge, Shadow Procession   9.4 Jesús Segura, I Can Be You   9.5 Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance   9.6 Mieke Bal, Nothing Is Missing   9.7 Célio Braga, Dalice   9.8 Célio Braga, Dalice 12.1 Badiou: Event

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61 178 179 181 182 183 184 192 193 230

Notes on Contributors Jon Adams is currently a film-maker at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Interference Patterns (2015) which investigates the possibility and desirability of making a science of literary criticism. From 2005 to 2010, he was a researcher on the ‘How Well Do “Facts” Travel?’ project at LSE’s Department of Economic History. In 2011, he was selected as one of the BBC’s ‘New Generation Thinkers’. Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She has written numerous books and articles on translation and untranslatability, including Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). She has recently published a book on micropolitics, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstructionism, Impasse, and the Impolitic (2017). Paulina Aroch Fugellie is Associate Professor at UAM Cuajimalpa, Mexico City. Her background is in literature, theatre, postcolonial theory and ideology critique. She has published widely on contemporary intellectual production in the Global South. Her recent books are Unrealized Promises: The Subject of Postcolonial Discourse and the New International Division of Labour (2015) and Shylock and African Socialism: Julius Nyerere’s Postcolonial Shakespeare (2019). She guest-edited a special issue of Open Cultural Studies on Marx: Semiotics and Political Praxis (2018). For his collaboration on the essay included here, she would like to thank Brían Hanrahan, visiting researcher at 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Mexico City. Sarah Atkinson is Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. She has published widely on health and well-being, arts and health, and medical humanities. Her books include Wellbeing and Place, with S. Fuller and J. Painter (2012) and Geohumanities and Health, edited with R. Hunt (2019). She is a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (2016). With Marc Botha and Patricia Waugh, she was a researcher on the 2010–15 Leverhulme Project, ‘Tipping Points’. Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor, University of York. His many books include The Singularity of Literature (2004); The Work of Literature (2015); Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (1988); The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019) and, with Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (1992). Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and curator whose work focuses on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. Her forty-one

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books include a trilogy on political art. Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic (2017) demonstrates her integrated approach to academic, artistic and curatorial work. After documentaries on migratory culture, she made ‘theoretical fictions’: A Long History of Madness, and Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker (2016). Her film Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina explores the social aspects of thinking. Currently she exhibits a sixteen-channel video work, Don Quixote: Sad Countenances. Marc Botha is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Theory in the Department of English Studies at Durham University and Research Associate the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has written numerous essays on risk, fragility, minimalism and vulnerability. His books include A Theory of Minimalism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and a special issue of English Academy Review addressing ‘Fragile Futures’ (Routledge, 2014). From 2012 to 2015 he worked as postdoctoral research association on the Leverhulme Trust ‘Tipping Points’ project, with Patricia Waugh and Sarah Atkinson. He is currently working on a monograph, provisionally titled, Appearing in Disappearing: On the Politics and Poetics of Fragility. Matthew Calarco is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, where he teaches courses in continental philosophy, environmental ethics and animal studies. He is author most recently of Thinking through Animals (2015) and is currently completing a book entitled Beyond the Anthropological Difference. Timothy Clark is Professor of English Studies at Durham University. He has published numerous articles and books on philosophy, literary theory, aesthetics and issues around environmentalism, ecocriticism and climate change, including The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011) and Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015). His most recent publication is The Value of Ecocriticism (2019). Justin Clemens is Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of many books on contemporary European philosophy and psychoanalysis and co-editor of many more. These include the monographs Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (2013) and, with A. J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014). Recent collections include What Is Education? (2017) and Badiou and His Interlocutors (2018), both edited with A. J. Bartlett. His current research is on the compromised role played by Romantic poetry in the colonial establishment of Australia. Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written many books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture and feminist philosophy. She has recently published Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (co-authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, 2016).

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Simon Critchley is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of many books on philosophy, cultural theory, art and literature, including On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008), Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) and Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019). Mark Currie is Professor of Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His work focuses on the theory of narrative, literary theory and contemporary fiction. He has published widely in these fields and those of cultural theory and aesthetics. His recent work has concentrated on questions of time in philosophy, fiction and narrative. His recent publications include The Invention of Deconstruction (2013), About Time (2006) and The Unexpected (2013). Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on utopianism, science fiction, the philosophy of time and theories of Marxist revolutionary subjectivity. She has published numerous essays and articles and is the author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (2019), co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015). She is currently writing a book about science fiction and ecocatastrophe. Aleš Erjavec is Professor and Director of Research at the Philosophy Institute of the Slovenian Academy for Natural Sciences and Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Ljubljana. In addition, he holds the Chair in Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities in Koper. He writes on aesthetics, critical theory, postmodernism, art and the relation between aesthetics and ideology. His works include Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Movements (2015), Art and Aesthetics after Adorno (2010) and Impossible Histories (2006). Alexander García Düttmann is Professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin. His recent publications focus on art, aesthetics and politics and include Between Cultures (1997), Seeing for Others (2012) and What Is Contemporary Art? (2020). He has also translated Derrida’s works into German and edited Theory and Practice, an unpublished seminar by Jacques Derrida on Marx. Andrew Gibson is Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of numerous books, articles and essays on modern literature, theory and continental philosophy. His books include Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (2006), Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (2002), The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898–1915 (2013), Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (2011), and Misanthropy: The Critique of Humanity and Modernity (2017).

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Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He is the author of eighteen books, including Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018), Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009), Speculative Realism: An Introduction (2018) and, most recently, Art and Objects (2018). Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005), Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014), and Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016). Future work includes an exploration of what is meant by Turbid Media. Maebh Long is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests include modernist and contemporary literature in Ireland, Britain and Oceania, as well as literary theory and continental philosophy. She is the author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014) as well as the editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (2018) and co-editor of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (2019). She is a co-investigator of the Oceanian Modernism project, which links modernist studies and post-1960s independence and Indigenous rights literature from the Pacific. Her current project examines modernist discourses of medical and political immunity. Roger Luckhurst is Professor in English at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and essays on modern literature and culture. He works on Victorian and modern literature, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction. His publications include The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005), The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy (2012) and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015). His most recent book is Corridors: Passages of Modernity (2019). Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers. His first book, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (2008), examined the bases of modernity/ coloniality in terms of a paradigm of war through the work of Enrique Dussel, Frantz Fanon and Emmanuel Levinas. He is the co-editor of two special issues of the journal Transmodernity and is currently working on two book-length projects, Fanonian Meditations and Theorising the Decolonial Turn. Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, co-founder of the Slought Foundation and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory. Recent titles include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018),

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Rire au Soleil (2019), and the collections After Derrida (2018), New Beckett (2017) and Understanding Derrida/Understanding Modernism (2019). Forthcoming are Beckett and Sade and Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of Literature and Film. Mick Smith is Professor (jointly appointed between) in Philosophy and the School of Environmental Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He is author of An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social Theory (2001) and Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics and Saving the Natural World (2011). He is coeditor of Emotional Geographies and Emotion, Place and Culture (2009). His interests are in posthumanism and ecological community, emotion, place, and environmental ethics. Enzo Traverso is Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Europe at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history and political ideas of the twentieth century. His publications, widely translated, include a dozen authored and edited collections. Several of his works investigate the impact of political and mass violence in European culture. He is currently preparing a book on the representations of the Jewish intellectual in Germany, France and Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as an edited book on the history of revolutions. Patricia Waugh is Professor in the Department of English Studies, University of Durham. She has published a dozen books and edited collections and many essays on modern literature, philosophy and literary theory. She is currently completing a book, More than Ordinary Madness: Writers Hearing Voices, and working on a project on writers and wartime intelligence. With Marc Botha, she worked on the Leverhulme Project, ‘Tipping Points’, 2010–15, which provided the inspiration for this book.

Acknowledgements The idea for this book arose out of conversations we began with each other after working on a ground-breaking interdisciplinary project – housed in Durham University’s Institute for Hazard, Risk and Resilience – exploring the concept of ‘Tipping Points’ across the mathematical, environmental and social sciences, and the humanities. We are extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust who generously supported the project financially (project number FCD128/BF) and to Durham University and the Department of English Studies for granting us research time to work on our ideas. We would very much like to thank, too, Professor Sarah Curtis of Durham University, who took over as principal investigator in the last phase of the project and was very supportive of our desire to think through the crucial role of the humanities in the evolution of concepts and theories of radical change as we move into an increasingly unpredictable future. The work on this book – the task of developing our ideas, gathering together so many perspectives and essays, thinking through their implications, organizing such a very large body of material, and editing and processing so much exciting and challenging intellectual work – has been immense. We would like to thank Dr Rick de Villiers whose great conscientiousness, good humour and editing skills have been invaluable: we are extremely grateful to him. Our editors at Bloomsbury, Liza Thompson and Lucy Russell, have likewise been models of patience and support, and so too our many brilliant contributors. We owe to them too, a huge debt of gratitude for believing in us and in our project. We had little sense, as we embarked on the intellectual task of this book, that of all the various challenges and obstacles to its completion, not the least of them would be the arrival, at the end of 2019, of Covid-19 and the first pandemic in a century. Writing on the unpredictable and on complexity and radical change from the perspective of the humanities was, from the beginning and in the context of climate change, economic precarity, decolonization and neoliberalism, hardly untimely: but we never imagined just how timely, indeed how urgent, this project would so very quickly become.

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Introduction Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha

Some seventy years ago, George Orwell imagined into being a Hobbesian society of Big Brother, a world where the corporate, the consumer-driven and the totalitarian have narrowed and even shut down independent and creative thinking: The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no more words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten … every year fewer and fewer words and the range of consciousness a little smaller. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.1

Orwell’s major theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four was that the ability to imagine and work towards alternative futures depends on keeping alive the experience of an historical moment through language that is conceptually rich enough to grasp and convey its true complexity. Throughout his writing, Orwell sought to explore and expand the temporal genealogies and spatial geographies of words as they resist the will to essentialist abstraction. He believed that words and concepts – if they are to continue to resist conformity and containment – need to go abroad as well as carry with them the traces of the diverse kinds of company they have kept.2 For even in science, as the twentieth-century philosopher of science W. V. O. Quine also averred, concepts never arrive in single and discrete files but are deeply entangled with others in complex webs of belief.3 They are, as Deleuze too insists, ‘intensive multiplicities’ that struggle with chaos against doxa but resist the kind of simple verbal equivalence or correspondence evident in Orwell’s polemic against positivist reduction.4 That Newspeak shall not destroy independent thinking or the ability to recognize the threats to its existence, requires the continued exercise of creativity and responsibility in the construction and use of concepts to explore and describe material and intellectual environments. For Orwell, the social and political responsibility of all deliberative and non-utilitarian writing is to sustain and add to conceptual precision, diversity and richness. This is work that sometimes seems like a rescue mission, at other times a virtuoso performance, but undertaken always with a palpable sense of the dire consequences of its suppression or abandonment.

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What threatens this kind of conceptual richness in our own time? To behold the spectacle of symbolic as well as actual power wielded by political leaders and to listen to the conceptual impoverishment of much of the language of public debate might be to wonder whether Orwell’s nightmare vision of a future dominated by Newspeak has now – some seventy years on – finally materialized. The signs are everywhere: the ubiquity of social media sound bites; the global rise of authoritarian populist regimes that restrict or close down difference and diversity by reconstituting the wisdom of the crowd as ‘the people’ versus ‘elites’; the reign of bureaucratization, accountability and standardization; the hegemony of neoliberalism that continues with shibboleths of ‘growth’, ‘marketization’ and ‘healthy’ competition as if blind to the mounting evidence of economic crisis, unsustainability, the dire effects of austerity and global inequality. Buzzwords abound – conceptual short circuits – and spread with unprecedented digital speed to create fashionable trends and concepts, from ‘wellbeing’ to ‘wokeness’. But conceptual mindlessness as well as overzealous hygiene can infect critique too, especially when well-intentioned political slogans discourage acknowledgement or awareness of long and complex histories of struggle and resistance. It is in the context of this cultural and political backdrop that we arrived at our decision to present the question of theory’s future by exploring the concepts that seem most resonant and apposite in gathering and organizing the manifold ways in which our own historical moment seems one of transition and significant change. We asked each of our contributors to reflect, independently, genealogically and performatively on a particular concept that might be thought of as a keyword in articulating aspects of change and critical transition. We wanted to avoid the usual (dis)organization of the edited essay collection – by thinker, theorist, movement, discipline, kinds of academic affiliation – because we felt there was a pressing need for intellectual, historical and philological interrogation and creative improvisation on the key concepts themselves as they cut across thinkers, disciplines and movements. We also decided not to impose unnecessary constraints on the organization of individual essays, but to allow each author to approach a concept from perspectives and within intellectual frameworks chosen by them, rather than according to a specific disciplinary or rigid intellectual editorial template. We encouraged and sought difference and diversity in approaches, organization and, within generous limits, the length and style of each chapter. Our hunch, that allowing such intellectual freedom would produce writing of significant imaginative insight, as well as demonstrating the sheer range and vitality of contemporary critical thinking, has paid off. Read collectively, however, the essays reveal a remarkable unity of purpose, shared passion and overall intellectual coherence. We believe the volume offers a unique perspective on and debate around the future of theory and the contemporary problem of addressing futurity, even beyond our initial hopes for it.

Part one: Concepts, transitions and the role of theory thinking futures The concepts we have chosen to foreground are included because individually and collectively they offer a multi-perspectival and rigorous investigation of the pervasive

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yet curiously elusive problem of conceptual change in our time. Each essay proceeds through meditation on and interrogation of a single concept that reflects, engages or shapes the significant forms of innovation, transformation and transition in contemporary culture. Collectively they identify and interrogate terms most central to the urgent task of examining cultural change as a process of dynamic transition. Conceptual change is always entangled with historical structures of feeling, emergent senses of the new, that drive intellectual reflection on transition. Each generation refashions its conceptual tools in order to grasp and respond to the exigencies of its own moment and its ongoing reframing of histories. Crises often prompt the return to conceptual foundations and genealogies. Numerous of the most revolutionary approaches included here have been prefixed in a way which specifically draws attention to their capacity for rethinking the legacies of the concepts to which they respond. But at the same time, they show how it is impossible to ignore the sense of urgency which pervades much contemporary thought: the demand for something new which is less a reconfiguration or realignment of historical substance but defines itself as an openness to invention and might as easily be conceived ahistorically as historically, as a speculative trajectory as much as a genealogy. For the conceptual thinking that is theory is never simply tied reactively to an historical moment: to engage and reflect on new, older and emergent concepts that provide orientations for critical thinking requires some detachment from the immediate demand for pragmatic repurposing of tools for thought. This is true even of the current moment with its unusually intense, fast-moving and global sense of urgency around numerous political and economic issues: as this book goes to press, the coronavirus pandemic; global warming and environmental degradation; the rise of right-wing populist authoritarianism in the United States, Italy, Hungary, Poland, India, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand, the Philippines and the UK; the growing threats to the future of democracy as currently defined; new technologies that facilitate the rapid dissemination of information and misinformation; increasing attacks on minorities and a preoccupation with borders, walls and boundaries; the fallout of the war on terror; the ever-increasing gap between the richest and poorest. Then there are changes that threaten specifically intellectual futures: the shift to neoliberal and corporatist models of higher education; the return to positivist methods in the social sciences; the infatuation with big data and evidence; the proclaimed exhaustion of critique.5 What this adds up to is a widespread sense of inhabiting a transitional moment where many previously orienting concepts in public and private life are under strain: the time is ripe for a resurgence of theory as that mode of critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences most oriented towards conceptual understanding and the explicit refining and imaginative renewal of concepts. Not all of the concepts examined here, of course, have evolved in specifically academic contexts; many, like ‘community’ or ‘climate’ or ‘risk’ and ‘resilience’, have their origins in more public-facing forums. Collectively, they represent a wide range of international and global perspectives, as well as an interdisciplinary spectrum across anthropology, health studies, geography, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science and the new bio-sciences of complexity, emergence and mathematical modelling of dynamic systems. In exploring and inhabiting current and developing concepts of transition, they engage topics that

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range from the future of the Left to that of the planet; the direction of the academy and knowledge economies; the modes and futures of aesthetic practice, social justice, decolonization, capitalism, care of the self, science and democracy. Addressed too are the scientific ideas, technologies and social developments that shape concept formation and dissemination and are informed by them. Moments of crisis are often rich moments for theoretical work and the invention, modification and dissemination of new concepts. What might now be thought of as First Wave theory, especially the writings of the Frankfurt School in the 1950s, sought an accommodation between Marxist traditions of critique and Freudian and post-Freudian constructions of the subject, its thinkers initially driven by a desire to expose entrenched positivist styles of thinking – what Fredric Jameson would later call the ‘political unconscious’ – as part of the long arm of capitalism. Herbert Marcuse’s concept of ‘repressive desublimation’, for example, reflects this complex MarxistFreudian genealogy, but its revolutionary dissemination and refinement also hugely depended on political and historical events of the time: the Vietnam War protests and interventions, the civil rights movement in the United States, global student uprisings and the formation in the late 1960s of the women’s liberation movement.6 The Second Wave of theory, in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes referred to as ‘the theory revolution’, would go on to address, more extensively, questions of power, knowledge, subjectivity gender, race, sexuality – the foundations of identity politics – but through a more sceptical and deconstructive focus on representation, language games, framework relativism, and the idea of aesthetic and conceptual experiment as a means to break out of the ‘prison-house’ of language. This is the moment of High Theory with its rich array of new concepts and its reworking of former genealogies: Orientalism, incommensurability, alterity, aporia, the rhizomatic, subalternity, deterritorialization, intertextuality, the semiotic and the symbolic, interpellation, the (Althusserian) problematic, the symptomatic reading, subjectivation, the political unconscious, performativity, and the play of the signifier. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, many of these concepts were being displaced or absorbed into new conceptual vocabularies – a Third Wave – starting to reshape the landscape of cultural theory: the Anthropocene, bare life, exception, emergency, event, biopolitics, neoliberalism, populism, necropolitics, precarity, entanglement, decolonization, resilience, intersectionality and risk. These are terms that reflect a sense of changing global futures and rapidly shifting political, economic and intellectual preoccupations. Change is occurring too in the conceptualization of underpinning forms or methodologies: from structure to system; from linear and mechanical causality to non-linear and unpredictable emergence; from translation to interference; from postcolonialism to decolonization. There is a new emphasis on assemblages, networks, emergence, dissemination, distribution, tipping points, cascades, catastrophe, scale, interconnectedness, autopoiesis, order and chaos. One of the most important insights derived from the modelling of complex dynamic systems and affecting how we have come to see change in the present moment – from climate change, political shifts and regime changes, trends and social fashions, economic collapse as well as the spread of disease, intellectual ideas and social media hype – is that a pervasive attachment to gradualism and gradualist thinking has made us blind to the actual nature of change

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in complex systems which is often sudden, catastrophic and irreversible. Change may be almost invisible, even if recognized as incremental, until a tipping point brings the system crashing down: but our Bayesian systems of probability thinking and even our cognitive and affective tendencies to avoid looking the coming storm in the eye perpetuate attachments to gradualist styles even as the concept of the ‘tipping point’ has itself gone viral in the last decade.7 The volume approaches the question of transition from multiple perspectives, demonstrating how the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention and intellectual discourse are specifically entangled in the contemporary world and how the practical and theoretical dimensions of cultural change often seem inextricably interwoven. The book is of necessity interdisciplinary in approach for the concepts we have foregrounded exceed any single discipline, set of objects or practices. In the last century, a variety of cross-disciplinary definitions have been offered in response to the demand for intellectual periodization and mapping. What is distinctive about this volume is that it seeks ultimately to address change on its own terms – rather than on those dictated by an academy increasingly driven by financial concerns and a cynical utilitarianism – by placing such genealogical, radical and speculative currents of thought into meaningful counterpoint. Its terms both implicitly and explicitly measure different models of change against one another: cause and effect are opposed to aleatory and unpredictable change; efficient causalities are weighed against teleonomic, circular or final causalities; linear models compete with non-linear models of change; radical change and progressive emergence are counterposed revealing how sudden acceleration and gradual transition, irreversibility and cyclicality, absolute novelty and differentiation are meaningfully contrasted. On the one hand, it is clear in many cases that, in order to trace transition, careful attention must be given to those situations in which concepts have emerged, as well as the concrete situations in which they are currently, and might prospectively, be deployed. In this, our aim is to demonstrate how concepts travel both within and between disciplines, and how these disciplines engage, borrow from, and reciprocally shape and alter each other. More often than not, sudden changes habitually acquire their rhetorical force and argumentative currency within specific contexts, even as they actively shape them. To grasp the internal and relational dynamism of concept and context with insight requires the capacity to recognize how concepts of or related to change often import specific sequences of ideas, constituting genealogical legacies not always evident at the time of their emergence, even under the most thorough critical examination. In this light, genealogies of change are by no means static and must constantly be subjected to critique and reassessment if the phenomenon of transition is to be understood. Yet it also seems necessary to remain open to the invention of concepts that not only reflect but also generate sudden and unexpected shifts; that define themselves in terms of an active scission of thought from its context; and that open transitional journeys along experimental and unpredictable trajectories. In this sense, the genealogies and trajectories of (transitional) concepts might be regarded as coextensive from one perspective, but as productively opposed from another. Their capacity simultaneously to shape and alter paradigms, to export other concepts and vocabularies previously regarded as incommensurable, is demonstrated in fields as diverse as fluid dynamics,

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synthetic and developmental cell biology, critical sociology, revolutionary political theory and avant-garde aesthetics. These are all remarkable for the manner in which they simultaneously effect specific changes but also constitute more general paradigms for the conceptualization of change across a range of practices, providing conceptual focus at one level, but generating mobile and even militant concepts at another. One of the noticeable features of many of the essays in the volume is the extent to which they engage conceptual change not only within the context of the humanities and social sciences but, more unusually, across the sciences too. The volume attests to a sense of how far we have moved on from previous ‘two cultures’ controversies or ‘science wars’ conflicts to a new sense of conceptual engagement and entanglement across formerly remote intellectual domains. Metaphors and concepts of complexity, networks, recursivity, emergence, assemblage and reflexive embodiment are central to the new systems sciences such as developmental biology and the fast-growing new genomic and post-genomic sciences: they are also now the dominant organizational concepts across many domains of contemporary culture. An important task is to look at the manifold ways in which such concepts are assembled and put to practical uses so that the degree and kind of mutual entanglement of concepts across cultural and scientific theories are available for further reflection. Just as informational concepts around life as a deterministic and unidirectional ‘script’ empowered the early development of molecular biology and genetics in the 1960s and 1970s, for the new genomic biologies of the 1990s and 2000s, it is the network, as a complex process of looping entanglement, that provides the organizing trope signalling the limitation of simple or linear accounts of genetic change and development. New concepts of system, change and complexity are now distributed through increasing numbers of knowledge economies. The biomedical sciences are being transformed by the post-genomic understanding of cellular processes and epigenetics that has required abandonment of classic unidirectional models of genetic determination resting on classic realist constructions of causality.8 Reductionism, as the key analytic process in scientific method, is no longer an adequate tool in understanding complex dynamic systems such as the weather or global finance or epidemiology. In the environmental sciences too, the scalar effects of complex emergent processes that are irreducible and irreversible as they cross unknowable thresholds and are distributed across human and non-human agents prompt difficult ethical questions around responsibility and collective agency. These new discourses in the life and environmental sciences, that have challenged the understanding of experimental and evidentiary processes, have required and helped to drive reappraisal on the part of the humanities concerning their own responsibilities in rethinking their own ontological, epistemological and ethical concepts. Such developments have also challenged models of interdisciplinarity that envisage pre-packaged individual disciplines retaining and contributing their particular concepts in constrained and appropriate spaces that simply reframe epistemic objects already securely positioned within a specifically bounded disciplinary domain. Examining conceptual change in this way recognizes the necessary vagueness and yet richness of concepts as epistemic objects as they are displaced from disciplinary ownership to enter places of experimental exploration and entanglement that may bring forth the new and radically different.9 Like high energy physicists assembling the myriad

Introduction

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differential traces left as various sensitive instruments move over the invisible surfaces of entities only observable through the effects of those instruments, new epistemic objects may also emerge whose identities are entirely a product of the experimental process. However, a word of caution. Working by accretion, entanglement, analogy or tropic extension, conceptual change enables new ways of knowing, but it may also obscure or marginalize other alternatives or build unwarranted ontological or ethical assumptions on the back of what are claimed to be new epistemological categories. Post-genomic techniques in systems biology, for example, were enabled by concepts and metaphors from cybernetics and then developed further with the appearance of the World Wide Web. But complexity and entanglement have now become catch-all terms that are sometimes used overextensively to rewrite the world in their own image, just as the central dogma of Crick and Watson turned the genome into a scriptwriting service for life. At a certain level of generality or overextension, concepts no longer explain very much at all. The new concepts of complexity and entanglement are everywhere and no more so than at the heart of the creation of a new risk culture with its centralized as well as more distributed mechanisms for controlling risk and enhancing security. Complexity is a double-edged tool, allowing systems biologists to escape charges of reductionism while enabling an extension of their conceptual reach, legitimized as ‘science’, to ever more domains of the lifeworld. Whereas an ontoepistemology of Uncertainty was built on the back of the New Physics, the new life and environmental sciences are elaborating newer models of complex dynamic systems, conditions of fragility, tipping point mechanisms, and modes of positive and negative forcing. But there are problems too in transferring concepts across disciplinary boundaries. Liberal inclusivity can blunt the politics of critique, and vaguely formulated concepts of interconnectedness, entanglement and assemblage sometimes require vigilant unpicking. Concepts map out colliding forces but the transference of systems thinking to the humanities in the mode of loose analogy can be used to deflect the need for difficult thinking within the more familiar modes of the humanities themselves and may lead the overenthusiastic to overlook the kinds of resources that are available within such styles of thinking. The current liberal tendency to see concepts around entanglement, assemblage, the interconnected and ecological community as necessarily carrying a kind of ethical virtue is deeply problematic and is addressed in several essays in this volume (for example, on network, community, paradigm, climate, irreversibility). That nature and society is now a compound has produced, in the idea of the Anthropocene, for example, the sense that the two can only be separated by violent means. Yet entanglement and assemblage involve categorically different kinds of agency, intention and effects that need to be analysed carefully: the flattened ontological landscape of the ‘actant’, the new materialism of vibrant matter, or the distributed cognition of enactive, embodied and extended theories of mind, individually and collectively, can contribute to the production of a vision of endless, indiscriminate and boundless matter circulating contingently across multiple distributed networks to produce chance collisions and productions of the new. But such visions, though seemingly liberating, depend on minimal definitions of agency or intention and encourage at times new kinds of identity thinking that might be seen to constitute a pervasive kind

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of inverted Cartesianism. Older or residual concepts – drawn for example from the tradition of historical materialism – that remind us how objects and matter are only powerful and ‘vibrant’ (a favoured term in the new materialisms) in the context of relations of production and exchange mediated by the infrastructures of political institutions and subtended by economic modes of production are important in reining in infatuation with the new and currently more fashionable materialisms. In being vigilant, rigorous, historically and linguistically aware of conceptual genealogies, theory in the humanities also promises to be dynamic, experimental and risky in reshaping but also, when appropriate, restraining concepts for future thinking and for thinking the concepts of futurity. The concepts we decided to foreground across the volume as a whole, therefore, simultaneously describe and participate in the process of change and are anchored in complex histories as well as reaching out to unknown futures; each essay is also a process of self-reflection on its own entangled relation with the concept it addresses. The concepts offer a comprehensive sense of current work, but they cannot hope to exhaust it and we hope that readers will bring their own sense of what is most significant to the task of mapping conceptual models of change. Some of the essays make challenging reading but that seems to us entirely appropriate: we haven’t interfered as editors to simplify but, given the enormous intellectual range of the volume as a whole, we have offered in the second half of this introduction a brief but systematic explication and contextualization of the orientation and perspectives offered by each essay. For these are all concepts with a trajectory – necessarily grasped as part of a genealogy that traces how terms gain their currency, participate in prevailing regimes of knowledge and effect generative speculation regarding potential futures. Transitional concepts not only bridge past, present and future but also move across the boundaries of any particular discipline or practice. Such transitions simultaneously reflect, and critically reflect upon, the sense of exigency which pervades much contemporary thought in its veritable obsession with change, innovation and futurity. In this way, the concepts explored in the volume as a whole avoid reproducing or reinforcing an existing lexicon, but all of them significantly expand our understanding of these terms, forging a new type of interdisciplinary cultural theory in the process. The transitional points and processes explored are critical in at least two senses: first, they confirm the sense of urgency and significance which marks the transformation of prevailing intellectual conditions; second, they maintain a critical, indeed self-critical, disposition towards the situations prior to and following transition, as well as to the process of transition itself. They interrogate the complex and vital interrelationship between intellectual, sociopolitical and cultural change, emphasizing the pivotal role that particular concepts and styles of thinking play in initiating, facilitating and coordinating these various concerns on one hand and, on the other, in offering resistance and opposition within the same sphere. While each essay takes as its main focus one concept drawn from a list of many possibilities, some reaching back to earlier moments of theory, others arising out of the current New Wave, the individual concepts/essays are organized into five clusters each of which designates what might be thought of as a key infrastructure of change; these are ‘Rethinking Change’, ‘Boundaries and Crossings’, ‘Rupture and Disruptions’,

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‘Assemblages and Realignments’, ‘Horizons and Trajectories’. This organization is tentative, of course: there are so many resonances and connections across individual essays and broader clusters that one aim of the explication and contextualization of individual essays and concepts in the second half of this introduction is to offer pointers for further deliberation and reflection on such cross-currents, entanglements and the kinds of questions they raise.

Part two: Clusters, concepts and contexts Rethinking change This first cluster of essays and concepts is important in guiding questions with respect to the topic of transition: what are the conditions which need to be in place in order for change to take place and what are the concepts that allow us to recognize or grasp that change and its processes? How do these conditions translate into concrete situations? What sort of situations might be/is likely to emerge as a result of a critical transition? To expand on these questions, we asked our contributors to examine situations as they exist before and after critical transitions (remainder); the contingencies which characterize such situations that place change somewhere between the possible and the inevitable (risk); the ways in which entities and forces, including words and concepts, together constitute these situations (community); the way in which past events and our awareness of such events shape possible interactions and hence transitions (memory); and the way ideas regarding transition are ordered, culturally embedded, codified, transmitted and contested, beginning with the social and epistemological coherence of the forces which inform change (movement and paradigm). Memory studies is an expanding field across the range of academic disciplines, from the psychologist Endel Tulving’s concept of memory as ‘mental time-travel’ in the 1970s, to contemporary multidisciplinary interest in the forms that memory might take: episodic and procedural, implicit and explicit, autobiographical and cultural, conscious and non-conscious, recollection and recall, traumatic and reparative or reconciliatory.10 Without memory there is no identity, either personal or collective: change too cannot be grasped or felt without it. But how memory is conceptualized varies and so do its uses. Enzo Traverso’s essay is specifically an examination of cultural ‘Memory’ focused on the current epidemic of Left melancholia: but in addressing its subject, the essay demonstrates the political effects of the uses of different kinds of memory.11 The relation of memory as a process of active recollection that returns to a shared cultural past in order to shape a new future is juxtaposed with a concept of memory understood as a more passive process of recall, a witnessing of the return of the past that is often bound to processes of trauma and subsequent memorialization. It is now a truism that the Enlightenment break with cyclical accounts of historical time (revolution as return or renaissance rather than watershed and rupture) shifted understanding of the trajectory of history to one of linear openness to the future in liberal progressivist and in revolutionary, post-Hegelian accounts. This temporal frame and ethos of progression that underpinned the idea of Enlightened modernity began

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to falter by the end of the nineteenth century and has since undergone numerous legitimation crises. But Traverso argues that it is only after 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent tendency to conflate Socialism with Communism (as totalitarian politics), that a ubiquitous sense of an epochal break with Enlightened modernity is registered. Why is this? The embedding of neoliberal reason is the most obvious suspect, its hegemony since the late 1970s assumed by many on the Left to have stifled utopian thinking as we come to inhabit a world of incessant change where social and economic injustice remains static. From this perspective, revolutionary movements of the Left are simplified and come to seem simply pathways to terror. As revolutionary hope, expectation and anticipation are therefore abandoned, an eternal present (with the reification of the past as memorialization) now stretches toward the horizon of a non-future. Traverso, however, suggests that it is the fragmentation and loss of solidarity of the social and class base of the Left that has also displaced collective memory as a potent force in vitalizing socialist or progressivist movements: melancholy alone is not necessarily in contradiction with the desire for revolutionary change. But many on the Left no longer find hope in looking forward or back, and without a memory of hope, it becomes impossible to imagine a future of hope: for memory works protentionally as well as retentionally, organizing the future as well as the past and is stymied if the relation between them is interrupted or cut adrift. This demise of utopian dreaming coincides moreover with a marked turn to mournful memorialization of the past. The essay examines how in failing to keep alive in the present shared memories of past collectivist struggles for social justice, the cultural memory of the Left is preoccupied instead with memory as ‘witnessing’: no longer the recovery of shared experiences of hope, but of the lived experience of collective trauma. History and cultural memory lose their complexity, reduced to a binary confrontation of victims and perpetrators. What is remembered and memorialized is mostly the suffering of victims rather than heroic political struggles for democracy, decolonization and human rights. A landscape of fragmented suffering comes into being as competitive cells of trauma proliferate, each claiming the greatest intensity for its own experience, its own special right to mourn. This is a landscape hardly conducive to political and social hope. Memory finds its protentional capacities deadlocked. Mick Smith’s essay on ‘Community’ extends Traverso’s thinking about community and its loss beyond human cultures to pose the question: what are the ways of thinking community as constituted by more than human beings or human events and relationships? As we revere and look to nature as a model for political and cultural association in order to think community in specifically ecological terms – as in many contemporary modes of communitarianism – we might also look to the past to examine ways in which nature has previously been used as a symbolic imaginary for political purposes. A long tradition of political philosophy has naturalized or anthropomorphized the idea of the state as a ‘body politic’. Adam Smith’s invisible and homeostatic intelligent hand is used to underwrite the idea of balance in society as part of the natural order of things; Darwin’s and Ernst Haeckel’s later ideas of evolutionary niches, of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, and life as ecologically interconnected, provided evolutionary equivalents. Closer examination of this history, however, reveals

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the dangers inherent in seeking to ground ecological community in naturalist thinking: from the earliest accounts of economic liberalism through to its neoliberal counterparts, political thinkers have sought to legitimate ideas of competition, economic survival, social and political organization, with appeals to nature. But now, as the human body is recognized as a plurality of ecological communities – microbiomes, friendly germs and the like – it becomes evident that ‘community’, existing at different scales, from the microbe to the planet, is not governed by any single overarching principle of nature, whether derived from grand narratives of the invisible hand, theories of economimesis or popular versions of Gaia.12 Analogical thinking cosmogonizes ‘ecological community’ as a grand narrative, but chimerically: there is only a complex patchwork of adjacently overlapping communities. The concept of ecological community has neither a metaphysical nor a natural foundation, nor is it a seamless interwoven garment stitching difference into identity. Each community, whether the biomes of gut bacteria, or the organization of the ant colony, or the network of human biologists who study both, occupies its own Umwelt or field of affordances though often exerting pressures on others (as in the concept of the ‘extended phenotype’). Organizational models of communities in nature vary widely from the pyramidal and the hierarchical to the horizontal and cooperative, the loose, and the networked. The analogizing impulse – from the seventeenth body politic, to Gaia, to current environmentalist discourses – that presents nature as one interconnected system is just as likely to be put to use defending the naturalness of markets and competition as that of ecological harmony and cooperation.13 The concept of community, currently laden with the warm glow of the interconnected, feeds off such emotive kinds of naturalization. Mick Smith’s essay shows how, if this unity appeals to romanticized versions of communitarianism, it also perfectly suits the interests of neoliberalism that communitarians should continue to think community in such terms. ‘Remainder’ addresses itself to what is left behind after change has occurred: in mathematics, where the concept is formally defined, remainder is what is left over in the performance of an axiomatic computation. In his essay, Andrew Gibson develops the concept in relation to the idea of the event, described by philosophers such as Badiou as the rare happening or unprecedentedly new beginning that overturns a previous state or experience.14 The true event is a mode of radical change, producing a vertiginous feeling of groundlessness like the visionary’s experience of the release of the Soul from its Dark Night as, for example, in the late medieval mysticism of St John of the Cross. Remainder in this sense is like being left behind in the dark night, a condition of accedie, of spiritual paralysis yet affective volatility, where the event, or even its possibility, remains absent or withdrawn from the frame of the picture. Though it is a concept important in contemporary theoretical discussion of the event, remainder’s genealogy is complex and its earlier mystical associations are often overlooked. Gibson begins his essay therefore with a description of the Venetian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio’s ‘Miracalo della Reliquia della Croze ai Ponte di Rialto’. The painting, at first glance, as its title suggests, appears to depict a group of onlookers witnessing a miracle. On closer inspection of their omnidirectional and wandering gazes, however, Gibson suggests that what is being enacted is a drama of remainder, the drama of those excluded from the miraculous, outside its vicinity. Lost in attitudes of non-relation,

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they remain in an atomized world, directionless and wandering. Gibson goes on to suggest that the secularization of remainder appears with Hobbesian nature – nasty, brutish and short – that is used to legitimate the shift of sovereignty from the divine to the earthly. In Rousseau’s political thinking, remainder reappears in a cognate capacity, for although nature is here reconceived as the Good, there is no place in it for human beings who have enchained themselves to the sovereignty of the state through a Hobbesian social contract; they must remain bereft of nature’s beneficence. In Schopenhauer’s depiction of the world as will and representation (the world too in Wagner’s operas and Beckett’s writings), art might appear to offer the experience of substitutive transcendence, but it is one premised on withdrawal from life itself, which remains in all its dreary horror. Surprisingly, however, Gibson concludes by promoting the virtues of remainder in our own time as a necessary antidote to the slick promise that we can have it all. In this time of complacent ‘boosterism’, the bleakness of remainder can protect serious political thought, a necessary reminder of how (toxic) positivity can promote a state of theodicial trance that averts the gaze from material need, vulnerability and suffering. Since the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the concept of ‘Paradigm’ has been ubiquitous in accounts of the rise and embedding of radical change in styles of thinking and numerous kinds of thoughtworld, from knowledge economies to modes of artistic practice. Patricia Waugh’s essay shows how Kuhn’s originality lies in a single, but highly generative conceptual move that brought together Aristotle’s rhetorical concept of paradeigma (model or exemplar) with Ludwik Fleck’s idea of a discipline as a loose constellation of practices and thinking styles (Denkstil) constituting a thoughtworld (Denkkollectiv). Working analogically, and therefore horizontally, rather than logically, parad(e)igmatic thinking evades theoretical framing and therefore intervention and can more easily scale up the singular model to a level of generalization that sidesteps positivism’s vertical procedures of proof: its processes of induction and deduction. The essay highlights three turns in paradigm’s role in thinking radical epistemic change from the 1960s to the present: from anti-critique, to critique and, most recently, to post-critique. In the first (anti-critique), Waugh argues that, despite the title of his book, Kuhn elaborates the conceptual underpinning for a fundamentally normative project that, in offering an alternative to classic scientific ‘method’, provides an historical account of and mode of protection for science as a discipline that ultimately (and inadvertently) weakens its claims to epistemological distinctiveness and authority. In the second, Foucault’s (untimely) critique of governmentality, as the establishment of an eternalized present, is clarified and developed as an essentially paradeigmatic method in its laying bare and analysis in the work of Agamben. Waugh argues that, from the 1980s until the present, this mode of critique, as genealogical historicism, provides the dominant critical methodology for many of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Since Latour’s (2004) claim that critique is now exhausted, however, the construction of a paradigm of post-critique, claiming to represent a ‘revolution’ of the ordinary and connecting with the so-called affective turn, neo-phenomenology and embodied cognition, has called for a reconnection of expert knowledges with wider publics. But as Waugh suggests, such arguments draw on many of the same intellectual sources

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and strategies – mostly rooted in philosophical pragmatism – as Kuhn’s own. The essay concludes with a reflection on the potential of more recent work on cultural affect to revitalize a paradeigmatic critical style through an accommodation between pragmatism and Marxism. Esther Leslie begins her essay by introducing the concept of ‘Movement’ through a reading of Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’. At the poem’s heart, she argues, is a depiction of the dialectical relationship of mind and world: the ‘everlasting universe’ flows through the human mind and both are mutually transformed by the esemplastic imagination. Leslie suggests that the poem condenses the many senses of ‘movement’ to be explored in her essay: the aesthetic movement that is Romanticism, the affective response of readers who are ‘moved’ by the poem, the revolutionary movements that provide the political context of its production. Working associatively and dynamically, the essay also moves back and forth across semantic contexts that have subtended concepts of ‘movement’ in the modern world. This juxtapolitical method places Hegel’s dialectics and Marx’s dialectical materialism alongside the new material alchemies of liquidity and crystallization, combustion and galvanization in the new sciences of chemistry; it places the rise of revolutionary workers’ movements alongside the new global flows of trade, manufacturing and industrial processing. The accretion of movement’s metonymies conveys the material ground of a new historical structure of feeling: one driven by hope in the possibility that history too might move in new and radically different directions. Leslie argues that when movement as a political concept appears in 1828, it is already accompanied by many other examples of the social, philosophical and literary preoccupations with becoming, with ‘flow and ingress’. Movement is everywhere: it is the concept most synonymous with modernity itself. Momentum, the idea of a gathering force, continues to propel the twentieth-century fascination with and praise of movement: the emergence of film, kinetics, avant-gardism, studies of the body in movement, technological animation, new cultures of enterprise and innovation, mass movements, mass production, and the search for mass markets. All that is solid melts into air. One might add as a coda that, in a time of mission statements, performance targets and automatized efficiency, the modern compulsion to perpetual movement seems to have come under particular strain. Why this compulsion to perpetual motion? For never to be still is to risk burnout. Or more likely it is to find oneself in a chronic condition of generalized weariness, of attrition rather than growth. And beyond this weariness of the self lies a more catastrophic awareness of the exhaustion and unsustainability of the planet and the feeling that, even if it is already too late, the time has come to slow things down: to move, in that sense, beyond modernity. It is a theme reiterated through several essays in this volume.15

Boundaries and crossings While certain transitional concepts serve to illustrate the situations pertaining to the possibility and structuring of change, others are better suited to describing actual processes of change themselves. It is to these latter situations that the essays in the second section – Boundaries and crossings – turn their attention, recognizing that the contingent stabilization granted by organizational structures, borders and boundaries

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must invariably be destabilized, transgressed or crossed. To understand this phenomenon, the essays here examine concepts which address the so-called margins of structure, experience and activity. They explore the idea of interstices and extreme spaces and positions (threshold), the question of the relative positioning of such spaces with respect to norms and centres (periphery and exception), and the relations between inner and outer, interiority and exteriority (privacy). They also address the way that art might render and communicate the difficulties but also the affordances and insights that accompany both physical and conceptual movements across such boundaries (migration). Matthew Calarco’s essay addresses what he sees as the impoverishment of traditional anthropological thinking concerning the formation of cultural identity as a ‘rite of passage’. A closed concept of transition here supplants the more open possibilities of thinking subjectivity through the concept of ‘Threshold’. The idea of cultural transition as a ‘rite of passage’ is not a threshold concept for it reduces (and contains) the process of subject formation to one of passage through successive but preformulated states, like Stations of the Cross, journeying from the pre-liminal, through the transitional or liminal, to a post-liminal phase of mature incorporation or assimilation to a final constitution of selfhood and place in a community. The concept of transition thus nullifies the force of threshold, restricting what should properly be understood as a process of unknowable and unpredictable ontological change to one of transition from one pre-constituted identity to another. From within such fixed coordinates, threshold is absorbed into the greater containment of boundary, while subjectivity is confined to predicates of ceremony rather than excess. By way of correction, Calarco’s essay turns from anthropology to examine the work of three philosophers and cultural theorists, each proposing a concept of threshold – through the figures, respectively, of the face, the visitor and the bridge – that articulates the desire for a more openended and indeterminate conception of the subject. He finds in Agamben’s extension of the Levinasian idea of responsiveness to the face, an openness to the other that reconstitutes the subject as a contact zone between the outer edge of what Agamben refers to as its ‘whatever singularity’ and an ever-changing and unpredictable outside: a process that constantly shifts the threshold between interior and exterior so that familiar concepts such as internalization and projection are mutually confounded. In Derrida too, the stranger who stands at the threshold, perhaps seeking asylum, is the other who stands outside the door; what awaits, however, may be a visitation, not even human, that will entirely throw the doors off their hinges. To invite in the unexpected risks opening oneself to a visitation that might bring ruin, loss of property, and of control. As propriety is rendered impotent, the subject is rendered vulnerable and without anchor, but at a threshold where a new process of creative opening to the other might begin to transform the subject. The essay concludes by offering a third example that challenges the anthropological ‘rite of passage’: Gloria Anzaldua’s figure of the bridge draws on the transformative subjective opening to a larger cosmos that is undergone in spiritual exercises and mystical experience. Anzaldua too abandons anthropological conservatism to propose the making of a new activist subject, a spiritual ‘thresholder’, who fights to stay in the condition of liminality. This subject becomes rather than merely passes over a threshold. She steps onto but refuses to turn

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back from, or leave behind, the dilapidated bridge that is the mystic’s heightened state of opening to an intense awareness of shared mortality, the vulnerability of the body and suffering. Threshold carries an immediate sense of change that is accompanied by associations with the hierophantic. In contrast, ‘Periphery’ might seem to conjure the image of a neutral description of geometric space. Paulina Aroch Fugellie, however, begins her essay by insisting that it is a concept as politically loaded as ‘race’ or ‘totalitarianism’: periphery carries nothing less than the ‘wound of Empire’. No mere geographic descriptor, periphery is presented as a relationally constructed concept whose political effect is ultimately to slash open the self-sufficiency of what is self-understood as the metropolitan core. Aroch Fugellie’s essay first explores the genealogy of the concept, beginning with its construction in the social sciences as a means of bringing together discourses of political economy, social geography and econometrics in order to make sense of the development and spread of globalized trade and the economic transition from mercantilism to modern capitalism. She goes on to explore how periphery is initially constructed as the necessary outer realm of capitalist expansion, providing invisible labour and new markets for the advancement and growth of the colonial ‘core’. Outraged responses to this conceptualization drove the subsequent rise of ‘dependency theory’, initially in Latin America, but also in a context of Cold War and growing US economic hegemony. For Eisenhower, for example – in a classic gesture of supplementarity – the superiority and ‘maturity’ of Western cultures was held up against the arrested development of the periphery as a pre-modern and ‘backward’ remnant. While theories of ‘development’ or modernization, constructed from the core, claimed to address the problems of underdeveloped nations, dependency theorists (Dependistas) analysed the ways in which periphery was actually a construct necessary to the maintenance of the capitalist core and a creation rather than beneficiary of it. This stalemate provides the backdrop for the subsequent re-articulation of periphery in world-systems theory: a shift from the structural and fixed construction of geographic space as core and periphery to a more dynamic, chronotopic and complex systems-oriented account. The writings of Annales historians such as Braudel (with his concept of the ‘longue durée’) and those of Frantz Fanon and later postcolonial theorists provide the groundwork for the ambitious project of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-systems theory begins the move away from Eurocentric preoccupation with the nation-state to thinking capitalist relations more dynamically and world-systematically. (Wallerstein has emphasized the influence of systems and complexity theorists such as Ilya Prigogine on his refinement of world-systems thinking.16) The essay concludes with an analysis of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa as an ‘infra peripheral space’ whose primary function, from the perspective of the core, is now to render invisible the dirty work of capitalism and so help in the perpetuation of the neoliberal project. Southern Africa, mapped from this perspective, is a still untapped space of capitalist opportunity, natural resources and cheap labour – the recipient of buccaneer fantasy projections of ‘the rich wilderness of potential markets’. But the other side of this imaginary is the projection of the sub-Sahara as a place of abjection, dire poverty and ragged starvation, a chronotopic warning of the dark future that awaits the core, should the tectonic plates of neoliberal economies slide into a different gear.

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If remainder suggests what is left behind, ‘Exception’ is what exclusion positions as an outside that comes to define what is inside – as in the common adage that exception proves the rule. Its supplementary logic shares family resemblances with periphery, fragment, event, hospitality, catastrophe, interference, in particular. Outside, but somehow of the field, the set or the order, exception specifies a zone of application that requires its extraction from key aspects of the order that it constitutes. In relation to the law, for example, crime is the exception that is also its foundation. Law is evidently founded on a problematic of exceptionality: what is ‘exceptional’ in the context of the everyday – the disruptive effect of criminal acts, for example – is also, from a different perspective, the norm that makes possible the self-legitimation of its practices. As all orders produce exceptions, so exceptions reveal orders. Justin Clemens’s essay examines the formal properties of exception but pursues pressing questions concerning exception’s ability to illuminate key aspects of contemporary cultures: are some orders or kinds of order more ‘tolerant’ of exceptions than others? Is the exception everywhere today, as Agamben suggests, simply because the exception has itself been normalized? If so, does this normalization of the exception make our era exceptional? From what theoretical perspectives can such questions be usefully approached? The essay ranges across a number of possibilities, but central to it is an account of Agamben’s writing on exception as he thinks through Foucault’s reflections on sovereignty. Why is it, Agamben asks (calling on Benjamin), that the state of emergency in which we now live is the rule and not the exception? Clemens argues that Agamben shows how, as the work of sovereignty is to produce biopolitical bodies, ‘bare life’ emerges not so much as the other of sovereign power, but as its very nucleus. Under Roman law, homo sacer is the one who might be killed but not sacrificed, existing outside the law: but it is the law that, in its withdrawal, creates the possibility of the outlaw. As the sovereign decides on the state of exception, so the exception becomes the foundation for the law that it exceeds. The law prohibits, commands, punishes: essential to its operation is the biopolitical making-sacred of life that delimits the creatures and spaces deemed to fall within its purview. In this withdrawal from and creation of exception, the law legitimates its rule and order. In Agamben, exception is then the key instrument of biopolitics: it is the self-suspension of the law with regard to life. As Clemens argues, though, it is difficult to construct a general theory of exception. The essay concludes by turning to Badiou, by way of comparison, but here it is truth rather than sovereignty that is exceptional – as love, science, art and politics – and it is mathematical set theory that will provide the proof. For the event that is truth must subtract itself from being and knowledge of being: truths are exceptions to the law of being, which might only be mathematically established. Mieke Bal’s essay turns to the aesthetic to explore the concept of ‘Migration’ in a reflection on the practices of ‘Migratory Aesthetics’, the subject of an exhibition of migrant video art (2007–8) that she curated as part of a collaborative project. Exploring the medium of video as one of movement and kinesis – intrinsically well-equipped to help audiences grasp the experiences of migration and of migratory cultures – Bal demonstrates, through close analysis of a series of video installations, how this work contributes to the promotion of migration’s visibility in the transformation of public spaces in host countries. Such artistic work is seen to enhance affective engagement as a

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mode of ethical non-indifference for it obstructs the impulse to narcissistic projection that interferes with a properly empathetic response. The installations are shown to employ a variety of techniques to endorse and amplify for participants the remainders and traces left by migrants as they pass through different cultures: slowing down time, for example, or fragmenting space, so that it must be painfully and painstakingly rebuilt in the present of the viewing and listening experience. In its interactive qualities and feeling of immersive but dynamic presence, video art is valuable in opening up the imagination to the richness and diverse experience brought by migrants to host countries, challenging entrenched views about migrant ‘transgression’ or the violation of a pure or ‘native’ monoculture. In this process, the unexpected is brought into the space of attention through complex processes of multi-modal and multi-sensory binding. Bal further shows how video is particularly equipped to integrate and draw attention to the complex double movements of migration and she presents a very different, more positive and functional account of memory than Traverso’s analysis of Left melancholia: memories of home are powerful in this migrant experience, as one would expect, but they are ever-changing, actively and continuously reconstituted rather than passively experienced as recall. Rather than a fixation on a past that is better left behind, they are crucial to the dynamic and complex reconfiguring of life in the new country. Time is experienced as multiple and heterogeneous: haste and waiting, slow and fast time, stagnation and movement, an unsettling present and unpredictable future. The techniques available to the video art medium can render these complex experiences through felt rhythms that are shared by audiences and participants in ways that sustain ambiguity and ambivalence, avoiding the propogandist or the merely politically correct. Bal’s essay reveals the often forgotten but powerful and complex agencies of different modes of the aesthetic, but also the shared capacity of art as immersion and defamiliarization to reshape experience: its therapeutic qualities; its availability for curative as well as diagnostic practice; its ethical and political capacity to change the meaning and resonance of the concept of migration. Alexander Garcia Düttmann’s treatment of ‘Privacy’ – its place in contemporary culture as a requisite for individual and collective flourishing – approaches the concept from a different perspective from more familiar liberal economic discourses on ownership and property that tend to defend, legitimize or challenge the relationship between domains of the private and the public, most often from a rights perspective. Instead, Düttman begins with the artistic enterprise and ends with the knowledge economy of the modern academy. Key to both, he argues, is the activity of thought. His essay, drawing on a tradition of cognitive aesthetics that focuses on the place of thinking in art, gives a new turn to familiar ideas about artistic practice as the defamiliarization of habitual relations to the world. This brings to mind Viktor Shklovsky’s original observation that habit devours the real, flattening perception so what we perceive is something that has always been there and always will be; even memory, therefore, that relies on the recall of past experience, becomes a kind of forgetting.17 Art is presented by Düttmann, however, not so much in the formalist terms of renewal of perception – making the stone stony – but more iconoclastically as an act of annihilation of and against the production of the inconspicuous and the normal. Without privileging theories of avant-gardism as such, Düttmann argues that all significant art is a process

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of creation from the verge of a forgetting that allows the world to appear as a different kind of presence. Aesthetic thinking is therefore an antidote to the stereotype and the mindless. But it requires freedom and space to deliver its insights. In the second part of the essay, he suggests how this is disappearing as a culture of repressive normality and surveillance is enforced so that value is reduced purely to markers of transparency and accountability. Is there a right to secrecy that is a right to thinking, to a space of interiority as impenetrability or privacy? Are secrets different from private thoughts? Literary writers – of course – from Milton to Orwell, Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie, Maya Angelou and Elif Shafak – have long and eloquently fought against state censorship in such terms. But Düttmann urges that it is privacy that is now the freedom most under threat. Why? Because even the academy, classically the space for freedom of thought, is now as much under siege from neoliberal managerialism as from other pressures that regard free thinking as dangerous. A slippery slope looms from the taken-for-granted assumption that the ultimate place of privacy is the place where I think, to the very real spectre of the gradual, even velvet-gloved elimination of those who desire to think for themselves. (This is Orwell’s fear too.) Unexpected bedfellows appear: as the institution of the university is oriented to corporate ends, the bureaucracy that attempts to capture and contain independent thinking is likened to the safe space demanded by the student ‘triggered’ by the encounter with the freethinker’s unruly ideas. If this collocation seems politically inappropriate, or dubiously incorrect, it is intended to be so: Düttmann’s essay is written in defiance of all forms of correctness as they threaten the privacy required for independent thinking. Is this simply the usual libertarian defence of art as dependent on the right to free thought as well as to free speech? He suggests that the plea for privacy as a concept carries different meanings in different contexts. In our own time, loss of privacy entails the sacrifice of art as annihilation, and risks bringing nearer the awful prospect of the annihilation too of that kind of intense privacy of aesthetic thinking that rescues this world from forgetting in its activity of building another.

Rupture and disruptions The next cluster of essays, on Rupture and disruptions, examines a set of concepts particularly closely related to imminent and sudden change. Classical poetics presents the possibility of peripeteia as a sudden turning back that offers to heal rupture. But does tragic thinking still provide hope or consolation in facing personal, political or planetary demise (catastrophe)? Coming to terms with the phenomena of disruption and transgression as exemplary instances of change requires, in the first instance, engaging the phenomenon of change from the perspective of the situation which pre-exists it and the forms and thinking of totality that precede rupture. However, equally important are those exemplary points at which novelty, sudden change or critical transitions may be said to erupt (event). How might conceptual change and concept formation itself be affected through the disruption created by language, for example, as in translation thought of as a mode of verbal transition that highlights untranslatability (interference)? Are points of extreme rupture or critical transition in political and historical contexts equivalent to the reality of the tipping point in climate

Introduction

19

science, and if the mathematical concept of the tipping point is translated across into the terms of classic political thinking, does that denial of reversibility destroy or make more difficult the belief in and political commitment to reparation and making good (irreversibility)? How does rupture or disruption constitute itself in programmatic terms (revolution) and does revolution make it possible to grasp change in terms of transitional sequences? Stretching from classical tragedy, evolutionary theory and modernism to the mathematical modelling of complex dynamic systems, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s wideranging essay on ‘Catastrophe’ gathers its argument in a sustained reflection on Beckett’s aesthetics as understood through his late play, Catastrophe, with its veiled allusions to the Stalinist show trials. What interests Rabaté most is the way that the unfolding drama plays with the expectation that the spectacle of torture and suffering will be transformed, through catastrophe’s final word, into a profane apotheosis that is the deified reification of a battered humanity. Why does Beckett refuse to meet the generic (tragic) expectations of his audience? The etymological root of catastrophe – a final reversal – also points to the expectation of the strophe, the final word or gesture, the Aristotelian peripeteia that will turn everything around: the sense of an ending that only the end might confer as it brings meaning to what has gone before.18 As Mark Currie also demonstrates in addressing the concept of event, catastrophe too operates in the mode of the future anterior.19 In Beckett’s work, however, the catastrophe is and is not, for the play ends not with resolution but with consternation and an audience wrong-footed in its impulse to applaud. Rabaté suggests that Beckett’s experience of psychoanalysis – analysis interminable – resonates with the thinking of the British object relations analyst, Donald Winnicott, especially in his last essay of 1974, ‘Fear of Breakdown’. This examined how, for the psychotic, and like the structure of so many of Beckett’s plays, it is fear of catastrophe that appears to drive the disintegrated behaviour. Psychosis arises because the catastrophe has already happened but has not been experienced. The catastrophe is therefore the focus of dread and imagination rather than of recognition, working through and recovery. Rabaté senses that Winnicott is touching on the powerful drive for prediction as retroactive sense-making that is also the dynamic of classic tragedy. One might say that although the logic and psychology of catastrophe are recursive in this way, the logic of Beckettian catastrophe is a broken one. Thom’s catastrophe theory, known to Beckett, also appeared at the same time as Foucault’s genealogy: there is a nice historical coincidence in how all three of these writers are preoccupied with a question of how one abandons the limitation of probability – the mode of the Bayesian brain – in order to live in a radically uncertain world where even small events might culminate in a sudden and unpredictable breaking point. Thom was working with the mathematics of non-linear systems, exploring concepts such as bifurcation points, catastrophe folds, catastrophe cusps, basins of attraction, amplification and positive forcing, and the butterfly effect. As Beckett questions the retroactive logic of ancient tragedy, and Foucault and Thom question the linear causality of positivist science and history, all three reveal our limited ability to predict and control, or even experience, as and when it happens, the moment of irreversible rupture that is a tipping point (another kind of event). A lesser artist than Beckett, Rabaté observes, might approach such catastrophe by advocating

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joy in the aesthetic spectacle of dissolution. But for Beckett that would be to make aesthetic gain out of and therefore betray the suffering that, in reality, has no end. Like Gibson’s essay on remainder and Calarco’s account of threshold, Rabaté suggests that Beckett fashions an art that remains with the impotence of the self in the face of the broken catastrophe of existence: it is an art that pre-empts any rush of joyful applause or even catharsis of the ancient kind. An ‘Event’, argues Mark Currie, is essentially a distribution of knowledge through time; it is a happening that we don’t foresee but later add to the ‘set of possibilities’ of what might happen or, more appropriately, of what might have happened. The question of the event has always been central to thinking about change, prediction and decisionmaking; it has become central in a different way, more recently, in the new sciences of complexity and emergence prompting reconsideration of traditional philosophies of time. Indeed, event is at the heart of many of the concepts addressed throughout this volume: exception, catastrophe, irreversibility, risk, paradigm, revolution, climate, memory and hope. Exceeding classic sciences of prediction, event seems closer to the Kierkegaardian idea of life that is lived forward but only ever understood backwards: surprise is its affective register, recursivity the temporal structure of its hermeneutics. Event is a complex relation between unforeseeability and retrospection. Event, like exception, is extraordinary, capable of collapsing the ground of existing orders but, as Currie shows, and like exception, is also ordinary, embedded, for example, in the decision-making processes of everyday life. Confronted with the undecidable, we resort to the imagination of the event in the mode of the future anterior. Projecting forward to a moment after an imagined event – on which we are then hypothetically able to look back – allows us to model the present from the perspective of the future as a condition of will have been. Currie emphasizes how so many accounts of the event, however, fail to distinguish or adequately interrogate the crucial distinction between modes of epistemological and ontological uncertainty. As an epistemological occurrence, the event is what suddenly appears but already exists (like the Winnicottian catastrophe discussed by Rabaté or in Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit). But the event that is genuinely new is an ontological transformation of the real. The question of their relation has a longer philosophical and scientific history: central to Hegel’s thinking of contingency and necessity as a relation of being in the midst of and at the end of history, and to debates between Einstein and early twentieth-century quantum theorists over the principle of uncertainty. For Heisenberg, the universe is ontologically uncertain, indeterminable and finally unpredictable; for Einstein, the universe is only ever epistemologically uncertain and God does not play dice with it: uncertainty is simply a consequence of the limitation of our knowledge. The ontological real event brings the unprecedentedly new into the world; it could not have been foreseen under any circumstances, and its effects are retroactive as well as prospective – the event changes everything. ‘Revolution’ understood as an episode of convulsive political transformation is now a rare phenomenon. Even the concept has been debased and vulgarized, Aleš Erjavec argues, overextended to describe almost any upheaval – trivial or serious – in fashionable mores: the market is flooded with ‘revolutionary’ products; ‘revolutionary ideas’ are proclaimed everywhere. A proper genealogy of revolution should at least, therefore, provide a correction to biases evident in both the adverse reactions to its increasingly

Introduction

21

rare but specifically political use, and its current overuse in demotic trivialization. How might revolution be reclaimed and made properly available again for serious political thinking? One means of rehabilitation is to employ an interdisciplinary and genealogical approach to explore the close entanglement of the concept of political revolution with (the less maligned) uses of the concept in adjacent cultural and artistic contexts. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are deemed the first great eras of modern revolution, marked especially by the French Revolution. However, the coexistence of Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ in philosophy – also providing crucial intellectual scaffolding for the revolutionary aesthetic of European Romanticism – suggests that distribution of revolutionary thinking has always been across broader cultural and intellectual domains. Similarly, if we move to 1917, Marxist discourses that drove the Russian revolution arose alongside revolutionary claims for the new artistic avant-gardes of the time as well as the modernist concept of a ‘revolution of the word’. Lenin used the term ‘cultural revolution’ in 1923, giving it much the same resonance as Mao in his ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s. Both recognized that it is not enough to promulgate revolutionary thinking by pivoting exclusively on a theory of politics or economics; key too are the cultural politics and practices required for legitimating and embedding its concepts in ordinary thinking and the practices of everyday of life (as in Gramsci’s concept of hegemony). But so too the spheres of art and culture might exert counter-revolutionary forces as in Kuhn’s reworking of the concept of paradigm. These are mostly unarticulated, part of custom and practice: think of the contemporary academy, for example, with its medieval rhythm of observing the teaching or seminar hour, its organization of the curricular around colonialist concepts of state and nation, and its commitments to Enlightenment concepts of learning and knowledge. This complex temporal multiplicity is important in providing resistance to the kind of justin-time thinking that drives the economic and political revolution of neoliberalism. One might argue that new ideas in one domain rarely emerge entirely in lockstep with similar concepts in others, though the key political revolutions of the past have mostly happened alongside other kinds of radical artistic and intellectual change that have provided receptive contexts for them. Revolution is closely related to other concepts addressed in essays here on event, catastrophe, irreversibility, memory and paradigm. Revolutions may, for example, be marked after the event and are distributed in time: Erjavec suggests that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is an invention of the 1930s as modern ideas of political revolution were projected back onto intellectual history. His essay concludes with an examination of Rancière’s more recent idea of revolution that locates the capacity for radical change not so much in the idea of an exclusive avant-garde, but in the aesthetic as a shared and collective sensorium created in a revolutionary ‘distribution of the sensible’. It will become apparent, exploring these essays, how much the new systems thinking is transforming earlier structural conceptualization of mechanisms and levers of change: distribution is now a key mode of conceptual leverage, applied to everything from accounts of cognition to the complexities of global warming and also related to other concepts such as dissemination, event, network, periphery and irreversibility. Derrida’s seminar on the death penalty refers to Plato’s Laws and his questioning whether the teacher who insidiously imports foreign ideas into the state through

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translational swerves should be regarded as engaged in a criminally illicit act of ‘Interference’. It is not only that such ideas might have a disruptive effect on the behaviour of citizens, but they also traduce the aristocratic ideal of non-interference. Emily Apter demonstrates how each translator of Plato – including Derrida – has also interfered, through translation, with the master’s words and concepts. Even Plato’s own concept of ‘interference’ is variously translated, running from notions of criminal or ‘illicit interference’ to the more benign construct of ‘the busybody’. The structure of a debate is carried through the quality of untranslatability. Apter, however, regards this process not so much as betrayal, traducement or misprision, but more a mode of ‘cognising philology’, hovering always on the brink of failure, but with the potential to keep concepts alive as a way of saying rather than what is said. In this idea of interference, the untranslatable functions as a potentially powerful or resistant glitch, the vehicle of a micropolitical experiment. In some ways close to Wittgenstein’s idea of fuzzy concepts as complex nodes where many discourses cross and gather, interference through translation disrupts the quest for conceptual purity and disables the workings of instrumental language that flatten concepts to all-purpose or generalized ideas. Translation as interference provides an important tool in resisting reductionist world-systems theorizing that seeks global equivalences through overgeneralized concepts.20 Interference is therefore a function of the counter-hegemonic. Apter’s examples include ‘Occupy Wall Street’, for example, which began by interfering with the normative association of the concept of ‘occupation’ with violence, military and colonialist takeover. As Plato might have feared, ‘Occupy’ took the language of the streets and injected it into the language of the law, turning around its meanings. The essay concludes with a call for greater awareness of the potential of translational politics to be responsive to politics of interference: in other words, another call to recognize the capacities of words and concepts for civil disobedience. Though political thinking has never been premised explicitly on an understanding of history as resting on an Arrow of Time, the new climate change politics has brought with it an unprecedentedly bleak sense of irreversibility as the material world seems to bite rather than write back in defiance of culturalist and textualist accounts of nature. Revolutions, reforms, progress, reconciliation, reparation, all depend on an idea of being able to turn back the clock at least some of the way. Now the science of dissipative systems (pioneered by the chemist Ilya Prigogine) tells us otherwise, as do the various sciences that rely on concepts of emergentism and the mathematical modelling of nonlinear complex dynamic systems. But all living systems are non-linear and complex. How appropriate is it to extend mathematical modelling of physical non-linear systems to political and other kinds of human organization? Mick Smith has already warned of the limitations of indiscriminate extension to politics of concepts of ecological community. Graham Harman’s essay argues along similar lines concerning the ubiquity of the network. Concepts associated with dynamic systems theorizing are all too easily overextended to apply to political systems (and to world-systems thinking, Moretti’s style of distant reading, corporate communications) but when does this become a means of avoiding the specific challenges of a particular system or situation? Climate change and global warming, in particular, not to mention economic crisis and deepening political world instability, have produced a tendency to reach to complex

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systems modelling as a kind of panacea. But complex systems thinking presents a particular challenge, for the possibility of reversibility and reducibility is removed and so too therefore the possibility of recovering original points of emergence, or of knowing the effects of interventions at different scales and levels, the measurement of specific effects of positive forcing, or of amplification through backwards and topdown as well as bottom-up causalities. Though Jorge Luis Borges allegorized a similar problem in his quantum manyworlds’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ [1941], it has taken climate change to disseminate more widely the recognition that we cannot simply reverse a trajectory – from forest to desert and back to forest, for example – that has already materialized through a complex process. There is simply no way to go back. Claire Colebrook’s essay on ‘Irreversibility’, like Tim Clark’s on climate in the final section of this book, examines tensions between the politics of climate change and the science of complex systems in order to think through the challenges of responding to the calamity of global warming. How to think politics in humanist terms when the sciences of irreversibility and the inhuman appear to pre-empt possibilities of reform or reparation? Like Mick Smith’s essay on community, the longer historical perspective is important, even as the current issues are unprecedented. For it is evident if we think about it that the political commitment to unmaking was never, in the first place, dependent on the Newtonian science of reversibility. Colebrook suggests that thinkers in the humanities should listen to scientists, of course, but know when the naive appropriation of concepts developed in specifically scientific contexts risks clouding rather than clarifying their own thinking. The utopian ideal of tabula rasa, of reversing history by wiping the slate clean and starting again, has long been discredited in a distinguished tradition of commentaries on Plato’s Republic. But Colebrook emphasizes that most models of political reversibility have not been as totalitarian or as absolute as this. To give up on the concept of political reversibility as unmaking because of an infatuation with the concept of irreversibility in science may disarm political hope and replace it with a depoliticizing fatalism that buys into the belief that the present is all there is: capitalism is here to stay and the wrongs of the past may never be put right. It might even (paradoxically) mean reversion to the oldest myth of all, that of the invisible hand or intelligent design or the idea that nature is hierarchically fixed. Bruno Latour is not the only theorist, though perhaps the best known, to point out the ironies of a situation where so-called progressive thinkers have so focused their energies on persuading us that nature is a construct – thereby inadvertently contributing to the denial of the findings of climate science – even as they buy into a fatalism around the possibility that there might ever be an alternative to the economic system of capitalism.21 But Latour himself rejects the dualism of human agency versus the passivity of matter as an evasion of the necessity to think through the entanglement of human and other agencies as a flattened ontology of human and non-human forces and relations. Colebrook’s essay leaves us wondering if climate change is not making Latourians of us all. How do we square political reversibility with material irreversibility? Once again, a key problem is how we approach this newly presented condition of entanglement; how do we unpick it? Can we? One might argue that like that of the network and the interconnected, entanglement is also a slippery concept. Simply because it is no longer possible to disentangle human agency from what is

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thought of as nature or the material world (nineteenth-century fossil use has always already changed ‘nature’ in irreversible ways but through a past shaped by human uses of the material world) then it is also too easy to assume that humans bear no special agential responsibility for its degradation: surely there is a need to keep different kinds of agencies analytically distinct however entangled they are in terms of the complex causality of dynamic systems. The new ‘vibrant’ materialisms and flattened ontologies ignore a Marxist tradition of dialectical thinking: more important to them is that matter is no longer to be thought as an inert substance worked on by human agencies but instead materiality is given power – vibrancy – as a co-creator of history, so that agency is distributed (as also in some distributed cognition arguments that work through a similarly flattened ontology of humans and objects). Like Mick Smith’s writing on community and Patricia Waugh’s on paradigm, Claire Colebrook’s essay shows how the concept of complexity as it is used in science and philosophical theory is able to scaffold entirely contrary arguments: that everything is irreversible (deflating the force of the political and the revolutionary) and that everything is reversible (capitalism is fragile and there is no such thing as nature). Whatever the road forward through this Scylla and Charybdis, simply to conflate scientific with political thinking around irreversibility is no way forward. That trajectory of thinking might all too easily arrive at precisely the same kind of fetishization of the object that Marxism set out to critique or where, if the distribution of power is simply a property of the network, it is therefore possessed equally by no one and no thing. But if we ignore the political in our accounts of nature then it is all too easy to forget that the industrial capitalism of wealthy nineteenth-century nations has produced a world where it is those at the periphery who are suffering and will suffer most from its environmental fallout in the future. Colebrook’s essay suggests that entanglement – another concept that runs through many of the essays here, like distribution, and like network – is in need of some careful conceptual unpicking. One might detect a tension, in particular, between new and old materialisms.22

Assemblages and realignments If rupture and disruption open up the possibility of novelty, it remains to be demonstrated how the situations they leave in their wake might be reconfigured and realigned to constitute recognizable situations. To this end, it seems necessary to investigate specifically those concepts that describe transitions in terms of process – processes which grasp the dynamics of a transition by emphasizing the continuity across that which is prior and subsequent to a particular shift (fragmentation), as well as those which place their emphasis on emerging assemblages themselves. Other concepts attend to the unexpected and innovative recombinations of information or other material across a variety of situations or transhistorically or across different media and disciplines (network). Regardless of whether we finally ascribe to the view that contemporaneity is marked by increasing complexity, or whether it is marked by an increased awareness of complexity, it is clear that our conceptual frameworks must be expanded to include the increasing number of situations in which strands of information once considered independent are now shown to be interdependent

Introduction

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(hybrid). How do these points of coherence come to be mediated and communicated, particularly in the contemporary situation (dissemination), and how do stable infrastructures and systems emerge that seek to regulate or organize change and how do they operate (institution)? What is the fragment? Maxim, aphorism, epigram, sketch – do we interpret the fragment as a clear-eyed mode of formal escape from the illusion of completion, a writing out of risk whose natural tendency is towards interruption and disruption? Or do we read fragment as a mode of impossible nostalgia or desire, a yearning for the possibility of a lost or yet-to-come plenitude? Is it part of a totality that opposes from within or does it lie outside of all systems? Is it a scrap of a pre-existing whole or a hypothetical structure never to be completed? If we agree with Schlegel, Maebh Long suggests in her essay on ‘Fragmentation’, it is equally difficult for the mind to have a system, as it is for the mind to have none: the turn to the fragment raises issues around philosophical self-reference and excess even as it appears to offer a means of making the indeterminism of the world manageable, moving between order and chaos. As a mourning for lost unity, it produces the Romantic fetish of the ruin; as resistance to totalization, it produces the postmodern cut-up. One might of course insert modernism between these two: one of the most famous lines in modernist poetry, in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), tells of how ‘these fragments [the poem itself] I have shored against my ruin’. Like the interference of the untranslatable, the fragment is that which resists recuperation or conversion into system, purity, originality and totality. Even to read a succession of fragments, Long argues, is to be embarked on an unending poeisis of ‘unworking’: for there is no preformulated narrative, cognitive schema or script that might guide the making of a pattern. The fragment points to art as a counterpoint without resolution: the emergent remade with each encounter or, to recall Eliot, the pattern new in every moment. Maebh Long concludes with a close reading of essays by Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy that continue to circle around the paradoxes of the fragment. As that which asserts the yearning for, but also undoes the impulse to system, the fragment is ultimately at one with the event of being we call existence. As that which nothing completes, being is the absolute fragment, the absolute non-absolute. And should the fragment have its way, nothing and no one will have the final word. Whereas fragment plays with the idea of parts breaking up and splitting off from imaginary wholes, ‘Hybrid’ seems to work in the opposite direction: existing parts coming together in new and imaginary wholes. Originally a technical term from botany, the concept of the hybrid acquired new life as the buzzword of 1980s postcolonialism, part of its resistance to discourses of ethnic, racial and national ‘purity’. It was in the work of Homi Bhabha, in particular, that the political and theoretical celebration of hybridity and fascination with the in-between first became legion. In the 1990s too, hybridity featured in feminist and posthumanist discourses of the cyborg and the monstrous woman, constructed against a purification of the ‘natural’ that has mostly served to exclude or marginalize actual women from cultural power. Of late, the hybrid, like the concept of the untranslatable, the exception, and the fragment, or the entangled and distributed, seems to flourish wherever a tropic weapon is required against the bounded, the pure, the categorical and the taxonomic. Hybridity has been hybridized

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in this current fascination with entanglement, intra-action, species crossing, genetic engineering, artificial life and the dissolution of boundaries. It was Latour again who insisted in 1993 that ‘so many hybrids’ have undone the promised land of modernity.23 But as Roger Luckhurst demonstrates, however, culturalist biases in 1980s and 1990s accounts of hybridity suppress a much darker and more complex genealogy and this provides a context for the new hybrids of the twenty-first century. Luckhurst traces three moments in this history, exploring through this more complex genealogy the negative consequences of unthinking acceptance of essentialist reductions that ignore the political and philological histories of seemingly neutral concepts. His essay begins with the first use of the term in 1720 to describe the production of a plant, a ‘hybrid pink’, that became known as ‘Fairchild’s Mule’. Successful botanical hybridization of this kind, appearing at the moment of publication of Linnaeus’s great taxonomy, was read as a portent of humans’ growing ability to intervene in and change the course of nature. But Luckhurst describes how, by the mid-nineteenth century, hybridity moved from plant to human as fears around miscegenation prompted Josiah Nott’s work on the Mulatto, the idea of the racialized ‘mongrel’ that inspired the first evolutionary formulation of races as separate species. This ‘scientific’ work reflected and fed growing colonial anxiety concerning the ‘hybrid zone’, a condensation and fetishization of fears and fantasies around racialized encounters as dangerous contact points of sexual transaction and potential inter-racial breeding. This particular spectre of the hybrid, racialized and sexualized, intensified fantasies of racial purity. In short, Luckhurst reveals how the concept of hybridity, the darling of postmodern jouissance, had fifty years earlier carried the very same spectral anxieties that gave rise to the catastrophic negative eugenics of the twentieth century. The concept of the network has become prominent in conjunction with the orientation of much systems thinking to the idea of the interconnected and the entangled that reiterates too the sense of living in a world that is increasingly digitally ‘wired’. It is arguable that whereas Foucault dominated critical thinking until 2010 or thereabouts, Latour has substantially influenced the shift from Foucauldian critique to the current preoccupation with circulation, surfaces, assemblages, interconnectedness, chance and a flattened hierarchy of ‘actors’. ‘Keep it flat’ is the new mantra. Latour’s early work included his anthropological study of contemporary laboratory life as a distributed and complex process revealing how the artefactual is involved in the assembling of what is established as ‘fact’. This led to his thinking through of the assemblage as a way of challenging those fallacies of misplaced concreteness that he saw reflected in sociological concepts such as ‘the social’. His Actor-Network Theory, revolutionary in its effects on the social sciences, has been slower to infiltrate and arrive at a similarly dominant position in the humanities (despite the efforts of the new postcritique) – perhaps because the deconstruction of facts, systems and structures and the ongoing gathering of discourses into various kinds of new assemblage is already intrinsic to its work. Over the last decade, however, ANT has started to creep more visibly into humanities’ styles of thinking: around social networks, the circulation of texts, the deconstruction of previous conceptualizations of the social, curation as assemblage, and the network as a mode of resistance to reifications of system and structure.

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Graham Harman begins his essay on ‘Network’ querying the deeper sources of its appeal, tracing how the concept of the network inserts itself into two powerful trajectories from ancient philosophy, pre- and post-Socratic. In this ancient thinking through of relations between the One and the Many, if the Many is a splintering from the One, how does it emerge? Or in the alternative atomistic universe of the discretely Many, how does the Many assemble into the higher structure of the One? The question posed bears some resemblance to that raised by the fragment. From Parmenides through to Leibniz, and from logical atomism to contemporary objectoriented ontologies, the relation between the Many and the One is problematic (or simply refused as in Deleuze’s thinking). Harman suggests that part of the appeal of the network too is that it seems to avoid the tendency to polarize ‘everything is connected’ against ‘nothing is connected’, that is to say, the view that only relations are real, or only material particles are real. In that sense, ANT’s insistence on a flat ontology might seem to be a contemporary version of neutral monism or of early twentieth-century process philosophy such as that of A. N. Whitehead that shaped Deleuze’s thinking, but ANT avoids positing the idea that there is anything primary, either relational, evental or substantial, behind the network. The network is all there is and – to borrow from the title of Iris Murdoch’s first novel – there is no getting under it. Instead Latour suggests an economy of distributed agential force: we should simply accept that all things that have effects on something else are actors. Harman too argues that although Latour may seem to avoid privileging matter or relation, what is privileged is the network itself. A thing is nothing unless it is acting. Harman detects a similar move interestingly in Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action and agential realism – a version of the Uncertainty Principle that argues that new epistemic objects come into being, without prior existence, as entanglements of observer and observed. For Harman, both Latour and Barad are idealists, rather than realists, though both situate themselves in a broad category of realism. Both insist that objects are shorn of pre-existing qualities or attributes that exist prior to entry into the network. The Network or (as I’ve suggested above) the condition of entanglement is all. Harman concludes that only a properly robust realism might counter this version of infatuation with the interconnected. Objections to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory are still relevant, he argues: just because the object cannot be separated from its measurement, this doesn’t entail that its position and momentum exist only in the observer’s relation to it. There are real things, insists Harman, but they are not to be found in network theories. The hermeneutic appeal of the network, as that of social constructionism, in disciplines whose positivist reifications – of ‘the social’, for example – continue to exert their grip is not hard to understand. The question remains: is there a further appeal of the network as a contemporary philosophy of becoming, a way of asserting relationality against atomism and fragmentation, openness against closure and stasis? Is network simply a reflection of the contemporary obsession with interconnection that runs through much digital, ecological and popular forms of relational thinking? Or is it another way of decentring the subject? What new tools, if any, does network provide for the humanities, and for what purpose? We have identified here a further contemporary movement concept, like entanglement and distribution, that runs through and is addressed in many of the essays here: interconnectedness.

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This takes us neatly to the next essay that addresses the problematic of ‘Dissemination’, related to that of network, particularly in a digital age, but also importantly captures political anxieties around relations between democracy and expertise, the opposition of elitism and populism, in an era of data-glut and information overload. This is the focus of Jon Adams’s essay as it explores how questions around the dissemination of expert knowledges can no longer ignore the growing threat to established – especially liberal – models of representative democracy from varieties of right-wing populism, particularly those authoritarian modes currently on the rise across the globe. Populist regimes have in common the desire to limit freedom of choice by excluding political alternatives, preferring majoritarian political models that interpellate a narrow construction of ‘the people’ as standing in for the wider demos and opposed to what are constructed as ‘elites’. What has this populist turn to do with dissemination? In an age of social media and increasing surveillance and shaping of public opinion through the digital medium and the sound bite, Adams examines how the idea of information as transmission (signals extracted from noise in communication models) has always been at odds with hermeneutic practices such as those favoured in the humanities that have mostly sought to protect complex processes of understanding through ‘creative misreading’, the concept of the tacit, the embodied, the ‘symptomatic’ and the hidden. The issue of how ideals of democracy might be reconciled with epistemic ideals of expertise has always been a challenging one: expertise is mostly – one might argue, almost by default – provided by elites (though the term ‘experts by experience’ has recently entered a variety of health contexts). As populists now seek to revive and manipulate the concept of the wisdom of the crowd, however, experts find themselves increasingly deemed dispensable. Adams argues that the fashionable academic concept of ‘knowledge exchange’ is to be seen, in this context, as a feeble attempt to mitigate the inevitable gap between expertise and democratic dissemination in the context of increasingly populist modes of governmental reason. It remains to be seen, one might add, whether current experiments in new democratic forms, such as citizens’ assemblies, or devolved parliaments, may provide workable alternatives.24 Institutions are unavoidable in any discussion of assemblage, as Simon Critchley points out. But they come in many shapes and forms. His essay on ‘Institution’ is a personal reflection, from within the discipline of philosophy, on his own extensive career experience of teaching and practising as an academic philosopher in different kinds of academic institutions, on both sides of the Atlantic. The period in question coincides, of course, with an acceleration of external pressures, economic and political, that have pushed the academy, its ethos and practices, away from institutional, towards a more evidently corporate status. (Wendy Brown and others have written eloquently in recent years on the implications and meanings of this neoliberalization of universities; it is the focus too of Düttmann’s essay on privacy.)25 But Critchley’s interest is in whether there are sources elsewhere that might suggest viable alternatives to current models of academic and pedagogic organization and practice, that might allow more genuine forms of collaborative and creative thinking to flourish. For the major threat to academic values, particularly in the humanities, is to its long-enshrined commitment to a more or less Kantian idea of autonomy as giving the law unto oneself in a space that is free from coercion. Critchley too acknowledges the forces militating

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against this ideal: managerialism (the demand for transparency, accountability and the preoccupation with calibrating ‘performance indicators’); commercialization (‘knowledge partnerships’, the demand for ‘translational’ or ‘for-profit’ research, the ethos of competition, league tables and the like). But the current university structure, particularly in the humanities, is still one broadly derived from the Humboldtian University of the nineteenth century, hierarchical and bureaucratic, rigidly guarding disciplinary silos. Critchley sees the Humboldtian philosopher as a civil servant struggling to retain Kantian ideals of integrity, hoping to be more than an instrument of the state: as in the contemporary academy, he or she fights to resist the transformation of a discipline into a knowledge factory. For Critchley, idealizing the Humboldtian model as an alternative to the contemporary ‘research’ university is not a valid solution to neoliberal corporatization. Neither offer models for genuinely collaborative, creative and rigorous thinking. Critchley begins with some reflection on the earliest academies – Plato’s, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Epicurus’s Garden. Small-scale and face to face, albeit aristocratic and privileged, their commitment was to produce disciples through engagement with masters in an ongoing process of close collaboration and dialogue. The three are offered as exemplars, not so much nostalgically, but for what they offer in thinking through the requirements for more optimal conditions for creative thinking in the contemporary academy. The new universities of the 1960s were experiments with organizational structures, pedagogy, modes of interdisciplinarity (one might add that the ‘Centre’ and the ‘Institute’ are contemporary counterparts of these experiments), but since then corporatism has largely triumphed. Can alternatives still be envisaged? Critchley argues that one small beginning might be to move away from the current conceptualization of ‘research’ that has largely replaced the concept of ‘scholarship’ in the humanities, a shift reflected in the power of the Research Exercise Framework to drive academic research and academic appointments in the UK. What if we returned instead to thinking of the classroom as a laboratory for research and teaching as a way back to the dialogic creativity of the ancient academies? Is it any longer possible to recover the ideal of a culture of paideia in the original Greek sense? Are there elements in the current system that might be transformed or repurposed for more collaborative kinds of thinking?

Horizons and trajectories Where is all of this heading, and what is it leading to? We end by turning attention to horizon as the outer limit of space – phenomenological, global and planetary – and the outer limit of time – the trajectory into an unknowable future. In focusing throughout on transition and change, the volume as a whole has already been directed towards questions of the future and futurity and not simply the future of theory and of the concepts that seem crucial in this trajectory. The final cluster of essays, however, aims to elaborate notions of transition by weighing the study of futurity in terms both of what it promises and the threats it makes apparent (climate). Ranging across the politico-theological domains of decision, commitment and faith, the section addresses questions of ethics and the relationships between human and non-human entities (hospitality), the ways in which the concept of modernity is finally being left behind or

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radically transformed through other spatial and global perspectives (decolonization), the tensions which exist between a hopeful commitment to futurity and the risks and paradoxes this commitment entails (hope). The deep contradictions which inhabit our apparent capacity to shape the future connect with earlier analyses of memory, reversibility and periphery and questions about how we confront the unknown and the unpredictable (resilience) weighed against the growing recognition that catastrophe is, at this point, a likelihood. Addressing the question of ‘Climate’ and climate change from both a broader humanistic and a more focused literary critical and theoretical perspective, Timothy Clark’s essay lays out the challenges facing academic disciplines as they seek the means to think through and respond to the epic scale of threats to planetary existences. Since the early 2000s, global warming has profoundly impacted all academic disciplines and not simply those directly engaged with it, such as the earth and environmental sciences. Everywhere, as we have seen throughout this volume, a sense of the continuous seems confounded, the future cancelled or emptied of hope. The incalculable and the discontinuous are no longer remote cosmological or quantum physics hypotheses; they are the reality of every horizon. One response is to bury one’s head in the sand but Clark recognizes that, as climate change impinges more and more on our lives and futures, every discipline will be required to rethink its aims and objectives, norms and practices, politics and ethos and ask difficult questions: is rereading Shakespeare in the new framework provided by the concept of the late Holocene any longer a useful contribution? What might a scholarly climate activism look like? On a more pragmatic level, Clark addresses his own discipline of literary studies: how do literary humanities disciplines – whose traditional scale is that of the individual in society, or the subjective and intersubjective, and whose classic genres are narrative or lyric – even begin to think at the level of scale and complexity demanded by the complex dynamics of climate change and global warming? How does the moral structure of the tragic, for example, confront the deep wrongs done to the Earth, rather than to a human being or a group? Like Rabaté, Clark sees that the tragic in the mode of the catastrophic can all too easily become a way of cheering oneself up, like joy-in-destruction, or a selfcongratulatory Stoicism: is this the ecocritical reinterpretation of King Lear? If one catastrophizes the future as a wheel of fire, how to persuade others to make a promise to it? Traditional liberal or even Fabian defences of educating a citizenry may be one riposte to Clark – the importance of the small but valuable engagements that might, for example, encourage the need for more complex deliberation as a spur to political activism and pressure on governments, or the cultivation of a more expansive kind of caring (for the Earth as well as the creatures on it). But Clark asks us to think hard about our disciplinary practices and modes of thinking: whether the ‘ecocritical reading’ is ultimately an empty symbolic politics (what Stanley Fish once called ‘professional correctness’) that runs the risk of simulative displacement of the real thing? Or will the key task for humanities disciplines be the struggle to hold onto the kind of culture that has allowed them to flourish in the first place? As Clark observes, bad news, without real solutions, offers no future at all. But his essay has also pinpointed another problematic concept that runs through many of these essays: the emergence of the concept of scale is one that has arrived in the foreground of thinking around systems

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and with the reorientation of theory to questions concerning world-systems, the global and the planetary. Turning from climate to ‘Decolonization’ also reflects issues around scale but offers greater hope that conceptual change might help to bring about political change in the present and future. The concept of decolonization is often used interchangeably with that of independence by movements that oppose colonization: decolonization, it is assumed, simply means the struggle for political and economic independence. Nelson Maldonado-Torres challenges this assumption, calling for a longer historical perspective and a broader horizon of thinking on decolonization than the usual focus on British Imperialism or trajectories that, with their political frameworks of empire and nation-state, privilege the European Enlightenment. Decolonization is at the very least a perspective that requires going back in time to the conquest of the Americas. But Maldonado-Torres is calling for more than that. This shift in historical perspective entails a philosophical shift too: one that opens out the current methods and framing of the concept of decolonization in order to loosen the (still) tight grip of empiricism and narrowly historicist periodization with their third-person flattening effects. The new horizon that is proposed instead opens up a concept of decolonization that includes lived experience understood and reconstituted beyond the philosophical frames and perspectives of the European Enlightenment. To be colonized is not to live in a ‘period’ or era laid down by this trajectory. The colonized live the past in the present as experiences that resist reduction to the Procrustean bed of a European historical period. To live as the colonized is to experience space as well as time phenomenologically from the ground of a particular embodiment; decolonization must therefore be a process that happens not in the frame of Western modernity but enacting a rupture with its modes of governmental reason. It must build its own frameworks of meaning-making and political and ethical intervention from outside the crude binaries of modern and primitive, developed and underdeveloped. As modernity is colonial in its very nature, the goal of decolonization must be one of moving beyond its horizons, ‘beyond modernity’. Decolonization demands a new ontology, a new ethics, a new epistemological framework. Maldonado-Torres concludes his essay by suggesting ten theses addressed to the advancement of a more authentic concept. Above all, decolonization must involve the recognition of the subject as an open site of struggle for a world view, as well as for independence in the narrower political and economic sense. A range of strategies involve adopting and inculcating a ‘decolonial attitude’ – attitude as an orientation of the subject with respect to knowledge, power and being – that recognizes modernity as a metaphysical catastrophe. Decolonization means building a new collective ‘world of you’, a world of love as well as rage, a future worth having. As discourses of climate change, risk, catastrophe and discontinuity present a different kind of horizon, Sarah Atkinson’s essay turns to the concept most widely associated with the ways that humans cope with and accommodate themselves to situations of radical uncertainty, unpredictability and catastrophic threat. She begins by examining the history of the concept of ‘Resilience’ and its metaphorical extension to a variety of contexts – health, governance, economics, well-being – that have gradually shifted away from its original semantic field of engineering (though the popular idea of

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‘bouncing back’ retains something of the flavour of the original notion of a material that is ‘resilient’ to return to its prior state). Like all such fuzzy concepts – sustainability is another – its semantic origins facilitate tropic extension, boundary crossing and scalar movement. ‘Resilience’ became Time magazine’s buzzword of the year in 2013 as the concept of the ‘Tipping Point’ began to go viral and the newest sciences of complexity were revealing more and more the unpredictable, stochastic and indeterminable nature of many of the contemporary threats to the planet and to personal futures. The essay focuses specifically on ways in which discourses and practices around public and personal health and well-being have drawn increasingly on such constructions of ‘resilience’ in the last decade. The interest in how people cope with adversity and threats to flourishing, or with chronic conditions, for example, began in the 1970s, though they were not addressed until more recently by traditional predictive models of disease employed by epidemiologists or diagnostic medicine. In the 1970s, the ‘positive psychology’ movement, built on the initial work of Martin Seligman, capitalized on this gap between felt experience and scientific calibration. Atkinson traces how, as this movement becomes an extension of Big Pharma, therapeutic discourses around resilience are increasingly entangled with neoliberal assumptions concerning selfcare and perpetual self-management. Although the concept is now a key driver of the contemporary (multi-billion) self-help industry, its current fashioning and therapeutic deployment is mostly unresponsive to and disconnected from any politics of fragility, precarity or vulnerability and the glaring evidence of the debilitating effects of economic and political regimes that, worldwide, bear devastatingly on people’s lives. As with Samuel Smiles’s Victorian liberal concept of ‘Self Help’, the new ‘resilience’ is fully at home in neoliberal times. Derek Attridge reminds us that ‘Hospitality’ is an ancient concept that might be traced back to Homer but is still as important in the present as it once was for the Ancient Greeks. Hospitality is a key issue for our time in numerous domains for it is the question of whom we admit and on what terms. The asylum seeker? The refugee? The undocumented immigrant? It raises the question of what we think of as home or mean by homeland or belonging. Like the gift, hospitality is nothing, however, without risk – nothing unless there is no expectation of reciprocity (a riposte indeed for evolutionary game theories with their mercenary or biologistic constructions of altruism). Like the event, hospitality engages the unexpected, arrival and arrivants. The key philosophers of hospitality in our own time are Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In both, welcoming is an ethical act. But for Attridge, it is Derrida above all, who helps to clarify how hospitality, as a welcoming to the infinite and the unconditional, cannot simply be opposed to hospitality as a conditional in the ethical realm of the intersubjective and the everyday; this would be to treat them dualistically rather than as entangled qualities of the broader concept. His essay goes on to trace the complex and interdependent nature of the relation between conditionality and unconditionality in Derrida’s engagement with Levinas’s idea of the ethical as an unconditional opening to the singular other. He cautions, however, that even as Derrida shows how the unconditional cannot be thought without the conditional, neither is its function interchangeable with the Kantian concept of a regulative ideal. Instead Attridge demonstrates how Derrida’s broader writing transposes this duality onto other domains such as justice and the

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law (for the law as an unconditional requires actual laws in order to be more than abstract utopianism). Whereas an invitation welcomes in the other, but conditionally, and on the terms of the host, the unconditional visitation carries the risk that the host be taken hostage. If the other is unknown, not even in species terms – unexpected, unpredictable – then hospitality must be inventive too if it is to respond to the specific kinds of care required by the other. As in the space of the poetic where language reinvents itself, hospitality is an encounter with the singular other, an interruption finally of and by the other in oneself. Attridge ends by suggesting how the question of hospitality raises awareness of two versions of human life: the one, material, calibrated, seeking the predictable; the other, unpredictable, risk-taking, open to the future. As demonstrated in so many other essays too, their relation is never one of simple duality. It is this unpredictable relation to the future that defines ‘Risk’ at its simplest, Marc Botha claims. At once universal and particular, risk crosses physical, cultural and historical boundaries, always taking new forms in the process. In exploring these forms, Botha draws on a wide range of thinkers whose works span over three decades, from the pioneering work of Ulrich Beck on the risk society, to the more recent interventions in the biopolitics of vulnerability by Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe. That risk remains significant to the present is evident from the profound tension that has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic which, Botha notes, exposes a clear rift in risk thinking between the abstract understanding of risk as an economic calculation of probability on one hand, and, on the other, a visceral conception of risk as a phenomenon that is located, in the first instance, in the body of the vulnerable subject or the subject at risk. In exposing this tension between abstraction and viscerality, it becomes clear that risk presents a pervasive ideological battlefield on which the value of human life (that is, the lives of visceral, embodied beings) is set in opposition to the value of economic markets. Since risk is radical not only to life itself, but to every conception of the future, Botha suggests that it is only by undermining the connection between risk and economic value, and rather interrogating how risk grounds the more radical value of all human life, that it becomes possible to formulate what it means to take the right risks. To engage critically, in this sense, with risk and its cognates – vulnerability, fragility and precariousness among them – requires, in the first instance, to rethink the ways in which we represent risk. Risk, upon closer inspection, resists direct representation, appealing instead to the overwhelming sense of presence associated with an aesthetics of the sublime. To probe this claim, Botha turns to the work of poet, Rob Halpern, and in particular two recent collections, Music for Porn (2012) and Common Place (2015), which offer an exemplary vehicle for thinking through risk. Both collections centre on a deeply critical interrogation of US military and economic imperialism and, in particular, the inextricability of the post-9/11 state of exception and a contemporary global capitalist world order dominated by the United States. This world order adopts as its avatar a very specific constellation of qualities aggregated into a recognizable abstraction, the neoliberal subject: a subject that is politically docile, enslaved to various commodity markets and made responsible for its own welfare in a system designed to exploit rather than nurture. The neoliberal subject, therefore, becomes

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the subject par excellence, as both contemporary risk thinking and neoliberalism are strategically constituted through a process of abstraction. In contrast, Botha holds, by insisting on the sheer radicality of fragility, vulnerability and risk to the lived experience of the subject, Halpern’s work draws us back to a visceral understanding of the embodied subject at risk which counteracts risk’s abstraction. The visceral subject of Music for Porn, the vulnerable body of the US solider, becomes a highly charged vehicle capable of disturbing ideological complacencies precisely to the extent that it also becomes an uncanny object of the queer gaze. In Common Place, Halpern continues this exploration of the abjected body at risk by turning to the figure of the post-9/11 political detainee (in Guantanamo Bay) – an individual who has not only been utterly deprived of fundamental human rights, but also placed entirely outside of what Judith Butler recognizes as any economy of grievability and, Botha argues, its corollary, desirability. For the right to be grieved and the right to be desired constitute visceral expressions of the right to be loved, Botha suggests. In this light, the radical nature of Halpern’s strategy comes fully into view: to problematize the struggle in contemporary biopolitics, between the viscerality of the body at risk and the capacity of contemporary societies to abstract such bodies to some kind of purely informational or algorithmic form. How then to redeem the visceral body from total abstraction? Botha suggests that Halpern seeks a tentative answer to this question through something we might call an erotic thanatography – the injection through language and writing of a queer desire into a situation where all desirability has been suppressed or even erased – which aims, in effect, to write life back into necropolitical narratives that frame bodily and social death in the contemporary state of exception. Drawing sustained attention to how these queered figures disrupt our blind acquiescence in current configurations of power, it becomes possible to see how both the body and the body politic can be opened and reopened through a radical re-examination of vulnerability and risk, seen not simply in terms of the need to manage or govern risk, threat and insecurity, but as a necessary condition for the future itself. In the context of everything that has been written so far in this volume, to conclude with the concept of ‘Hope’ might seem to strike a falsely upbeat note, a capitulation to some impulse of conscience prompting the feeling that to end otherwise – without, at least, a gesture of optimism – might be a betrayal of our professional duty as editors. As Caroline Edwards reminds us in her essay, optimism doesn’t require hope: in a world that seems evidently thin on expressions of communal joy, the search for signs of hope is also a sign that optimism, rather than its cheery cousin fatalism, is in short supply. But even to think about the concept of hope, like the Left melancholy analysed by Traverso where we began, reminds us that the political life is an affective one. That said, hope is not necessarily an uncomplicatedly joyous emotion: like anxiety and fear, it is an anticipatory emotion; its relation to time is complex. But Edwards finds signs of hope in the midst of gloom. Her essay opens with an account of the Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, an act of civic disruption quickly reiterated across 1,500 cities worldwide, a howl of rage against the effects of a decade of neoliberal austerity. Since then, of course, numerous political commentators have criticized Occupy as a mode of horizontalist politics whose effects were always bound to be transient, never

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penetrating into financial and political institutions so that deeper or more permanent change might have been affected. But for Edwards, Occupy got something right and it captured a change in mood, close to what Raymond Williams has described as an emergent ‘structure of feeling’.26 One might add that there are now further signs that the long reign of neoliberal hegemony may at last be starting to break up as rightwing populist governments are being forced to retreat from reductionist ideologies of markets and policies of extreme austerity. For Edwards, other signs abound too, in slut walks, trans-activism, the many new collectives around race, environment, sexuality, Green politics: all voicing protest in varieties of boisterous profanity akin to what Ernst Bloch referred to as ‘holiday’. The essay strikes a sympathetic note in this respect, foregrounding the work of Ernst Bloch, the most overlooked of Western Marxists, the one who – drawing on rich traditions of Jewish Messianism, phenomenology, Expressionism and classicism – had most to say about utopia and hope, about how the dream of a non-alienated life might be translated into action. Bloch is the philosopher of hope and, Edwards suggests, his time has come again. She reads Bloch in the context of post-secularism, within an understanding of temporality where the ‘not yet’ is already an ontological component of experience in the present, an affective condition hovering between absence and presence. Her essay sits interestingly alongside Andrew Gibson’s reflections on remainder, though their moods are very different. Reconceptualizing Jewish Messianism within such a materialist frame, Bloch can be seen too as a philosopher of catastrophe (to despair is to give up hope, whereas the structure of the catastrophic is the anticipation of a final turn), though again the mood of Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay on catastrophe is closer to Gibson’s – a reminder that concepts carry multiple possibilities of affective association. Bloch’s concept of ‘the leap’, the flash of recognition in the present of that which is to come, as in mystical experiences of the Parousia, is a kind of event that draws on religious traditions that still have much to teach us about cultivating attention to what slips through the cracks of habitual seeing. Edwards reflects by way of conclusion that utopia too might be hiding, even now, between these very cracks. It may even be hiding between the words that make up this volume. That would be convenient for us: for though we decided to begin with the past, melancholy and memory, we had always desired, somehow, to end this journey through the landscape of contemporary theory with hope and the future – as more than the imagination of disaster.

Notes 1 2 3

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976), 773. See in particular, George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, originally published in Horizon in 1946; reissued as Politics and the English Language (London: Penguin, 2013). Quine rejected the analytic/synthetic distinction in philosophy, arguing that conceptual schemes are tools for prediction in the light of past experience and that, although things exist, they enter our conceptions only as cultural posits within webs

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Future Theory of belief: the key text is ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, The Philosophical Review 60 (1952): 20–43. Deleuze derives this idea in part from Henri Bergson’s critique of abstract concepts as too general; instead Deleuze posits the idea of a multiplicity as a perpetual heterogeneity of concepts produced from within a system where virtual ideas and intensive dramas form an interplay producing concepts out of perpetual difference and repetition. These ideas run through much of his work but see especially, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991) and A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). There is a huge literature on each of these themes but particularly helpful recent accounts include Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2015); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Philip Mirowski, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Jan Werner-Muller, What Is Populism? (London: Penguin, 2016); Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018); Alain Badiou et al., What Is a People? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliott (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (New York: Columbia, 2016); Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, eds., Critique and Post-Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt, A Time for Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon Press, 1964). See Patricia Waugh, ‘Futures for English Studies: English at the Tipping Point and Styles of Thinking in the Twenty-first Century’, in Futures for English, ed. Ann Hewings, Lynda Prescott and Philp Seargeant (London and New York: Palgrave, 2016), 19–39. The essay is a reflection – from the perspective of our own discipline and its styles of thinking – on ways in which literary thinking, despite the limitation of its scale of operation can provide a kind of cognitive workout for understanding, without knowledge of the precise mathematics of systems modelling, how complex dynamic systems operate. One of the problems in grasping climate change or the effects of austerity economics and neoliberal financial systems is an adherence in everyday but also in intellectual argument to thinking in linear and mostly gradualist terms. There is also widespread ignorance of and resistance to acknowledging and recognizing the complex mechanisms involved in downward causation and those of positive forcing at the heart of catastrophic change in complex systems. The humanities need to think more about how their own resources might contribute to shifting these entrenched styles. The shift from structure to system, genetics to postgenomics, dialectics to entanglement, and more generally towards complexity, emergence, networks and interconnectedness, begins tentatively in the 1990s, particularly in the return of more dialectical and complex evolutionary developmental biological theories that displace selfish gene thinking. But there is a marked surge of publications in this area across numerous disciplines appearing from 2005 onwards. Many of these reflect the turn to systems or ecosystems thinking or the rise of the new materialisms, posthumanisms, the digital humanities, theories of extended and embodied mind and distributed cognition. There are too many to mention here, but influential texts published between 2000 and 2010 and relevant to many of the

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essays in this volume include Stuart Kauffman’s development of complexity within the biological sciences, Investigations (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioural and Symbolic Variations in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005) calling for an end to biological reductionism and genetic determinism; Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, The ReEmergence of Emergence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Alan Lui, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge, Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2004) on the new networked and digital worlds of work; Bruno Latour (his Clarendon lectures), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London and New York: Continuum, 2006); Mary Chayko, Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Communities (New York: Suny, 2008) and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke, 2010). Andy Clark and David Chalmer’s hugely influential paper ‘The Extended Mind’ was published in 1998 in Analysis 58, 1 (Jan, 1998): 7–19 as well as Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension in 2008 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), whose account of ‘agential realism’ as ‘intra-action’ rereads the quantum physics account of indeterminism and uncertainty as a mode of entanglement within a framework of ontological emergence; Barad builds on earlier feminist science studies, particularly the important pioneering work of Evelyn Fox Keller that straddles physics, biology and epistemology. Endel Tulving’s seminal idea of episodic memory appeared in ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory’, Organisation of Memory 1 (1972): 381–403. See also his book, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press). See John Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) for a critique of naturalistic thinking that leads to sociobiology and reductionist evolutionary psychology, especially his entertaining account of the microbe’s view of the world as a friendly germ meeting a selfish gene. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) is associated with this argument but it is a remarkably persistent one, eventually entangled with evolutionary thought as current theories in favour of deregulation of markets tend to suggest. See Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (London: Penguin, 1994), Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate; The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2003) and also Paul Krugman’s The Self-Organising Economy (London: Blackwell, 1996), one of the first to develop the concept of self-organization from biologists such as Maturana and Varela as a means of updating invisible hand thinking in economics. Gibson’s ‘Badiou and Beckett: Actual Infinity, Event, Remainder’, Polygraph 17 (2005): 175–203, lays out the relation between event and remainder. Alain Ehrenberg’s Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill: Queen’s University Press, 2009) is a powerful and thoughtful account of how neoliberal performance culture’s constant raising of the bar for markers of ‘success’, and its infatuation with growth, induces a state of perpetual acceleration that is unsustainable in both personal and global terms.

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16 Wallerstein’s work draws heavily on dependency theory, the work of Fanon and on Marxism, but he also acknowledges a huge debt to the chemist Ilya Prigogine and to complex dynamic systems theory in several places. See, for example, the introductory essay written by Wallerstein in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000). This essay recounts a sense of revelation on first hearing Prigogine deliver a lecture and in recognizing the affinities with his own thinking. 17 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose [1925] (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993). 18 Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) was crucial in first analysing the structure of narrative in such terms, drawing substantially on Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of As If that had been translated by C. K. Ogden in 1921. 19 It was Peter Brook’s Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) that developed Kermode’s ideas, suggesting that plot functions as ‘an anticipation of a retrospection’. 20 For a more developed argument along these lines, see Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). 21 Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 25–48. 22 For a cogent and impassioned defence of old materialisms, including historical materialism, against the new forms of vibrant matter and Latourian distributed agency, see Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018). 23 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 206. 24 For an original and challenging alternative that suggests an entire reorganization of both political and knowledge economies, see the Brazilian political philosopher Roberto Unger’s The Knowledge Economy (London: Verso, 2019). 25 Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos examine the effects of neoliberalism on the contemporary university. For a more recent wide-ranging collection of essays developing many of Brown’s insights, see Debaditya Bhattacharya, ed., The Idea of the University (New York: Routledge, 2019). 26 Raymond Williams’s phrase was first used in The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) and continues to resonate through his later work, especially in Marxism and Literature where it is attached explicitly to the concept of emergence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Section One

Rethinking Change

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1

Memory Haunting pasts without utopias Enzo Traverso

Historical turn In 1967, reconstructing the long trajectory of the uses of Cicero’s celebrated maxim, historia magistra vitae est [history is the teacher of life], Reinhart Koselleck stressed its exhaustion at the end of the eighteenth century, when the birth of the modern idea of progress replaced the old, cyclical vision of history. The past ceased to appear as an immense reservoir of experiences from which human beings could draw moral and political lessons. Since the French Revolution, the future has had to be invented rather than extracted from bygone events. The human mind, Koselleck observed quoting Tocqueville, ‘wandered in obscurity’ and the lessons of history became mysterious or useless.1 The end of the twentieth century, nevertheless, seemed to rehabilitate Cicero’s rhetorical formula. Liberal democracy took the form of a secular theodicy that, as the epilogue to a century of violence, incorporated the lessons of totalitarianism. On the one hand, historians pointed out that innumerable changes occurred in a turbulent age; on the other hand, philosophers announced the ‘end of history’. Fukuyama’s optimistic Hegelianism has since been criticized, but the world that emerged from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism was desperately uniform. Liberalism invaded the stage; not since the Reformation had a single ideology established such a pervasive, global hegemony.2 The year 1989 stresses a break, a momentum that closes an epoch and opens a new one. This is reflected in the international success of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes (1994), a text which places in a broad historical perspective the widely shared perception of the end of a cycle, of an epoch and, finally, of a century.3 In this context, the unexpected and disruptive character of the fall of the Berlin Wall immediately took on the dimension of an event: an epochal turn exceeding its causes, opening new scenarios, suddenly projecting the world into an unpredictable constellation. Like every great political event, it modified the perception of the past and engendered a new historical imagination. The dialectic of the twentieth century was broken. Instead of liberating new revolutionary energies, the downfall of State Socialism exhausted the historical trajectory of socialism itself. The entire history of communism was reduced to its totalitarian dimension, which

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appeared as a collective, transmissible memory. Having entered the twentieth century as a promise of liberation, communism exited as a symbol of alienation and oppression. The images of the demolition of the Berlin Wall appear, a posteriori, as a reversal of Eisenstein’s October: the film of revolution had been definitely ‘rewound’. Revolution had been subsumed under the narrative of totalitarianism. Reinhart Koselleck defined as a Sattelzeit – a ‘saddle time’, a time of passage – the period in the seventeenth century stretching from the crisis of the Old Regime to the Restoration (c. 1750–1815). In this cataclysmic era of transition, a new form of sovereignty emerged, based on the idea of nation that, for a short period, erased the European dynastic regimes; a society of orders was replaced by a society of individuals. Words changed their meanings and a new conception of history as a ‘singular collective’, including both a ‘complex of events’ and a meaningful narrative (a kind of ‘historical science’), finally appeared.4 So might the concept of Sattelzeit help us to understand the transformations that are now happening in the contemporary world? We may suggest that, toutes proportions gardées, the years from the end of the 1970s to September 11, 2001 witnessed a transition whose consequence was a radical shift in the general landmarks of European history, of its political and intellectual landscape. In other words, the fall of the Berlin Wall materializes a transition in which old and new forms merged together. It was not a simple revival of the old anti-communist rhetoric. During this quarter of a century, market and competition – the cornerstones of the neoliberal lexicon – became the ‘natural’ foundations of post-totalitarian societies. They colonized our imagination and shaped a new anthropological habitus, constituting the dominant values of a new ‘life conduct’ (Lebensführung) in comparison with which the ethically oriented old Protestant asceticism of the bourgeois class – according to Max Weber’s classical portrait – appears an archaeological vestige of a submerged continent.5 The extremities of such a Sattelzeit are utopia and memory. This is the political and epistemic framework of the new century that is opened up by the end of Cold War. In 1989, the ‘velvet revolutions’ seemed to return to the situation of 1789, shortcircuiting two centuries of struggle for socialism. Freedom and political representation appeared as the only horizon, according to a model of classical liberalism: 1789 opposed to 1793 as well as to 1917, or even 1776 opposed to 1789 (freedom against equality).6 Historically, revolutions have been factories of utopias; they have forged new imaginaries, new ideas, and have aroused expectancies and hopes. But that did not occur with the so-called ‘velvet revolutions’. On the contrary, they frustrated any previous dream and paralysed cultural production. A brilliant essayist and playwright like Vaclav Havel became a pale, sad copy of a Western statesman once elected president of the Czech Republic. The literature of Eastern Germany proved extraordinarily fruitful and imaginative when, submitted to the suffocating control of the STASI, it created allegorical novels stimulating the art of reading between the lines. Nothing comparable appeared after the Wende. In Poland, the turn of 1989 engendered a nationalist wave, and the deaths of Jacek Kuron and Krizstof Kieslowski sealed the end of a period of critical culture. Instead of projecting themselves into the future, these revolutions created societies obsessed by the past. Museums and patrimonial institutions devoted to recovering national pasts kidnapped by Soviet communism simultaneously appeared all over the countries of Central Europe.

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More recently, the Arab revolutions of 2011 have quickly reached a similar deadlock. Before being stopped by bloody civil wars in Libya and Syria, they destroyed two hated dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt but did not know how to replace them. Their memory was built out of defeats: socialism, pan-Arabism, Third-Worldism and Islamic fundamentalism (which did not inspire the revolutionary youth). Such revolutions and mass movements are burdened with the defeats of the revolutions of the twentieth century, an overwhelming heaviness that paralyses the utopic imagination.

End of utopias Thus, the twentieth-first century is born as a time shaped by a general eclipse of utopias. This is a major difference that distinguishes it from the two previous centuries. Opening the nineteenth century, the French Revolution defined the horizon of a new age in which politics, culture and society were deeply transformed. The year 1789 created a new concept of revolution – no more a rotation, according to its original astronomical meaning, but a rupture and a radical innovation – and laid the basis for the birth of socialism, which developed with the growth of industrial society. Demolishing the European dynastic order – the ‘persistence’ of the Old Regime – the Great War birthed the twentieth century, but this cataclysm also engendered the Russian Revolution. October 1917 immediately appeared to be a great and at the same time tragic event that, during a bloody civil war, created an authoritarian dictatorship that rapidly transformed into a form of totalitarianism. Simultaneously, the Russian Revolution aroused a hope of emancipation that mobilized millions of men and women throughout the world. The trajectory of Soviet communism – its ascension, its apogee at the end of the Second World War, and then its decline – deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century, on the contrary, opens with the collapse of this utopia.7 François Furet drew this conclusion at the end of The Passing of an Illusion [1999], with a ‘resignation’ to capitalism that was excitedly emphasized by many reviewers: ‘The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept. Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is.’8 Without sharing the satisfaction of the French historian, Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson formulated a similar diagnostic, observing that the end of the world is easier to imagine nowadays than the end of capitalism.9 The utopia of a new, different model of society increasingly appears as a dangerous, potentially totalitarian desire. In short, the turn of the twentyfirst century coincided with the transition from the ‘principle of hope’ to the ‘principle of responsibility’.10 The ‘principle of hope’ inspired the battles of the previous century. It haunted also the most terrible moments of that age of war and revolution and encouraged resistance movements across Nazi Europe. The ‘principle of responsibility’ appeared when the future darkened, when we discovered that revolutions had generated totalitarian monsters, when a growing understanding of ecology made us aware of the dangers menacing the planet and, so, began to think about the kind of world we would leave to future generations. Using the famous conceptual couple

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elaborated by Reinhart Koselleck, this diagnostic might be formulated in the following way: communism is no longer a point of intersection between a ‘space of experience’ and a ‘horizon of expectation’.11 The expectation disappeared, while experience has taken the form of a field of ruins. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch distinguished between the chimeric, Promethean dreams haunting the imagination of a society historically unable to realize them (the abstract, compensatory utopias, such as the aircrafts imagined in the technologically primitive societies arising from the Middle Ages), and the anticipatory, emancipatory hopes inspiring a possible revolutionary transformation of the present (the concrete utopias, such as socialism in the twentieth century).12 Today, we are witnessing the vanishing of the former and the metamorphosis of the latter. On the one hand, taking varied forms from science fiction to ecology studies, the dystopias of a future nightmare made of environmental and social catastrophes have replaced the dream of a liberated humanity – a dangerous dream of the age of totalitarianism – and confined the social imagination to the narrow boundaries of the present. On the other hand, the concrete utopias of collective emancipation have turned into individualized drives for the inexhaustible consumption of commodities. Dismissing the ‘warm stream’ of collective emancipation, neoliberalism has instead introduced the ‘cold stream’ of economic reason. Thus, utopias are destroyed as they are transformed, by their privatization, into a reified world.13 According to Koselleck, the present gives its meaning to the past. At the same time, the latter offers to the actors of history a huge collection of experiences indispensable for formulating their own expectations. In other words, past and future interact, related by a symbiotic link. Instead of being two rigorously separated continents, they are connected by a dynamic, creative relationship. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nevertheless, this dialectic of historical time seems exhausted. The utopias of the past century have disappeared, leaving a present charged with memory but unable to project itself into the future. There is no visible ‘horizon of expectation’. Utopia seems a category of the past – the future imagined in a bygone time – because it no longer belongs to the present of our societies whereas the past haunts them as an unfinished experience. History itself appears as a landscape of ruins, where a living legacy of pain transforms it into a work of mourning. Some historians, such as François Hartog, characterize the regime of historicity that emerged in the 1990s as ‘presentism’: a diluted and expanded present absorbing and dissolving in itself both past and future.14 ‘Presentism’ has a double dimension. On the one hand, it is the past reified by a culture industry which destroys all transmitted experience; on the other hand, it is the future abolished by the time of neoliberalism: not the ‘tyranny of the clocks’ described by Norbert Elias, but the dictatorship of the stock exchange, a time of permanent acceleration – borrowing the words of Koselleck – without a ‘prognostic structure’.15 Twenty-five years ago, the fall of real socialism paralysed and prohibited the utopian imagination, generating for a while new eschatological visions of capitalism as the ‘insuperable horizon’ of human societies. This time is over, but no new utopias have yet appeared. This new regime of historicity, nevertheless, resulted from the end of the twentieth century, whose legacy haunts the present as an inescapable, traumatic, catastrophic past made of wars, totalitarianism

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and genocide. Thus, ‘presentism’ becomes a suspended time between an unmasterable past and a denied future, between a ‘past that won’t go away’16 and a future that cannot be invented or predicted (except in terms of catastrophe).17 In recent times, ‘presentism’ has become, far beyond a historical diagnostic, a sort of Manifesto for some left intellectuals. One of them is the former situationist art historian T. J. Clark who, claiming a sort of Nietzschean, disenchanted reformism, suggests a realist politics that would renounce any utopia. ‘There will be no future,’ in his assessment, ‘only a present in which the left (always embattled and marginalized, always – proudly – a thing of the past) struggles to assemble the “material for a society” Nietzsche thought had vanished from the earth. And this is a recipe for politics, not quietism – a left that can look the world in the face’.18 In such an assessment, the boundary between recognition of the objective situation and resignation to defeat as an ineluctable destiny of the left almost disappears. The twenty-first century engendered a new kind of ‘disenchantment of the world’. After the Entzeuberung der Welt announced by Max Weber a century ago, when he defined modernity as the dehumanized age of instrumental rationality, we have experienced a second disenchantment brought about by the failure of its alternatives. This historical impasse is the result of a paralysed dialectic: instead of a negation of the negation – the socialist transcendence of capitalism according to the Hegelian (and Marxian) idea of Aufhebung – we observed the reinforcement and the extension of capitalism through the demolition of its enemies. Blochian hope of human becoming – the ‘not yet’ (noch-nicht) – is abandoned in favour of an eternal present.19 Of course, the failure of real socialism is not the only source of this historical change. Socialist utopia was deeply linked to a workers’ memory that disappeared during the last few crucial decades. The fall of communism coincided with the end of Fordism, that is, the model of industrial capitalism that had dominated the twentieth century. The introduction of flexible, mobile and precarious work, as well as the penetration of individualist models of competition among salaried workers, eroded traditional forms of sociability and solidarity. The advent of new forms of production and the dislocation of the old system of big factories with enormous concentration of labour forces had many consequences: on the one hand, it deeply affected the traditional left, placing in question its social and political identity; on the other hand, it disarticulated the social frameworks of the left’s memory, whose continuity was irremediably broken. The European workers’ movement lost both its social basis and its culture. Simultaneously, the decade of the 1990s was marked by the crisis of the traditional ‘party model’. Mass political parties – which had been the dominant form of political life after the Second World War and whose paradigm was the left parties (both communist and social-democratic) – disappeared or declined. Composed of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of members, and deeply rooted in civil societies, they had been a major vector of the formation and transmission of a collective political memory. The new ‘catch all’ parties that replaced them function as electoral apparatuses without strong social and political identities. Socially decomposed, class memory remained without political representation in a context where labouring men and women had lost any visibility in public space. Class memory became a kind of ‘Marrano’ memory – a hidden memory, exactly as Holocaust memory just after the

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war – and the European left lost both its social bases and its culture. The failure of real socialism was followed by an ideological offensive of conservatism, not by a strategic balance sheet of the left. The reactivation of the past that is shaping our time is probably the result of this eclipse of utopias: a world without utopias inevitably looks towards the past. The emergence and increasing centrality of memory in the public space of Western societies is a consequence of this change. We entered the twenty-first century without revolutions, without Bastilles or Winter Palace assaults, but we got a shocking, hideous ersatz on 11 September 2001 with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, which spread terror instead of hope. Deprived of its horizon of expectation, the twentieth century appears to our retrospective gaze as an age of wars and genocides. A previously discreet and modest figure bursts on the centre of the stage: the victim.20 Mostly anonymous and silent, victims invade the podium and dominate our vision of history. Thanks to the quality and influence of their literary works, the witnesses of the Nazi camps (Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, Imre Kertesz, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel among them) as well as those of Stalin’s Gulags (Varlam Shalamov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gustaw Herling, for example) became the icons of this century of victims. Capturing this Zeitgeist, Tony Judt concluded his fresco of post-war Europe with a chapter devoted to the memory of the continent emblematically titled: ‘From the house of the dead’.21 This sensibility with respect to the victim illuminates the twentieth century in a new light, introducing into history a figure that, in spite of its omnipresence, had always been in the shadows. Henceforth, the past seems the landscape contemplated by Benjamin’s Angel of History: a field of ruins incessantly accumulating towards the skies. Yet the new Zeitgeist is exactly antipodal to the Messianism of the German-Jewish philosopher: there is no ‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit) resonating with the past in order to accomplish the hopes of the vanquished and to assure their redemption.22 The memory of the Gulag erased that of revolution, the memory of the Holocaust replaced that of antifascism, and the memory of slavery eclipsed that of anti-colonialism: the remembrance of the victims seems unable to coexist with the recollection of their hopes, of their struggles, of their conquests and of their defeats. Several observers wrote as early as 1990 that it was, once again, ‘midnight in the century’.23 The turn of 1989 produced a clash between history and memory, merging two concepts that scholars had rigorously separated throughout the twentieth century, as evidenced in work ranging from Maurice Halbwachs to Paul Ricoeur and Aleida Assman. ‘Historical memory’ exists: it is the memory of a past that definitely appears as closed and has entered into history. In other words, it results from the collision between memory and history that shapes our time, a crossroads between different temporalities, the mirror of a past at the same time still living in our minds and archived. The writing of the history of the twentieth century is a balance between both temporalities. On the one hand, its actors achieved – even as witnesses – the status of becoming a source for the historians; on the other hand, scholars work on a matter that constantly interrogates their lived experience, putting to discussion their own status. Although books such as Age of Extremes by the Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, and The Passing of an Illusion by the conservative, François Furet, are in many respects antipodal, their interpretations of

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the twentieth century have in common a recollection of its events that often takes an autobiographical form. In his posthumous book History: The Last Things before the Last (1969), Siegfried Kracauer suggested the metaphor of exile to describe the historian’s journey. In his eyes, the historian is, like an exile or a ‘stranger’ (Fremde), a figure of extra-territoriality.24 He is divided between two worlds: the world where he lives and the world he tries to explore. He is suspended between them because, in spite of his effort to penetrate the mental universe of the actors of the past, his analytical tools and hermeneutic categories are formulated in his own time, that is, in the present. This temporal gap implies both pitfalls – first of all anachronism – and advantages, because it allows a retrospective explanation that is not submitted to the cultural, political and also psychological constraints belonging to the context in which the subjects of history act. It is precisely from this gap that historical narratives and representations of the past originate. The metaphor of exile is undoubtedly fruitful – exile remains one of the most fascinating experiences of modern intellectual history – but needs to be more nuanced. Historians of the twentieth century are both ‘exiles’ and ‘witnesses’ (primary or secondary) because they are deeply involved in the events that constitute the object of their research. They do not explore a far and unknown past, and the difficulty of their task lies in opening up a distance with respect to the recent past, a past they have often lived through and observed and which still haunts their environment. Their empathetic relationship with the actors of the past permanently risks being disturbed by unexpected moments of ‘transfer’ – in a psychoanalytic sense of the word – that break through to the surface in their work, awaking lived experience and subjectivity.25 In other words, we live in a time in which historians write the history of memory, while civil societies carry on the living memory of a historical past. The exploration of the past results in an exercise of melancholy criticism, in a precarious equilibrium between history and memory.

Three memories As Dan Diner suggested, the commemoration of the Allied victory in the Second World War on 8 May 1945 is an interesting observation point for exploring the memory landscape of the early twenty-first century.26 Established as a national holiday in many countries, this anniversary does not have the same meaning for the Western world, Eastern Europe and North Africa. Western Europe celebrates the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich to the Allied forces as an event of Liberation, the starting point of an era of peace, freedom, democracy and the reconciliation of a continent that had been involved in a fratricidal conflict. With the passing of time, Germans themselves came to adhere to this vision of the past, abandoning their old perception of the defeat of the Third Reich as a national humiliation that was followed first by the deprivation of their sovereignty and then by the division of their country into two enemy states. In 1985, former president of the German Federal Republic, Richard von Weiszäcker, defined May 8 as ‘liberation day’, and twenty years later Chancellor Gerhard Schröder participated, side by side with Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair, George

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Bush and Vladimir Putin, in the commemorations of the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Germany’s adoption of a kind of ‘constitutional patriotism’ strongly rooted in the West was definitely ratified. In this context, the memory of the Holocaust plays the role of a unifying narrative. It is a relatively recent phenomenon – we could date it to the beginning of the 1980s – concluding a process of remembering that has passed through different steps. At first, there was the silence of the post-war years, then the anamnesis of the 1960s and 1970s provoked by the awakening of Jewish memory and a generational change, and finally the preoccupation with memory of the last twenty years. After a long period of repression, the Holocaust returned to the surface in a European culture finally liberated from anti-Semitism (one of its major elements until the 1940s). All the countries of continental Europe were involved in this change, not only France, which has the largest Jewish community outside of Russia, but also Germany, where continuity with the Jewry of the years before the war was radically broken. In a rather paradoxical way, the place of the Holocaust in our representations of the history of the twentieth century seems to be growing as the event becomes more and more remote. Of course, this tendency is not irreversible and things could change with the death of the last survivors of the Nazi camps. Until now, however, it dominates the memorial space of the West – both in Europe and the United States – where the Holocaust has become a kind of ‘civil religion’, a secular belief which, according to Rousseau, is useful for unifying a given community.27 Covered by the media and ritualized by national and supranational institutions, the commemoration of the Holocaust allows for the sacralization of the foundational values of liberal democracies: pluralism, tolerance and the Rights of Man. The defence and the transmission of such values take the form of a secular liturgy of remembering. It would be wrong to confuse collective memory and the civil religion of the Judeocide: the first is the presence of the past in today’s world; the second is a politics of representation, education and commemoration. Rooted into the formation of a transnational historical consciousness, the civil religion of the Holocaust is the product of state pedagogic efforts. As the commemoration in January 2005 of the liberation of Auschwitz’s camp clearly reveals, it is an attempt to create a consensual memory of compassion. The presence of the architects of the war against Iraq at the heart of this celebration roughly showed its apologetic aim: the remembrance of the victims, they seemed to say, inspired their choices and, by consequence, their war was a just war. Within the European Union, the civil religion of the Holocaust tries to build an ethical supranational foundation with many functions. On the one hand, the political divisions of the European Union could be hidden by a facade of ethical unity. On the other hand, this virtuous appearance could conveniently conceal the enormous democratic vacuum of a European construction founded, according to the terms of its abortive constitutional project, on a ‘highly competitive’ market economy in which the only effective supranational power is the Central European Bank. In the age of the victim, the Holocaust becomes the paradigm of Western memory, the foundation upon which the remembrance of other ancient or recent forms of violence and crimes was built, from slavery to colonial massacres, from the Gulag to Latin American desaparecidos, from the Armenian to Rwandan genocides.

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Historiography itself was deeply shaped by this tendency, with the consequence of transforming the analytical categories elaborated by Holocaust Studies into a kind of normative framework. The propensity emerges, in public debates, to reduce history to a binary confrontation between executors and victims. This temptation does not concern exclusively the remembrance of genocides but also that of completely different historical experiences as, for instance, the Spanish Civil War. According to this new approach, the conflict between democracy and fascism – the way this historical event was perceived in Europe during the 1930s – becomes a sequence of crimes against humanity. Some historians depict a Spanish ‘genocide’, an eruption of violence in which there were only persecutors and victims (furthermore often taken to be interchangeable roles, depending on one’s point of view).28 Returning in this light to the earlier question posed regarding differing perspectives on the end of the Second World War, in Eastern Europe this event is not celebrated as a moment of Liberation. Of course, in the Soviet Union – and today in Russia – the anniversary of German surrender, signed in Berlin on 9 May 1945, was commemorated as the triumph of the ‘Great Patriotic War’. In the countries that were occupied by the Red Army, however, this anniversary indicates the transition from one foreign occupation to another. The end of the Nazi nightmare coincided with the beginning of the long night of Soviet hibernation. For some observers, such a change confirmed that the historical vocation/destiny of many Eastern European countries was to be oppressed by a foreign power, whereas others denounced a ‘kidnapping’ through which Central Europe had been separated from the West.29 The true ‘liberation’, for Eastern Europeans, did not come until 1989. This explains the violent confrontations in Tallinn in the summer of 2006, in which Estonians came to blows with Russians around a monument devoted to the memory of the soldiers of the Red Army. For the Russians, this statue celebrates the Great Patriotic War; for the majority of Estonians, on the contrary, it is the symbol of many decades of Soviet oppression:30 Today, in Eastern Europe, the past is revisited almost exclusively through the prism of nationalism. Many signs indicate a re-nationalization of collective memories. In Poland, an Institute of National Remembrance was created in December 1998, whose aim is to preserve the memory of ‘the Communist, Nazi and other crimes committed against Polish citizens in the period from September 1, 1939 to December 31, 1989’. [See the Institute website: https://ipn.gov.pl/en/brief-historyof-poland/1,Brief-history.html.] Postulating a substantial continuity between Nazi occupation and Soviet domination, the Institute celebrates the history of twentieth century Poland as a long national martyrdom and totalitarian night. A similar vision of national history inspires the House of Terror in Budapest, a Museum devoted to illustrating ‘the fight against the two cruelest systems of the twentieth century’, a struggle which fortunately ended with ‘the victory of the forces of freedom and independence’. [See the Museum website: http://www.terrorhaza. hu/en/museum.] In Kiev, the Parliament passed a law in 2006 defining the Soviet collectivization of agriculture and the famine of the 1930s as ‘genocide of the Ukrainian people’. [Law voted by the Parliament of Ukraine, Verkhovna Rada, on Nov 28, 2006, Kyiv, Ukraine, providing that ‘The Holodomor of 1932–1933

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Future Theory in Ukraine is genocide against the Ukrainian people’, with related provisions.] Depicting themselves as representatives of nation-victims, the governments of Eastern Europe leave a marginal place for the memory of the Holocaust. Here, the latter does not play the same role as in the West. On the contrary, its recollection appears as a kind of competitor and as an obstacle to a complete acknowledgement of the suffering of entire national communities. This contrast is paradoxical because the extermination of the Jews did take place in Eastern Europe: it was there that the great majority of the victims lived and the Nazis created ghettos and death camps. The new members of the European Union often seem to consider the Holocaust as an object of diplomatic mourning. Exhuming an image forged by Heinrich Heine in order to depict the conversion of the Jews in nineteenth century Germany, Tony Judt presented this compelled condolence as a ‘European entry ticket’, i.e. the price to pay for gaining respectability and showing sensibility with respect to human rights.31

In North Africa, the anniversary of 8 May 1945 evokes other events. On that day, French colonial forces opened fire on many thousands of Algerian nationalists who, celebrating the defeat of Nazism in the streets of Setif, refused to retire their flag. Military repression spread in other towns and villages and the conflict was heightened by new demonstrations of force in which Algerian indigènes were compelled to submit themselves to the colonial authorities, bowing down in front of a French banner. The massacre resulted in between 15,000 and 45,000 victims, according to French or Algerian sources.32 Setif was the starting point for a wave of violence and military repression in French colonies, notably in Madagascar, where an insurrection was bloodily suppressed in 1947.33 In May 2005, while the representatives of the Western great powers celebrated the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Algerian President Abdel Aziz Boutlefika officially asked for the recognition of the bloodbath of Setif, characterizing colonialism as ‘genocide’ and claiming reparation from France. This official statement was also a response to the law with which, a few months earlier, the French Parliament had welcomed the ‘positive role’ of colonialism in North Africa and the Antilles. The wave of protests raised by this law compelled President Chirac to demand the abrogation of its most controversial articles. Indignation was calmed, but this episode revealed the tensions that, far beyond Franco-Algerian relations, deeply shape France itself, a country where a large minority of citizens whose ancestors were Black slaves or Maghrebian Indigènes embody a new postcolonial memory. The universal, pedagogical and paradigmatic character of the Holocaust becomes highly debatable when it is claimed by a political power that, at the same time, rehabilitates colonialism. The commemoration of the victory of 8 May 1945 is a condensation of entangled memories. Observed from a Western, Eastern or postcolonial perspective, the history of the twentieth century takes on a different aspect. The historical narratives intertwined by this anniversary are different, in spite of their shared tropism towards the victims of the past, which is the dominant feature of the globalization of memories in early twentieth-first century. Of course, they are not monolithic and incompatible memories and their pluralism could open fruitful spaces of coexistence beyond closed

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national and cultural identities. Until now, however, their different focus – Holocaust, communism and colonialism – illustrates the tendency to draw competitive rather than complementary ‘lessons from history’. The global memory of the beginning of the twenty-first century sketches a landscape of fragmented suffering. New collective hopes have not yet risen above the horizon. Melancholy still floats in the air as the dominant feeling of a world burdened with its past, without a visible future.

Notes 1

Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process’, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 26–42. 2 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ National Interest, Summer 1989, pp. 3–18; on this debate, see Perry Anderson, ‘The Ends of History’, in A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992). 3 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1995). 4 Reinhart Koselleck, Einleitung, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), vol. 1, p. xv. See also Gabriel Motzkin, ‘On the Notion of Historical (Dis)continuity: Reinhart Koselleck’s Construction of the Sattelzeit’, Contributions to the History of Concepts 1.2 (2005): 145–58. On the emergence of a new concept of history, cf. op. cit. 5 For the analytical description of this historical change, see Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007), and Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (London-New York: Verso, 2014). 6 On this debate, see Steven Kaplan, Farewell Revolution: The Historians’ Feud, France 1789–1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 7 Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 8 François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion. The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 502. 9 Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City,’ New Left Review 21 (2003): 76. 10 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 3 vols; Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985). 11 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘“Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’, Futures Past, notably 258–9. 12 Bloch, Principle of Hope. Cf. also Ruth Levitas, ‘Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia’, Utopian Studies 1.2 (1990): 13–26. 13 Peter Thompson, ‘Introduction: The Privatization of Hope and the Crisis of Negation’, in The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, ed. Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–20. 14 François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et experiences du temps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2003), 119–27.

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15 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘History, Histories, and Formal Time Structures’, Futures Past, 95. 16 According to the famous formula coined by Ernst Nolte during the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s. 17 For a discussion on presentism among left-wing intellectuals, see T. J. Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’, New Left Review 74 (2012): 75, followed by the cogent criticism of this piece by Susan Watkins, ‘Presentism? A Reply to T. J. Clark’, 77–102. 18 Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’, 75. 19 Peter Thompson, ‘Introduction’, 15. 20 See Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 21 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 802–33. 22 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 395 (392–3). 23 Adolfo Gilly, ‘Mil Novecientos Ochenta y Nueve’ (1990) in El siglo del relampago: Siete Ensayos Sobre el Siglo XX (Mexico: La Jornada Ediciones, 2002), 118. He implicitly referred to the novel of Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century (London: Writers and Readers, 1982). 24 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995), 83–4. See also Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans and ed. Kurt H. Wolf (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 402–8. 25 Saul Friedländer, ‘Trauma, Transference and Working-Through’, History and Memory 4 (1992): 39–55. 26 Dan Diner, Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust (Tübingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). On the commemorations of 8 May 1945, see the contributions collected by Rudolf von Thadden et Steffen Kudelka, eds. Erinnerung und Geschichte: 60 Jahre nach dem 8. Mai 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006). 27 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 11, 198–9. On the concept of ‘civil religion’, see Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). On the Holocaust’s memory as a foundation of the present discourse on the Rights of Man, see Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 28 This concerns even one of the most important historians of the Spanish Civil War: Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). 29 Milan Kundera, ‘L’Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe central’, Le Débat, 27, Paris, 1983, 3–22. 30 Tatiana Zhurzhenko, ‘The Geopolitics of Memory’ (10 May 2007), www.eurozine. com. 31 Judt, Postwar, 803. 32 Cf. Jean-Louis Plance, Sétif 1945: Histoire d’un massacre annoncé (Paris: Perrin, 2001); Boucif Mekhaled, Chroniques d’un massacre: 8 mai 1945, Sétif, Guelma, Kherrata (Paris: La Découverte, 1995). 33 Cf. Yves Benot, Massacres coloniaux (Paris: La Découverte, 2001).

2

Community Ecology and the body politic Mick Smith

How might we think community ecologically, as something constituted by beings, things, events and relations that are more than just human? How would such understandings be shaped by, and include, different ethical and political possibilities? What relation might such understandings have to earlier, overly naturalistic but still influential, notions such as the ‘body politic’? In what ways might an idea of ecological community be more or less naturalizing, political or hierarchical than this previous ideal or its contemporary successors, such as models of mobile market-based individualism and/or ‘cybernetic’ systems of social interaction? What histories of these material and symbolic transformations might we trace? Are all ideas of ecological community still inextricably anthropocentric insofar as political communities emerge and persist through the symbolic imagery associated with them?1 If an ecological community is, by definition, composed of very diverse bodies then what kind of a ‘body politic’, if any, might it be said to have? What follows can only suggest tentative and provisional answers to such questions. Nonetheless, these questions need to be raised now precisely because of the current ecological state of the world; that is, because of the beleaguered condition of ecological communities exploited under current political/symbolic regimes, and because of the loss of any sense of ethico-political community with the diverse species and habitats that are continually rendered economically, militarily and systemically expendable. We also need to recognize both the foreseeable and the unpredictable repercussions of climate change, deforestation and a thousand other dubious, and often unnecessary, economic and political interventions.

Community and the body politic Symbolic activity does more than provide the units of thought and feeling; it also connects those units with other structures: religious systems, planetary orders, physical bodies, man-made machines. It unifies the universe, provides politics

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Future Theory with a series of references, links it closely with other realms of human experience. Thus the state, when seen as a body politic, is brought into close relation with the whole organic world. A single vocabulary describes animal bodies and political communities and makes the second appear almost as familiar, as natural, as well organized as the first. So kings become heads and soldiers arms; change is understood in terms of growth; disorders described as a disease; decline as senility.2

This quotation, from one of Michael Walzer’s earliest papers, already makes apparent the core interests that led to his being so closely associated with ‘communitarian’ thought, especially his emphasis on the underlying role of shared cultural and symbolic forms in constituting a political community. For Walzer, symbols effectively connect thought and feeling with other structures because they are ‘prior to understanding or, at any rate, to theoretic understanding’.3 Politics, he suggests, is itself ‘an art of unification; from many, it makes one. And symbolic activity is perhaps our most important means of bringing things together, both intellectually and emotionally, thus over-coming isolation and even individuality’.4 It is, then, hardly surprising that the key example he should choose to elucidate this symbolism is that of the ‘body politic’, of the political community as a unitary, all-encompassing, organically interdependent whole, based on human anatomy. Somewhat ironically, it is Hobbes (Figure 2.1), the very philosopher Walzer identifies as expressing modernity’s shift away from this particular sociopolitical metaphor, who provided the most influential image of the body politic in the form of his Leviathan.5 If, as Walzer claims, Hobbes’s political theory expresses the emergence of a new political metaphorics of the individual ‘body-in-motion’,7 then this is clearly tempered by, and in tension with, the appearance of this ‘magnus homo’, the symbolic epitome of the state’s sovereign power over these individuals and all he surveys. Indeed, Hobbes’s concepts of ‘contract’ and ‘sovereignty’ are, one might say, theoretical instruments used to enforce a resolution to the tensions arising when the social reality expressed in the novel ‘symbolic figure’ of the mobile individual appears as a disruptive element, rather than a fixed harmonious constituent, of any larger political body. This is, presumably why this same image of Leviathan so fascinated the fascist juror Carl Schmitt for whom symbolism also played a unifying, pre-theoretical political role.8 For Schmitt, a great admirer of Hobbes’s vision of the ‘total state’, the only problem with this particular symbol was, ironically, that the Leviathan carried too much mythic baggage, allowing space for a variety of political interpretations.9 This, combined with the fact that Hobbes allowed space for religious freedom of thought, rather than simply insisting on ideological conformity, left open symbolic or theoretical possibilities which ‘liberal’ philosophers would later exploit.10 The same hierarchic, totalizing and totalitarian implications of the image of the body politic lauded by Schmitt have meant, as Schatzki and Natter suggest, that this trope has been all but abandoned by mainstream political theorists: ‘Today, under the twin suspicions of theoretical insufficiency and political perniciousness, focused theoretical analogizing between the human body and human society has largely lost appeal.’11 Indeed, why would the kind of politics we now expect to see enacted through a mobile multitude of divergent individuals and associations be illuminated, rather than just

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Figure 2.1  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, frontispiece by Abraham Bosse, 1651. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.6

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restricted, by comparisons with the biological organs, functions and capacities of those individual’s own material bodies? Such analogies exaggerate and idealize the bounded, natural and internal coherence of the community in ways that can indeed become ethico-politically pernicious when individual and particular interests are re-envisaged as ‘functionally’ subservient to the larger political body of the nation state, when ‘even individuality’ is ‘overcome’.12 This anatomical image of politics also seems to have lost its ‘naturalness’ even as, and perhaps because, we now inhabit a situation often described as biopolitical, where the organic world is now far from familiar to most, where the very existence of nature and the natural is questioned, and where animal bodies of every species, including humans, are subject to constant managerial and transformational intrusions.13 What is more, the idealization of a larger body politic loses traction even as social and political theorists insist on the indelible micro-political inscription of individual human bodies, bodies that are never just natural: ‘[t]o be a body’, says Butler, ‘is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology’.14 Every (human) body is hereby re-envisaged as a precarious, contingent, and changing, biological, socio-cultural, and political achievement rather than just an act of God or a fact of nature. This reversal, which is itself a critical response to the dominant atomistic model that Hobbes encapsulated, denotes a shift of attention from the body politic to political bodies and to varied discourses of materio-political embodiment. Walzer, of course, does not address such issues but does posit a ‘chasm’15 between the old pre-Hobbesian symbolic order and later images of the body politic. The symbols at our disposal, which emerge and gain currency through our socio-historically particular and lived experiences, mean that we ‘see a different world’,16 incomprehensible to earlier generations. Yet the image of the body politic remains a pervasive part of the West’s cultural heritage and the case of Schmitt, and the current re-emergence of fascist movements in Europe and nationalistic populism in the United States shows that one should never underestimate the appeal of a symbolically mediated nostalgia for a falsely idealized and culturally homogeneous past/body under the sway of a strong nation state. Indeed, such nostalgia is, unfortunately, often especially appealing for those exposed to the excessive and disorienting bodily, economic and cultural mobility required by contemporary capitalism. In arguing that the image of the body politic provides ‘an elementary sense of what the political community is like, of how physically distinct and solitary individuals are joined together’, even suggesting ‘that individuals are neither solitary nor distinct, but exist only as members of a body’,17 Waltzer presents a view that is anathema to neoliberal ideology. For the culturally dominant ‘common sense’ of capitalism is precisely that of the falsely naturalized individualistic ontology of ‘bodies-in-self-interested-motion’ that serves as Hobbes’s theoretical foundation and is, of course, a target of Walzer’s own ‘communitarian’ critique.18 Put bluntly, neoliberalism seems to leave little space for any kind of notion of a more encompassing or unifying sociopolitical ‘organism’ or community in general. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous claim that ‘[t]here is no such thing as society’19 (a position, in fact, contradicted by her simultaneous nationalistic posturing) is a case in point, and contemporary neoliberals apparently find nothing odd about referring, for example, to the business community.

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However, even in such cases a supra-individual and bodily imagery is still at work, as exemplified by the free market’s invisible guiding hand and in the continually extended individualized rights (if not responsibilities) of corporations. Indeed, the very idea(l) of the market as a self-regulating, circulatory reality must be seen against the backdrop of the earlier and very extensive organicist traditions of the ‘body politic’, together with broader metaphors of ‘the balance of nature’ in general.20 Bowler, for example, suggests that the laissez-faire approach to competition may in some respects be seen as an analogy to another typically eighteenth-century concept, that of the ‘balance of nature’. To the extent that writers of this period recognized the existence of struggle in nature, they tended to give it a beneficent appearance by arguing that the whole system is designed in such a way that each species is kept in check by the activity of others which prey upon it or serve as its food. Nature as a whole is a balanced, harmonious system in a state of dynamic equilibrium.21

The idea of a ‘natural balance’ still resonates very strongly both in populist views of ecology22 and in free-market economics – in the former case as a natural state that is never fully recoverable, in the latter as an economic ideal that is never achievable. Individual and political bodies are often envisaged as avatars of nature’s larger circulatory balance, and, wherever these metaphors reinforce each other, they gain symbolic currency. For example, the Physiocrats, including Francois Quesnay, whose influence on Adam Smith’s work is well documented, noted that ‘[i]n nature everything is intertwined, everything runs through circular courses which are interlaced with one another’.23 These views of nature are reflected in Smith’s espousal of the circulating flow of goods and money, an image which was also clearly influenced by Harvey’s earlier discovery of the bodily circulation of blood.24 Hobbes too had previously used this same bodily metaphor to elucidate economic flows.25 Smith then combines this notion of natural circulation and balance with the health of the body politic, for example, when he criticizes the roles of monopolies in colonial trade, since they make the whole state of her [body politic] less healthful, than it otherwise would have been … one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown … A small stop in that great blood-vessel, which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most dangerous disorders upon the whole body politick.26

Smith’s theoretical emphasis, unlike Hobbes’s, is less on ensuring the sovereignty of the head of state over continually circulating subjects and objects than on encouraging circulation per se because it is deemed economically and politically healthy for individuals and for the ‘social body’27 as a whole. Smith, says Packham, depicts ‘a very specific kind of body … in his image of the economy: a body powered by internal forces and vital energies which steer it unconsciously and independently to well-being,

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ease, and health’.28 It is also a body capable of adapting and maintaining itself in balance even in the face of changing and hostile conditions. She suggests, quoting Smith, that for him ‘[e]xperience would seem to show that the human body frequently preserves, to all appearances at least, the most perfect state of health under a vast variety of different regimens; even under some which are generally believed to be very far from being perfectly wholesome’. It would seem that the ‘healthful state of the human body … contains in itself some unknown principle of preservation, capable either of preventing or of correcting, in many respects, the bad effects even of a very faulty regimen’. This same principle of preservation in the political body, Smith goes on, is ‘the natural effort which every man is continually making to better his own condition’.29

For Smith then, this circulatory balance is actually powered by self-interested exchanges between competing mobile individuals who, and as a way of seeking to ease this same competition, move into increasingly specialized, but also increasingly interdependent, economic positions. The social body grows and develops according to the extent that it facilitates and is facilitated by this increasing division of labour. The division of labour, we might say, is the natural and social principle that plays the key regulatory and developmental role in making mobile individualism and the body politic appear compatible. It economically constitutes whatever community there might be; it delimits the role of politics. These socio-economic relationships outlined by Smith will later be re-envisaged, through a symbolism that calls, in part, on other bodily and organic and economic metaphors, as a kind of ‘metabolic exchange’ between individuals and between the metaphorical body of the economy and its external environment, and still later, in terms of homeostatic (self-balancing) systems.30

Bodily traces: Individual, social and ecological Adam Smith, of course, did not invent, still less think in terms of metabolism and homeostasis. Yet a retrospective reading reveals how the bodily metaphors present in The Wealth of Nations subsequently gain currency in the social and natural sciences and come to be applied in a manner that confirms or (in neoliberalism’s case) undermines certain views of community. To this end it is worth tracing a genealogy of a key metaphor like Smith’s division of labour as it is applied to individual bodies (human and non-human), to social/political ‘bodies’ and to ecological relations. This might illustrate how the kinds of metaphors Walzer thinks so important to symbolizing political community are continually transferred and transformed in an anastomosing passage back and forth between sociopolitical and naturalistic discourses, practices and events. And if natural and social histories continually inform and/or confound each other, this obviously has implications for any attempt to speak of ecological community. It also demonstrates how these same symbols are appropriated and employed (in different contexts and, of course, for different ends) by both the political

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left and right to sediment and claim universality for their own understandings of ‘community’, however ontologically and ethically ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ these understandings might be. In his The Division of Labour in Society, published in 1893, Durkheim (a committed socialist) famously described the progressive social historical movement of societies from a relatively undifferentiated form of ‘mechanical solidarity’, where any one individual’s role is similar to all others, to one of ‘organic solidarity’ where productive roles are highly differentiated but also heavily interdependent on each other. Durkheim31 begins his book by noting that its key term, ‘the division of labour’, was coined by Adam Smith, before being ‘lent to biology’.32 (As Marx had already noted, Smith was by no means the first to describe the division of labour or recognize its economic and social importance.)33 In fact, Limoges argues that this idea of the ‘division of labor’ was specifically imported from Adam Smith’s work on political economy to biology via the work of Henri Milne-Edwards (1800–85), a specialist in invertebrates (including marine invertebrates) among other ‘colonial’ animals (see below), and a key influence on Darwin’s own understanding of physiological and evolutionary divergence (speciation):34 The single most important influence on Darwin’s ideas of divergence was Henri Milne-Edwards, who was chair of entomology at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris from 1841 to 1861 … [In his Histoire Naturelle des Crustace´s, read by Darwin during his own work on barnacles in the 1840s] Milne-Edwards writes that ‘the internal economy of [simple] animals can be compared to a workshop where each worker is employed in the execution of the same tasks’. As one moves higher in the series of animals, these tasks become more and more differentiated. At the top of the series, ‘this division of labour is taken still further, and special systems, designed for defence, locomotion, etc., appear in the economy’.35

Milne-Edwards’s physiological division of labour is then given a more specific evolutionary and ‘ecological’ aspect by Darwin and his follower, Ernst Haeckel (who, of course, coined the term ‘ecology’), by its extension into a theory of divergence both within organisms and between species. This occurs before their writings are reimported back into the emerging discipline of sociology by figures including Herbert Spencer and then Durkheim36 as supportive evidence for the ‘division of labour’s’ biological and social universality. What is more, Durkheim’s division of labour, like Darwin’s natural selection, is generated and powered by ‘Malthusian’ biological/social pressures as population size and density increase. That is to say, the progressive ‘division of labour’ is ‘mechanically’ driven by increases in what Durkheim refers to as the ‘social volume’ (the population size) and the ‘social density’ of communicative interactions – this despite the fact that Durkheim will later famously argue that sociology as a positivistic discipline should be defined on the basis of social facts needing specifically social explanations. It is also worth noting that although Durkheim terms his advanced form of society ‘organic’, and despite his well-known emphasis on the supra-individual reality of society as a ‘social fact’,37 the ‘mechanical’ law that initiates and forces its evolution is, as for Smith, one of individual struggle and competition.38

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Indeed Durkheim directly quotes both Darwin, to support his arguments about the views about the competitive origins of biological diversity, and Haeckel, to illustrate how such specialization might actually ameliorate competition and foster coexistence between species.39 The number of insect species we find on an oak tree ‘“would be absolutely impossible,” states Haeckel, “ … if all belonged to the same species, if all, for example, lived on bark or only on leaves”’.40 Durkheim is quite explicit that the social division of labour is ultimately based in ‘a general biological phenomenon’, a ‘law’ that ‘applies to organisms as well as societies’.41 There is not just an analogy between species in natural communities and individuals in human society, but both are subject to the very same causal and evolutionary law.42 This law also extends into every field of social organization, for although Durkheim admits his initial examples of the division of labour are taken from ‘economic life, this explanation is applicable to all social functions without distinction. Work, whether scientific, artistic, or otherwise, does not divide up in any other way or for any other reasons’.43 Haeckel in his turn had previously used social and economic metaphors to argue the case for the role of the division of labour in the formation of the kinds of colonial animals such as the siphonophores that also interested Milne-Edwards, and on which, in 1869, Haeckel published a prize-winning monograph (Figure 2.2):44 Careful examination shows us that every stock of Siphonophora is composed of a large number of different Medusa-like persons. Each of these medusa has, by adaptation to a definite kind of life, assumed a peculiar form, some act as swimming bladders, others as swimming bells; a third group of persons, the Siphons, only take up and digest nourishment; a fourth group, the Palpons, have essentially the value of sensitive tactile organs; two other groups of persons, male and female, devote themselves exclusively to propagation – the former produce sperm, the latter eggs. Thus, in consequence of progressive division of labour and varied change of labour … the different persons of the Siphonophora colony have developed quite differently and act together for the united life of the whole colony, in the same way as, among the higher animals, is done by the organs of a single person, or like the different estates of a human community.45

In this passage it is possible to trace, quite explicitly, the movement of an organic metaphor back and forth between (a) the jellyfish-like siphonophore46 Haeckel so vividly describes, (b) certain assumptions about the political, social and economic constitution of ‘human community’, and (c) the body and organs of a single human person or ‘higher’ animal. Haeckel considers the siphonophore as an entity, an ‘organism’ that is also, morphologically and developmentally, an internally differentiated ‘community’. Tracing this metaphor thus challenges the idea that such metaphors are simply ‘natural’, but it also reveals that the very idea of an individual body is by no means so biologically simple or obvious as it might have seemed to Hobbes and his political precursors. Haeckel believed studying what we might call the compositional ontology of organisms, for which he coined a specific term ‘techtology’, was not just a matter of taxonomy but a vital aspect of understanding their evolutionary (phylogenetic)

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Figure 2.2  Haeckel’s diagrammatic representation of a siphonophore (of the genus Physophora).47 His key reads a΄: air-bladder or swimming-bladder at its top end; m: swimming-person or swimming bell; o: opening of the bell; t: sensory-persons or tactile polyps; g: egg-forming or female persons; n: nutritive-persons or eating-polyps’.48

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heritage.49 Techtology thus occupied a large portion of his Generelle Morphologie, the work in which the term ‘ecology’ too first appears.50 Haeckel’s interest stemmed not only from his own work in marine biology but from his time as a student of Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), an early proponent of the cell theory – the idea that all animals and plants were composed of multiple differentiated cells that should be regarded as the fundamental developmental constituents (in physiologist Ernst Brucke’s terms, the ‘elementary organisms’) of all living beings.51 Over the course of the decade before Haeckel published his Generelle Morphologie, Virchow had developed the ‘metaphor of der Zellenstaat (the Cell State) to describe humans and other multicellular organisms as compound associations of individual cells’.52 Here each of the cells was understood as a ‘citizen’ that together comprised the larger body in terms of ‘a kind of social arrangement … where a mass of particular existences depend on one another’.53 Haeckel became a major proponent of cell theory, an idea that was both influential and productive in biological circles: ‘Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, this theory of animals and plants as evolved aggregates of cell-organisms, facilitated by the social-political metaphor of the cell state, enjoyed wide popularity among biologists.’54 Applying this even to human bodies Haeckel would write: ‘The cells are truly independent citizens, billions of which compose our body, the cellular state.’55 The ‘political’ nature of the relations between these ‘independent citizens’ became a key issue. To be sure, generally speaking ‘cell state rhetoric usually stressed cooperation within an organism’.56 Virchow wrote of a ‘cellular democracy’ and of ‘republics of cells’, and these are, as Canguilhem argues, ‘perhaps more than images or metaphors. A political philosophy holds sway over a biological theory. Who could tell whether one is a republican because one is a partisan of cell theory, or rather a partisan of cell theory because one is a republican?’57 But other options were certainly available. Haeckel’s student, Wilhelm Roux, founder of the school of ‘developmental mechanics’ (Entwickelungsmechanic), took a very different line in his Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus (1881, The Struggle of Parts in the Organism).58 Here, as the title suggests, he conceived of the relations between cellular citizens under the rubric of a very narrowly interpreted Darwinian selectionism that extended notions of individual competition to every organism’s parts, whether molecules, cells, tissues or organs.59 Roux mostly depicts a direct form of struggle, with molecules and cells destroying other ones. He refers several times to military metaphors: ‘When parts struggle against each other to acquire an ever greater efficiency, the overall performance should also increase, in the same way that the efficiency of an army increases when officers compete and when the best among them are selected to train the novice soldiers.’60

Darwin himself commented favourably on Roux’s book in a letter to George John Romanes61 but interestingly his key philosophical admirer seems to have been none other than Friedrich Nietzsche.62 Nietzsche read Roux’s book in 1881 and again in 1883. Of course, Nietzsche was no fan of Darwinian biology, but Roux’s idea of an

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ongoing ‘inner’ struggle certainly influenced his ‘understanding of the organism as a plurality of conflicting wills to power’.63

The political ontology of (ecological) community You cannot understand anything in biology without recognizing the community nature of all life whether they’re loose bacterial cultures or they are very tight ones that we recognize as cells or they are even tighter ones that we recognize as animals or plants.64

The case of the division of labour illustrates how our understandings of the compositional ontology of organisms, and of nature in general, are inherently (and not just accidentally) political in all manner of ways. There is a politics implicit in how and where the metaphor of the ‘individual’ body is adduced in any ontology (cell, organ, organism, colony, community, factory, economy, polity); in whether such individuals are regarded as cooperative ‘citizens’ within a greater organic whole and/or struggling ‘competitors’; in terms of what ‘processes’ and ‘principles’ (like the division of labour) are determined to guide the development and regulate the maintenance of this ‘body’ and in the continual exchange and transformation of those bodily metaphors travelling back and forth between physiological, evolutionary, political and ecological, discourses and practices. There is no way to simply disentangle the mutual imbrications of our political and natural scientific discourses, and if our greater aim is to envisage a more than simply human ecological community then perhaps we should not wish to!65 However, in recognizing this, we also forfeit the possibility of grounding ecological community in any naïve naturalism. We cannot appeal to the science of ecology here either, since this is riven with similar debates, such as that between Frederic Clements’s ‘organicism’ and Henry Gleason’s ‘individualism’,66 and the debate regarding the role, if any, of interspecific competition in bodily divergence (character displacement), speciation and community structure. Consider the ecological niche, often uncritically regarded as a kind of ecological ‘division of labour’ between species. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, as the twentieth century unfolded the niche became ‘economized’, ‘gradually … linked with competition’ and ‘increasingly associated with resource utilization spectra’.67 Discussions of niches came to mirror neoliberal economics, implicitly assuming that entire populations and species might be treated as competitive ‘individuals’, and this despite the weakness of any scientific evidence for such competition.68 Today, despite literally hundreds of studies selectively targeted at cases where interspecific competition was deemed most likely to be found, evidence for its influence in structuring communities remains equivocal at best. As Chave remarks, ‘[T]he original quest for a universal role for competition in community assembly rules has turned into a more ramified research program, including a search for the relative importance of processes aside from competition’.69 These ‘processes’ include relations like predation, commensalism, mutualism and symbiosis.70

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Perhaps there is more here to be learned from Haeckel’s siphonophores. It is not just that they reveal the arbitrary nature of the appropriation of a specifically human body as a model for political community, but that they pose questions as to what kind of a body politic would be headless, many-tentacled, lacking a circulatory ‘system’, drifting, invertebrate, luminescent, translucent, stinging and so on? Their compositional ontology and evolutionary genealogy also challenge the very notion of a body formed under the auspices of a single over-arching process. The evolution of the siphonophore body suggests that the organization of many beings71 – and, perhaps by the same token, the sociological organization of communities – is inexplicable in terms of any simple, competitively driven (organic) process like the division of labour. In this, and many other cases, there is no single (monophyletic) line of evolutionary descent. We can only explain siphonophores’ current ontology by assuming the symbiotic conjoining of radically different organisms, each with their own developmental history to produce this novel organism. That is to say, the siphonophore’s composition highlights gaps between the mechanisms by which any internal developmental division of labour and the evolutionary and additive association of physiologically, morphologically and evolutionarily distinct ‘persons’ (to use Haeckel’s phrase) occurred.72 To understand what a siphonophore is we are required to recognize evolving forms of mutualism and symbiosis between radically different species (and very many additional complicating factors too). Siphonophores, we now think, are composed of two distinct kinds of zooids or organized bodies: one which has an ancestral medusoid form, the simple, precursory evolutionary form of which would be like that of a true jellyfish; the other which is like the polyps, which in their solitary form are homologous to creatures like sea anemones. Each siphonophore is a genuine colony in the sense that it is composed of zooids that at an early evolutionary period had such solitary forms, but that became so closely physiologically integrated and so specialized that they are now existentially dependent upon each other. The specific combination of the zooids that comprises each ecological ‘individual’ – the number, types and organizational structure of these zooid forms – varies markedly between different taxonomic subgroups of siphonophores. The manner in which these colonies arose and their exact evolutionary relations are still matters of conjecture,73 but the zooids have also become developmentally integrated in the sense that the colony is not formed anew in each generation but now arises by a process of asexual budding from an initial polyp-like protozooid that itself develops from a single fertilized egg. This means that the colony’s ‘individual’ zooids are, despite their very different ancestral origins, and their very different eventual roles, all now genetically identical! Any attempt to turn the siphonophore into a unifying political symbol, an evolutionary and ecological equivalent of the body politic, could only mock the complexity of such a situation. This ancestral diversity does not fit with the monophyletic understanding of Darwinian selectionism that Haeckel espoused. His ‘techtology’ was inadequate. This, in turn, should lead us to recognize that there is no single or simple process that can describe how different kinds of complex organisms, each with their own functionally differentiated ‘organs’, must have evolved. And if there is no simple monophyletic biological model then this should similarly undercut any naturalistic claims to find a homologous monophyletic mechanism in cases of social and political organization.

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Put bluntly, and contra Durkheim, there is no universal principle of a ‘division of labour’ that can be applied across natural and social fields and no way to claim that any associations that might be formed in this way are more genuine, natural, closer or in keeping with scientific knowledge than those formed via symbiosis or mutualism or myriad other varieties of direct and indirect association across many different taxonomic levels. Siphonopheres and many other radically different organisms (for example, lichens and fungal mycorrhizae) suggest alternative, non-reductive and extremely diverse ways of evolving and ‘organizing’ individuality and community. Ecologically speaking, even the human body itself now appears as more than an individual. It too is an ecological community where ‘bacterial cells outnumber human cells 10 to one … so much for human autonomy’.74 More than a thousand other species can inhabit ‘our’ bodies and ‘no two people share the same microbial makeup’.75 These microbes can be pathogens, parasites, commensals or symbionts; indeed the same species – a term that does not apply in any straightforward way to many microbes – can play entirely different roles in various bodily contexts. Our own interventions in this microbiome, for example in taking antibiotics, radically alter these relations – sometimes to human benefit, and at other times, it seems not, since some microbes are associated with facilitating the body’s appropriate auto-immune responses. Again, the argument here is not that we should take this new image of the human body, or even the compositional ontology of the siphonophore, as a new unifying symbol for a body politic. Nor is the point that there is no such thing as ecological community. On the contrary, there are all kinds of ecological communities composed in radically different ways at very different scales and intensities, some of which are also actual human bodies with all of their attendant species. There are, though, no single overarching principles (archē) that can produce or explain or define the nature of ecological communities as such; no overarching ‘processes’ that control, regulate or govern all beings that compose them, no invisible hand, no free market, no sovereign power.76 Ecological community is an-archic in this sense: not in terms of reducing to a radical individualism, but in the sense of radically questioning individualism as a foundational category. The compositional ontology of these communities is evolutionarily, physiologically and, of course, ecologically complicated. The beings and things and relations that compose them have nothing essential in common and yet, as Margulis notes above, you ‘cannot understand anything in biology without recognizing the community nature of all life’. The term ‘ecological community’ is useful precisely because it explicitly recognizes the imbrications of politics and nature. As with the ideal of the body politic, however, the uncritical naturalization of ecological community poses certain dangers. That said, there are much more serious dangers in asserting that it is possible to describe these worldly inter- and intra-relations in an apolitical or neutral fashion, for instance by using an alternative, purportedly value-free, term like ‘ecosystem’. Indeed, we should note that even here there are genealogical connections with the body politic too, since general systems theory is itself an outgrowth of what its key proponent, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, called ‘organismic biology’.77 Its original purpose was to understand the physiological and evolutionary ‘organization’ of living biological bodies. This ‘system theory of the organism’78 was then expanded by so-called system

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laws which, interestingly, ‘manifest themselves as analogies or “logical homologies” of laws that are formally identical but pertain to quite different phenomena or even appear in different disciplines’:79 It is a striking fact that biological systems as diverse as the central nervous system, and the biochemical regulatory network in cells should be strictly analogous … It is all the more remarkable when it is realized that this particular analogy between different systems at different levels of biological organization is but one member of a large class of such analogies.80

It is surely an even more striking fact that, despite widespread scepticism regarding the relevance of the analogy of the body politic (as argued above), so many ecologists and social scientists uncritically accept the more abstract (and, of course, mathematically manipulable) homologies of organismic biology propagated by systems theory,81 especially when this is combined with a technologically derived and managerially applicable cybernetics. Perhaps we should actually be rather more wary of the ways in which the idea of ecology and society as ‘systems’ has so quickly moved from metaphor to analogy to established fact, especially because this new, bodily derived metaphor now plays exactly the role of a Walzerian political symbol. In government circles and academic conferences, workplaces, business offices and stock exchanges, ‘system’ now provides ‘the units of thought and feeling [and] also connects those units with other structures: religious systems, planetary orders, physical bodies, man-made machines. It unifies the universe, provides politics with a series of references, links it closely with other realms of human experience’.82 Indeed, Ringmar explicitly posits a historical ‘transition from organic and hierarchical metaphors to cybernetic and egalitarian ones’.83 He also notes that this ‘is the metaphorical groundwork required by the spirit of laissez-faire capitalism and liberal political thought’ and that ‘the cybernetic metaphor is unable to capture many aspects of social life … including a notion of community’.84 The problem, he suggests, is precisely the dominance of a single symbol: ‘[T]hose who stick to only one metaphor and who make it their life’s work to impose this interpretative grid on all spheres of life and on the rest of us – come across as simple-minded and fanatical. In recent years, it is cybernetic fanaticism which has been predominant.’85 According to this fanaticism the Earth itself is now just a (human) ‘life support system’.86

Political and ecological community Metaphors and/of bodies and/of communities are involved in intricate political and material ‘conspiracies’ across different (natural and social) historical situations such that only particular kinds of bodies and communities are politically, ethically and sometimes also scientifically recognized as mattering – as existing and being things of concern. Hobbes, Smith, Durkheim and Haeckel all offer various theoretical expressions of these conspiracies, while adding to their reach and political/ontological ambitions. The political danger, indeed the endangerment of politics, arises from the

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fanatical adoption of a single metaphor to order the world. That is to say, politics should not, as Walzer claims, be regarded as ‘an art of unification’.87 Politics as such is not at all a matter of forging symbolic unity, for this actually denotes the limit of politics, the frames of understanding within which normalized depoliticized life is contained and practised – ‘organized’ and ‘systematized’. And although politics is, indeed, as Walzer suggests, an ‘over-coming of isolation’, of ‘individuality’, it is only ‘overcome’ when politics fails.88 Indeed, a rather different understanding of politics, in a more Arendtian vein,89 would regard it precisely as the ‘public’ expression of (individuated) differences, in community, but not necessarily in agreement, with others.90 Community, in this sense, we might say, is the field of affordance of expressions of similarity/difference between bodies that are politically and ontologically recognized as unique and creative constituents of that community. There can be no universal or apolitical rules for determining when the application of the term ‘ecological community’ is justified. However, the very claim that there are ecological communities – affordances of expressions of individuated difference between bodies that are more-than-just-human – fundamentally challenges modern political theory, whether individualist or communitarian. Such a challenge is inevitably political as well as ontological for all the reasons already adduced. Again, it is important to be clear on this point: to say that ecological community is political is not to claim that nature is structured according to the same political principles as, say, a market economy or a democratic or communist state. Such claims are absurdly anthropocentric. To say that an ecological community is political does not mean discerning particular forms of politics everywhere one looks – libertarian plankton, socialist, monarchist or communist beehives, entrepreneurial crocodiles or liberal lemurs. Indeed, it means that the nature of any such claim is always politically questionable because ontology is not just naturally given. Still, ecology challenges modern humanist presuppositions regarding individual and community ontology, the body and the body politic. Whether any specific body constitutes an individual or any individual is itself a community is always a matter of ontology and politics and of inter-twined social and natural histories.91 Is the ant colony a ‘super-organism’? Is the siphonophoran a ‘colony’? There is clearly a politics to ascribing ecological community to beings and elucidating its manner(s) of constitution, but, and this is more important, there is also a politics (in a quasi-Arendtian sense) in terms of affordances of expression amongst any community’s more-than-human constituents. That is to say politics, in terms of the larger ‘recognition’ afforded to individuated creative expression, is one of the aspects of ecological community in general (it is not just a distinguishing feature of human communities). This, of course, raises all manner of questions about politics, individuation, expressions, and their meanings, affects and recognition, which might be addressed in a variety of ways. Such understandings might, for example, be pushed biosemiotically (somewhat ironically, given Walzer’s position) by seriously addressing the ‘pretheoretical’ importance of ‘signs’ and the role of semiotic ‘significance’ in all biological entities including, for example, cells.92 This does not require a return to ideas like Virchow’s cell state or Roux’s elemental cellular struggles. Rather it recognizes the significance of cellular interactions, their meaningfulness in the sense that a sign is

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something that refers to something else in a way that requires interpretation within a context by a sensing body. In this sense, cell membranes, the skin of animal bodies and indeed every living body (at whatever scale) can be regarded as being engaged in forms of creative semiosis – sign production and interpretation. This, as Hoffmeyer notes, ‘challenges ontologies that tend to de-semiotize all the naturally communicative and fundamentally interactive processes of living systems’.93 The relative tightness or looseness of these semiotic relations is a key aspect of the kinds of affordances that together constitute bodies/communities. Here, then, thinking ecologically, we might posit a community partly constituted through signs that are not at all unifying symbols in Walzer’s sense – a community that would include all manners of significant relations, all kinds of beings, perhaps all life. But this only makes the notion of individual and community stranger still, and hardly at all like the notions of community construed only on the basis of mutual conscious awareness between essentially similar human beings, as in Hobbes, Smith or Marx. Limiting relations to conscious awareness would, in any case, hardly scratch the surface of the semiotic, phenomenal and material ecological relations actually present in any ecological community. An ecological community is not, then, an object or even just some-‘thing’ (even in a Heideggerian sense), still less something delineated by some essential sameness among its constituents.94 Nor is it a system. In its ‘tighter’ forms it may appear as a cell or an animal or plant body, in its ‘looser’ forms more like a bacterial culture or a woodland. The inhabitants of any particular region are often, to borrow Alphonso Lingis’s phrase, more like the ‘community of those who have nothing in common’95 or, in Corlett’s Derridean terms, a ‘community without unity’.96 However, we might provisionally describe ecological community as a more or less closely associated field of affordances of bodies, where beings touch and affect each other in all manner of ways, an an-archic set of relations which I suggest elsewhere resonates with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.97 Such ‘de-finitions’ may (and I think necessarily do) leave the constitution of ecological communities an open matter. Still, if these communities can even be envisaged as a body politic then this will not be along the lines of Hobbes’s magnus homo, nor, for that matter, the fantastic notion of an imaginarily fragmented body, a corps morcelé (Lacan), or even of a ‘machinic assemblage’ or ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze).98 The variability, looseness and tightness of ecological relations, the differences in forms of (inter)dependence between the microbes in a bacterial ‘culture’ or in one’s bloodstream, the mitochondria in a cell, the grasshoppers in the meadow, should not be mistaken for the kinds of relations that can be ordered by the political/ epistemic monotheism associated with sovereign powers. But nor are they inchoate or even chaotic. All ecological communities involve some forms of ‘organization’ and modes of recognition of organisms (for life evolves like this), but this can take many varied forms. Some ecological communities are hierarchic, but not in just the same ways that political communities are (who, after all, is at the head of the ‘food chain’, the human or the mosquito or the malarial parasite transmitted by the mosquito?); some seem dominated by ‘competition’; some by ‘cooperation’. Finally, however, these political antonyms are themselves inadequate to the task of expressing the variety of relations in nature, just as they often are in human societies.

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Moreover, ecological community requires the recognition that what appears (and appears significant) to human beings is not what appears (significant) to other beings, and what matters to humans may not matter to others at all. After all, even in a biopolitical age, bodies touch, are sensed by, and affect other bodies without any humanly produced mediation. The space of appearances is never a simple collectivity, one where all that happens appears to all that are physically present, but rather one of incredibly complex interconnectivity: of partial sensing, of passing feelings and gripping jaws, communication in senses that are never reducible to information, translated via diverse media, temporally and evolutionarily evolving, (bio)semiotically intertwined – being meaningful for/to each other, inhabiting gaps and interstices, missing each other and tracking each other; stinging, mating, infecting, swallowing, associating in so many different registers, phenomenologies, chemistries, exchanges, gifts – overcoming isolation. How could we fail to see that we, too, are constituted within, and constituents of, such ecologies?

Notes See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester: Ellis Horword, 1985). 2 Michael Walzer, ‘On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought’, Political Science Quarterly 82.2 (1967): 194 (191–204). 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651; Oxford: Blackwell, 1960). 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book), accessed on 16 September 2020. 7 Hobbes, Leviathan, 201. 8 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 9 See Tracy B. Strong, ‘Foreword’, in Schmitt, Leviathan in the State, vii–xxiii; see especially xi–xii. 10 In fact, the anti-Semitic Schmitt blamed Jewish philosophers from Spinoza onwards for exploiting this ‘weakness’: ‘Crudely, [according to Schmitt] Hobbes understood the need for the total state but inadvertently left a crack which Jewish thought exploited into a full-blown fissure’ (Strong in Schmitt, Leviathan in the State, xiv). 11 Thomas R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, ‘Sociocultural Bodies, Bodies Sociopolitical’, in The Social and Political Body, ed. Thomas R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (New York: Guildford Press, 1996), 1 (1–25). 12 Waltzer, ‘On the Role’, 194. 13 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Roberto Esposito, Biopolitics and Philosophy, intro. and trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Mick Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics and Saving the Natural World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 1

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14 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 3. 15 Waltzer, ‘On the Role’, 204. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 194. 18 Walzer does not actually like applying the term ‘communitarian’ to his own approach but this is how it has usually been labelled in subsequent debates. See, for example, Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 19 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Interview’, Woman’s Own, 23 September 1987; and statement to the Sunday Times, 10 July 1988, accessed on 30 March 2013, http://www. margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689. 20 Donna Haraway, ‘Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic, Part I: A Political Physiology of Dominance’, Signs 4.1 (1978): 21–36. 21 Peter J. Bowler. ‘Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37.4 (1976): 644–5 (631–50). 22 John Kricher, The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 23 Francois Quesnay quoted in Andrew Skinner, ‘Analytical Introduction’, in The Wealth of Nations, ed. Adam Smith, Books I–III (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 42. 24 Sergio Cremaschi, ‘Metaphors in the Wealth of Nations’, in Is There Progress in Economics? Knowledge, Truth and the History of Economic Thought, ed. Stephan Boehm (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002), 95. 25 A. D. Harvey, ‘The Body Politic: Anatomy of a Metaphor’, Contemporary Review 275 (1999): 86 (85–93). 26 Smith in Cremaschi, ‘Metaphors in the Wealth of Nations’, 95. 27 Michael J. Shapiro, Reading Adam Smith: Desire, History and Value (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 9. 28 Catherine Packham, ‘The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002): 469 (465–81). 29 Smith in Packham, ‘The Physiology of Political Economy’, 469 (my emphasis). 30 The term ‘metabolism’ (stoffwechsel) emerges in the discourses of early nineteenthcentury German physiology (especially regarding respiration). This bodily metaphor is then transformed and applied to the economic, social and the political sphere and has today been ‘revived’ by Marxists like Foster to explain failures in ecological relations in terms of a ‘metabolic rift’ and also in ‘hybrid’ geographies of nature and culture (Swyngedouw). It is interesting that the ‘centrality’ of this physiological term to Marx has been ‘rediscovered’ even as it becomes apparent how little ecological, emotional, symbolic and political resonance a theoretical term like ‘dialectical materialism’ now has. Eric Swyngedouw, ‘Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities’, Science as Culture 15.2 (2006): 105–21; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 31 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 1. 32 Ibid. 33 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 475. Marx (474–80) also makes an important distinction between a general social division of labour and the (forced) economic division of labour in the factory system under capitalism described in Smith’s famous description of the pin-factory;

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see Smith, Wealth of Nations, 109–21. The idealized model of a ‘freely competing’, ‘autonomous’ capitalist is upheld as the epitome of mobile individualism, while the mechanically, ideologically and economically constrained worker is, to all effects, deemed a replaceable organ of the ‘corporation’. 34 Camille Limoges, ‘Milne-Edwards, Darwin, Durkheim and the Division of Labour: A Case Study in the Conceptual Exchanges between the Social and the Natural Sciences’, in The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences, ed. I. Bernard Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 317–44. According to Trevor Pearce, the influence of Smith on Darwin was probably indirect because he ‘only read a short summary of Smith’s economic ideas, and did not refer to them in his extensive notebooks’; Trevor Pearce, ‘“A Great Complication of Circumstances” – Darwin and the Economy of Nature’, Journal of the History of Biology 43 (2010): 495 (493–528). See also David Kohn, ‘Darwin’s Keystone: The Principle of Divergence’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species, ed. Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 105 (87–108); and Andrew Reynolds, ‘The Theory of the Cell State and the Question of Cell Autonomy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Biology’, Science in Context 20.1 (2007): 76 (71–95). 35 Pearce, ‘A Great Complication’, 513–14. 36 Durkheim, The Division of Labor, 2–3. 37 A view diametrically opposed to Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncements (see above) since Durkheim insisted that ‘social facts are things’; Durkheim quoted Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Penguin, 1988), 9. 38 Despite heavily criticizing Spencer’s individualism, Durkheim’s theory is actually no less indebted to a biologically rendered understanding of individualistic competitive struggle. ‘Indeed’, says Perrin, ‘without the variable of competition, no explanation can be drawn or is even imaginable from Durkheim’s account’ of the division of labour. Robert G. Perrin, ‘Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labour and the Shadow of Herbert Spencer’, The Sociological Quarterly 36.4 (1995): 793 (791–808). 39 Durkheim, The Division of Labor, 209. 40 Haeckel in ibid. 41 Ibid., 2–3. 42 The question remains as to whether the comparisons made between the social and ‘ecological’ ‘division of labour’ are even analogous, let alone homologous, as Durkheim claims. For example, in Haeckel’s biological case (the insects on the tree) competition is credited with causing divergence in the form of speciation, the generation of an ontological break of evolutionary independence, within a previously unitary (‘individual’) species. In the other social case (organic solidarity) it is credited with causing a specialization that amounts to an intra-specific interdependence. The claim to find such homologies also encouraged Durkheim to extend this principal of competition inwards so that even the organs in an individual’s body may in some (pathological) circumstances be considered to actually compete with each other: ‘Thus, in the individual organism, as a result of a prolonged fast, the nervous system nourishes itself at the expense of the other organs … The same is true for society’ Ibid., 213. But, we might ask, why, if competition is all-pervasive, is this pathological condition not the norm? 43 Ibid., 212.

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44 Ernst Haeckel, Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Siphonophoren (Utrecht: C. Van der Post, 1869). 45 Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Ternch, Trübner & Co, 1899), 186, vol. 11, emphasis in original. 46 Taxonomically, the class Hydromedusae, which includes the siphonophores, is not ‘true’ jellyfish (class Scyphozoa) but can have a similar free-swimming medusa life stage that leads them to be popularly described as such. Probably the best-known siphonophore is the Portuguese Man o’ War, Physalia physalia. 47 Ernst Haeckel, ‘Ueber Arbeitstheilung in Natur- und Menschenleben’, in Gesammelte populäre Vorträge aus dem Gebiete der Entwickelungslehre, ed. Ernst Haeckel (Bonn: Emil Strauss, 1878), 120 (99–141). 48 Figure reproduced from Lynn K. Nyhart and Scott Lidgard, ‘Individuals at the Center of Biology: Rudolf Leuckart’s Polymorphismus der Individuen and the Ongoing Narrative of Parts and Wholes, with an Annotated Translation’, Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 373–443, 388. 49 Discussion of Haeckel’s work has often focused on criticism of his attempts to link evolution and embryological development via his largely discredited ‘biogentic law’, that is, the idea that ontogeny (the successive forms taken by the developing individual organism) recapitulates phylogeny (that species’ evolutionary history). See Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Victor Hamburger, ‘Wilhelm Roux: Visionary with a Blind Spot’, Journal of the History of Biology 30 (1997): 229–38. 50 Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 128. 51 See Reynolds, ‘The Theory of the Cell’, 72. 52 Ibid., 71. 53 Virschow in Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, 128, fn.45. 54 Reynolds, ‘The Theory of the Cell’, 72. 55 Haeckel in Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 171. 56 Richard Weikart, ‘The Origins of Social Darwinism in Germany, 1850–1895’, Journal of the History of Ideas 54.3 (1993): 477 (469–88). 57 Georges Canguilhem, ‘Cell Theory’, in Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 48 (25–58). 58 Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus. Ein Beitrag zur Vervollständigung der mechanischen Zweckmäßigkeitslehre (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1881). 59 See Thomas Heams, ‘Selection within Organisms in the Nineteenth Century: Wilhelm Roux’s Complex Legacy’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 110 (2012): 24–33. Selectionism might be defined as ‘the extension of Darwinian chance/ selection dynamics beyond the individual level’ (24). A more subtle variation of this approach is still very much alive today, in various understandings of gene expression, developmental biology, and even used to explain patterns of brain activity due to a neural Darwinism that selectively stabilizes neuronal synapses. Roux’s work is also still cited in relation to mainstream evolutionary theory: ‘The whole is a single interacting system. Organisms are compromises among competing demands. Wilhelm Roux, almost 100 years ago, referred to the competitive developmental interactions as the struggle of parts in organisms’; Ernst Mayr, ‘How to Carry Out the Adaptationist Program’, The American Naturalist 121.3 (1983): 332 (324–34).

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60 Heams quoting Roux, ‘Selection within Organisms’, 29; see Roux, Der Kampf der Teile, 107. 61 Ibid., 25. 62 See Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, ‘The Organism as Inner Struggle: Wilhelm Roux’s Influence on Nietzsche’, in Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), (161–82); Lukas Soderstrom, ‘Nietzsche as a Reader of Wilhelm Roux, or the Physiology of History’, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 13.2 (2009): 55–67. 63 Müller-Lauter, ‘The Organism as Inner Struggle’, 163. 64 Lynn Margulis in Joanna Bybee, ‘No Subject Too Sacred in Below’, in Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel, ed. Dorian Sagan (White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green, 2012). 65 There are, of course, approaches that claim biological understandings are, or could be, politics-free in order to claim that their (naturalized) understandings of human ‘communities’ are merely statements of fact that transcend politics, as in various forms of sociobiology. See Mick Smith, ‘Morrow’s Ants: E. O. Wilson and Gadamer’s Critique of Natural Historicism’, in Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, ed. Forrest Clingerman et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 36–64. 66 For Clements the ecological community was an integrated co-evolutionary and teleological whole that developed towards a characteristic climax community, a view which embodies both a holistic ontology and a coordinated developmental phylogeny (the idea of ecological succession). Writing in 1916, he states that the plant ‘community is an organic entity. As an organism the community arises, grows, and dies. Furthermore, each community is able to reproduce itself, repeating with essential fidelity the stages of its development’. Clements in Ragan M. Callaway, ‘Facilitation and the Organization of Plant Communities’, in The Princeton Guide to Ecology, ed. Simon A. Levin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 282 (282– 8). Gleason, by contrast, argued that ‘communities’ are ‘temporary and fluctuating phenomena’ with ‘no similarity to an organism’; rather they are just ‘coincidental’ assemblages of individual organisms co-present because of their specific abilities to prosper in certain environmental circumstances. There is, on Gleason’s view, no such ‘thing’ as ecological community per se. Henry Gleason, ‘The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association’, in The Philosophy of Ecology, ed. David R. Kelly and Frank B. Golley (1939; Athens GE: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 43 (42–54). 67 Eric R. Pianka, ‘Competition and Niche Theory’, in Theoretical Ecology: Principles and Applications, ed. Robert M. May (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 169 (167–96). 68 For an early ecological critique of such assumptions, see Mark Williamson, Analysis of Biological Populations (London: Edwin Arnold, 1974). 69 See Jérôme Chave, ‘Competition, Neutrality, and Community Organization’, in The Princeton Guide to Ecology, ed. Simon A. Levin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 265 (264–73); Pianka, Pianka, ‘Competition and Niche Theory’; and Sharon Kingsland, The Evolution of American Ecology 1890–2000 (Baltimore MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 70 There are even ‘autecological’ positions that deny the very existence of unifying ecological principles and of ecological community per se. Walter and Paterson, for example, state that ‘the concepts associated with the terms community and community structure should no longer have a place in the theory and practice of

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ecology’. G. H. Walter and E. H. Paterson, ‘The Implications of Paleontological Evidence for Theories of Ecological Communities and Species Richness’, Australian Journal of Ecology 19 (1994): 244 (241–50). 71 We should note that ‘organization’ is itself not a neutral term in these debates. 72 This gap can be conceptualized as the difference between a narrow Darwinian selectionism and what will later be termed ‘symbiogenesis’. 73 Casey W. Dunn and Günter P. Wagner, ‘The Evolution of Colony-Level Development in the Siphonophora (Cnidaria: Hydrozoa)’, Development, Genes, and Evolution 216.12 (2006): 743–54. 74 Jennifer Ackerman, ‘The Ultimate Social Network’, Scientific American 306.6 (2012): 38 (36–43). 75 Ackerman, ‘The Ultimate Social Network’, 39. 76 Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty. 77 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, ‘The History and Status of General Systems Theory’, Academy of Management Journal 15.4 (1972): 410 (407–26). 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 413. 80 Ibid. 81 There is obviously no space here to detail the ways in which ecologist Arthur Tansley’s notion of the ecosystem, Bertalanffy’s general systems theory, and Norbert Weiner’s technologically and militarily derived understanding of cybernetics coalesce, or their ecological and political effects. However, for an interesting, if controversial, take on this, see Adam Curtis’s 2011 series of films for BBC, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. 82 Walzer, ‘On the Role’, 194. 83 Erik Ringmar, ‘Metaphors of Social Order’, in Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and Changing the World, ed. Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo (London: Routledge, 2008), 65 (57–68). 84 Ibid., 66–7. 85 Ibid., 67. 86 See, for example, Sian Sullivan, ‘Ecosystem Service Commodities – A New Imperial Ecology? Implications for Animist Immanent Ecologies, with Deleuze and Guattari’, New Formations 69 (2010): 111–28. 87 Walzer, ‘On the Role’, 194. 88 Ibid. 89 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); see also Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty. 90 Arendt’s definition of political ‘community’ here is also important because it does not assume some common purpose or essential similarity, as state communism, for example, has often done, but focuses on the provision of a space of creative appearances and on their unpredictable complex ramifications; see Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty, 135–58. 91 Smith, ‘Morrow’s Ants’. 92 Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs (Scarnton: University of Scranton Press, 2007). 93 Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, xiv. 94 Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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95 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). 96 William Corlett, Community without Unity: A Politics of Derridean Extravagance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989). 97 Mick Smith, ‘Epharmosis: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Political Oecology of Creation’, Environmental Ethics 32.4 (2010): 385–404. 98 A detailed comparison with Deleuze in this regard might be illuminating in numerous ways. Bernd Herzogenrath, for example, has written on both the Deleuzian understandings of ecology and of the American body politic. This might require an excursion into the relations between the body without organs, systems theory and associated ideas of the material generation of spontaneous order, which interestingly also features strongly in contemporary modes of interpreting Adam Smith. See Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Bernd Herzogenrath, An American Body Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2010); and Craig Smith, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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Remainder Andrew Gibson

The Accademia in Venice houses a compelling painting, a work of art darkly magical and radiant. In Vittore Carpaccio’s Miracolo della Reliquia della Croce ai Ponte di Rialto (Miracle of the Cross at the Rialto), Venice experiences an unattended moment of historical grace. On the left of the painting, in a loggia at mid-level, a miracle is taking or about to take place. In the Palazzo di San Silvestro, Francesco Guerini is healing a madman with a relic of the true cross. But the miracle is not the central focus of the painting. Indeed, save for the dominance in the loggia of white clothing not visible elsewhere, the (imminent) event is scarcely prominent at all, overshadowed as it is by the crepuscular tones of the rest of the picture and outweighed by its sheer proliferation of detail. Initially, we may find our attention drawn less by the miracle than alternately by the vista of the Grand Canal, and the faces of the crowd outside the Palazzo di San Silvestro, the gentlemen and merchants, foreign visitors, gondoliers and their fares, women beating carpets, masons and coopers. But it is the eyes that are most likely to fascinate us. Carpaccio’s figures stare out into unspecific distances, as if astounded or entranced. Yet it is not at all clear that the world of the painting is a rapt one or, at least, that its subject is a shared religious rapture. Carpaccio was a wry, sophisticated, urbane if (one would guess) moody Renaissance Venetian (the ground-breaking eighteenth-century art critic Anton Maria Zanetti described him as ‘fanciful’).1 It seems rather unlikely that he took medieval miracles of the kind to which his painting apparently testifies very seriously. Art historians have repeatedly thought of the Venetian religious istorie (narrative paintings) ‘as pious pretexts for profane interests, and as examples of secularizing tendencies within the society at large’.2 Furthermore, Carpaccio’s painting is an instance of what was a mini-genre. The Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista commissioned various painters to commemorate the powers of the relic donated to it, and Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Mansueti, Lazzaro Bastiani and others all produced ‘miracle paintings’ like Carpaccio’s. These paintings markedly share certain generic features: a particular, identifiable historical location (the Rialto, San Lorenzo, Campo San Lio); a collection of more or less dignified figures whose worldliness is clear; figures turning their gaze on the spectator; figures in the foreground with their backs towards us; and so on. But Carpaccio’s picture also differs from the others. In Mansueti’s, Bellini’s or Bastiani’s, the miracle in question is central or at least takes up more of the painting.

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Power, wealth, eminence, distinction all draw the eye. The worldly may seem awed: they do not shed their worldliness. The source of their awe is partly the very alliance of divine with human (Venetian) power that the paintings exist to confirm. For Carpaccio, this coincidence of powers is of no interest or simply not the case. His figures are actually staring in many different directions and seldom even looking towards the Palazzo. Very few of them appear to be aware of the miracle, and it is not clear that it has even obliquely touched them. The most arresting figures in the painting, the two gondoliers at its centre, might seem to be staring heavenwards in amazement. But their eyes are differently directed, and this effectively turns a kind of irony on any illusion of transcendence, any notion of a celestial vision by which Carpaccio’s people have together been transfixed. The gist of the painting is a kind of thought. In ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Auden famously wrote of how the old masters were never wrong about suffering, notably the Pieter Breughel of The Fall of Icarus: ‘Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky’.3 But Carpaccio has not engineered a contrast between an extraordinary occurrence and a real world about its business and therefore robustly indifferent. His figures, it would seem, are merely somewhere else, in an elsewhere of their own. Yet, in their own fashion, they are also caught up in a drama. This, however, is not a drama of revelation. It is rather a drama of its negative, a faint effect or trace of the possibility of a revelation or transmutation formally acknowledged in the downbeat depiction of the miracle. The greater part of the Miracolo is concerned, not with the event, but its remainder. The remainder, however, is not just the diurnal life of a historical state. Carpaccio’s Venice is a stunned or mesmerized world. The painter both renders a historical present in its presentness, its substance and density, its concretion and immediacy, its commitment to and so its seriousness about itself, and yet, at the same time, strips it of them. The present has become unheimlich without exactly being ghostly. The insubstantiality of this present, however, has less to do with solitude than with disaggregation, separation, non-relation, and we are to know it as such, since the painting itself seems to solicit the very melancholic, abstracted, contemplative gaze that it typically depicts. In an account of Carpaccio passionately hostile to the inert wordage of art history, Michel Serres captures the monadic disposition at stake in the Miracolo as the very foundation of the painter’s way of seeing, in one of his preliminary drawings: L’épure, ainsi nommée malgré les inevitable bavures, dit l’isolat ou l’insulat. Héritiers soumis à la catastrophe intimiste, nous dirions l’autisme …. Silence de tous avant toute conversation. (The sketch, named as such in spite of its inevitable blurs, speaks of isolation or insulation. Inheritors subjected to the intimist catastrophe, we would call it autistic …. The silence of all before any conversation.)4

Seen in this context, Carpaccio’s miracle is even ironic. The crazed, gaping madman in the loggia, seemingly and in one respect obviously a face apart, also looks merely like an embodiment in extreme form of the objective condition of a vastly successful mercantile and commercial culture – recalling that the Rialto was then ‘one of the

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world’s most important emporiums’5 – whose opulence is perceptible everywhere in the painting. Carpaccio’s typical, inerasable melancholy has to do with the perception of an atomized historical world determined as such by the absence of any possibility of historical redemption. His figures are staring, not in visionary ecstasy, but because there is nowhere to look. If they are gripped, ‘autistically’, it is by the uncanny power of a historical moment that, for all its lack of necessity, remains obstinately untransformed. *** The remainder has been a major theme of ours for a very long time now, if in separate stages, as three philosophers will briefly bear witness. Carpaccio’s painting is a peculiarly vivid if distinctively toned presentation of the remainder. But if Carpaccio views his theme with a certain detachment, it nonetheless appears within a theologically oriented world. For a properly secular grasp of the meaning of the remainder, if one is still influenced by the theological inheritance, we will have to look elsewhere: Hobbes, for example. For Hobbes, the commonwealth must be possible or, at least, thinkable. The Hobbesian bottom line is that, while human beings may indeed always be laying ‘the foundations of their houses on the sand’, nonetheless, ‘it could not thence be inferred, that so it ought to be’.6 It must be possible for them to covenant among themselves to establish their sovereign, to surrender their will and their natural right to rule. Then sovereign power can regulate difference in coming up ‘with rules or measures that will be common to all’.7 This is necessary to the security of the commonwealth, in which ‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’.8 The commonwealth alone ‘is the empire of reason, peace, security, wealth, splendour society, good taste, the sciences and good-will’.9 Hobbes wrote that his mother bore twins, ‘me and together with me fear’.10 Without the commonwealth, all perpetually threatens to dissolve into interminable terror. The commonwealth must be possible. But is it likely? Apparently not. Life is but motion and scarcely affords the tranquillity on which the commonwealth thrives. The constitution of the body and desire, continually mutating as they are, makes it hardly possible that all human beings should consent ‘in one and the same object’.11 The ζῷον πολιτικόν (zoon politikon) is not born fit for society or naturally equipped for it, for what Hobbes calls ‘association’, the harmony of human beings freely and easily involved in collaboration or exchange. What they primarily enjoy is rather gloria, their own glory – ‘there are very few, perhaps none, that in some cases are not blinded by self-love, or by some other passion’12 – and they therefore move towards others with profit, honour or advantage in mind. They do not naturally find any common cause with others, any more than Carpaccio’s figures do in his paintings (as Hobbes says, ‘[M]any eyes see the same thing in divers lines’).13 Human beings ‘associate’ only seldom: ‘Close … observation of the causes men seek each other’s company and enjoy associating with each other, will easily reach the conclusion that it does not happen because by nature it could not be otherwise, but by chance.’14 Covenanting with others requires an oath, but a form of words will not bind human beings to others. The only cast-iron guarantee is the pride that refuses all compromise to integrity. ‘But this latter is a generosity too rarely found to be presumed on, especially

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in the pursuers of wealth, command, or sensual pleasure; which are the greatest part of mankind.’15 So, too, the ‘keeping of covenant’ spells justice, but the will to justice is a very precarious thing: ‘That which gives to human actions the relish of justice, is a certain nobleness or gallantness of courage, rarely found.’16 Where or when there has long been a kingdom free from upheaval, ‘sedition and civil war’, or human beings capable of more than ‘a crazy building, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall on the heads of their posterity’?17 In any case, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, the Hobbesian commonwealth paradoxically threatens merely to re-establish at another level the very state of imminent conflict it was supposed to debar, since its logical consequence is an ‘international anarchy’ in which natural competition is translated into a war of states.18 But Hobbes himself knew this, envisaging commonwealths as perpetually ‘upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed, and cannons planted against their neighbours round about’.19 Association, then, is not the rule. Equality is the rule – and the remainder. Nature grants equality as ‘a full and absolute liberty in every particular man’; in nature, ‘every man has right to every thing’.20 But that means that there is ‘no mine and thine distinct, but only that to be every man’s, that he can get: and for so long, as he can keep it’.21 Under these conditions, each man retains ‘the natural and necessary appetite of his own conservation’; otherwise humans suppose they will have no ‘security’.22 Without the commonwealth, there is only ‘the empire of the passions, war, fear, poverty, nastiness, solitude, barbarity, ignorance, savagery’.23 The basis of this empire is the familiar Hobbesian law of nature, homo hominis lupi, the war of all against all. The consequences of living by natural law must be lawless disorder, internecine violence, ‘horrible calamities’.24 The bellum omnium contra omnes suspends all notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. There is no common power, and therefore human beings hold no values in common save force and fraud. Human beings’ lives unfold ‘in continual fear, and danger of violent death’.25 But the fearsome law of nature is not a Hobbesian absolute. It is a remainder. This is logical enough, since the original concept of the commonwealth is for Hobbes that of the kingdom of God as covenanted with Abraham, by which, he asserts, the Bible designates a real kingdom, a kingdom upon earth. The word ‘περιούσιος’ (periousios) conveys as much, in that it betokens ‘a peculiar, that is an extraordinary, people’, as opposed to the world of the επιούσιος (epiousios), the quotidian, the life of nations that are not God’s ‘in a special manner’,26 the remainder. As the last sentence underlines, the Hobbesian remainder is theologically derived without being theologically oriented (the view of Hobbes as an atheist, already current in his lifetime, seems plausible enough). But the religious trappings in his writings are no mere convenience or political calculation. They give form to his thought. For Hobbes, it was not obviously possible or indeed desirable that one should jettison all theological constructions, not least in the case of historical time. In this respect, however, Hobbes is clearly an early modern mind. The remainder subsequently takes on greater scope and diversity. It threatens to gobble things up. Without relinquishing its historical, political and social purchase, it grows to encompass other forms of experience and other modes of life, the psychic and private, the romantic, sexual and domestic. This has the effect both of pushing it further away from its theological roots

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and embedding it more deeply in modernity. The experience of the remainder is above all a modern feeling, and this for one obvious reason: part of the modern conviction is that there should no longer be a remainder. We come across a new and sheer surprise at the durability of the remainder, distress that the remainder remains. Rousseau will serve as an example, if we clear away some of the Rousseau who was, to so many of his successors and heirs, a great uplifting source of revolutionary, romantic and progressive modernity. The shock of the remainder partly accounts for his increasingly unfortunate progress. After all, Rousseau discovers a Europe where others will stone you for writing on behalf of freedom. Initially, however, he might seem a less-than-promising candidate. For Rousseau, everything is good in nature. The Savoyard Vicar in Emile presents the ‘order of beings’ as a ‘picture of nature’ in which, universally, there is ‘only harmony and proportion’. However, it turns out that this picture does not include human beings at all: indeed, in stark contrast to it, ‘mankind presents me with only confusion, disorder’, says the Vicar, ‘evil on earth’.27 Everything ‘is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things. Everything degenerates in the hands of man’.28 Human beings are in thrall to ‘prejudices, authority, necessity, example’ and submissively conform to social institutions.29 They therefore mix and deform things, produce muddle and monstrosity, and surrender to the perversities and vices. If they would respond ‘only to what nature demands’ of them, humans would ‘do nothing but good’.30 But humanity is, ‘from the first steps’, outside nature, the remainder of nature.31 But surely ‘[m]an is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’.32 Is Rousseau not concerned with a historically oppressed humanity, if one complicit in its oppression? Firstly, there was a side to Rousseau that felt that the chains were unbreakable: it is always too easy for that which ‘favours the malignity of man’ to ‘establish itself ’.33 Law, for example, ‘will always favour the strong against the weak’. Justice and ‘subordination’ are mere ‘specious names’ for the ‘arms of iniquity’ and ‘will always serve as instruments of violence’.34 Secondly, the chains are not necessarily those of gross inequalities in wealth and power, though Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality might lead one to think so. They are partly the twining fetters of sheer complication, with which Rousseau was impatient. Thus, while Emile begins with a version of the familiar case regarding nature, in Book II, a more startling argument appears. Rousseau asserts that man is good by nature but bad by association and that social involvement of any kind is dangerous. But the social chains are the rule, natural freedom the rare exception. One happens upon the same structure repeatedly in Rousseau’s thought. Take for example The Social Contract, which evokes ‘a moral and collective body’.35 The civil state constituted by the contract changes man, giving his actions ‘the morality they had formerly lacked’.36 However, if the people will the good of the contract, they do not see that good itself, as they no longer exist in a state of nature, and so must be taught to know what it wills. Hence ‘the Legislator’, an extremely rare figure who tends to the maintenance of what is otherwise ‘an impractical, speculative chimaera’, bearing ‘no relation to our nature’, and is therefore capable of changing that nature, of transforming each individual.37 Through the Legislator, there is the possibility that a future humanity – what ought to be – will become the present one. Humans are at least creatures that can infinitely exceed their own boundaries, and no philosopher can say, ‘[T]his is the limit of what man can attain and which he cannot surpass.’38 Rousseau struggles to

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think about actual and historical man from the point of view of an infinite excess. But this leads him to create what he fears others take to be his ‘imaginary and fantastic beings’39 – in effect a challenge to those who dare ‘to assign precise limits to Nature and say: here is as far as Man can go, and not beyond it’.40 In comparison with such beings, actual and historical man is the remainder. It is finally Julie that provides the great example of this tendency in Rousseau. With their moral elevation, their sensibility ratcheted up to the nth power, their transports that ‘elevate’ them ‘above [them]selves’ and their ‘hearts warmed by a celestial fire’, all the main characters qualify as ‘beautiful souls’.41 The novel is correspondingly founded on a belief in an exquisite language that exists apart from trivial actuality and can appear only in private and intimate documents, confessions, diaries and, above all, letters. This, the language of the few, the initiates, is the only true language, and Rousseau and his characters pit it precisely against the remainder. The exemplary souls at length close ranks, creating Julie’s ‘adorable and powerful empire of beneficent beauty’.42 Her Elysium, a garden in which those who tend it take ‘great care’ to ‘efface human footprints’, is a figure for the novel as a whole.43 In the second Preface, ‘N’, a man of letters, protests that a Julie there has never been. Rousseau’s characters ‘are people from the other world’. The editor and Rousseau-figure ‘R’ merely replies, ‘Then I am sorry for this one’44 – the one that is left. The shock of the remainder ripples on insistently through modernity. But there is equally a tradition within modernity that recognizes the remainder from the start, and confronts it, in the conviction that it is at one and the same time both radically inescapable and unassimilable. The supreme example in the early stages of modernity is Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer, the will is a remainder. Not only that: as such, it has an ontological status. Schopenhauer takes will for Being. It is clear that ‘this world’s non-existence is just as possible as its existence’.45 What determines that the one prevail over the other? Will. Will ensures that there is not nothing. The will strives for existence, but that is all it does. The will endlessly achieves its simple purpose. As its drive is quenched, so it at once begins afresh. Satisfied desires can only give birth to new occasions for desire. The conduct notably of men towards one another is determined by the general struggle, which stems from an irreducible ‘want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction’.46 This means that ‘the phenomena in which the will objectifies itself ’ are involved in an ‘endless and implacable struggle’ with each other.47 All creatures compete for the air of being, as if in an infinite jungle crammed with feuding forms. The will buries its teeth in its own flesh: life forms eliminate each other. Everyone ‘wants everything for himself, wants to possess, or at least control, everything, and would like to destroy whatever opposes him’.48 These are the whips ‘that keep the top spinning’.49 The Schopenhauerian remainder, ‘the in-itself of life’, is therefore ‘a constant suffering’.50 Luther was therefore right to suggest, in his Commentary on Galatians, that the devil is ‘prince and lord’ of the world; we are all subject to him.51 But Luther’s is not the last word. If human beings can only live in a world determined by the principle of sufficient reason, in which everything becomes their representation and representation is of the phenomenon only, nonetheless, we can also abstract from our representations and represent them all over again, as ideas. The object passes ‘out

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of all relation to something outside it’ so that ‘what is thus known is no longer the individual thing as such’. So, too, the abstracting subject passes ‘out of all relation to the will’ and becomes the pure ‘subject of knowledge’.52 The act of abstraction is, in particular, the basis of every work of art, and the state of ‘pure objectivity of perception’ in which the subject also becomes ‘the pure subject of knowing’ is a fundamental constituent of aesthetic enjoyment.53 This is as close as we can come to freedom, save for the saint’s. The saint or ascetic can cure his or her heart of ‘the passion for enjoying and indeed for living’.54 Saintly knowledge brings about ‘the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still’.55 The subject no longer ‘affirms its own inner nature’ but experiences a horror of it which ‘proceeds from the immediate and intuitive knowledge of the metaphysical identity of all beings’.56 The saint also comes to understand the ‘heavy guilt’ the human race incurs simply ‘through its existence itself’.57 But such understanding is a ‘hairy garment that causes its owner constant hardship’,58 a hardship that can only be allayed by a denial of the will in oneself. If that becomes possible, one sees that the apparently ‘exceedingly desirable benefits’ of life are in fact ‘chimeras’ and acknowledges ‘the true end of life’ as ‘a euthanasia of the will’.59 Art and asceticism alone can liberate a subject from servitude to the will. However, they are together extremely singular modes of life. Schopenhauer quotes Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘all that is excellent and eminent is as difficult as it is rare’.60 Artistic distinction is always added ‘from outside so to speak’ and is therefore strange and even unnatural.61 So, too, any goodness, beauty, nobility, saintly asceticism and wisdom appear but scantly. Otherwise, however, the world is only will. On rare occasions, artistic and ascetic, the will may turn against itself.62 Yet, in the end, art and asceticism are ways of not living. Schopenhauer finally recommends disinterest, the wisdom of letting go of the world. He agrees wholeheartedly with Artabatus in Herodotus: there has never been a man who did not wish he did not have to live through the following day.63 The one freedom possible is established in a kind of abnegation that is also a detachment from the remainder. *** Incipient in the early modern period, the idea that there is, has to be, a remainder is explicit if not specified as such in the several phases of modernity from the late eighteenth century onwards. With modernity, however, this becomes the case above all in art. There is, self-evidently, a romantic remainder (Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Hölderlin, Kleist, Chateaubriand, Lamartine). There is, self-evidently, a symbolist one (Baudelaire, Rimbaud’s later poems, Mallarmé, Laforgue). There is a remainder for modern women writers (Dickinson, Woolf, Rhys, Bowen). There are great new modern modes of expressing or articulating the remainder (modern American jazz, for example, which so fluently articulates the African American experience of the remainder). There are also great late exponents of the remainder in literature such as Beckett. I want to turn, however, to an earlier paradigm of the remainder currently little recognized as such: Wagner’s operas. Wagner very seldom stops brooding on the

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remainder; indeed, the Wagnerian project increasingly became, in a sense, a full-scale statement of it. We might think of his work as dramatizing a hugely protracted tension (or agony) of and within the remainder. Wagner’s post-war reception has skewed our views of him, particularly in the hands of Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe.64 These critics were unable to separate their view of Wagner’s music from the historical advent of Nazism, though no historical logic or necessity binds them together. Thus Wagner becomes the very paradigm of an aestheticization of politics inadequate to modern horror, the reverse of the ‘modest’ art we now need. Wagner’s art is schematic and aspires to totality and unity.65 It is an art of closure and essence, not openness and appearance. This view goes back to Nietzsche, for whom Wagner was a sorcerer, enchanting multiplicity into unity, thereby proving the enemy of Dionysian vitality, and subsequently Heidegger, who saw Wagner as the archetypal metaphysician, capturing and imprisoning Being in the name of the One. For this tradition, the operas contain difference, box it in and determine it as a finite or limited play. The Wagnerian dereliction is even in some measure Hegelian. His music is dialectical, certainly insofar as he must everywhere convert the negative into the positive. By the same token, in Adorno’s terms, Wagner’s is never an art of aporia or suspension, never arrested before an absolute or Aufhebung that it cannot produce and that requires patient and sustained meditation and solicitation. By the same token, his is an art that sublimates suffering, in that the possibility of salvation is always intrinsic to it. So, too, there is no new experience of time in Wagner, no creation of an original experience of time, only a time expressed as blockage eventuating in resolution. This seems obtuse, if for historically conditioned reasons. Wagner’s art scintillates with endless detail, is an extremely subtle complex of musical cells, an atomized music in a permanent state of transition. It operates through its own singular, complex, profound and indefinitely sustained tensions which are a function of extraordinarily rich and dense relations between harmonies and dissonances. Wagner introduced a new treatment of difference in music which pushed chromaticism to its tonal limits, a point of radical tonal incertitude, and operatic form to a point of indeterminacy at which all kinds of totality and unity and resolutions blur and fall back. So, too, time in Wagner is not exactly a blocked time. It is more irregular than that suggests. Action is sporadic and commonly very brief. What rather takes the place of action is discourse, or discourses prolonged at great length, with actions a brief interlude between them. Hence stories are told and retold and take different forms. Such features produce a time that is deeply and inherently unresolved. The crucial paradox is that Wagner’s worlds appear full of foreboding, indefinitely suspended on the brink of disaster, and yet are also invariably provisional. So, too, ambiguity appears in all the features of Wagner’s operas, musical, scenic, narrative, poetic and their relations, exploding any notion of a Wagnerian One or whole. Take for example Tristan’s aria ‘Wo ich erwacht … ’.66 Tristan sums up the effect in the first two lines: ‘Wo ich erwacht, / weilt’ ich nicht’ (Where I awoke / I lingered not). Longing drives Tristan from death and towards the light. But in Act Two he and Isolde hated light. Its ‘falschem Prangen’ (false glitter) was intrinsic to a world well lost and its deceitful lures. So, in effect, longing is impelling Tristan towards an impossible composition with the world. Thus, even in turning to the light, he evokes death in

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paradoxical terms. Escaping the death-drive would mean emerging from a nightbound condition, but into a world of light which is at once convicted of madness, error, deceit, folly. So the process can and does begin all over again. The point is paradox, involution, an argument that is not an argument because it cannot possibly go anywhere or arrive at any end. Wagner was by this time a devoted Schopenhauerian, but the operas only partly reflect that. Precisely the point about Tristan, here, is that he cannot attain to the Schopenhauerian consciousness that is a ‘quieter of the will’,67 because he cannot renounce his love. The music is exactly fitted to this sense of intractability, an irreducible predicament. As with ambiguity, so too with indefinite suspension: the longest episode of waiting in the history of opera surely involves Tristan in Act III of Tristan und Isolde. Isolde may finally arrive, but this does not in the slightest affect the presentation of waiting, which appears as a ‘waiting in itself ’, not least since all that is left Tristan is to die; the excitement with which he returns to life is altogether futile. Compare the first act of Parsifal, which is all about a world without Parsifal, that is waiting for its Parsifal – ‘Durch Mitleid wissend, / der reine Tor / harren sein’ (By compassion made wise, the pure fool, awaits him) – and that is not sure that it has found him when he arrives, for good reason, for his arrival is unpromising. This world appears to be irremediably, structurally flawed. As for suffering: in Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring, suffering is hardly firmly lodged in a context of redemption. The supposed Wagnerian longueurs are often protracted if not unremitting struggles with more or less obscure forms of pain from which there is no immediate or obvious issue. Wagner’s are not worlds in which pain must duly yield to transcendence and is therefore secondary. His music is infused with an astonishing intimacy with not only pain, but its subtleties, nuances and vacillations, supremely in the case of women (Brünnhilde, Kundry, Elsa). After the elimination of transcendence, suspense and anguish may prove inalienable. In Wagner we happen upon the beginning of a great sway of modern suffering which is founded in a particular logic: there is no final reason in nature that the world should be as it is, why Elsa should not keep Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde should not delight in their love, Tannhäuser should not resolve his dilemmas. How is it, then, that all are tormented by such disastrous cross-purposes? This is the great Wagnerian question. The sufferer knows the necessity and inessentiality of suffering, together. Thus Wagner’s creatures writhe haplessly yet are not without an obstinate if obscure belief that all may somehow turn out for the good; the point being that this belief is not without foundation. The Wagnerian Umschlag or ‘turnaround’ is a recurrent feature of the operas, as the fragment to which dialectic is reduced. At the end of the first act of Die Walküre, Siegmund and Sieglinde declare their passion for one another. They do so with a shock captured in Sieglinde’s stunned interrogation of a setting in which nothing can be taken for granted any longer: ‘Ha, wer gin? Wer cam herein?’ (‘Ha! Who went out? Who came in?’). Sieglinde experiences a brusque, a radical estrangement from the world, and an intense sensation of the need to reconfigure it. Compare Tristan’s Verirrung after drinking the magic potion, the loss of all relations of familiarity evident in his response to the approach of the King (‘Welche König?’). On one level, Wagner’s operas hinge on chance encounters with a transformative power.

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But such encounters seldom take place. This is what Siegmund and Sieglinde declare, above all Siegmund, in his dismal evocation of what has otherwise been his life, his Unheiligkeit, his pariah status, his constant misfortune, the irony whereby his own drive to happiness incurs only misery and his social presence becomes a ceaseless invitation to violence, his certainty that his judgements are always the reverse of the established ones: ob ich um Freund’, um Frauen warb, immer doch war ich geächtet: Unheil lag auf mir …. was schlimm immer mir schien, andere gaben ihm Gunst …. gehrt’ ich nach Wonne, weckt’ ich nur Weh …. (whether I sought friends or wooed women, I was always ostracized: Calamity stalked me. What seemed only wicked to me won others’ favour. If I longed for delight, I awoke only misery ….)

Sieglinde adds her own, briefer account of the death of the spirit in a disastrous personal history and a loveless marriage. Both in effect invoke a degree zero of existence, the remainder. Things have gone badly for Siegmund and Sieglinde individually, and they will soon go badly for them together. But this seems of a piece with a world which has always been going badly. From the moment in Das Rheingold 1.1 when the music dramatically shifts from fluent serenity to sinister foreboding – with Alberich’s ‘Erzwäng’ ich nicht Liebe, / doch listig erzwäng’ ich mir Lust?’ (‘If I cannot compel love, / Can I perhaps win pleasure by cunning?’) – the world of The Ring is clearly awry. Soon events are casting a long ironic shadow over Wotan’s bourgeois pride in his new property, Valhalla, putatively an ‘ewige Werk’. The shadow lengthens even as Wotan demonstrates his casual indifference to the giants. When the gods suddenly age as Freia is taken from them, Wotan begins to compound his error, Alberich delivers his curse and Fafner and Fasolt violently fall out, the world of Der Ring starts to lurch like a pilotless vessel. Fricka’s rebukes to Wotan will eventuate in Erda’s great, dark, brass-heralded address to him, her injunction to a fear and a dread without which the ring spells vast destruction, and her warning of ‘Ein düstrer Tag’, a dark day looming. But Wagner has already made it clear that Wotan and the gods can have no hope of transcending the web of relations in which they find themselves caught, which means that fear is always close at hand. Siegmund and Sieglinde will duly find themselves haplessly caught up in the same web; Siegfried and Brunnhilde, too. As so often (Tristan versus the King, for example), Wagner expertly conflates the psychic and personal and the historical and political and turns them into mirror images of each other. Allegorizations of Der Ring, however compelling within limits – Shaw’s

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assertion, for example, that, ‘under the reign of Alberich’, Nibelheim ‘is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels’s Condition of the Labouring Classes in England’68 – ultimately fail to register Wagnerian dualism, which is a unique feature of a new mode of philosophy in music. Yet there might seem to be a specific point at which we must limit my argument. Surely, in Der Ring, fate makes itself felt? But exactly what does this fate consist in? It is certainly not a metaphysical concept: there is no idea, here, of a fate which steamrolls over contingency. That the Norns supposedly weave the strands of fate is of practically no significance, other than as a superstitious alibi which occasionally flickers in the background. What matters is the drama, at the beginning of Götterdammerung, of seeing the rope finally break, which is itself an absolute confirmation of the illusory character of fate. The world in which a concept of fate was sustainable, which Der Ring has always known to be in fact ephemeral, is finally dying: fate is fated. Fate is fated by history, by the dawning of unending historicity. The stark truth, however, is that there is no obvious cause for reassurance in the logic according to which this happens. This knowledge – of the only certainty, groundlessness, but a groundlessness that does not automatically spell promise – is one of Wagner’s great inspirations and perhaps his greatest gift to modernity. The operas invariably proceed from it. It is a deeply modern knowledge. Der Ring is gripped by it, as a kind of modern portent or augury, and its condition is the remainder. To say that Der Ring generalizes the historical moment, however, is not to say that it grants the moment an inescapable hold. Wagner rather generalizes the principle of historicity itself. This, Der Ring tells us, is a unique moment, a unique story. But alas, uniqueness may be infinitely repeatable, for nothing like fate promises any longer to root or endstop the endless, aimless, disoriginated production of historical singularities – what Walter Benjamin called modern ‘catastrophe in permanence’.69 But the special combination of mythological and modern features in Der Ring allows Wagner to express an intuition which is not just the Nietzschean premonition that, with modernity, nihilism arrives at the door. Wagner’s is a fear beyond any consciousness of the onset of modernity, a fear that catastrophe in permanence unveils nihilism as what in any case was always lurking within the mythical worlds that preceded modernity and now stands exposed as the absolute rule of which modernity has become at length the manifest expression. For Wagner, there is always a flaw in the Schopenhauerian system and its insistence on endless and ubiquitous suffering: the possibility of the Umschlag. Wagner was that weird and implausible phenomenon, a Schopenhauerian and a revolutionary together. Certainly, the revolutionary Wagner of Dresden in 1849 subsequently withdrew massively from revolutionary ardour into Schopenhauer, and yet he never quite dies. Thomas Mann arrives at a conception of Wagner in line with this. As his admirable ‘Leiden und Grösse Richard Wagners’ puts matters, Wagner was melancholic, attached to night and death, ‘the most illustrious confrère and comrade of all these symbolists for whom life was an affliction’.70 But his art itself was ‘revolutionary in character’, and this in effect propelled him repeatedly towards a thought of ‘renewal, change and emancipation’.71 It is thus that the later, passionately anti-Nazi Mann, who had been so very close to the Schopenhauerian seduction, the Wagnerian seduction, the

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Schopenhauerian seduction within the Wagnerian seduction, recognizes that the remainder, however all-encompassing it may sometimes appear to be, is always and only that, a remainder. *** The concept of the remainder becomes fully clear precisely now, at the moment when we may be abandoning a profound, historically endorsed intuition of it. Why might one want to keep the remainder, a concept of the remainder, at least in play? It can serve as a basis for a sustained critique or objectification of two pre-eminent features of the present culture, a theoretical conviction, and an affect that goes along with it: plenitude, and what J. Jack Halberstam has called ‘toxic positivity’.72 These are extremely problematic in that they spawn a generalized affirmation or set of affirmations whose roots, whatever else, are certainly not in thought and which are drastically unwarranted. Needless to say, they are everywhere in the discourses of total capital, but also much in evidence in contemporary progressivisms, post-Marxisms, postmodern liberalisms, social-democratic and ‘creative’ discourses, and so on. They threaten to lure us into a kind of theodicean trance. But we shouldn’t be lured. It is important to write off contemporary positivities (or wishful thinkings) as exemplified by, say, Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature).73 Pinker, however, is only one among a host of present-day Panglosses. Schopenhauer’s judgement has much to be said for it: the only good thing about Leibniz’s Theodicy is that it provoked Candide. The conviction of plenitude is a persuasion of real or realizable fullness: we can have it all; I can have it all, or a great deal of it, if perhaps only in the fullness of time. Equally, we all have rights, we must all in principle get what is our right, and all rights can and must be satisfied. For Pascal, that was a catastrophic logic. ‘“This is my dog”, said these poor children. “That is my place in the sun”. There is the origin and image of the usurpation of the whole world.’74 For Lacan, the assumption of plenitude is constantly fuelled by, but also constantly founders on, ineradicable lack. For the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, it breaks up against the truth of scarcity. Scarcity is the original condition, at least insofar as thought should begin from it. There is not and has never been enough to go round. Scarcity is not merely a question of a founding injustice. It is various and manifold and exists in a complex and dialectical relation to need. Need and scarcity constantly define and redefine each other. There is no rationally engineered and administered comprehensive justice with which we might all finally be satisfied.75 Toxic positivity is the mode of contemporary boosterism,76 the inveterate habit of self-promotion, talking ourselves up, revelling, in the fashion of contemporary euphorics, in the myriad achievable possibilities before us. Boosterism has become a reflex, not only individual and psychological, but political, cultural and historical. It is ubiquitous and mindless. No doubt many historical cultures, at least in the West, have maintained a belief in their special place in history. But the contemporary persuasion of this is perhaps unique, in that the culture possesses both the will and the means to block out the claims of both past and future as never before. It is less and less able to imagine a past that did not resemble it or to assert the principle of a better future

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that is not commensurate with itself. Rather, it pleases itself, is pleased with itself, and increasingly requires of intellectuals that they please it, as the affluent Roman classes preferred Pelagius to Augustine. An insistence on the truth of the remainder is a means of preserving and handing on the possibility of a serious political thought and a serious intellectual, moral and psychic life, assuming, that is, that we still want them. I will seem to have argued for yet another exceptionalism, not least in resorting to Hobbes and Schopenhauer. But the exceptionalism actually at stake in this essay is not the exceptionalism which Agamben has taken to task. It is rather an exceptionalism that a certain reading of Rancière promotes, an assertion of what is, so far as we know up to now (and may ever know), the rarity of the (political) good, but one which nonetheless does not surrender the democratic foundation, not least but not only because there is no reason particularly to identify the democratic constituency that has theoretical priority with the present Western one. This leaves a space for the historical exception. We should persevere with a manner of thinking history as punctuated, if seldom, by goods. The familiar philosophies of difference are for the foreseeable future dead. They have been locked down into new (or reconstituted) totalities. The important task now is to think difference differently, distinguishing the grains and textures of history as meticulously as possible while also documenting the holes that open up in it, in the knowledge that the remainder, though it looms very large, is always the remainder, can never become a totality and can never constitute the whole.

Notes Quoted Terisio Pignatti, Carpaccio (Lausanne: Skira, 1958), 9. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 164. 3 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 146. 4 Michel Serres, Esthétiques sur Carpaccio (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 13–16. Except where otherwise specified, all translations are my own. 5 Stefania Mason, Carpaccio: The Major Pictorial Cycles, trans. Andrew Ellis (Milan: Skira, 2000), 13. 6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Of the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott, intro. Richard S. Peters (New York: Collier, 1978), 158. 7 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, intro. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 79–80. 8 Ibid., 143. 9 Ibid., 116. 10 Quoted in A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2. 1 2

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11 Hobbes, Leviathan, 48. 12 Ibid., 205–6. 13 Ibid., 197. 14 Ibid., 22. 15 Ibid., 111. 16 Ibid., 116–17. 17 Ibid., 157. 18 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), 541. 19 Hobbes, Leviathan, 162. 20 Ibid., 163. 21 Ibid., 101. 22 Ibid., 103, 138. 23 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 116. 24 Hobbes, Leviathan, 140. 25 Ibid., 100. 26 Ibid., 297–9. 27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l’éducation, Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 583. 28 Ibid., 246. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 322. 31 Ibid., 259. 32 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique, Œuvres complètes, vol. III, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 351. 33 Ibid., 588. 34 Rousseau, Emile, 524. 35 Rousseau, Du contrat social, 361. 36 Ibid., 364. 37 Ibid., 381, 392. 38 Rousseau, Emile, 281. 39 Ibid., 549. 40 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise, ed. with intro., chronology and notes by René Pomeau (Paris: Bordas, 1988), 738. 41 Ibid., 169, 199, 221. 42 Ibid., 427. 43 Ibid., 461. 44 Ibid., 738. 45 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 171. 46 Schopenhauer, World as Will 1, 308–9. 47 Ibid., 153. 48 Ibid., 332. 49 Schopenhauer, World as Will 2, 359. 50 Schopenhauer, World as Will 1, 267. 51 Schopenhauer, World as Will 2, 580. 52 Schopenhauer, World as Will 1, 179. 53 Schopenhauer, World as Will 2, 371.

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54 Ibid., 635. 55 Schopenhauer, World as Will 1, 196. 56 Ibid., 380; Schopenhauer, World as Will 2, 601. 57 Schopenhauer, World as Will 2, 604, italics mine. 58 Ibid., 607. 59 Ibid., 635, 637. 60 Schopenhauer, World as Will 1, 384. 61 Schopenhauer, World as Will 2, 377–8. 62 Schopenhauer, World as Will 1, 146. 63 The original runs thus: ‘Even in this short space of life, no man is so blessed by fortune that he would not many times desire to die rather than cling on to life.’ Herodotus, Histories, Books VII–IX, trans. G. Woudrouffe Harris (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1907), 19 (7.6.46). 64 See Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner (Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1952); and Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966); and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures de Wagner (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2007). 65 I get my bearings in this paragraph and the next from Alain Badiou’s excellent attempt to change the direction of recent Wagner criticism. See Cinq leçons sur le ‘cas’ Wagner (Besançon: Nous, 2010). But my argument as a whole does not follow his, since Badiou has no concept of the remainder as such. 66 Tristan und Isolde, 3.1 67 Schopenhauer, World as Will 1, 397. 68 George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on ‘The Nibelung’s Ring’, 4th edn (1923; New York: Dover, 1967), 11. 69 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 164. 70 Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden, intro. Erich Heller (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 146. 71 Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, 147–8. 72 Judith [J. Jack] Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 73 See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin, 2012). 74 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris: Livres de Poche, 2000), 86. 75 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, ed. Jonathan Rée, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson (1960; London: Verso, 2004), 113 and passim. 76 The man who gave prominence to boosterism was Sinclair Lewis. See Babbitt (1922; New York: Dover Books, 2003). Previously, the allusion was to new American small townships which started making inordinate claims about themselves and their future, thus ‘boosting’ their own prospects. They aimed to attract new residents to their areas, keep up the spirits of communities – and raise the value of real estate.

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Paradigm Patricia Waugh

‘Thomas Kuhn single-handedly changed the currency of the word paradigm’ – so wrote the philosopher of science, Ian Hacking, in his foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962].1 But it was Kuhn’s original coinage of the term ‘paradigm shift’ – to designate the tectonic overhaul of an entire thoughtworld – that helped guarantee paradigm’s own rapid dissemination. Now, sixty years on from the publication of his book, it is still difficult to think movements, research programmes, periods and eras in intellectual history, without some recourse to Kuhn’s original construction of the paradigm as a ‘disciplinary matrix’ or ‘thought community’.2 Though significantly refined since 1962, paradigm – still luminous in its generative power – continues to be deployed as a byword for processes of institutional embedding and radical change in knowledge economies. Kuhn’s book too still continues to generate controversy. For at the heart of paradigm lurks something more momentous than simply the question of how disciplines organize and change their knowledge regimes. From the moment of publication, Kuhn was viewed as radical and ultra-conservative, positivist and anti-positivist, an avatar of postmodern incommensurability and a post-Hegelian communitarian and Cold War Warrior for challenged liberal times. So the philosopher of science and methodological anarchist, Paul Feyerabend, praised Kuhn’s orientation away from positivism while berating the conservative anti-pluralism of the book.3 The Frankfurt School Marxist Herbert Marcuse, meanwhile, condemned outright what he saw as Kuhn’s misleading promulgation of the normative under a title promising a theory of revolution.4 The central claim to be elaborated in this essay is that the generative but paradoxical power of the paradigmatic lies in a single but fiendishly slippery intellectual move at the heart of Kuhn’s argument. This is his scaling up of Aristotle’s rhetorical concept of paradeigma as model or exemplar in order that it might function as the scaffolding for a fractally reiterated and amplified but entire thoughtworld. This world (paradigm as a thought community) is presented by Kuhn as growing organically out of a style of thinking that is case-based (paradeigmatic), fundamentally analogical rather than logical and is reciprocally reinforced by the paradigm (thought community or disciplinary matrix) that it builds.5 To understand the move and the strategic thinking behind the concept is to begin to grasp a major source of the subsequent and ongoing Manichean response to the book. Kuhn’s ‘paradigm’ went viral within a few years of

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publication because the analogical rather than logical style of thinking entailed in working with the singularity of the case or model was performatively realized in the book’s own argument, facilitating the passage and remodelling of the concept across a multiplicity of cultural domains, disciplines and knowledge economies. As a species of ‘fuzzy concept’, Kuhn’s paradigm also held together a network of associated concepts that became buzzwords in their own right across the arts, social sciences, cultural theory and psychology: ‘Gestalt Switch’, ‘incommensurability’, ‘anomaly’, ‘revolution’, ‘normal science’, ‘puzzle-solving’. And therein lies an abiding paradox at the heart of its genealogy: for Kuhn had always intended paradigm/paradeigma to provide a model of disciplinary protectionism, safeguarding an exclusive knowledge community of science. Once its dissemination was under way, however, the paradigm was deployed more as a concept inherently resistant to closure than one serving its facilitation.6 Three turns in paradigm’s conceptualization since 1962 are traced here that draw out the sources and effects of this paradox: they triangulate a fascinating and complex genealogy of anti-critique, critique and post-critique. In the first (anti-critique), Kuhn elaborates the conceptual underpinning for a fundamentally normative project that, in offering a compelling alternative to the classic understanding of scientific method, provided a model of protection for science as a discipline. But an unintended consequence was a generalized perception by non-scientists that Kuhn’s defence of science as a paradeigmatic process fundamentally weakened science’s claims to epistemological distinctiveness and authority. In the second turn, Foucault’s (untimely) critique of governmentality as the establishment of an eternalized present is clarified and developed in Giorgio Agamben’s laying bare of that mode of critique as also essentially paradeigmatic in its processes and thinking style.7 Since the 1980s, this mode of critique as genealogy – what I will refer to as paradeigmatic historicism – has provided the key critical tool for the dominant working practices of many of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Whether the efficacy of paradeigmatic historicist critique is now weakened remains to be examined. But a perception of its loss of force and lack of fit with the urgency of new times – awareness of effects of environmental degradation and climate change, deepening social injustice and precarity introduced by neoliberal economics and rationality, the fallout of the war on terror, increasing political violence and attacks on minorities – produced, in 2004, Bruno Latour’s declaration of critique’s exhaustion.8 Why? According to Latour, political violence and the effects of economic neoliberalism have become so visible to all that their active resistance no longer requires support from the kind of elaborate ideological unmasking previously performed by critique. Furthermore, the textualist and social constructionist orientation of critique is now seen to threaten and undermine belief in the robust evidence of global warming and climate catastrophe that science is providing. A change of attitude and of stance, the need for ‘new proactive metaphors’ and more open intellectual ‘arenas in which to gather’ are now key to the continuing vitality of the humanities and social sciences.9 Latour’s provocative turn against archeo-teleological models of critique became the inspiration for a so-called revolution of the ordinary now naming itself and being named ‘post-critique’.10 This movement (or tendency) has revived a self-consciously Kuhnian language of paradeigmatic thinking that adopts a communitarian stance

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(even as it sometimes disguises its Kuhnian affiliations with the larger idea of paradigm as thoughtworld) with a preference for Latourian concepts such as ‘assemblages’ and ‘networks’. Post-critique promises a recalibration of thought and practice as it lays the groundwork for a radical shift in thought and attitude from a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to one of trust, the abandonment of difference and identity politics for the construction of spaces for promotion of the common good. Trust is the keyword in Rita Felski’s reworking of Latour as she urges a Kuhnian argument for the need to conserve our institutions, to give up on revolutionary thinking and critique, turning a blind eye to the ways in which the damages of the past – industrialization and the religion of capitalist growth – now threaten us with extinction.11 Promoting a blanket virtue ethics of trust as ‘new’ is problematic in numerous ways in the context of rising authoritarian populisms that depend on faith in charismatic leaders and emotive appeal. But in the arguments of post-critique’s proponents, however, there is little that reflects on or thinks dialectically from local to global political contexts or that is intellectually new: the space being cleared is conceptually as Wittgensteinian as it is Kuhnian, though transposed into a Latourian vocabulary of circulation, networks, surfaces, the ordinary, the affective and the sensible, flat ontologies and distributed agencies. Almost entirely sidestepped are the economic, the political and the governmental, or the ways in which the devastating truths of legacies of the past continue to be borne most of all by subalterns or those at the periphery who were never in a position to determine legacies and consequences, intended or unintended, in the first place. Wittgenstein’s belief that in language ‘nothing is hidden’ is used to proclaim a new horizontalist rejection of Foucauldian and Marxist metaphors of depth and verticality, excavation and archaeological unveiling, at a time when we are surely more in need of critique than ever. Though post-critique claims that what is exhausted or has at least become ineffectual is critique and not theory per se, its proponents have deeply internalized the Wittgensteinian repudiation of conceptual thinking – or even thinking through and with concepts – as an expression of a ‘craving for generality’ that keeps us captive to metaphysical ‘big pictures’. Conceptual thought is seen to prise language away from its entanglement with and embeddedness in ‘ordinary forms of life’.12 The reverence for the concept over the example, the abstract over the concrete, is seen to be the source of our confusion: for the pragmatist and the Wittgensteinian, concepts act on the world rather than name things in it. But therein lies the problem – for there is no sense in which the local and the particular are not in complex and dialectical relation with ‘big pictures’. For the tradition of critique, whose (old) materialisms are historical and dialectical, working through problematics of structure and system, it goes without saying that language acts in and on the world and is entangled with it, extending beyond what post-critique dismisses as critique’s ‘diagnostic’ stance and its hermeneutics of suspicion. Kuhn’s development of the concept of paradigm was rooted in Aristotelian phronesis, ordinary language philosophy, and a style of pragmatism shaped by his many discussions with close friend and collaborator, the literary critic and pragmatist, Stanley Cavell, whose ideas for The Claim of Reason were developed alongside Kuhn’s work on the paradigm.13 Cavell’s own sense of paradigm was taken from Wittgenstein’s phrase, ‘paradigm of our grammar’, used to refer to the fundamental entanglement of

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world and language: workable – as opposed to ‘idle’ – concepts are acquired out of the ‘rough ground’ of experience: a ‘philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about’.14 To learn a grammar is to be assimilated to a world through ordinary and practical engagement rather than rote or conscious learning of disembodied concepts: ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’.15 The idea that science, as a community of knowledge, might be understood as this kind of deep culture is reflected in Kuhn’s ontologically oriented argument that, after a revolution, scientists don’t so much work with new theories as ‘work in a different world’.16 They literally see new phenomena, even as they look at the same objects. Tracing a genealogy of paradigm in this way – as a self-referential concept born out of a context of thought that is resistant to the conceptual – raises the interesting and broader question of why and how pragmatist styles of thinking are evidently revitalized at moments of legitimation crisis or interregnum when established theoretical concepts seem no longer adequate containers – as in our moment as well as Kuhn’s – for the historical challenges with which they are confronted. Kuhn’s work was crucial in showing how and why institutions mostly embed their equivalents of ‘normal science’ via paradeigmatic thinking rather than theoretical conceptualization. But his account of paradeigmatic and case-based thinking provided the tools for a style of immanent critique where paradigm becomes the key instrument for the dismantling of institutionalized reason. After 1962, paradigmatic thinking therefore bifurcates into two broad trajectories: in one direction, towards Foucauldian critique of the normative and of normalization; in the other, towards disciplinary protectionism and institutional consolidation. This second trajectory culminates in the liberal/ communitarian pragmatism of post-critique but also takes in the deeply conservative pragmatism of thinkers such as Stanley Fish, with his mantra of ‘professional correctness’: the key weapon in a career-long campaign against critique’s ‘uncashable claims’.17 Fish’s insistence that the ‘vocabularies of disciplines are not external to their objects but constitutive of them’ disempowers critique, rendering it meaningful and relevant only within the terms of its own disciplinary closed space.18 Post-critique is distinguishable from this kind of deeply conservative anti-critique in that it picks up and attempts to combine both trajectories of paradigm: while pragmatist immanence informs its tendency towards conservative modes of disciplinary closure, its renewal of the pragmatist tradition of aesthetics, from Dewey through I. A. Richards to Jacques Rancière, compellingly leverages critique back towards agencies of style and form that are also at the forefront of new and older styles of Marxist thinking.19

Paradigm as world building: Kuhn, the paradeigma and the normative But what is the mechanism subtending the generative force of the Kuhnian paradigm? Kuhn’s most innovative move was to bring together, in a blend, two rudimentarily theorized and separately conceived prototypical accounts of paradigm that fundamentally challenged both the method of positivist science – where the hypothesis

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presupposes the already existing intelligibility of an entity and then uses induction and deduction to reach it – and the liberal and progressivist ethos traditionally associated with the exercise of scientific reason. The first, the idea of science as a Denkkollectiv, had already been developed by Ludwik Fleck in his largely forgotten The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), rediscovered by Kuhn in 1949, and providing an important source for his more ideologically neutral conception of science as a thought community. This sensus communis – described by Fleck as dependent on a ‘Denkstil’ (thinking style) that combines ‘mood’ with ‘method’ – provided the inspiration for Kuhn’s own concept of a ‘disciplinary matrix’. Fleck likened the scientific practice of thinking to bodily movement: as a limb both facilitates and constrains the body’s trajectory through space, so the shared Denkstil of the scientific community constitutes a ‘force field’ shaping and constraining what is thinkable. But whereas Fleck’s democratic idea of science is of a community of values (the ‘esoteric’) ultimately tested by a wider public (‘the exoteric’), Kuhn confines the legitimation of the paradigm to a closed community of experts.20 In Kuhn, the paradeigmatic, as the exclusive style of thinking of a thought community, is its means of safeguarding disciplinary autonomy and exclusivity. The second, and more rhetorically significant source for paradigm, was Aristotle’s concept of paradeigma, presented by Kuhn as ‘a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various themes in their conceptual, observational and instrumental applications’ and ‘as a shared example, the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of the book’.21 In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, paradeigma designates a model, pattern or exemplar, the illustration of a rule not otherwise articulable; it is the more complex and central, though also more easily overlooked, elementary particle in the evolution of Kuhn’s paradigm. But the refashioning of paradeigma as a style of analogical thinking provides the fundamental method as well as ‘mood’ for the fashioning and consolidation of the community of thought as a paradigm. What Kuhn significantly borrows from Aristotle is the etymological derivation of paradeigma from para-deiknyumi: to exhibit side by side. An entity is made tacitly intelligible through its juxtaposition with another. Placing an already known entity or singularity adjacent to another that is less familiar exerts tensional potency from known to unknown; the perception of the less familiar entity is already directed, therefore, occurring in a constrained zone of relational possibilities set up by the familiar model. As a tensional rather than dichotomous relation, the unknowable is made intelligible in a conceptually indeterminable space of the in-between. Exploration proceeds associatively and horizontally, by analogy, rather than logically upwards (from particular to general as in induction) or logically downwards (from general to particular as in deduction). This process of working concretely through the shared example – rather than through hypothesis, induction and deduction – is the embodied and embedded cognitive basis for Kuhn’s ‘normal science’, the ‘puzzle solving’ practice that consolidates the larger picture of the paradigm and fashions the habitus of the thought community. In the Kuhnian world of enquiry, it is not so much that the scientist rigorously observes in order to believe, but rather that, in paradigmatically believing, he or she is enabled to see. The sense of Heimlichkeit or convergence provided in the reassurance of inhabiting a safe, familiar and legitimated world is the source of

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a deep feeling of conviction that deters the divergent or unfamiliar, especially in the form of the anomaly: this is the unexpected that refuses to fit the paradigmatic pattern and must therefore be deflected.22 Strategies might include marginalization (scorn for the ‘crazy’ idea or the ‘crackpot’ scheme), deferral (dismissal as ‘before its time’), stigmatization (the awkward outlier dubbed as ‘misfit’) and disavowal (the refusal to see the anomaly, the blindness that accompanies insight). Paradigm is here the key mechanism in setting up a ‘hermeneutics of trust’ that makes significant change nigh on impossible. Revolution as paradigm shift is only thinkable once an established paradigm, overwhelmed by a thickening to critical mass of proliferating anomalies, is already subject to a thoroughgoing legitimation crisis. What is evidently crucial to Kuhn’s argument is his recognition of similarities between the operations of modern case-based disciplines and this more formal account of paradeigmatic style in the Rhetoric. In case-based thinking in law, for example, the singular case functions actuarially, setting precedents to control the future, binding up time in a retentionally oriented process that minimizes conceptualization and gives authority less to reason than to a community of expertise. In Kuhn’s account, the paradigm is oriented towards institutional domestication of an event of thought in its adjudication by normative expertise. A process of reflexive equilibrium ensures that the new sheds its transience as it is assimilated into a pattern of recognition, made perceptually and perpetually available as part of a naturalized world. Set up as if dialectically open-ended, the Kuhnian paradigm actually operates in the mode of future anteriority, providing a retroactive explanation for a synthesis already established. The analogical process insidiously manufactures the effect it purports to discover. But Kuhn’s anxious defence of the threatened autonomy of science employs a style of thinking associated not only with traditionally casuistic disciplines like law and medicine, but also with the aesthetic and critical modes of the humanities. Indeed, in the avowedly non-epistemological disciplines of the humanities, the focus on and starting point with the single case satisfies a moralized desideratum of particularity and anti-universality (often seen as a core value), but the capacity of the case to become a model through horizontal or adjacent or associative movement (from particular to particular) further satisfies the requirement that the singular be made significant through reiterations that elaborate an excess that carries a generalizing capacity. Paradigm, in its Kuhnian operation, paradoxically softens the boundaries between the humanities and sciences even as it is intended to safeguard the distinctiveness and autonomy of science. Kuhn’s account of modelling in scientific thinking most obviously shares with precedent-oriented disciplines such as law a premium on tradition and conservation, on gradualist rather than evental or catastrophic change. Kuhn’s thinking tends towards structure and relative autonomy rather than system and interrelatedness. In the casebased disciplines whose styles of thinking attracted him, the singular case provides reference and anchor point for a rectilinear process of analogical reasoning that operates horizontally and recursively, so the emergent and the futural are continuously brought back to the past and assimilated to the model or exemplum. The construction of the case enables comprehension of the unknown in the absence of explicit theoretical agreement about the nature of either the precedent or the new and unknown entity.

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In functioning outside of rules or explicitation, however, the case is more open to fetishization, to becoming a closed or shut case, a limit(ed) and limiting stereotype that closes down horizons of possibility.23 The new event, as it is made into a case, is no longer new; it becomes the thing one would have expected or had been expecting, all along. Although a discipline such as the literary humanities insists more than most on its openness to creative possibility and newness, paradeigmatic thinking as a provider of cultural stability has always resided at the heart of its tensions between the claims of tradition and individual talent. Genres in literary studies, for example, exert their own paradeigmatic stabilization as middle-level formations existing in mutually reinforcing relations with figures and conceits, paradeigmata, at a lower scale; together, they mediate and modify higher-level formations such as periodizing concepts. Paradeigmata are never simply illustrative, therefore, but exert constitutive agency as the building blocks of higher forms that might likewise exert their own downwards causality. This process of paradeigmatic entanglement is often so well embedded as to be relatively invisible and therefore resistant to change or challenge. Examples abound: Cleanth Brooks’s selfreferring trope of the ‘well-wrought urn’ becomes the exemplary figure for the New Criticism in its reiteration of Romantic organicism, persisting through later models of verbal equivalence and their deconstruction as ‘aesthetic ideology’ in the work of Paul de Man. In psychoanalysis, the ‘primal scene’ provides both the core of the family romance and the therapeutic method of Nachträglichkeit or retrospective recognition. The moment of ‘anagnorisis’ provides the narrative unblinding or belated insight in the genre of tragedy and its poetics of catharsis. T. S. Eliot’s term ‘dissociation of sensibility’, his myth of a secular fall into modernity that separated reason and feeling, was central in the early construction of Modernism as a period concept. Such paradeigmata provide the naturalized schemata, the invisible and often insidious predictive coding or pattern recognitions of disciplinarity. For exemplars exert a powerful consolidatory force, not so much in pointing to or confirming explicit rules of a genre, period or movement, but in providing perceptual confirmation of habitual expectations that determine inclusion or exclusion in canons and periods. Paradeigmata drive patterns of assemblage that Kuhn fixes institutionally as paradigms through analogical extension, tacitly galvanizing the disciplinary thoughtworld against theoretical or other kinds of interference. As in Kuhn’s ‘normal science’, criticism as ‘puzzle-solving’ is a process of working through disagreement to make new shapes fit the bigger picture. Kuhn’s paradigm also borrows from Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’ or the concept as an unarticulated ‘network of overlapping and crisscrossing resemblances’ where no member manifests all family characteristics, but each member carries at least some.24 There is no map giving directions, but one finds one’s way about, working from one particular to the next.25 This style of thinking, of working with paradeigmata, is not confined to legal case-based thinking, however, and as Nelson Goodman pointed out shortly after the publication of SSR, it might be thought of as intrinsic to the world-making practices of art, where the exemplar, like the tailor’s swatch, both possesses the properties of the world of which it is part and also points up those properties without any explicit formulation of them.26 So too, the art critic Michael Fried quickly appropriated the Kuhnian paradigm, reformulating Modernism as an institutionalized ‘modern tradition’

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to be distinguished from the transient ‘event’ of a discredited avant-garde.27 In Cavell’s view also, ‘deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history’:28 one has to possess the convention in a deep way, as a way of life, to recognize that it no longer serves. Art might be made revolutionary so as to preserve the canons of a tradition in danger of popular destruction; science too, for Kuhn, needs renewal of its disciplinary core, but only at rare and opportune moments when threatened by unwarranted interference or populist degradation. In these artworld appropriations of Kuhn’s paradigm thinking, the virtue of the paradigm is seen to lie in its power to guarantee disciplinary autonomy, a keyword of modernity and the mid-century construction of Modernism. Autonomy reiterates the Kantian idea of freedom as the capacity to act in accordance with self-determined principles independent of heteronomous pressures; it means giving the law unto oneself. Transferred to the modernist aesthetic of the mid-century, it entailed that art create its own universe, structured according to internal rules not applicable or subordinate to, or interchangeable with, any imperative or order outside of art, whether ethical, political or epistemological. Kuhn’s paradigm supplied a template for a neo-Kantian pragmatism that provided tools for the building of a modernist aesthetic, even as it considerably weakened science’s claim that only observational data provide incontrovertible evidence for the growth of knowledge. As the paradigm is elevated as more explanatorily effective over positivist criteria of knowledge, the practice of scientific investigation is brought closer to aesthetic making and hermeneutic anti-foundationalism.

Paradigm and positivism If Kuhn’s pragmatist orientation has remained, oddly enough, mostly unremarked, his departure from the ideal of scientific reasoning formalized by logical positivism was seized on by many of his contemporaries. For the paradeigmatic style is in marked contradistinction to the tight circular reasoning of logical positivism, where deduction establishes the conclusion given the truth of the premises, and induction establishes the logical probability of the truth of an inductive conclusion given the evidence available. Not anti-positivist per se, Kuhn’s book and its concept provided ammunition for those seeking positivism’s demise. For positivism’s stated purpose since the 1920s (and still its regulative ideal) had been to build an absolutely certain logical and empiricist foundation for science in order to strengthen its claim to be exclusively the domain of knowledge and truth. In order to rein in any tendency towards enchantment – the extension of science to metaphysical, ethical or aesthetic propositions – positivists argued that demonstration of the reducibility of the sciences to a shared logico-linguistic method would guarantee their unification and resilience. For logical positivists such as Carnap, all scientific assertions were to be grounded in experience of facts open to observation; scientific theorems are axiomatic systems whose connection to experience is to be achieved through the discovery of rules of interpretation; empirically derived laws then serve as premises for deductive arguments. That meaning pertains only to propositions open to empirical verification or falsification restricts knowledge exclusively to scientific epistemologies.

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What Latour has called the modern settlement was never as clear-cut, however, as the positivists (or Latour) wished to believe.29 It was not so easy to decide where science ended and metaphysical or humanistic thinking began. Albert Einstein, a self-proclaimed realist, warned in 1938, perhaps with Paley in mind, that the scientist trying to read the book of nature is also like a man trying to study a watch that he cannot open: ‘He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.’30 Wittgenstein’s renunciation of positivism, movingly foreshadowed in the last sections of The Tractatus, had begun with the recognition that even in science there can be no pure language, no foundation, no certain beginnings. Positivism limited knowledge to true meaningful statements but, logically, must then provide a definition of meaningful statements which could include the statement itself: but as positivism had defined all meaningful statements as those which can be empirically verifiable, any statement of limits inevitably fell outside of its own limits and was therefore not a meaningful claim by its own criteria. The legitimation crisis of positivism was well under way even before Kuhn formulated his paradeigmatic challenge. The republication of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic in 1946 briefly reignited positivism’s philosophical project, but it was fundamentally challenged by Quine’s argument that all observation statements depend on ‘webs of belief ’ and are not open therefore to discrete propositional definition.31 A growing recognition of the underdetermination of theory by data suggested too that the outcomes of scientific experiment might be variously framed by multiple and even rival theories, and if experimental outcomes are theoretically indeterminable, then theory choice is never wholly rational. The destabilizing effect of a ‘permanent revolution’ proclaimed as the ‘open’ model of science in Popper’s radical scepticism was first developed in 1934 in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery and translated into English in 1959. His concept of falsification seemed to threaten science as the most securely grounded epistemological discipline, leaving it with no privileged claim to the validation of final truths about the physical universe. The Kuhnian paradigm entered intellectual history, therefore, at a moment of crisis, presenting a style of argument drawing on pragmatist and ordinary language philosophy in an attempt to re-legitimate science. In Kuhn, models are not maps but concrete actors or forces that have effects on and change the systems in which they are embedded and, unlike the cognitive processes associated with logical positivist (or later critical realist) accounts of scientific thinking, involve practices and applications not fully open to critical rational formulation as rules.32 They are therefore resistant to rational forms of critique: this is why paradeigmata – whether the falling apple or the well-wrought urn – are key to the protection of disciplinarity as a closed shop. Thinking paradeigmatically produces a simulacrum entangled with and in the world that works without theoretical conceptualization. Indeed, in a later reflection, Kuhn acknowledged that ‘the paradigm is what you use when the theory isn’t there’.33 And theory, if understood as universal rule, never is quite there. But the ‘intelligibility’ produced through the paradigm, a substitute for theory in uncertain times, is also an instrument for the normative and ideological inflection that is outlawed in positivism’s worship of the fact. I would argue that the paradeigmatic is revived or intensified

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whenever systems or institutions are under stress or when existing theoretical concepts are not yet renewed but no longer seem adequate to map on to or model the realities they claim to describe. We are arguably in the midst of one such interregnum now, and the return of the paradeigmatic as a component of pragmatist styles of thinking is one symptom of this.

Double coding: Paradigm shift in (and out of) history The tensional possibilities at the heart of the conceptual blending of paradigm – as paradeigma and thought community – are easily scaled up. Kuhn fashions the larger paradigm or disciplinary matrix out of a scaled-up version of the same rectilinear logic that fashions paradeigmata at a lower scale. From this he constructs a similarly double-coded and paradoxical account of the intellectual history of science. From inside the paradigm, where its ordinary practitioners reside, the world seems an open trajectory of continuity and progress where past scientific ‘truths’ have been so far left behind and forgotten that the current world and its trajectory into the future appear all that is the case. To look in from outside the paradigm – however – as in Kuhn’s own philosophical stance – is to be aware of the cyclical movement of history: this world will end, consigned to silence, as another rises to take its place. One can live, intimately situated in a condition of Hegelian optimism, or one can step outside into nowhere and bring into view a panorama of serial doom, of transient worlds and their phantom knowledges slipping successively into darkness. Like a nineteenth-century fictional narrator Kuhn speaks one moment alongside his scientists from within the Sittlichkeit of a thought community but, as philosophical viewer from nowhere, he can at any moment step outside and unveil the myth of continuity and progress as a Noble Lie built up through the fabulatory capacity of paradeigmata. But how does Kuhn present this double coding of history at the level of the paradigm itself? Consider first his own favourite example of a falling object: for Aristotle its fall is invisible, for the object is understood not as a process but as a change of state in a teleologically driven trajectory. For Newton, however, it becomes suddenly visible in the Eureka moment that clarified the concept of dynamic motion. Likened by Kuhn to a Gestalt switch, a duck/rabbit complementarity, Newton is catapulted out of one world and into another: perceptually incommensurable, however, they are worlds now cut adrift. Kuhn describes his own Eureka moment as he registers the force of this insight. While reading Aristotle’s Physics, the scales fell from my eyes. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I’d never dreamed of. That sort of experience – the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way – is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change.34

In a strange (and empathetic) moment of illumination, Kuhn’s imagination transports him into Aristotle’s thoughtworld; once there, Aristotle’s physics make perfect sense.

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Retold in the non-rational language of imagination and inspirational event, Kuhn’s Eureka moment is narrated as one that casts into the wilderness the accepted Hegelian, even Baconian, modern account of incremental scientific progress. But it also cuts away the ground of the prevailing positivist idea of scientific rationality as an adequate vehicle for arriving at or closer to truth: it is feeling and imagination that finally transports Kuhn from one world to another. Far from being cumulative, progressive and continuous, inching slowly but ever surely nearer to truth, science is revealed as discontinuous, catastrophic, true only ever in an immanent rather than transcendent sense. The history of science is constituted as one of discontinuous thoughtworlds. Scientific enquiry, more like art, is sufficient to itself, grounded less in referentiality than in figurality, more in practices and models than in laws or rules and reference: ‘[W]ithout a paradigm, there is no such thing as research.’35 If no paradigm, there is no knowledge, no meaning, no value. No wonder paradigm and institution go hand in hand. The idea of a match between the ontology of a thing and its real counterpart in nature is abandoned in paradeigmatic thinking. But what about paradigm shifts? How do revolutions occur? Once the paradigms of ‘normal science’ are so beset by unresolvable anomalies and exceptions that puzzlesolving seems stymied, a thought community may be launched upon a revolutionary road. In this interregnum or crisis period of the pre-paradigmatic, newly minted or residual hypotheses and theories vie for recognition and legitimation. For revolution is never simply a matter of the new. Reiterating the logic of paradeigmatic thinking examined earlier, revolution is an extended as well as belated affair, where the significance of the event is retrospectively fashioned and enfolded in a structure of future anteriority that converts contingency into necessity and narrativizes a serendipitous sequence into a cast-iron Hegelian narrative of necessity. Revolution is a last resort when all attempts within ‘normal science’ to ‘save the phenomenon’ have failed: like the idea of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary theory, the stabilization of Being requires an ever-vigilant attempt to second-guess or pre-empt event. The paradigmatic at this level stabilizes knowledge through the narrative arc that rewrites revolutionary events backwards, just as, at the level of ordinary paradeigmatic practice, the unknown singularity is enfolded back into the force field of the paradeigma as model. Like the mid-century reading of Modernism as a ‘modern tradition’, the ontological orientation of the paradigm as a new world is asserted, yet its more militantly subversive effects are contained. Each new paradigm that comes into being will repeat the epochal pattern of event, emergence, consolidation and the long fall into staleness and inertia – all without recourse to any deux ex machina, transcendental machinery or external historical forcing. Kuhn’s version of the waning of the paradigm and the rise and containment of the revolutionary through institutional stabilization – the King is dead, long live the King – is one of the oldest clichés under the sun yet seems to borrow the lyrically evocative recognition of a deep truth about the life of things: ‘in the knowledge derived from experience. / The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every moment / And every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation of all we have been’.36 In relation to its own historical moment, of course, Kuhn’s refashioning of the paradigm can now be understood as a response to Cold War fears of Communist revolution or of interference in science for military co-optation. Indeed, his argument

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has much in common with that arising from Edmund Burke’s fears of the danger of revolution as a threat to law, where jurisprudence is reconfirmed as the collective wisdom of the ages. Precedent and custom protect the rule of law under conditions of threat and uncertainty for explicit rules might more easily be challenged and overturned. Rational argument carries the potential for democratic extension, dangerous in revolutionary times. This evidently Cold War style of rethinking knowledge as culture connects Kuhn directly too with the contemporaneous ‘two cultures’ debate that broke out on the other side of the Atlantic as his book first appeared. Leavis’s dismissal of science as not so much bound to the Hegelian grand narrative of progress, but more to a technologico-Benthamite pursuit of ‘jam tomorrow’ and his insistence that it is simply ‘absurd to posit a culture that the scientist has qua scientist’ was another fallout from positivism’s promulgation of science as logical-empirical method.37 For Leavis, it is culture as a tacit process of intersubjective linguistic engagement that provides the real building blocks of knowledge. But Kuhn and Snow saw that the positivist account of science as method also obstructed the cultural embedding of the ‘scientific outlook’ as a structure of values and an extension of ordinary thinking. For though neither repudiated positivism as such, they were both kicking against its methods of conceptual hygiene. And so was Leavis, who saw that the positivist model was instrumental in sustaining a dismissive view of humanistic discourse as simply chatter about culture.38

Reverse engineering: Paradigm as critique What is still to be learned from such close analysis of the mechanisms of the paradigm? In an era where revolutionary thinking is on the back foot and where the hegemony of neoliberal reason though faltering feels still unshakeable, greater understanding of the rhetorical building and maintenance of paradigms provides an important means of understanding the rise and institutional embedding of knowledge regimes as thoughtworlds. Recent historical accounts of the emergence of neoliberalism as such a thought community, for example, trace its origins to the 1938 conference where Hayek first put forward his new economic agenda. Over the next forty or so years, a small core of converts, including the Chicago school economists and adherents of Milton Friedman, systematically disseminated its central tenets, infiltrating almost every significant policymaking, media organization and economic research institute, across the globe. But its full instauration and hegemony awaited the ‘Stagflation’ years of the 1970s that destroyed the credence of the Keynesian economics that had reigned for forty years.39 Such accounts of the neoliberal revolution bear many of the marks of the Kuhnian paradigm shift and its institutional embedding: the moment of full emergence must be propitious; the new paradeigmata must have explanatory or at least analogical attractiveness and power; the old paradigm must be struggling with change and the build-up of anomalies that can no longer be accommodated by its explanatory models. But the counter-hegemonic potential of the paradigm as critique offers more than this. Kuhn played down paradigm’s more subversive potential in his formulation of paradigms as ‘models of the right way to do things’.40 He ignored the capacity

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of analogical thinking unleashed from tightly controlled adjacency to transfer disruptively across disciplinary domains and historical scales; he ignored how the inference from source to target, in changing both, might even create new models for the kind of interdisciplinary entanglements suggested, for example, in Karen Barad’s onto-epistemology of the agential cut.41 Yet his semantic shift – in the postscript to the book written in 1969 – to a preference for the Latin concept, exemplum, over the Greek paradeigma, is not insignificant: the concept of exemplum is more available for reverse modelling and, therefore, for purposes of disruption and critique. The etymological roots of exemplum – in examinare, to cut out, to make an exception of – press on Kuhn’s earlier semantic preference for the Greek term. For whereas paradeigma is identified with illumination, sight and indication, emphasizing class membership, exemplum leans more towards selection, excision and discontinuity, of exceptionality and standing outside of a class. This tension, between Greek and Latin, operates at different scales in Kuhn’s text; it is one of the clues to its paradoxical generative power as available for ideological confirmation or critique. To exhibit the intelligibility of the class is to stand inside and outside of it so, as a rhetorical device, the exemplum is foregrounded from the first as a part of and apart from the group of entities it exemplifies. Michel Foucault, writing at the same time as Kuhn, also used the word ‘paradigm’ and shared Kuhn’s focus on institutions as instruments for the embedding and embodying of governmentality; his work has been described by Rabinow and Dreyfus as comprising historical articulations of a paradigm.42 Whereas for Kuhn, paradeigma is constructed as the primary unit endorsing or embedding processes of governmentality, in Foucault’s writing, however, it describes a reverse process of disembedding and exposure of the processes of knowledge-making as ‘eventualisation’: the entanglement of knowledge with power that makes the contingent seem necessary as it performs its effects of subjectivation and normativization. Although critique is the means whereby ‘the subject gives himself the right to question power or its discourses of truth’, Foucault shares an interest in case-based thinking – as the early chapter ‘Signs and Cases’ in The Birth of the Clinic suggests – as a tool for revealing how the case made by the expert becomes the shared knowledge that functions to suppress its own conceptual contradictions and genealogical origins. Eluding conceptualization, it conditions the ‘rationality of an era’.43 Like Kuhn, Foucault moved away from the word ‘paradigm’. From the outset, his concept of ‘episteme’, as ‘the total set of relations that write, at a given period, the discourse practices that give rise to epistemological figures’, conjured a contested arena where, although the historical conditions for knowledge construction might be obscured, they might also be recovered through critique.44 Foucault’s genealogical critique operates analogically, like Kuhn’s, through the construction of inventive paradeigmata whose force is redeployed to make intelligible, by tropic displacement and defamiliarization, the processes of subjugation and domination hidden in liberal and Whiggish constructions of history. His most powerful exemplar in developing this paradeigmatic style of critique was Bentham’s sketch of the Panopticon: the detailed image of a theatrical structure built to control the multitude through the organization of space so as to maximize surveillance.45 From this, Foucault develops his powerful concept of the carceral society where the panopticon as exemplar makes intelligible the

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rationality of an era heretofore invisible to positivist historiographers. By the time of his 1978–9 lectures, Foucault had presciently fathomed and was beginning to expose the workings of a new political rationality, the entrepreneurial refashioning of economic liberalism that would later emerge fully fledged as neoliberal reason. It was Agamben’s work, however, especially in The Coming Community and The Signature of All Things, that revealed the pivotal function of paradigmatic thinking in Foucauldian critique. In a paradigm, Agamben argues, the example shows itself ‘in the empty space in which its indefinable and unforgettable life unfolds’.46 Example and exception form a strange intimacy: becoming paradigmatic is a function of exceptionality. Agamben spells out how, in Foucault, and like his own examples of the camp and the Musselman, the analogical style creates a new ensemble whose homogeneity it constitutes, to become a powerful instrument for interrogating what has escaped the gaze of conventional history. Paradeigmatic thinking, liberated to generate the instruments for genealogical critique, becomes the dominant thinking style of the humanities for the next thirty or so years. In ‘What is the contemporary?’ Agamben describes his own genealogical method as one of tracing concepts back to the moment they first become operative as an arche, but with awareness that every arche is also constructed through the figures of the contemporary.47 The paradigm is not simply found in the past but is also made in the present: the past lives on in the present, but as its construct. Paradeigmatic thinking here functions again in a pragmatist mode of the onto-epistemological: to read the past as an artefact of the present is to discover the present in fashioning the past. The hermeneutic circle is a paradigmatic circle. But this is where the openly ‘vexed’ or ‘paradeigmatic historicism’ of Foucault and Agamben departs from Kuhn’s own historicist version of the past as a series of discrete thoughtworlds. Autonomous, discrete and self-referring, with no bearing on the shaping of the present, Kuhn’s thoughtworlds are endlessly abandoned and consigned to dust at the thresholds of new futures. For Foucault, however, the past is what is constructed as evidence to legitimate the present and, therefore, (like memory) set up continuously through the dominant rationalities that drive the present. The paradigm as critique becomes a means of revealing those alternative histories or subjugated knowledges and experiences of the dispossessed that have been rendered invisible: anomalies air-brushed from official histories. In this kind of paradeigmatic reopening of the past, suggestions and models might be found too for the fashioning of alternative futures.

Post-paradigm/post-critique The paradigm – fully informed by the Kuhnian doublet of disciplinary matrix/ paradeigmatic style of thinking – has been surprisingly resilient, both as a vehicle of normalization and of critique. At both ends of the scale, in the singularities of paradeigmata, or as the distributed matrix of an episteme, the paradigm has turned up, ever since 1962, whenever and wherever the radically new is announced. When a ‘post’ is prefixed to a reigning paradigm, however, a signal is sent of impending interregnum,

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transition or arrival of the pre-paradigmatic: the current paradigm, whether operating as a periodizing concept or as a method or critical stance, has become tired or overvexed. So ‘the modern’ or ‘critique’ is challenged by ‘the post-modern’ and ‘postcritique’; the ‘post’ changes the code from within. The ‘New’, however, is more often instituted as supplement to or announcement of a recalibration of the system to accommodate technical, political, environmental or other kinds of recent change or intellectual turns that remain within the paradigm but require its updating. Or it may signal an attempt to anchor recent historical developments in a legitimated tradition. But the ‘post’ is often more problematic than the ‘New’: sequestration in the guise of renewal is often being sought. Read in the context of paradigm, what becomes most compelling about the current challenge of so-called post-critique is not that it recommends a break with or complete turning away from critique in its Marxist or Foucauldian modes. More significant is the extent to which its current advocates have specifically turned back to the ideas and vocabularies of the later Wittgenstein; of pragmatists such as Dewey, Cavell, Goodman and Quine; and of ordinary language philosophers such as J. L. Austin who provided the original intellectual scaffolding for Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm. Toril Moi, for example, proclaims the return to ordinary language philosophy as promising a revolutionary recalibration of the methods of the humanities; Rita Felski not only acknowledges the influence of Latour and the pragmatist sociologist of critique, Luc Boltanski, but also liberally appropriates phrases such as ‘ordinary forms of life’, ‘thinking styles’ and ‘thought communities’ that Kuhn borrowed from Wittgenstein and Fleck. Critique is set up as a ‘method and mood’ (Fleck’s original terminology), by Felski and others, but characteriologically inflected as a hermeneutic so suspicious as to be verging on the psychotic (paranoid) – one so inflated with intellectual hauteur as to be deaf to and detached from the grammars of ordinary experience. In fact, postcritique shares with Kuhn three features laid down by Dewey that are still key tenets of pragmatism: the promulgation of everyday enquiry or ‘normal science’ as ‘puzzlesolving’; an orientation to ‘ordinary forms of life’ seen to condition such modes of enquiry; an advocacy of the aesthetic – as making and curating or assembling – as a more creative and agentially powerful tool for refashioning worlds than the ‘debunking’ of critique (Dewey too was no fan of Marxism). Advocates of post-critique mesh pragmatist concepts with more recent vocabularies drawn from systems thinking to promote the emergent and the unpredictable: the steady ambulation of the ANT worker alert to the multiple and distributed affordances of the rough ground of the earth is expected to refuse the seduction of catch-all concepts such as ‘the social’. Post-critique also readily attunes to the neophenomenological revival of the embodied, the affective, the sensory and the new materialisms of vibrant matter, the distributed and the ‘ordinary’. The pragmatist conceptualization of knowledge as curating continues to be opposed to the classically Marxist view of knowledge as discovery and the symptomatic reading. Foucauldian making as propaedeutic to finding is less often demonized, but more often pronounced exhausted, a symbolic gesture of the now over-domesticated, ineffectual, business-asusual mode of the humanities.

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Post-critique might be read as a complex response to Left melancholy, the populist backlash against experts, a sense of the academic domestication and exhaustion of Foucauldian critique, the retreat from totalities and rationalism and, more positively, as an attempt to revive traditions of aesthetic education as a means to defend the humanities in a threatening climate. But as post-critique seizes on Latourian concepts such as the network and the assemblage and recognizes their compatibility with its own pragmatist orientation, what is often neglected is Latour’s long association with and orientation to science. For Latour is, in many ways, Kuhn’s direct legatee: both are philosophers with strong pragmatist orientations whose work has provided an important bridge between the sciences and social sciences and humanities. When Latour writes that critique is now ‘a dangerous pharmakon’ delegitimizing the fact, and when he calls for a new ‘stubbornly realist attitude’, like Kuhn, he is certainly not advocating a return to the positivist fact or the rigorous separation of facts and values. But he is calling for the importance of a proper understanding of the powerful but fragile ‘objects’ of science that are matters of concern, carefully assembled through the rigorous processes of the new complex sciences. These are now being turned into things, he argues, weakened and undermined by modes of critique unacquainted with the new systems sciences: they are in urgent need of rescue and care, the provision and building of arenas and new spaces, shelters ‘in which to gather’.48 Latour’s position – though often shifting from one work to the next – is fascinatingly close in many respects (and certainly as it is taken up in post-critique) to Kuhn’s own. One key emphasis in Kuhn and Latour not sufficiently recognized is that, for both, scientific facts are artefacts: but that does not mean they are fictions. When Latour talks of ‘gathering’, it sounds hospitable and welcoming, a tuning into the affective turn, but he is actually calling for more understanding across the humanities and sciences. For the assemblage is not simply a ‘gathering’ in the sense of a hospitable coming together of groups of people, it is a concept resonant with the new systems thinking in the biological, environmental and molecular sciences that model complex systems which are entangled, unpredictable at different scalar levels, emergent and uncertain. Constructivism, unlike constructionism, is in this sense a realism: the epistemic objects that emerge from the new sciences are real but distributed, fragile, unstable and in complex agential relationships with their instruments of discovery. Their assemblage routinely involves an array of instruments, models, data, media, procedures, tacit practices and recursive moves that collapse distinctions between theory and practice, inside and outside, instrument and experimental subject, researcher and researched. That does not make them less real. But the more distributed and complex processes of the modern laboratory – which might now involve numerous sites, thousands of scientists and multiple kinds of equipment, modelling and display – mean they are always arte/facts. As Latour’s work has moved on from his early focus on scientific communities, however, the assemblage has taken on a life of its own, emphasizing the fluid and the multifunctional, the circulatory and the contingent. The kind of omni-intentionality now evident in both the new materialisms and the Latourian network presents analytical challenges in terms of identifying and extricating particular kinds of agency and intrinsic qualities that preexist networks and assemblages.

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As science moves towards these onto-epistemologies of the complex, the emergent and the artefactual, the humanities are being urged to follow in a similar direction, towards the assemblage, the curated, the network, the open, unpredictable and the horizontal. But a problem arises when critique is simply dismissed as a mode of social constructionism or textualism that fails to understand the artefactual in a scientific context or is working with a metaphysical language of abstraction that has gone ‘on holiday’ in Wittgenstein’s sense. Post-critique champions the surface, the network, the horizontal, as it updates the Kuhnian paradeigmatic, but in dismissing critique as ‘vertical’ – preoccupied with metaphors of depth, excavation and the rigidity of structure, fixity and totality – it ignores first of all Kuhn’s insight into the paradeigmatic as a powerfully stabilizing tool of institutionalization, and it also ignores Foucault’s aesthetic remodelling of it as a powerful instrument for laying bare those very processes. The (faux) humble stance of post-critique, keeping its nose to the ground, avoiding views from nowhere or generalizations, avowing only a desire to connect and keep in touch with the ordinary, the ‘common reader’ or the non-expert, abandons the complex historicism of these earlier analyses of processes of normalization and radical change. Without a proper account of processes of institutionalization, postcritique’s emphasis on making, curating and assembling resonates with neoliberalism’s refashioning of homo faber as homo economicus: creativity reduced to innovation and for-profit entrepreneurship, creative industries and performativity; its neo-empiricism sits comfortably too with the swing back to positivism in the social sciences and to conservative literary and historical scholarship in the humanities. But I want to end, albeit briefly, by highlighting another, more promising, turn in paradigm’s complex journey through sixty years and three generations of theory. Running adjacent to and entangled with many aspects of post-critique is a selfconsciously more ill-disciplined variation on critique, a more radical accommodation with pragmatism, in the refashioning of paradigm via a return to Raymond Williams’s Marxist engagement with the concept. In an essay of 1981, Williams announced the coming revolution in what he referred to specifically, citing Kuhn, as ‘the paradigm’ of English Studies. Whereas Marxism and Structuralism had until that moment simply accommodated themselves, ‘in a pinched climate’, to the prevailing canon – ‘guests of a decent pluralism’ – all was about to change, paradigmatically.49 And it did. Within a few years, a concatenation of Marxist critique (the introduction of the concept of the political unconscious for example), Williams’s own cultural materialism and Foucauldian historicism would shift the paradigm of English Studies away from its early formalist and aestheticist roots and away from the concept of structure (and Structuralism) to one of system. Williams’s work largely predated the Marxist turn to emergentism and autopoiesis (as in the systems theorizing of Immanuel Wallerstein and Franco Moretti as well as the more recent work of Fredric Jameson) in the decentring and distribution of structural models of totality, but in Marxism and Literature his thinking was already moving in that direction; his reformulation of Kuhn’s paradigm away from homeostasis and uniformity reflected this tendency. Williams proposed instead a more complex temporal and spatial constellation of paradigm with shifting and variable components: ‘the residual’, ‘the dominant’, and ‘the emergent’. In this more systems-oriented account, elements in a cultural

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landscape rarely march in uniformity or lockstep: different temporalities and geographies coexist in complex and entangled ways. The dominant might function as the current thoughtstyle of a generation, but the residual, not lost, is always enfolded into protentional openings of the past into unknown futures that might rediscover or recalibrate their force or potential anew, and the pre-paradigmatic, present as ‘the emergent’, functions as a publicly shared intimacy and sense of historical ‘not-yet’ that is at the edge of somatic availability, and for which no concept exists: ‘a structure of feeling’ – a concept that Williams first introduced in his seminal work, The Long Revolution in 1961.50 The emphasis is on movement and complexity, ‘impulse, restraint and tone’, thought as feeling, the dismissal of ‘fake rigour’. The great error is reification: the assumption that the social, as thoughtworld, is a fixed ‘structure’. Williams’s enfolding of complex modes of affect and temporality into his reformulation of paradigm; Kuhn’s rhetorical analysis of the paradeigmatic as a mode of analogical thinking, and of the anomaly as a mode of exception: these are now ingredients in recent work in cultural affect theory. In Lauren Berlant’s work, in particular, the Kuhnian anomaly offers a more ‘ordinary’ alternative to the austere terms of exception, while the analogical and case-based mode of paradeigmatic thinking might be opened up to a recognition of the importance of the affective in everyday reason. The focus of Berlant’s own micropolitical interest in how institutions embed and legitimate hierarchies and kinds of knowledge foregrounds economies of specifically affective investment that shape beliefs and perpetuate hierarchies, modes of social injustice and political oppression. Why do we commit to institutionalized patterns of living that deplete and defeat us? What might interfere with those processes and open up different kinds of knowledge and understanding?51 This is where she returns to the paradeigmatic, attempting to forge a path that combines a pragmatist and ethnomethodological interest in ‘zones’ of lived experience – how thoughtworlds are sensed and felt by those caught up in them – and a commitment to critique, Marxist and Foucauldian, as a means of interfering with and exposing the mechanisms that reproduce experiences of social injustice. Concerned that the potential for reification in ‘big’ concepts like ‘event’ and ‘exception’ might lose touch with lived experience, Berlant has fashioned her own synthesis, reformulating the various vocabularies of paradigm. Anomaly – less portentous than exception – is put to use as a means of throwing a ‘glitch into the system’, with the potential to amplify and cascade through it, disrupting, decentring and obstructing its processes (akin to those modes of civil disobedience and disruption that operate without formal vanguards or top-down organization). Like Kuhn, Berlant operates a mode of philological interference: ‘a-nomolous’, for example, is assumed to carry a primary association of that which is outside the law (nomos) that connects it with exception; understood as ‘an-omolous’ where being level and even (omalos) is what is being disrupted, suggests not so much the austere sense of ‘law’ and ‘exception’, as the kind of roughening up or affective discombobulation produced by the unfamiliar that prompts reflection on the source of discomfort (or, more intellectually, the limits of a given conceptual scheme). Berlant interferes similarly with Kuhn’s account of analogical thinking. Inventing the term ‘juxtapolitical’, she seizes on the potential for scaling up offered by analogical styles of thinking to promote

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creative transduction and rhizomatic juxtaposition as means of liberation from the institutionalized and Orwellian closing down of concepts and categories: ‘the form of the analogy is not a brace or foundation but a sign of world-making action and exposure to risk’.52 The ‘awkward analogy’, like the anomaly that becomes a ‘glitch’ in the system, is foregrounded as a tool for de-realizing existing paradigmatic thoughtworlds and what Berlant refers to as fetishized figural constellations, bringing to awareness emergent structures of feeling in order that toxic aspects of present experience might be grasped, recognized, even dissolved. So too, in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, paradeigma stands close to parabole, as in parable, a mode of the analogical that foregrounds a fictional or hypothetical ‘as if ’, an imaginative rather than an actual association of entities. But parabole (as in ballein, to throw) indicates beyond as well as alongside. A thing might be exemplified in a controlled manner by placing it intentionally and directedly alongside another thing, but things can also be thrown more hazardously and dynamically together, so that the paradeigmatic that emerges might open up the entire system (just as the anomaly that refuses to fit might function as a glitch that runs through the system opening it to the unpredictable and the new). Paradigm might become a mode of truly creative critique. Berlant’s writing seeks to radicalize the paradigm once more – once more, but this time, with feeling.

Notes Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th edn, introduced by Ian Hacking (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 14. 2 Ibid., 181. This was added to the original edition in a postscript written in 1969, pages 173–208 in the fourth edition. 3 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1978), 37–8. 4 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 5 Aristotle, Rhetoric, especially book 1, chapter 2, 1356b. 6 See, ‘A Discussion with Thomas Kuhn’, in The Road since Structure, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 255–323, 308. 7 Giorgio Agamben, The Signatures of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books). 8 Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Masters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2005): 225–48. 9 Ibid., 239, 240. 10 Key relevant texts include Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2015); Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ed., Critique and Post-Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke, 2003); Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108 (2001): 1–21; Heather Love, ‘Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, NLH, 41, 2 (2010): 1

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371–92. Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) claims that a return to ordinary language philosophy will revolutionize contemporary theory and criticism. 11 Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, New Literary History, 47.2–3 (2016), 218. 12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigation’ (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 17; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 4th edn (London: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 115. 13 Kuhn’s debt to Cavell is expressed in SSR, xiv, xx1. 14 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 20, 123. 15 Ibid., 19. 16 Kuhn, SSR, 117. 17 Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 83. 18 Ibid. 19 Although developing a different kind of argument from the one I am concerned with here, Daniel Hartley has recently developed a compelling case for rethinking Marxism and style that is relevant to the one made in the final section of this essay: see Daniel Hartley, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 20 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. T. J. Trenn and R. K. Merton, foreword Thomas S. Kuhn (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1979), 102. 21 Kuhn, SSR, 175, 186. 22 SSR: see the section, ‘Anomaly and the Emergence of Science’, 52–66. 23 See Ronald Dworkin’s, Law’s Empire: Critique of Legal Positivism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); John Forrester, Thinking in Cases (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017) and the special issue of Critical Inquiry (Summer 2007), ‘On the Case’, edited by Lauren Berlant. 24 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 316. 25 The insight is carried through to the networks of Bruno Latour but again, as the ANT worker plods along and as Wittgensteinian families gather, there is little sense of how incremental effects of the various micropolitical forces of a network might amplify and intertwine with other rhythms to bring about far-reaching macropolitical effects. See, in particular, Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 26 Nelson Goodman, Ways of World-Making (New York: Hackett, 1978), 32. 27 Michael Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–74. 28 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 121. 29 Latour’s classic account of the ‘modern settlement’ is that it never really happened and that we never became properly modern (i.e. Cartesian); what seems odd is that he should think that we ever really thought we had become so, or even that Descartes didn’t think he was trying to find ways around the aporias of his own substance dualism. See We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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30 Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), 33. 31 W. V. O. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, The Philosophical Review, 60.1 (1951): 20–43. 32 See The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective, a book of interviews between Roy Bhaskar and Mervyn Hartwig for an accessible account of the development and arguments of critical realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 33 The Road since Structure, 300. 34 Ibid., 16–17. 35 SSR, 79. 36 T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, in Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1952), 179. 37 F. R. Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), 87. 38 See Michael Yudkin, Two Cultures: The Significance of C.P. Snow, an edited volume of Snow’s lecture and Leavis’s response (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962). 39 See, for example, Alex Williams and Nick Smicek, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2105) and James Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 40 The Road since Structure, 298. 41 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 42 Paul Rabinow and Henri Dreyfus, Michael Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 43 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Critique’, in The Politics of Truth (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997), 41–81, the transcription of Foucault’s 1978–9 lectures. 44 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock), 191. 45 Michael Foucault, ‘Panopticon’, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. A Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195–228. 46 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10. 47 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is the Contemporary’, in What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (California: Stanford University Press, 2009). 48 Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’, 225, 246. 49 Raymond Williams, ‘Crisis in English Studies’, in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), 192–212, 196. (The essay first appeared in New Left Review in 1982.) 50 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 126, 132. 51 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 52 Lauren Berlant, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Society and Space, 34.3 (2016): 393–419, 401.

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Movement Esther Leslie

In Mont Blanc (1816), a poem about movement, Percy Bysshe Shelley begins: The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves.1

This world of things is everlasting, is eternal, and yet this world moves through the mind, shifting shape as the sea. It is in endless, everlasting movement. This rolling wave of ‘things’ is variously conceived. It is the actual stream in the real world that gushes down from the top of the mountain. It is this same stream seen by a person and reflected in that person’s mind. It is this stream perceived by a poet and deflected into words. The flowing stream that comes down from the mountains becomes the flow of words, and this flow of words that comes to make the poem is composed from the flow of ideas coursing through the mind. Both words and mind move, and in moving, it would seem, constitute a force, or a number of forces – a physical force, a mental force, a poetic force. Movement in a physical and mental sense becomes something metaphorical too. Movement constellates as the name for a gathering force that is organized and has historical ambition. It becomes movement in an artistic sense: an articulation by a self-constituting Romantic Movement, which will gather around certain tenets and form a greater force in their numbers than alone. Shelley’s poem, like the stream at the start of its descent from the mountain, gathers pace, first trickling, then thundering downwards. This poetry is, just as Romanticism strives to be, an expression of a feeling, of a gush, of an overwhelming and unstoppable force. It is moving. In its flowing, which gathers in volume and intensity, the flux it produces is able to get everything moving, pulling all in its wake. In this way the small spurt that is the poem amasses with other poems to form a current. The current, which constitutes a poetic movement, disturbs the conventionalized, frozen, static rules of academic poetry and the mechanistic apparatuses of neoclassical poetry. This poetic movement, a movement of words in rhythm and a movement of ideas which are shared by a number who will come together as Romantics, attempts to move poetry itself, to make of it something else. The old poetry, seemingly, had a view of nature without mellifluousness, lacking those ‘seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness’2 that flow like honey. What gushes and cascades in Shelley’s poem is not just a tumble of language

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emulating words and images coursing through the mind directly from nature, but also a displacement of the sense of self. The self is moved. In this poetry, for this artistic movement, there is an overflowing of the self into the world, described by Shelley as ‘an undisciplined overflowing of the soul’.3 The self is moved to become something other to itself. Other Romantics similarly held that all should flow, thaw, melt, move. Poetry moves, which means it moves its reader in an emotional sense. We are moved by poetry and moved by the Romantic impulse. If we are to gush into the world, then we change that world that is flooded by our sentiments. The movement that constitutes an artistic movement is also, in an incipient sense, a social movement or desires to be one. It is born of revolution and so takes movement, the movement of revolutionary change, to be its context. In revolution, history becomes historical, flows into being, into change. That is to say, history moves into movement. Social stasis or social freeze – the coldness of dead time that is assumed to be part of historical time but is always really a stilling, an enclosing – has to be swept away, overpowered, drowned out. This drowning out ought not lead to chaos and perpetual dissolution but should inaugurate the new, that which is current. Society, which has solidified into convention, becomes natural again, spontaneous, innocent, organic, as a cloud, which wanders and is in constant motion. And all those who demand nothing other than to be citoyens, both are the swell and are caught in the swell. They swim forwards in the flow of time, the flow of the river of history, into the future. What Shelley appears to do is to draw together an image of movement, the constellation of an artistic movement, and the proposition of a social or political movement. Movement is a word that was in circulation in the late fourteenth century, adopted from Old French, which, in turn, took it from medieval Latin’s movimentum. But it was a term little used until it entered the musical vocabulary of the eighteenth century to describe the major divisions of a composition. As a political or social term, it is prevalent only from 1828. Were these resumptions in the use of the term responding to an increase of movement in the world, if such a thing can be conceptualized? Romantics brought political, social and environmental concerns into dialogue, but what sort of work had prepared the way for this? Perhaps Kant’s ‘Notes on the Theory of Winds’, composed in 1756, and surely a sign of an interest in the ways in which the developing world and the everlasting world of nature might intersect under prevailing conditions, offers a paradigmatic response to this question. This work constitutes an effort to explain the causes of wind direction,4 proposing that the atmosphere is an ocean of elastic, liquid material composed of layers of different density. Humans inhabit the seabed of this ocean of air. The direction of coastal winds depends on the contraction and expansion of air caused by differences in the rates of heating and cooling of the land and the sea’s water by day and night. The trade winds – East winds – track the warming of the Earth. Oppositions produce weather and the winds that will aid trade. The air is a sea, and this mobile air works with the ever-undulating seas to produce movement. In producing movement, this system of nature allows for global trade. Such is the world thought of as a space of flow and ingress. Is Kant’s conception of a watery cosmos a transposition of how the fluidities of trade are coming to dominate the planet? The winds are the trade winds first and foremost.

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What will be traded on these flowing seas that limn the busy ports of the world? Commodities of all types, as world trade begins in earnest from 1820 onwards, at the point when, in Great Britain at least, much of the work of the first Industrial Revolution is done. What will come to weigh down the cargo ships are things extracted from far away and brought to the great cities of the world to be processed and sold. Among their number, from the 1870s after their discovery in South Africa, is a commodity in the shape of a crystal. The diamond, a natural resource, comes to be understood as the emblem of wealth, a magical compaction that serves as super-fetish. These eternal ‘things’ are torn from the earth and set in motion. Movement is the movement of goods, moved by nature’s power and social energies. The revolution that articulates itself as multilevelled modes of change – of emotions, the self, the social environment, economies – is harnessed to a more determinate political programme in Marx. For Marx, every historically developed form is in a fluid state. What is the thing that every dialectician knows, a knowledge developed in classical antiquity? It is the Heraclitian truth: one never steps twice into the same river, or as Heraclitus put it: ‘On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.’5 The waters are ever changing. The elements are in flux, but the river remains the river, even as it becomes filled with new contents, as it becomes non-identical to itself. Furthermore, Marx acknowledges in his terminology that movement might be imagined or speculative, an ideal or idealist goal, which arrives from outside as an imposition on the world. Or, alternatively, the movement might be real, which is to say immanent in reality and on the point of articulation. Marx describes Communism as ‘the real movement’. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.6

Movement is potential and it becomes real by taking its allotted course. Movement is immanent in reality, though it may not be articulated. This movement, if its moves, annihilates what has subtended till now, but it does not emerge from nowhere. It is potential movement. Perhaps Marx’s movement, like Shelley’s trickle, has its origin nearer or further away, but it is yet of this world. For Marx, the dialectic – the lodestar of his method – is associated with movement. In the afterword to the second German edition of volume one of Capital (1873), he refers to his reworking of Hegel’s dialectic and its ‘general forms of motion’: In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesman, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its

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transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.7

Fredric Jameson cogently describes the ‘tripartite movement of the Hegelian dialectic’, which is the one that all subsequent dialecticians, including Marx, adopt: ‘stupid first impression as the appearance, ingenious correction in the name of some underlying reality or “essence”; but finally, after all, a return to the reality of the appearance’.8 In relation to capitalism this might mean the following. A stupid first impression: capitalism is the product of all human efforts at making. The ingenious correction: capitalism escapes human agency, for capitalism is a great machine of abstraction. The return to the reality of the appearance: capitalism is indeed made by humans, but specific humans, the workers, performing specific types of work that keep the system as it is, allowing it to continue reproducing itself in the way it has done historically. Marx’s thought ricochets between social and natural contexts, which is part of the real movement between historical nature and industrializing humanity. For example, he coins a geological metaphor for the political movement he identifies at work in his own time. In April 1856, he offered the following in a speech to mark the fourth anniversary of the People’s Paper at the Bell Hotel, the Strand, in London (later published in this same journal): The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents – small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock. Noisily and confusedly they proclaimed the emancipation of the Proletarian, i.e. the secret of the nineteenth century, and of the revolution of that century.9

The limited revolution of the bourgeoisie only cracked the ‘dry crust’, but even that force was a borrowed one, a surplus of energy from the true historical force embodied in pools of volcanic liquidity that burst from their confinement in the under-earth. This is the liquid force that should and must expand to carry through to the revolution proper. The struggle between classes comes to seem like a struggle between the liquid – which signifies the oppressed, propelling history – and the crystal, which is the hard rock and metal of reaction that would obstruct its own dissolution. Marx turns to the natural sciences to provide a metaphor for the invisible but forceful orientation that class struggle exerts: ‘But, although the atmosphere in which we live, weighs upon every one with a 20,000 lb. force, do you feel it? No more than European society before 1848 felt the revolutionary atmosphere enveloping and pressing it from all sides.’10 The force is not visible, at least not yet, and so is overlooked, even though its pressure builds. Marx records how technology and science – steam, electricity and the self-acting mule – are ‘dangerous’ revolutionists, for they alter society, which is to say they produce new social bonds. But Marx’s conception of political movement, that articulates historical movement, and which is imagined as geological movement, is nothing if not a mass movement. Throughout the course of history, it appears to be diverted into a movement moving on behalf of the few. Mass movement is a geological

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term for types of movement of surface materials that occurs in rockslides, mudflows or slumps. This happens, for example, when water adds weight to soil and exerts pressure, pushing apart individual grains of soil, a movement that might be prevented by certain measures. In the social world, too, movement can be, and is constantly, blocked. As Marx notes, At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.11

The antagonisms of capitalism work to stultify the flow of life into a solid block, while foisting agential, conscious force onto the material forces of technology and machinery. The body relinquishes its fluid movements and labile intelligence and subjects itself to the machine, which itself becomes lively. There is an antagonism between modern industry and science, modern misery and dissolution, and the productive powers and the social relations of the epoch. New-fangled forces demand new-fangled people; indeed they produce them in the form of the workers, who, alongside the machines and the new insights of science, mark an epochal shift. In combination, these newly constituted forms will make history flow differently, if negatively in this specific context. Marx nonetheless expresses an optimistic view in this regard. The bourgeois revolution is insufficiently revolutionary and indeed dissolves not the social conditions, but the social bonds of those who participate in it. The dialectic does not stop moving. History does not stop being historical under conditions of contradiction. Movements inaugurated by industry are not self-determined, but reactive and responsive, dictated not least by the rhythms of machinery, which gather pace, and at whose behest the twitching worker will jerk. Movement can be voluntary or involuntary, self-impelled or commanded. It can be immanent or impeded. Failure – worldwide failure of revolutions to overturn capitalism, to generate an unstoppable movement – leads to reflection, and Lenin takes ‘movement’ back to the drawing board by insisting in What Is To Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement (1901) that ‘[w]ithout revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’.12 The workers may move and the workers’ movement may take form, but to be revolutionary, to introduce the truly mobile into the movement, requires revolutionary theory to be the intellectual impetus of the party. Trotsky, subsequent to being exiled and far from events in the Soviet Union, reflects on questions of movements and masses in the context of the specific failure and degeneration of the 1917 revolution. Responding to a critic who avers that he could see no hope ‘from the Trotskyites or other anaemic splinters which have no mass base’, Trotsky scornfully retorts that for the correspondent ‘all that the laws of development of society have remained a seven times sealed book’. For, he continues, Not a single progressive idea has begun with a ‘mass base’, otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in its last stage that the idea finds

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its masses – if, of course, it answers the needs of progress. All great movements have begun as ‘splinters’ of older movements. In the beginning, Christianity was only a ‘splinter’ of Judaism; Protestantism a ‘splinter’ of Catholicism, that is to say decayed Christianity. The group of Marx and Engels came into existence as a ‘splinter’ of the Hegelian Left. The Communist International germinated during the war from the ‘splinters’ of the Social Democratic International. If these pioneers found themselves able to create a mass base, it was precisely because they did not fear isolation. They knew beforehand that the quality of their ideas would be transformed into quantity. These ‘splinters’ did not suffer from anaemia; on the contrary, they carried within themselves the germs of the great historical movements of tomorrow.13

Like the trickle that begins at the top of the mountain, movement gains force along the way if it is the right movement – the one on the side of historical progress, in line with the movement that is the ‘real movement’ of history, and not its endless cycling and revolving and flowing nowhere in the name of shoring up what already exists. The very essence of progress, of forward movement, is to gather volume and speed. The basic dialectical idea of transposition between quality and quantity is affirmed. Trotsky moves from the context of the political vanguard moving into view, to the avant-garde, which constitutes the motor for the development of art movements. The avant-garde emerges from exhausted tendencies, in small splinter groups which perceive anew, and whose visions eventually come to be taken on board by those who are moving with the current of time, with life and its progression. In very much the same way, to repeat, a progressive movement occurs in art. When an artistic tendency has exhausted its creative resources, creative ‘splinters’ separate from it, which are able to look at the world with new eyes. The more daring the pioneers show in their ideas and actions, the more bitterly they oppose themselves to established authority which rests on a conservative ‘mass base’, the more conventional souls, skeptics, and snobs are inclined to see in the pioneers, impotent eccentrics or ‘anaemic splinters’‚ But in the last analysis it is the conventional souls, skeptics and snobs who are wrong – and life passes them by.14

Movement, in a historical sense, is progression: moving qualities into quantities, parts into wholes. Elsewhere, in an analogy comparing the static art of photography and the moving art of film, Trotsky observes the following regarding dialects: Contrary to a photograph, which is the element of formal logic, the film is ‘dialectical’. Cognizing thought begins with differentiation, with the instantaneous photograph, with the establishment of terms – conceptions, in which the separate moments of a process are placed but from which the process as a whole escapes. These term-conceptions, created by cognizing thought, are then transformed into its fetters. Dialectics removes these fetters, revealing the relativity of motionless concepts, their translation into each other.15

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Concepts, which are static first efforts, pictures of what is, of things as they are, need to be brought into movement in order to align them with the shifting contours of history, and dialectics is the mechanism for this calibration of movement. Trotsky was suspicious of photography which he saw as an undialectical form, a form that mirrored static thinking. Static thinking is thought that posits ‘a=a’ and splits the world into motionless elements, severing the connections between things. Dialectics, on the other hand, is seen by Trotsky as thought that caresses the contours of change, of flux, where a double-think advances simultaneously the propositions ‘a=a’ and ‘a=not a’. Dialectical thinking enables the universe to be conceived in its connections and in its tendency towards movement and transformation. Perhaps Trotsky’s more positive disposition towards film signalled an awareness of S. M. Eisenstein’s correlation of filmic montage and dialectics, whereby one shot is conceived as a thesis colliding with the next shot, its antithesis, generating, in the mind of the spectator, a synthesis. Eisenstein noted that movement is the basic element of art. In particular this is the case in his dynamic art of cinema (it is, after all, ‘kinematic’), whereby cinema mobilizes the dynamism of the modern revolutionary moment through its technical mechanism. But the movement mobilized in such dynamized art must be, he insists, in opposing directions. For Eisenstein: ‘Cinema begins where the collision between different cinematic measures of movement and vibration begins.’16 Eisenstein’s cinema, which he named ‘Kino-Fist’, is the mingling of pathos and shock, which aims at the build-up of intensity until it explodes. This constitutes cinema’s power to move emotionally, to shake up the minds of its viewers. Eisenstein’s editing introduces conflictual lines and vectors into the image. And this occurs in a context in which, more generally, as he notes in Towards a Theory of Montage, the image, the sound and the music are all vibrating, as the laws of physics insist.17 Eisenstein believed that his films, through their use of montage, might restructure, in aesthetic form, the world as postlude to a revolution that had already taken place or which had, at least, set in motion a set of epochal changes in terms of relations of production and the forces that might emerge from them. This revolution and the establishment of a state were a prelude to more thorough reorderings to come. Montage as technique involves the extension or contraction of time – montage is a mastery over time in the ghosted reflections of art. It displaces and dislodges the known elements of the physical world and reconfigures conceptual order. Eisenstein’s film-making shocks and shakes up the contemplative consciousness of the viewers through the formal devices of Kino-Fist, but it also hopes to use a radically objective medium to express the internal or mental life of its subjects. Kino-Fist’s sensory assault propels the viewer from image to thought, from percept to concept, and, in so doing, aims to model the motion of thinking itself or of the progress of consciousness. An audience is stirred and this stirring translates into dialectic shifts in thinking and then into a movement towards restructuring the audience’s environment. Eisenstein’s interest in movement did not simply evoke the dynamized image on the screen. He was fascinated by the contour line in drawing and its animating possibilities. In his memoirs, described by him as the ‘twists and turns of the free associations that arise in the course of writing’, he reveals ‘How I Learned to Draw’.18 As in the process of writing up his ‘myriad digressions’ in his theoretical reflections,

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the lines of his drawing also twist and turn, making a dynamic rendition of the world outlined by mobile contours. Eisenstein draws on Wang Pi, a Chinese writer from the third century BCE, who, asking ‘what is a line?’, answers, ‘a line speaks of movement’. In this regard, Eisenstein recalls how a friend of his parents once sketched something for him in white chalk on a dark tablecloth, drawing the outlines of dogs, cats, deer and a frog, and that ‘before the eyes of the delighted observer, the line of the contours springs up and starts to move’. The line is ‘movement’. It is ‘dynamic process’. Lines dance. The line goes for a walk, or, as Paul Klee put it, a line is a dot that has been taking a walk. For Eisenstein, who, like many others, was a fan of Disney cartoons, the moving lines of drawings are further animated ‘in the real movement of the real lines in the contours of animated cartoons’.19 Eisenstein draws together the movement of thought and the movement of the image and all the other elements that constitute film. His interest in animation engages a question that movement cannot shake off: is it self-propelled or is it reconstituted? This is cinema’s question of movement from the start, and it is one focused in particular in animation. The first films on the first screens began not with images of movement, but rather with stasis. On the screen, before the audience, was a still image that was cranked into life to audience amazement. The drama of the event consisted in viewing the transition from stillness to movement or the actual event of the infusion of apparent life. In doing this, film offered an enhanced mode of what was already a cultural norm. Magic lantern shows – which reached a highpoint in London, for example, in the 1860s – proceeded similarly. Their mechanical slides could be manipulated to make the static images painted or printed on them move. These lantern images suggested to viewers something magical and mysterious because the actual source of their movement could not be seen. Two or more glass slides were manipulated so that dissolves and swoops, changes of scale or colour, occurred seamlessly. Fish swim; skeletons appear and disappear; a rat attacks a man. One scene transforms into another, day exchanged for night. What moves in some of these examples is time, signalled through transitioning light effects. The later nineteenth century incubated and stoked the delights of stillness impelled into movement: these pleasures could also be had at home through, for example, entertainment forms such as The Motograph Moving Picture Book (1898) in which a shimmering moiré effect was obtained on each page by slowly moving by hand a transparent piece of specially ruled acetate across a picture of snowstorms, an aquarium, a magic dice, a harlequin. One of the images from The Motograph Moving Picture Book was of a serpentine dancer resembling Miss Larrigan, the ‘Lady in the Blue Dress’ on one of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope plates. Indeed, the dance is a perfect theme for an animated culture, which proves to be mobile but iterative. Many of the early devices could do nothing more than loop time: the day circles into night; the rat leaps at the man’s neck repeatedly. Only later does film introduce the possibility of development, of the end differing from the beginning. Film was movement and time leading somewhere else. Until then there was the dance, round and round and round. As much as the arts of movement are developed technically in film, the dissection of movement is forwarded in the experimental work of Eadweard Muybridge and others. In a set of images of a dancing woman, her moves severed in numerous shots,

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Muybridge seems eager to find the eternal, as Walter Benjamin puts it, in the ruffle of a dress, in the sudden transient moment of its relevance. The moving body and the material that bends and shifts are frozen into place by the camera’s eye and afford some sort of knowledge of what we habitually do, or did, in this one moment. But it is the image of the material – not the material itself – that recalls this knowledge. Its contours frozen into fixtures evidence the truth of a moment and its materiality. Water, too, fascinates Muybridge in this regard, its fluid forms frozen into ice on the photographic plate. The mechanical arts developed and used in the later nineteenth-century play with the implications of their own mechanisms as they stage the transmutation between fluid and frozen states. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope (1879) attempted to restring the frozen moments of serial photography into vivacious sequences, but these could only repeat a loop of one or two seconds’ action. His discs presented a form of animation that was destined to go nowhere. But even Muybridge’s limited animation presents something spirited. Projected is a magic enchantment of material, which, through its very materiality, and in its marriage with the machinery of cinema, appears to take on a life of its own. It is animation in the animistic sense. What strikes as uncanny is a process of life arrested and then resuscitated. In this period, Charles-Émile Reynaud had adapted his Praxinoscope (1877) into a projector of a size suitable for presentation to a large audience which was used to show Pauvre Pierrot in the 1890s. It was in this same period, an epoch in which various optical machines were developed that depended on stop-startingness for capturing and resynthesizing a flow of images – that the science of saccades and fixations emerged. A mode of viewing, or model of eye movements, based on saccades and fixations, segues with a technological form, film, especially in the guises of the various forms of animation that crowd early cinema, that is based on starting and stopping, movement and stillness, on stillness animated into life, on the jerkiness of sudden movement that always falls back into stillness, on mobility and its impediment, energy and rest, repetition of sheer movement, ever again starting and stopping and reshowing. The optical devices that synthesized or re-synthesized movement relied upon a flaw inherent in vision: that viewers do not, at a certain hertz, see the gaps between the still frames, which allow the snatched moments of time to be restrung through flicker fusion. Images that were actually still were compelled to flow as the materials that held them rushed through the devices. The new technologies of the microscope, photography and film came to be used in the analysis of vision and movement. Analysts determined how a movement can be accelerated or retarded by acting on the factors of space or time. It is impossible to see the big hand of a clock moving, but if it is examined under a microscope, its jerky motion becomes apparent. The space travelled has been multiplied and, by enlarging the optical system, so has the speed, bringing the movement into visibility. Filmic effects made time and movement visible in new ways. Jean Comandon, a pioneer of scientific cinema, began to make films of pathogens or bacteria in blood, such as his film of syphilis spirochaeta pallida in 1909. His microphotography reveals a level of movement that was impossible to see with the naked eye – the vibrations that Eisenstein would later insist were intrinsic to everything. Later, in the 1920s, Comandon filmed blooms opening, dragonflies metamorphosing, flowers growing in time-lapse.20 Movement

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appears in speed-up. Movement is both a property of the machine, its capacity to move things and people, and something that the machine alone can snatch from the realm of vision and reproduce for humans to see. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ (1935–8), Walter Benjamin recognizes the ways in which mechanically reproduced art is intimate with movement in a variety of ways. A film-maker might understand how movement is the language of cinema in so many senses: the movement of groups and crowds, of nature, of gestures, all within the frame, and, elsewhere, of the camera and the montage. Within the reproduced artwork that is film, movement is captured by the camera, but it is also introduced by the camera’s mode of apprehension. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material he is given constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups and so on. Some of these are designed to meddle with motion; for example, slow motion, which ‘not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions”’.21 Drawing on Rudolf Arnheim, Benjamin asserts that the camera unlocks not just visions but also movements imperceptible to the eye, indeed a different quality of movement inherent in the familiar one. Movement is defamiliarized from itself. He continues: Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.22

The camera participates in movement with its ‘liftings’ and ‘lowerings’, as well as other modes of cutting into time and space. Within the filmed objects, it finds their vibrations and rhythms, arrangements and energies. What Benjamin appears to describe as produced by and visible through the cinematic apparatus is an animated vision – mobile products, anthropomorphized nature. Film, in whatever form, is well adapted to display the dynamics of the modern world. In addition, as Benjamin argues elsewhere in the essay, the mechanical reproduction of art mobilizes by detaching the reproduced object from the domain

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of tradition. It displaces the artwork or even dislocates it from the realm of art itself. Furthermore, it subjects the artwork to a movement. It moves it into the ambit of the recipient and out of the space of the gallery. It permits the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his or her peculiar situation. These processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which, Benjamin notes, is the obverse of the contemporary crisis of the 1930s and the potential or necessary renewal of mankind. Mass reproduction of artwork – the genetic ability to make many copies – is aligned with the emergence of mass movements, in a political sense. Mass movements are, in themselves, not marked in any specific political way. Benjamin recognizes the aspiration of fascism to be a mass movement, as much as Communism would claim to be one. But these mass movements have very different qualities, just as film might operate politically in very different ways. For all mass movements, film is a powerful agent, not least because it provides a huge image of those mass movements as they go about their work and play. The mass movements appear to be represented in the fullest sense – given political voice, present in the world. Benjamin observes that in the Nazi newsreel, for example, they are not given political rights, but only an ‘expression’, and this is one in which their movements are marshalled for the camera’s eye, which seeks out ornamental patterns. The horror version of dialectics at a standstill is historical stasis, petrifaction, in that which should be mobile, in flux. The mass movements are hardened into patterns having relinquished their own autonomy. They are moved and mobilized. The immobilizing spell exerted by repressive governments, states or reactionary artworks can be broken, Benjamin insists, in a kind of image therapy which presents in a single image, or in a montage of images, both the forces of oppression – the flaw of the world – and the possibility of error’s supersession – the redemption of reality. The addition of ‘-ment’ to a word turns a verb into a noun. It becomes a thing, rather than an action. But beyond that nothing else is signalled: it is just a marker of mobility. Movement can come from the outside or be internally motivated. Both the mind and the body can be moved. Movement can flow endlessly or be a section, a cut, a sudden shift. Movement can be the movement of splinters or streams, but, in its evocation in social and political discourses, at least, movement is that which is assumed, potentially, to accelerate, gather in intensity, lead somewhere, move into the world and move the world to another stage. Movement in its various modes – social, political, physical, emotional, artistic, technical – constitutes itself conceptually in tandem with capital’s installation of capitalism and the simultaneous emergence of its critique. The question of movement becomes one of whether it is self-impelled or imposed, that is to say, questions intimate to animation, in its various senses. As questions, these can, of course, be registered in other languages and in more phenomenological registers, in Aristotle’s sense of the movement in nature, Husserl’s ‘animate organism’, the kinaesthetic knowledge of phenomenology and ‘embodied consciousness’, the wish to articulate ‘a metaphysics true to the dynamic nature of the world and to the foundationally animated nature of life’.23 These concerns with movement, framed ontologically and epistemologically, remain proximate to, if somewhat detached from, historical pressures.

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Notes Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1831), 218–19. 2 Keats, Poetical Works, ‘To Autumn’, 65. 3 Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), vi. 4 See Kant, ‘New notes to explain the theory of the winds, in which, at the same time, he invites attendance at his lectures’ (1756), in Immanuel Kant, Natural Science: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 374–85. 5 Heraclitus, in The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics, vol. 1, ed. Daniel W. Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 159. 6 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 47. 7 Karl Marx, Capital, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 103. 8 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 57. 9 Karl Marx, ‘Speech at Anniversary of the People’s Paper’, in Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 500 (500–2). 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 V. I. Lenin, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 696. This phrase appeared on a poster in the USSR in 1925. 13 Leon Trotsky, A Partisan Century: Political Writings from Partisan Review, ed. Edith Kurzweil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 18. 14 Ibid., 19. 15 Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933–1935 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 97–8. 16 S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works: Writings, 1922–34 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 192. 17 S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Writings, Vol. 2: Towards a Theory of Montage (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 224. 18 See Eisenstein, ‘How I Learned to Draw’, in Eisenstein at Ninety, ed. Ian Christie and David Elliott (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 64. 19 Ibid., 51. 20 For some discussion of Comandon, see Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 21 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 236. 22 Ibid. 23 For an exploration within this frame, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, expanded 2nd edn (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), xiv. 1

Section Two

Boundaries and Crossings

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6

Threshold Matthew Calarco

In Convolute O of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin remarks that in contemporary times ‘we have grown very poor in threshold experiences’.1 The threshold experiences to which Benjamin refers here relate to the broader set of practices associated with the rites de passage that give meaning to and mark important moments of transition in a culture, such as birth, death, marriage, adulthood and so on. These practices include rituals, myths and narratives that help to orient individuals as they undergo complicated transformations that undo and remake them both as individuals and as members of communities. Benjamin suggests that ‘in modern life, these transitions are becoming ever more unrecognizable and impossible to experience’.2 If we accept the basic premises of Benjamin’s remarks, certain questions immediately arise. What are the consequences of this impoverishment of threshold experiences and concomitant loss of practices that mark the importance of transitions in cultural life? And what would be required to recuperate a sense of the importance of threshold experiences? Furthermore, what kinds of practices and possibilities might be opened up in the process of such an exploration? Concern with the nature and status of thresholds and threshold experiences has become a live concern for much of contemporary theory. Not only is our intellectual and cultural present criss-crossed by a number of discourses that employ logics and rhetorics of the threshold, but our globe as a whole is currently faced with thresholds, tipping points and radical transformations along multiple economic, ecological and cultural lines. How might we make sense of these transitions and what they imply for subjectivity, sociality and human relations with the more-than-human world? My aim in this essay is to offer some provisional responses to these questions with the assistance of three influential theorists of thresholds: Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida and Gloria Anzaldúa. What these theorists suggest, as we shall see, is that our contemporary age is characterized by a hegemonic conception of self and community that overlooks the fundamentally threshold nature of subjectivity; furthermore, their works suggest that recovering a thought and a practice of thresholds is one of the central and most pressing issues of our time.

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Ritual In order to begin thinking through the questions and themes raised here, it will be helpful first to return to the notion of rites de passage from which Benjamin takes his point of departure. Although Benjamin does not cite a source for his reflections, it is possible that he has the work of French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in mind. It was van Gennep’s 1909 book, Les rites de passage, that emphasized the importance of ritual for human culture and that provided ethnographers with a way of classifying rites of passage and elucidating some of their chief characteristics.3 Among a wide variety of rituals and ceremonies, van Gennep highlights the central importance of rites of passage for many traditional societies and emphasizes their common linkage with natural periodicity. Such rites, he notes, typically mark a transition from one stage to another (for example, from pre-puberty to puberty) or from one ‘world’ to another (both in the sense of moving from one realm of meaning to another and from one place to another). Van Gennep’s analysis is perhaps best known today for its tripartite division of rites of passage into phases of separation (pre-liminal), transition (liminal) and incorporation (post-liminal), a schema that allowed him and other ethnographers to investigate important commonalities among numerous ceremonies of passage. For many years after its initial publication, though, van Gennep’s analysis lingered in obscurity until it was rediscovered and disseminated by Victor Turner. In his analysis of van Gennep’s work, Turner defines the liminal period as being ‘interstructural’ in order to contrast it with social models that are based on structures of relatively fixed positions.4 For Turner, these identifiable social positions are themselves not entirely static but are instead figured as being relatively stable. Rites of passage must thus be understood as marking points of transition and passage between states that are themselves in a process of becoming, such that the states appear to be stable enough to be identifiable and to serve their social function. For Turner, it is the liminal phases ‘betwixt and between’5 the two established states that are of the most interest, for it is in the liminal phase that the subject lacks the relative stability attached to established states. One’s identity is fundamentally in question in these liminal moments – indeed one’s very being is understood to be in flux, in a state of becoming. Turner notes that the initiate of transition rites is often structurally invisible,6 which is to say, the initiate has a physical but not a social reality; as such, in liminal situations the initiate is indeterminate and undefinable by the standards of established social structures and language. One of the chief reasons for this invisibility is that the initiate occupies an odd temporal and spatial position, namely that of no longer belonging to an established structure and not yet classified as belonging to another established position. As Turner notes, this liminal temporal and spatial condition saddles the initiate with an odd and rather paradoxical set of characteristics, with the ‘no longer belonging’ aspect of the initiate’s status associated with decay, filth and death and with the ‘not yet classified’ aspect being linked with motifs of gestation, birth, infancy and so on.7 Turner argues that these sorts of liminal zones are best understood as denoting sites of ‘pure potentiality’,8 in the sense that not only do such zones subtend existing structures but they also create the possibility for other structures and subjectivities.

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Liminal zones often bring together positions and groupings that established structures would divide into sharply separated categories, thereby disrupting the logic and functioning of established social meaning. In addition to creating new hierarchies (say, between an elder and an initiate), liminal rites can flatten hierarchies and create fields of equality among similarly situated initiates. This kind of radical flattening of the status of initiates, of their being ‘ground down to be fashioned anew’,9 is an essential part of rendering previous social positions more fluid and creating the possibility for new identities and positions to emerge. Turner maintains that what is most important about liminal rites is that they enact genuine ontological transformations within a given social group; in other words, the rituals enact and denote substantive changes in the very being of the individuals and groups at issue. In this sense, threshold rites and liminality are quite different from the celebratory ceremonies in dominant Western cultures that mark accomplishments (for example, graduations). These events are often understood to be marking the conveyance of a self-same individual from one position to another, without any fundamental change in being or subjective constitution. By contrast, liminal rites (especially as they are enacted in the kinds of non-dominant and indigenous societies that Turner has in mind) create a different kind of being and enact passages across thresholds. By showing the complex, overlapping, destabilized zones out of which social structures emerge, liminal rites thereby recall us to the ground of the social and to the fundamental threshold nature of the beings and relations that constitute them. With Turner’s points about threshold rituals in mind, Walter Benjamin’s assessment of our relative poverty in threshold experiences might begin to gain more clarity. That transitional and threshold states are becoming more unrecognizable and impossible to experience coincides with very different ontological conceptions of the social and of the individual. Rather than seeing individuals and social structures as relatively stable configurations which undergo various transitions, our dominant social ontologies would have us conceive of these things as something closer to having a fixed and unyielding being. It would be possible within this kind of ontology of fixed being for individuals to cross borders and boundaries between societies and even to change social positions within a society, but individuals and the larger social field itself would not be seen as being affected in any ontologically fundamental manner by such events. This is perhaps why Benjamin believes it necessary to emphasize the difference between the concept of a threshold and that of a boundary. As Benjamin notes, ‘[T]he threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle [threshold] is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to overlook these senses.’10 Although, as Benjamin’s English translators note, subsequent research has shown there is probably not any actual etymological link between Schwelle and schwellen, Benjamin is undoubtedly correct in underscoring that a threshold indicates a zone in which transformation and passage take place. Thus, if in following Benjamin we understand a threshold to be an indeterminate zone and site of passage between two places that are themselves in a state of only relative stability, then we will need to develop an alternative ontology to do justice to the nature of thresholds and also to gain a fuller sense of how we might recover a richer experience of thresholds in our individual and collective lives. In the sections that follow, I sketch

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out elements of such a project by way of three key thinkers and motifs: Agamben on the face as threshold, Derrida on the visitor and its relation to the threshold, and Anzaldúa on the bridge as a figure for threshold experience and practice.

Face In terms of recent discourse on the concept of the threshold, Giorgio Agamben stands as a particularly influential figure. He is perhaps best known for his analysis of the paradoxical role that thresholds play in the logic of sovereignty.11 This sovereigntybased aspect of Agamben’s influential account of the logic of the threshold, though, is chiefly critical in nature and does little to shed light on his more positive notion of thresholds and how threshold logic might function in a more affirmative manner in view of both individual subjectivity and community. In order to get at this more affirmative understanding of thresholds, it will be helpful to examine Agamben’s concepts of the outside and the face. Against a substantialist metaphysics of the subject, Agamben develops a concept of subjectivity that allows for both irreplaceable uniqueness on the one hand and relation, becoming and transformation on the other. In The Coming Community, Agamben uses the term “whatever singularity” to refer to this conception of subjectivity, with the concept of “singularity” denoting the uniqueness of the subject and “whatever” referring to the specific notion of relation that Agamben links to the threshold.12 Far from denying the specific predicates of a given entity, Agamben’s notion of singularity allows for identifiable predicates (say, a particular trait or group belonging) to constitute a subject’s being in a fundamental way. What is essential, though, is that these predicates do not exhaust the being of the entity under discussion; a subject is always something more than the predicates which are assigned to her or him (including the minimal gender predicates that such pronouns imply). But that which constitutes this ‘more’ beyond predicates is not something substantial or internal to a subject and is nothing that would allow a subject to remain identical to itself across time. Rather, the subject, understood as a whatever singularity, is structured by a ‘more’ that opens it beyond itself and that exposes the subject in its finitude to what exceeds it. It is because each subject has received a specific set of predicates and a unique set of possibilities that emerge in, through and beyond these predicates that we can speak of a subject as whatever singularity and as potentiality. For both the predicates and the possibilities that are produced in and beyond predicates are not proper to the subject but are markers of an im-propriety, an ex-propriation that lies at its very heart. The task for thought, Agamben maintains, is to learn to appropriate this impropriety by allowing it to remain open, to remain as such. Most dominant notions of subjectivity and community seek to give potentiality a fixed and determinate content and to turn one or more of the subject’s predicates into a task or a vocation that halts the play of singularity and potentiality, thereby locking the subject into an enduring identity. From the perspective of Agamben’s work, the dominant political project of trying to assign a vocation13 to the human would be one of the primary reasons for our poverty

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in threshold experiences. There are no transitions in the dominant forms of social life that need to be marked because the subject itself is understood to undergo no genuine, mark-able transitions; instead, it simply carries out its assigned function or work. To be sure, as we noted above, there is no shortage of celebratory confirmations and rituals within the contemporary established order, but few if any of these practices are aimed at acknowledging that finitude exposes the self to unanticipatable transformations. Agamben’s counter-proposal is that we should view the subject as essentially a threshold – a fundamental and continual point of passage – and build forms of life on that empty, but shared zone. For Agamben, then, the ‘whatever’ that is added to singularity denotes the threshold nature of subjectivity. ‘Whatever’ signifies a zone of pure relation, a place where self and other become indistinct and pass in and through one another. In line with Benjamin, Agamben makes certain to underscore that the subject’s limit and finitude be understood not as a border or edge that might delimit and secure its identity, but rather as a point of contact with what is outside of the subject. And yet if we follow the paradoxical logic of the threshold, this means that what is outside of the subject is in fact in a certain sense always already inside the subject. To exist as a threshold, then, is to conceive of oneself as a chronic, continual zone of passage between inside and outside, such that the two respective spaces cannot be neatly distinguished. This logic entails that subjectivity as whatever singularity exists in a fundamentally liminal zone, one that designates ‘the experience of the limit itself, the experience of being-within an outside’.14 In The Coming Community, Agamben refers in passing to this ‘outside’ or pure exposure of the subject as its ‘face’ or ‘eidos’ (the latter, a rich Greek term signifying outward or visible appearance, aspect and also kind and form).15 Some five years later, he takes up the themes of the face and appearance and how they relate to thresholds at more length in an illuminating essay entitled ‘The Face’.16 For Agamben, the face is not straightforwardly equivalent to the visage. Rather, the face denotes the various sites – embodied, to be sure – in which the pure communicability of the human appears. The face thus denotes the taking place of language, understood broadly to include all of the modes through which relation, communication and affect occur. As Agamben explains, ‘[T]he face’s revelation is revelation of language itself. Such a revelation, therefore, does not have any real content and does not tell the truth about this or that state of being, about this or that aspect of human beings and of the world: it is only opening, only communicability.’17 The overarching ethico-political imperative of Agamben’s work is to find ways to affirm and hold open the face against the countertendencies of the established order to turn sites of human relation into consumerist spectacles, narrow communitarian identities or other modes of existence that close off potentiality. Agamben is thus offering a rather radical account of the human and human sociality, for he is not content (as someone like Turner would seem to be) with making a space within social structures for threshold subjectivity, experiences and rituals. Rather, Agamben is arguing that the ethico-political task is to find ways of living that are fundamentally interstructural and that understand the human as being not simply occasionally ‘betwixt and between’ social stations, but as being threshold in nature and liminal as such.

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In the final paragraphs of ‘The Face’, Agamben gives voice to this imperative in powerful terms, suggesting that the face should be understood as ‘my outside: a point of indifference with respect to all of my properties … The face is the threshold of depropriation and of de-identification of all manners and of all qualities’.18 It is only by seeking to be a face – which is to say, seeking to exist as a threshold entity and to ‘endure’19 what comes one’s way in the process – that we actually engage in something that we might call ethics and politics. The ethico-political task for Agamben is to risk seeing our given predicates, identities and practices as received and thereby opening ourselves to the possibility of receiving others. Stating this threshold imperative in categorical terms, Agamben writes: ‘Be only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them.’20

Visitor Agamben’s analysis provides us with something like the conditions of possibility for threshold experiences when examined from the side of the subject that undergoes and is transformed by its threshold existence. To conceive of subjectivity as a zone of passage to the outside, as a threshold of indistinction, and as the face through which communicability and exposure appear, is to challenge the idea that the subject is a self-same substance that moves from one station to the next throughout life without undergoing any substantial transformation or becoming. Now, if we affirm this notion of subjective constitution and seek to live lives that do justice to our threshold natures, how precisely are we to configure this ‘outside’? For the outside does not belong entirely to the subject; it is, as Agamben notes, the site of the subject’s impropriety and the very locus of relation with others who arrive, others who come unexpectedly and unannounced. Agamben traces the etymology of his concept of the outside to the Latin term “fores” and the Greek term “thurathen”, both of which are linked with being ‘at the door’ or ‘at the threshold’. If we consider this image of the outside as being-at-thedoor, we might then raise the question of who or what is on the other side. Thus, not only does the subject both stand at and constitute a kind of open door or threshold (and we should recall that, in English, threshold is etymologically linked to the doorsill that holds a door in place and that provides passage from inside to outside and vice versa). In addition, because of this subjective constitution, the self is also immediately opened onto that which comes to meet it at the door. If we pursue the Greek etymology of thurathen back to its substantive root thura (door), we can then, following Émile Benveniste, note that for the Greeks what stands at the door and what comes from the outside is thuraīos, the stranger.21 What can be said of this thuraīos, this stranger that comes to meet one at the door? Jacques Derrida provides what I take to be one of the more expansive and rigorously non-anthropocentric answers to this question of the stranger. In his analysis of hostipitality (a neologism he coins to underscore the inclusion of the host as well as the possibility for hostility in hospitality), Derrida develops a thought of alterity in view of what arrives at the door and what it might mean for self and other to pass

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across the threshold of the door and toward each other.22 For Derrida, perhaps the most important characteristic of the relation to alterity in threshold subjectivities is that such relations take place, strictly speaking, outside of knowledge and beyond the full purview and mastery of the subject. Thus, one of his guiding theses in view of hospitality (understood as involving the aspects just mentioned with the concept of hostipitality) is that ‘we do not know what hospitality is’.23 This non-knowledge of hospitality can be understood in several senses, the most basic of which would involve the problems surrounding simply coming to grips with the fact and event of relation. As with the kinds of concepts and relations that Plato examines in the Socratic dialogues, the more carefully we reflect upon what a given something (love, justice, friendship, courage and so on) is, the more we come to realize how little we actually know about it. Such is certainly the case with regard to hospitality and with the strange relations that occur in welcoming someone across one’s threshold. Furthermore, inasmuch as the Other comes to me through a door and across a threshold – from an outside, to use Agamben’s language – that Other remains to some extent, precisely, other. Although as a threshold subject I have my being as being-within an outside, this does not make me identical in every way with that outside. I do not have full access to and understanding of that with which I am in relation, and yet relations of affect between me and the Other can and do still occur before, beyond and outside the purview of cognition. And it is precisely because hospitality constitutes this kind of complex relation with alterity and is not a fully present thing that is finished once and for all, that I cannot know what it is in the strong sense of full cognition. There is an additional sense in which we do not know what hospitality is, according to Derrida, and this concerns the sense in which being a threshold subject and welcoming the Other is less a matter of cognition and conceptualization and more a matter of experimental practice, a creative doing (in the sense of poēisis) that lacks the assurances and guarantees associated with cognitive and conceptual certainty. Threshold existence and hospitality expose the subject to the unanticipatable, to what cannot be delimited in advance. Opening doors and crossing thresholds, thus, entail risk and demand responsive, experimental modes of practice rather than preprogrammed actions based on established knowledge. From a Derridean perspective, it is this kind of vulnerable, experimental poetics that is missing from the established order’s notion of hospitality, and it is an additional reason why (to return to Benjamin’s observation from the opening of our essay) in contemporary times we are so poor in threshold experiences. The hegemonic model of relation and hospitality is one that not only seeks to control strictly what constitutes the door, threshold and passageway (turning zones of indistinction into borders that link two fixed identities or territories), but also endeavours to determine in advance who or what is coming or is allowed to come across a given threshold. For Derrida, the primary challenge concerning hospitality is to contest the desires and anxieties concerning propriety that animate the established order’s dominant mode of relation. With regard to the modulation and control of the scope of hospitality, Derrida distinguishes between a hospitality of invitation and a hospitality of visitation. The former is a welcoming of the other that seeks to determine in advance how hospitality will occur and how the territory or home at issue will be affected in the

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process. A hospitality of invitation creates fixed thresholds and doors that function like borders, linking one delimited place and form of alterity with another. Derrida characterizes the hospitality of invitation on the model of a house with doors and windows, with someone who has keys to control those passageways; in more extreme forms operating at the territorial level, the hospitality of invitation involves ‘customs and police checks’.24 This version of hospitality constitutes a paradoxical logic of the threshold. It creates passageways only to control them in such a manner that they effectively block passage and block alterity, creating narcissistically and jealously guarded spaces of propriety rather than relational subjectivities and collectives. It might be thought that this paradoxical and aporetic logic of the threshold is precisely what Derrida wants to underscore about the nature of hospitality as such – that hospitality is, effectively and in principle, impossible inasmuch as to be hospitable there must be a house, a door, propriety, sameness and so on. On this reading, hospitality effectively ‘immobilizes itself on the threshold of itself ’,25 undoing its own efforts to be hospitable. As Derrida insists, however, this kind of hospitality of invitation – which believes it can master hospitality through controlling doors and borders – needs to be contested from within by a hospitality of visitation. A hospitality of visitation actually risks doing the impossible, acting and being acted upon by the Other beyond and before knowledge. A hospitality of visitation proceeds on the assumption that doors must be taken off their hinges, that thresholds are and should remain porous zones of passage, and that the Same is not master in its own house and territory. In this version of hospitality (which resonates in important ways with Agamben’s account of the paradox of the logic of thresholds), the other who visits is understood to be always already there, inside and outside of one’s home (territory, space and so on) and prior to one’s ability to be fully present to the event of visitation. A hospitality of visitation thus seeks to affirm both a logic and a practice of the one who comes beyond knowledge, to find ways to make the home as hospitable and open as possible, to let the other come, to be and practise the threshold in the form of a zone of relation and passage. As is almost always the case with Derrida, this logic of welcoming alterity is not intended entirely to undo the home, the territory, or the Same, but rather aims to change the economy of the Same away from an anxious guarding of propriety to an ever more generous welcoming of alterity. Thus, Agamben’s ethico-political imperative of seeking to be one’s threshold is figured similarly in Derrida’s work as the imperative to do the impossible, to be a threshold and to let the other come in, in ever more generous ways. Lest this analysis be taken to render the hospitality of visitation as something akin to a safe and unthreatening prospect, it is important to recall that the hostis at the heart of ‘hostipitality’ is linked both to the place of the host and to the possibility of the Other who arrives being an enemy. In welcoming the unexpected visitor, one cannot delimit in advance who or what will arrive. More than perhaps any other threshold thinker in contemporary theory, Derrida underscores the monstrous nature of alterity to which threshold subjectivity is exposed. What arrives could be either friend or enemy, the very best or the very worst. Whereas a hospitality of invitation seeks to limit the scope of who arrives and who is allowed through a given passageway, a hospitality of visitation is unable to do so inasmuch as the door to the subject, the home or the territory is absent, leaving only the door’s threshold in place. This means

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that a hospitality of visitation risks the ruin of the subject, the home or the territory and creates the conditions for others of all sorts to arrive. With this conception of hospitality, Derrida moves well beyond inter-human notions of threshold subjectivity and community to a properly non-anthropocentric notion of exposure. As he writes in Of Hospitality, a hospitality of visitation seeks to affirm the radically monstrous nature of what comes, the absolute newcomer or arrivant: Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female.26

Given that this kind of hospitality runs the risk of ruining ‘Sames’ of all sorts (subjects, homes, territories and so on), being a threshold subject of this sort requires not simply saying ‘yes, yes’ to everything that arrives but rather requires learning how to filter and respond to that which arrives unexpectedly. The difference here is that the modulation and filtering of the threshold is driven by an attempt to be as generous and affirmative as possible, to open up traditional modes of hospitality (that is to say, hospitalities of invitation) from within and to remove the anxious and overly restrictive doors and locks that try to delimit in advance the scope of that which arrives. Thus, being a threshold subject or Same entails a stance of being ‘happily vulnerable’27 towards alterity in all of its monstrous and unanticipatable forms.

Bridge What, then, might constitute a practice of the threshold, in the sense of being one’s face (Agamben) and of being happily vulnerable to strangers of all sorts (Derrida)? What might it look like – today, and for those of us who inhabit societies in which a general impoverishment of threshold experience reigns – to put this kind of thought of the threshold into practice? As one possible means of addressing these questions, I want to turn in this last section to an analysis of the thought of Gloria Anzaldúa and one of her final writings in particular, an essay entitled ‘now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner work, public acts’.28 This piece provides a remarkable attempt to sketch out some of the rituals and practices that might be developed in trying to undertake the ethico-political task of threshold existence. It is worth remarking at the outset of our discussion that Anzaldúa’s project in ‘now let us shift … ’ has received relatively little scholarly attention in comparison with many of her other writings. The reason for this lack of attention is perhaps to be explained by the links Anzaldúa draws between thresholds and what she calls ‘spiritual activism’, a term that will almost certainly appear outmoded for many readers who are working in contemporary intellectual circles. The negative consequences and risks of endorsing such a concept are magnified for women of colour as well as other readers and scholars of Anzaldúa’s work who occupy marginalized positions in academia and society. For theorists and

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activists whose work is already devalued, the possibility of being saddled with the charge of endorsing what might appear to be an uncritical New Age spirituality in Anzaldúa’s writings is an additional burden that many theorists and activists have understandably not wanted to risk.29 Following AnaLouise Keating’s insistence on the importance of Anzaldúa’s spiritual writings, though, I want to suggest here that accepting the risks associated with engaging Anzaldúa’s notion of spiritual activism is necessary for trying to develop something like a practice of threshold subjectivity. In contemporary times, we have come to see philosophical and theoretical work as largely divorced from practice. As such, we might find ourselves somewhat embarrassed by such a bold attempt to put intellectual concepts into practice and to develop rituals and spiritual exercises that seek to do justice to them. But, as Pierre Hadot points out,30 philosophy in particular (which is my home discipline) was initially seen not simply as an intellectual pursuit but as a way of life, a set of practices and rituals designed to reconstitute and transform individual and collective subjects. Hadot himself, following a long philosophical tradition, uses the term ‘spiritual exercises’ to describe the kinds of practices that were associated with early forms of philosophy, inasmuch as philosophical rituals and communities often had as their aim both the refinement of individual subjectivity and the opening up of the individual to the larger natural and cosmic wholes in which they lived and had their being. Anzaldúa’s essay, I argue, can be read as contemporary spiritual exercise of a similar sort, as the development of a thought and practice that helps us sustain threshold existence in view of the vast array of beings, both human and more-than-human, with which threshold subjects are in relation.31 In ‘now let us shift … ’, Anzaldúa’s account of contemporary rituals of passage that take seriously the vision of self and other in terms of such relations is addressed both to herself (dealing with the ‘inner work’ of transformation) and to others (‘public acts’). Anzaldúa writes her essay in the form of an address, to a ‘you’, an address that implicates both a singular and plural second person and that underscores the ways in which personal transformation always occurs in, with and through multiple others. For Anzaldúa, the various stages of transformation are inaugurated and sustained by threshold events of various sorts. She places her own process of transformation in the context of her lived experience of the massive 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in northern California. As Anzaldúa recalls, the earthquake threw her into a space where familiar coordinates were absent (she found herself on a downtown public street where the pavement was buckling and rising up, bodies were being torn open, and buildings were collapsing), a zone that parallels the ‘betwixt and between’ threshold spaces explored by Turner. Anzaldúa refers to this disrupted zone as a ‘liminal, transitional space’ and a ‘zone of possibility’ and relates it to the Nahuatl concept of nepantla, meaning an inbetween land or space.32 Anzaldúa stresses that it is precisely in such liminal moments when self-transformation can take hold, inasmuch as one’s perspective is sufficiently displaced to allow other perspectives and possibilities to be glimpsed. To endure this kind of shattered and fluid perspective, though, is extremely difficult. The pull to reinhabit the consciousness and subjectivity aligned with the established order and to go back to one’s dogmatic slumbers is extremely strong. This overwhelming pull to return to the logic of the established order is yet another reason for why we are so poor

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today in threshold experiences. We have very few rituals, narratives or practices aimed at helping each other inhabit these difficult liminal spaces or at learning to think in fluid, threshold and transformational ways. Anzaldúa is here attempting to develop the kinds of spiritual and intellectual exercises needed to maintain and endure this space. Finding herself without any such rituals in place at the time of the earthquake, Anzaldúa writes of the feelings of ‘despair’ and ‘hopelessness’33 that often attend living in the cracks in between worlds. In this liminal space, she notes that one tends to become intensely aware of one’s embodied mortality and the sufferings to which one’s body is exposed (Anzaldúa describes her own struggles with illness and disease at this time in her life). One also becomes intensely attuned to the finite embodiment of others and the violence and death to which such bodies are recurrently exposed (Anzaldúa recalls us to what she labels the ‘original trauma’ of the United States, its genocide of indigenous peoples).34 The temptation here is to avoid the bodily and cognitive pain that attends liminal knowledge through drugs and whatever other distractions one might have at one’s disposal. Anzaldúa likens this point in the process of transformation to standing on the threshold of a dilapidated bridge, one that has ‘missing planks, broken rails’,35 stretched between one’s old self and way of life and the development of other possibilities and potentials. The chief psychological difficulty with making the transition to another way of life and to living with the knowledge (what Anzaldúa calls conocimiento) of being a threshold subject and altering one’s subjective constitution is that, upon making the transition to another mode of life, one can never go back to the established order with the same perspective. In Anzaldúa’s words: By crossing, you invite a turning point, initiate a change. And change is never comfortable, easy, or neat. It’ll overturn all your relationships, leave behind lover, parent, friend, who, not wanting to disturb the status quo nor lose you, try to keep you from changing. Okay, so cambio is hard. Tough it out, you tell yourself. Doesn’t life consist of crossing a series of thresholds?36

On Anzaldúa’s account, what ultimately effects the transition and encourages one to cross the bridge is a passion for the other side, a desire to engage the world in all of its extraordinary richness, difference and monstrosity. She describes crossing the threshold and affirming the richness of the world in moving terms: ‘With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings – somos todos un paíz.’37 Anzaldúa suggests that as one comes to accept one’s threshold subjectivity and aims to practice the love of relation and wonder, the next task should be that of trying to think carefully from this space and to give some minimal discursive form to what one now sees and feels. This view from between worlds is described by Anzaldúa in what we might call neo-animistic and neo-materialist terms, a view of life and the earth as being filled with its own agency and potentiality. One sees oneself here less as a member of a particular group with determinate predicates and more as a member of a planetary culture.38 When one seeks to share this story and vision of the world with

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others, however, Anzaldúa notes that one will often encounter significant resistance from those who remain firmly ensconced within the dominant, anthropocentric culture. In the face of this clash of perspectives, one might be tempted to withdraw from others and into oneself, but Anzaldúa argues that at this point the maintaining of community is more necessary than ever. Those who are experienced at thinking from and living in between worlds can help to serve as support for others who are trying to make their own passages. Thus, Anzaldúa encourages neplanteras, thresholders, not to withdraw but to serve as a bridge for others. These modes of solicitous relation are the first steps in the formation of what we might call threshold cultures and forms of life. As a means of giving additional substance and sustenance to such forms of life, Anzaldúa also recognizes the need for developing a justice-based politics that jointly contests the multiple forms of violence and injustice characteristic of the established order. This kind of intersectional politics constitutes the public, outer form of the spiritual exercises that Anzaldúa offers, an effort to bring self-transformation into line with the transformation of the public world towards a more just order. What makes Anzaldúa’s work so remarkable along these lines is that she has seen how such spiritual exercises and activism ultimately must take the form of a broad, coalitional project that includes but goes well beyond the human, to include what many Native American indigenous traditions would call ‘all our relations’. Anzaldúa’s essay closes with a description of a ritual she performs in order to remind her of the inner work and public acts required to sustain a non-anthropocentric, threshold form of life. Rather than reproduce and comment on that ritual here, I wish to leave it to the reader to examine for herself. I want to close by suggesting, though, that the specific ritual that Anzaldúa offers might be read less as a model to copy and more as an invitation to create additional exercises and rituals that make us more attentive to threshold existence, to justice and to all our relations. Such would be the practices that build threshold forms of life, which is to say, ways of life that aim to endure and affirm life and thought in that liminal space ‘betwixt and between’ established worlds.

Notes Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 494. 2 Ibid. 3 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee (1909; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960). 4 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93. 5 Ibid., 97. 6 Ibid., 98. 7 Ibid., 96. 8 Ibid., 97. 9 Ibid., 101. 10 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 494. 1

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11 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 12 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–2. 13 Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Work of Man’, in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1–10. 14 Agamben, Coming Community, 68. 15 Ibid. 16 Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Face’, in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vicenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 91–102. 17 Ibid., 92. 18 Ibid., 99. 19 Ibid., 92. 20 Ibid., 100. 21 Émile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes, vol. I (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 313. 22 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki 5 (2000): 3–18. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 Ibid., 14. 25 Ibid. 26 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77. 27 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 53. 28 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, ‘Now Let Us Shift … the Path of Conocimiento … Inner Work, Public Acts’, in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 540–78. 29 These points are made by AnaLouise Keating in her excellent essay, ‘“I’m a Citizen of the Universe”: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spiritual Activism as Catalyst for Social Change’, Feminist Studies 34 (2008): 53–69. 30 See, generally, Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995). 31 For more on the non-anthropocentric dimensions of Anzaldúa’s work, see AnaLouise Keating and Kimberly C. Merenda, ‘Decentering the Human? Towards a PostAnthropocentric Standpoint Theory’, Praktyka Teoretyczna 4 (2013): 65–85. 32 Anzaldúa, ‘Now Let Us Shift’, 544. 33 Ibid., 545. 34 Ibid., 543. 35 Ibid., 556. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 558. 38 Ibid., 542.

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Periphery Paulina Aroch Fugellie

Although its roots in spatial analysis may invoke an aura of benign, neutral empiricism, ‘periphery’ – and its accompanying equivalents, cognates and polar opposites – is a highly political term, loaded to a degree comparable with ‘race’ or ‘totalitarianism’. Taken seriously as an idea, periphery is the wound of Empire; it slashes open the ostensible self-enclosure and self-sufficiency of life at the metropolitan core. In the twenty-first century, the concept – as such – is more than ever a reminder of how words not only describe but participate in the fraught struggle over real and virtual territories, enabling their organization, regulation and appropriation, and also the understanding of those same processes. Periphery is part of a vocabulary that constitutes and energizes the political imagination of place and spatial relations. In a direct contemporary context, it often refers to the uneven socio-economic and techno-cultural topographies in the globalized world. Yet the notion of periphery forms part of a larger complex of ideas and idea formations. As a relational concept used to evaluate geopolitical and geo-economic space, it emerged in the social sciences to make sense of processes of globalization dating back to the sixteenth century and beyond. It has travelled through fields and disciplines, from geography, economics, sociology and history, to comparative literature, media and postcolonial studies.1 It is impossible to comprehensively summarize all of those intellectual contexts here. For all these reasons, this essay offers a schematic overview, in effect, a sequence of snapshots.2 Invoking a series of moments in which the term plays a dramatic role, I outline the movement of the term (and some of its associated terms such as ‘core’, ‘centre’ and ‘metropolis’) in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; its background in theories of economic geography and geopolitical economy; its emergence in the context of – and in bitter opposition to – theories of modernization and development; its role in a variety of social scientific and historical models; and its passage through the linguistic turn and towards something like a materialist semiotics of the image. However, these historical developments should not be understood simply in terms of the immanent unfolding of the content of ideas and still less reduced to the shifting For his collaboration on this piece, I would like to acknowledge Brían Hanrahan, visiting researcher at 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Mexico City.

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weather map of academic theory and group formation. The concept of periphery in the apparently more rarified realms of theoretical reflection and empirical description is inseparable from worldly processes of rule, of order and of imagination. Key to this analysis is an important moment: the marked shift in usage of ‘periphery’ from social sciences to humanities-based perspectives, particularly with the consolidation of postcolonial studies in North Atlantic academia from the 1980s on. Postcolonial theory’s main field of concern has – since Said’s Orientalism (1978) – been dominated by Europe’s othering of subjects at the edges of Empire, along with questions of place, displacement and epistemic violence. Thus, the notion of periphery is fundamental to postcolonial studies. Yet, owing to the concept’s solid grounding in social science models, its relationship to postcolonial studies has always been fraught. So, while concerned with the disciplinary struggle over the term and its implications, I hope not to reduce genuine historical tensions to disputes across and within academic fields. I hope also to do some justice to how those disputes index, shape and negotiate wider struggles, particularly how they participate in the assertion, regulation or foreclosure of the periphery as a site from which to think about the concept of periphery itself. Hence, in my last paragraphs, turning to the present day, I focus on the specific ‘peripherality’ of sub-Saharan Africa as a systematically disavowed location of semiotic and economic value production. The contemporary image of Africa places the continent on the divide between periphery and ‘infraperiphery’, where it does spectacular work within an intensified global economy of signification and imaging. *** If it is difficult enough to keep track of the peripheral once it emerges into the theoretical limelight on its own behalf, the prehistory of the term presents further challenges. Nonetheless, it is possible to weave together some early strands from a variety of disciplines and proto-disciplines – political economy, social geography, econometrics – which predate the semantic coalescence of periphery in the second half of the twentieth century, and to allude to a few early equivalents in the imagination, theorization and popular instrumentalization of political space. Some analysts find precursors to concepts of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in classical theories of geopolitical economics, in particular the work of Johann Heinrich Von Thünen, a pre-eminent early economist of market geography, agricultural production and the state. Von Thünen’s political geography, and its economic models, was of a particularly abstract kind, removed from historical analysis, positing ideal types in ideal situations. However, this is not to say that it served no broader function. Von Thünen, himself a Prussian landowner, expounded his geopolitical model shortly before the 1848 revolutions in Europe and with the explicit concern that communist ideas would not gain traction among the masses. In this context, his ideas ultimately suggested that colonization, the move outwards beyond a society’s spatial frontiers, could solve the contradictions of capital. In The Isolated State, Von Thünen created an economic model of concentric zonal belts, circles of varying land use spreading out from individual producers and from urban centres, the width of the circles determining a spatially inflected modelling of market

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behaviour. The eponymous ‘isolated state’ consisted of a city with ever-larger expanses of land available, the further one moved away. The frontier, given unlimited land and free mobility of capital and labour, offered the worker himself the opportunity to become a capitalist. Expansion could put pressure on the existing economy to provide fair wages, keep excess exploitation in check and thus maintain the social order. As the geographer and social theorist David Harvey has suggested, Von Thünen’s doctrine of the ‘frontier wage’ marks an important early theorization of colonial expansion. Von Thünen, like Marx in his own writings on colonization, suggests Harvey was responding to a question left open by Hegel: ‘the role of geographical expansion and territorial domination, of colonialism and imperialism, in the stabilization of capitalism’.3 Addressing the problem of poverty (in his Philosophy of Right), Hegel concluded that civil society was driven to territorial expansion since its inner dialectic created unresolvable contradictions. Harvey reads Von Thünen’s oeuvre as a systematization of Hegel. By gathering Marx’s scattered ideas on the spatial question, and by bringing Marx and Von Thünen together, Harvey summons attention to spatiality and, in particular, to the colonization of peripheral space, as a fundamental yet neglected realm for the analysis of capitalism. Harvey insists that Marx’s reflections on colonialism remain understudied, and he recuperates Marx’s theory that crises lead to geographical expansion, which assuage, but also reproduce, the inner dialectic of civil society at the core. Yet Harvey also recognizes that Marx paid insufficient attention to the qualitative difference that the spatial variable implies for understanding how capitalism works. According to Harvey, neoclassical economists learned a negative lesson from The Isolated State: to leave spatial relations to political theory and to visualize social harmony arising from within the system itself, without recourse to ‘the spatial fix’.4 But if bourgeois ideology deliberately masked the relations between economics and politics, and between inner and outer transformations of capital, neo-Marxist intellectuals seeking to address the constitutive tensions of capitalism and imperialism benefited from Marx’s radical awareness of the unity of political economy. However, they would still have to struggle ‘to extract their theory from the a-spatial mould in which Marx had cast it’.5 Before moving on to the neo-Marxist development of the concept of periphery, it is worth mentioning another German precursor: the spatial theories of ‘Central Place’, developed by Walter Christaller, the twentieth-century geographer and spatio-political economist whose formulae and diagrams sought to explain (and predict) the formation of agricultural land and markets. Christaller’s theory, particularly as expounded in Central Places in Southern Germany (1933), conceives of five differently sized types of urban centres, attracting consumers furthest away according to their production of low- or high-order goods. The Central Place model shows an overlapping of differently scaled peripheries, marked by the nature of production, forming a latticework of hexagonal arrangements. As with Von Thünen, these abstract models are also of course – in and for the ‘real world’ – theories of the state in more than one sense. This is tellingly illustrated by the fact that Christaller – still controversially for those who honour his work and his memory – found a comfortable place of work in the ministries of Himmler’s SS, where he contributed centrally to one vast project of applied human geography, namely the

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reorganization of population and production in occupied Poland.6 His geo-economic theories of space, with their abstract conceptions of centre and periphery, integrated smoothly into the technocratic apparatus of genocidal imperialism. *** The great age of European expansion – both intra- and extra-continental – brought forth only occasional models of spatial inequality; the major coalescence of thinking on ‘periphery and core’ appears in the aftermath of the Second World War. The key moment in the genealogy of periphery comes with the emergence of counterhegemonic theories of economy – and ultimately of culture – in the spaces of the Global South. These were theories crafted as tools of resistance, as thinking against Empire, at the moment of the decline of the European empires and the ascendancy of the American. The key source of intellectual energy in this was ‘dependency theories’. They were both a political response to the shifting politics of Empire and an outraged intellectual response to models of modernization and development, vital elements in the hegemonic theory formation of the Cold War United States. Although modernization theories were not confined to the United States, they had a particular flowering in the US academic and political establishment in the wake of the Second World War. Often specifically associated with the sociologist Talcott Parsons, ‘modernization theory’ became an umbrella term for a variety of theories in sociology, history, politics and economics. Differences notwithstanding, they tended to postulate linear conceptions of social evolution in the context of a world conceived in terms of differently ‘developed’ countries. They took industrialized Western societies not simply as one model among many but as more ‘mature’, exhibiting characteristics – wealth, industrialization, certain political features, etc. – which all societies would, given time and guidance to ‘grow up’, come to share. Seen in terms of their own discourse, modernization theories might be taken as a kind of abstracted US patriotism: wellmeaning but oblivious, sincerely believing itself to be both role model and honest broker, hopeful that all nations, in time, would know the blessing of being just like the United States. This marked a shift from previous theories of imperial conquest, which ascribed the ‘backwardness’ of colonial populations to biological inferiority, rather than to a belated historical position. A crude and yet inescapable index of the governmental nature of modernization theories was the ease with which their proponents participated in the apparatus of rule. The most striking figure in this respect, but far from the only one, was the economist W. W. Rostow. During the Second World War, Rostow worked as military advisor at the Office of Strategic Services and afterwards helped develop the Marshall Plan. Later, along with appointments at MIT and Harvard, Rostow continued a parallel career as policy advisor at the highest levels of US government. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War, he advised the Eisenhower administration, arguing for a drastic increase in development aid as an anti-communist strategy. His appeal was bipartisan: Kennedy recruited him as Deputy National Security Advisor, where he helped formulate the ‘Alliance for Progress in Latin America’. Promoted to National Security Advisor under Johnson, Rostow was a key figure in the escalation of the Vietnam War.

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In a number of publications during the 1950s, culminating in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), Rostow proposed a model of modernization by which all societies progressed through a series of five stages: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity and the age of high mass consumption. Rostow’s modernization theory epitomizes a disingenuous technocratism; his ‘stages of growth’ model, in all its abstracted simplicity, combine the optimistic hubris of bureaucrat and reductive model-builder. Here, development emanates from the centre but will eventually bring the underdeveloped periphery into the most evolved stage. The idea of ‘growth’, economic and otherwise, is naturalized, depicted as the linear development of all societies towards a ‘maturity’ resembling the status quo of industrialized nations. Finally, it is worth emphasizing the beautiful appropriateness of his borrowing the terminology of great Cold War military artefacts: the multi-stage rocket, with the ‘take-off ’ of countries couched in terms similar to the Saturn or Apollo missile. Many in the Global South were invested in theories of linear development.7 But the dominance of modernization theories, particularly when these so clearly emanated from the corridors of US power, prompted a coalescence of critical voices that turned the notion of ‘development’ on its head, questioned the pseudo-neutrality of the idea of ‘modernization’ and began to articulate a contestational strategy. This movement of thought included variants of neo-Marxism and is now often called under the term ‘dependency theories’. These emerged in Latin America (and elsewhere) from the late 1940s on but gathered particular momentum in the 1960s. They took ‘periphery’ not only as a subject, but also as a historically created place of articulation: one of the key claims of dependency theorists is that the periphery is not a remnant of premodernity, but both a product and a form of modernity, whose weakness and poverty are continually re-produced by the core-periphery relation. Dependency theory was not a unified school of thought; from the outset it was marked by differences and debate. Appropriately enough, its origin, if at all identifiable, is both double and hybrid: the theory originated with two separate but similar 1949 articles, by the German economist Hans Singer and the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, written separately but cast retrospectively as a combined piece of work. What came to be known as the Prebisch-Singer thesis proposed that the terms of trade for economies reliant on primary products deteriorate over time in relation to those producing manufactured goods. This influential account of free trade seemed to put in quasi-objective terms a growing disbelief in the benign determinism of development – an initial insight elaborated in much subsequent work. Among the dependentistas of the key years were Brazilian social scientist Theotonio dos Santos, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano and US-German economic sociologist and historian Andre Gunder Frank. Although a heterogeneous group, grounded in a variety of disciplines, sites of enunciation and ideological outlook, their basic standpoint might be summed up in Frank’s famous phrase, which soon became something of a dependentista slogan: ‘the development of underdevelopment’,8 implying that development at the core comes at the cost of underdevelopment at the periphery. Core regions, it was suggested, did not achieve development autonomously or innocently: ‘underdevelopment’ was not natural but systemically created. Attempts

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to help ‘underdeveloped countries’ out of their ‘backwardness’ were a fig leaf of vested interests, which continued to reinforce dependency in a single, ongoing and worldwide structure of capital accumulation. As Frank put it in another famous formulation: The metropolis sucks capital out of the periphery and uses its power to maintain the economic, political, social, and cultural structure of the periphery and its peripheral metropoles and therewith to maintain as long as possible the capitalist imperialist system which permits this exploitation. The essential internal contradiction of the capitalist system as a whole, while permitting the relative development of some, thus produces and maintains the underdevelopment of others on the international, national, regional, sectoral, and local levels. On any of these levels, therefore, the only escape from this underdevelopment is socialist escape from the capitalist structure which necessarily produces and maintains that underdevelopment. There is no dual society and no third way.9

Frank’s metaphor – in which ‘sucks capital’ stands in for ‘sucks blood’ – highlights the parasitic nature of capital accumulation at the global scale; there is no ‘innate’ backwardness of peripheral sectors or regions. As the quote also makes clear, while the surplus-extraction system is centralized in the ‘metropolis’, it operates in tandem with elites at the global periphery. Liberal reform is at best futile, at worst complicit. It is important to note dependency theory’s places of articulation as well as its content. New thinking on the ‘periphery’ – and indeed the popularization of the term – was partly produced in new or newly radicalized institutions, both international and national, of the post-war period. Singer directed the Economic Division of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Having served as head of the Argentine Central Bank, Prebisch in 1950 became executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), set up by the UN in Santiago de Chile; other important theorists including Anibal Pinto and Celso Furtado also worked at ECLA. Frank was long based in Latin America and found institutional support from the International Labor Organization. National institutions also played a role, above all the new universities of Latin America, and the governments of the day: Frank was an advisor to the Allende government of Chile before the coup in 1973. By the 1970s, theorists elsewhere in the Global South developed dependency theory to analyse local conditions, above all in Africa and the Caribbean. New connections were established across the South, casting ironic light on the ‘peripheral condition’ they ostensibly inhabited. Important figures included Egyptian economist Samir Amin, Tanzanian economist Justinian Rweyemamu, and the Guyanese activist and historian Walter Rodney. Rodney’s study of colonialism and its aftermath, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), became a classic in the history of African political economy. Rodney was an exemplary case of the new geographies of anti-colonial thought. He moved – partly through his career’s volition, partly through political persecution – between East Africa and the Caribbean.10 Amin (1973) introduced the term ‘peripheral capitalism’, by which he describes an economic mode characterized by export-dominated economies and the production

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of luxury goods for small local elites. In short, dependency theory, with its emphasis on the recognition and the liberation of the periphery in its relation to the centre, not only articulated a conceptual framework, but set up new circuits of intellectual influence and fertilization, beyond the traditional colonial disbursal of truth from the metropolis. In Nyerere’s Tanzania, as in Allende’s Chile, this circuit-building formed part of a struggle against the theoretical international division of labour, as well as a practical struggle against the realities of imperial domination. *** While the development of dependency theory focused attention on the constitutive relation of core and periphery, the terms themselves were not yet stabilized as the norm. In 1967, Frank, for example, favoured the term ‘the metropolis-satellite structure of the capitalist system’.11 Two years later, in the well-known formulation quoted above, he had moved on to ‘metropolis-periphery’. Above all, it was the work of Immanuel Wallerstein – the key and founding figure in the development of ‘world-systems theory’ – that led to the semantic stabilization of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ as standard terms within what might be called oppositional political economy.12 Building on the work of the dependentistas, ably synthesizing it with other intellectual currents such as the Annales School, Wallerstein’s world-systems perspective also participated in the new circuits of theory-production now coming into effect: his work was informed by the political and intellectual dialogues he engaged in as an Africanist, not least with the writing of Frantz Fanon. Over the course of more than four decades, from the early 1970s until today, Wallerstein and his associates have developed and refined a long-term analysis of global political and economic history that emphasizes the coalescence, in the early seventeenth century, of a single ‘world-economy’, a political-economic system centrally based on spatial dynamics between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ zones of production within a recognizably capitalist mode of production and exchange. A rejection of ‘modernization’ theories was also here a fundamental impetus: for Wallerstein, while modernization theories were better than the racist superiority complex which preceded them – ‘backwardness’ now a cultural failure rather than a biological one – they nonetheless remained mystifications which obstructed a clear view of the complex historical forces shaping core-periphery relations (and all political and economic relations). ‘We do not live’ went Wallerstein’s pithy formulation in his most direct dismissal of modernization theories, ‘in a modernizing world, but a capitalist one’.13 The key step in Wallerstein’s procedure is the change in the basic unit of politicaleconomic analysis, away from the nation state and onto the entire ‘world-system’ of which regions, zones and nation states form only a smaller part. For Wallerstein, capitalism’s ‘world-system’ emerged in the early seventeenth century, as ever-greater parts of the world merged into, largely speaking, a single economic entity, but without a corresponding political authority. This contrasted with previous ‘world-empires’, which unified disparate territories under a single political authority. In this remapping of the globe as a globe, ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ are central terms, referring to specific places and spaces, but also as a way of assessing production processes in terms of

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the development of their inputs. Found at the core are high-wage, high-technology and high-profit processes; at the periphery are their lesser counterparts and polar opposites. ‘Core’ and ‘periphery’ are, however, not only relational concepts, but also historical ones. The constellation of regions and processes can change over time. Germany moves from a peripheral place in Europe to a central one; Japan is incorporated into the periphery of the capitalist system, but gradually progresses to core status. Textile manufacture in late eighteenth century was the epitome of a ‘core’ production process – a cutting edge, high-skill, high-capital activity. Two centuries later it was a thoroughly peripheral, low-value process. World-systems analysis, as it developed over the decades, has accreted more and more theoretical and explanatory elements and has supplied a detailed historical narrative of capitalism in the last five hundred years.14 But ultimately, all major historical developments can be traced back to terms of core and periphery, from the ‘competition in the core’ which drove much European imperial expansion, to the gradual incorporation of ‘external arenas’ – previously unincorporated in the world-system of capitalist exchange – into the periphery. It is not possible here to do more than allude to the empirical and theoretical richness of world-systems analytic apparatus, as it evolved over decades of gradual exposition. Its main spatial categories, in effect a triad of core, periphery and semi-periphery,15 may sound schematic in summary, but these are, in the work of Wallerstein and his followers, thoroughly fleshed out with historical detail. Their spatial construction meshes with a carefully constructed temporal structure, albeit one which, by virtue of its range and its polycausality, has been subject to much detailed criticism.16 Wallerstein’s web of core-periphery relations changes over time, as cyclical forces draw historically significant actions from those caught in struggle, prompting long-term change as well as cycles of repetition. *** To sum up: the middle decades of the twentieth century saw the establishment of distinctions of ‘core-periphery’ – and increasingly, those very terms – as key discursive elements in certain strands of social scientific thought. I have tried to gesture towards the growing complexity and movement of that thought, its inclusion of the distinction in dynamic and empirically grounded analysis, at its best systematic without being schematic, as exemplified by the ambitious project of research associated with the writings and the school of Wallerstein. However, from around the early 1990s onwards, it was scholars in the humanities, particularly in the ‘theoretical wave’ of the postcolonial, who took up, and often took issue with, the periphery-core distinction.17 Their treatment of periphery and core forms part of a broader conceptual constellation. The postcolonial theory of this epoch often – implicitly or explicitly – presented itself as a corrective to the crude dualism of previous decades of social scientific analysis and indeed of the more simplistic tenets of nationalist emancipatory thought. It frequently valorized marginal spaces while denaturalizing them, reflecting on them as epistemic rather than historical locations. It looked often to third-term concepts – such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘interstice’ in Homi Bhabha, or ‘clash of epistemes’ in Spivak, ‘exile’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘marginality’ elsewhere;

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terms that were presented as crucial sublatory moments in overcoming dualistic thought in its many forms. This inflection of the postcolonial was frequently – above all perhaps in Spivak – intellectually complex and historically reflexive. But its popularizations – as marketed in university syllabuses and introductory volumes – often tended to essentialize anti-essentialism by reifying the latest concepts coined. They inverted the history vs. language hierarchy rather than working in and through the complexities of semiotic and historic interactions.18 This is best illustrated perhaps in a strikingly self-confident quote from the second edition of the best-known introduction to postcolonial theory, first published in 1998 and revised in 2007: From the perspective of this decade it is possible to look back at the 1990s and see how important the humanities in general and post-colonial discourse in particular were to developing a new language to address the problems of global culture and the relationships between local cultures and global forces. This occurred because the classical narratives of Modernity in which social theory was mired – dependency theory and center-periphery models – were unable to explain the multidirectional flow of global exchanges, a flow that was most noticeable in cultural exchange.19

While there was no doubt work to be done to develop cultural theory commensurate with the complexity of contemporary society, there is something startling about the glib dismissal of a large and thoughtful corpus of critical social theory and historiography, here dismissed as simplistic and crude, ‘mired’ in the ‘classical narratives of Modernity’. The rejection of core-periphery models in this manner led many in postcolonial theory to be sceptical towards the unpopular – almost embarrassing – dichotomy. The sleeker term ‘globalization’ and its derivations (including ‘glocal’, the crudest of reification of core-periphery dialectics, a grim and business-friendly coinage) would become popular as terms for macro-analytical frameworks. At the same time as a popular idiom of globalization occluded nuanced versions of core-periphery, other theorists continued in the labour of deconstructing the notionally simplistic dualism inherent in this coupling.20 Edward Said himself, shortly before his death, works up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘minor literature’ into an almost delirious patterning of decentring cultural flux, mooting an aestheticized notion of periphery largely emptied of its constitutive antinomy – a periphery without a centre: I think we have to change the landscape from a discussion of dominant to peripheral literatures. A series of assembled peripherals is really what we have, peripherals that work in an elaboration that is simply unceasing. I think what we have is a new perspective, and we’re able to see all literatures working in that way instead of major versus minor, which is the theory. You understand, I don’t think that the dichotomy is really operable. I mean you can read everything in terms of digressions rather than the main course and then there’s a digression … In other words, it’s not the center that really defines it, but it’s really the peripheries, and then you find that all there is is peripheries. Everything is an elaboration of something else. And it’s very close to my interest in music for example. What I’m interested in in music is really counterpoint.21

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This is not to say that the idea of a nexus of plural ‘peripheralities’ could not yield political and theoretical insights. Etienne Balibar, for example, uses precisely this image as a key-bearer of hope, in his 2009 analysis of the political imaginary of Europe, attempting to sketch a thinkable, progressive (and truly Europhile) alternative to the gruesome Eurocentricity of the security state. He ties this to a clear-eyed reading of the role of both borders and peripheries in the supposedly exemplary post-national European constellation. But in general, it is fair to say that ‘periphery’ – in this epoch, in these schools of thought, and along with related notions such as ‘exile’, ‘marginality’ and ‘nomadism’ – drifted dangerously towards a naturalized distinction between the realm of discourse and that of material realities, thus reinforcing precisely what it claimed to undo. *** Analyses of periphery which combined the best of post-structuralism with older materialist traditions could still be found, taking materialism not to mean the prevalence of economics over culture, but the inseparability of the two. In ‘The Economic ImageFunction of the Periphery’ (2005), the cultural studies scholar Timothy Brennan revisited core-periphery relations from a materialist semiotic perspective. Brennan suggests that the moralistic high-grounding prevalent in postcolonial studies in North-Atlantic academia, although well intentioned, tended to ignore the political and epistemo-perceptual functioning of the image and idea of the global periphery: By image-function I mean more than simply the ideological conditioning or the customs governing the dissonances of civilizational value. What should emerge from the term, rather, is a sense of the rules of perception … The utility of perception does not in any way displace earlier commodity forms ( … physical use values), which, on the contrary, become heightened by the idea’s agency. I am suggesting that the global periphery is a usable idea perceived as such, and that its existence is preserved by way of a fiercely defended set of regulations governing what can and cannot be said about it, at least if one wishes to maintain credibility in the United States and Europe.22

Arguing that the humanities, above all postcolonial studies, need to urgently address this question, Brennan reiterates the unacknowledged use the core makes of the periphery, whether for tax evasion, toxic waste dumping or experimental medical procedures. Core-periphery exchange (whether ecological travel, spiritual retreats, sex tourism, infrastructural hedonism – Spring Break on Mexican beaches – or slum tourism) provides different forms of relief for economic actors at the core. These sites of attraction for the core’s elite and middle classes remain unrecognized since the greatest value that they produce is not directly economic. But, for Brennan, there is something particular about the image of the periphery. Contrary to the common sense understanding of what images do, an image serves to hide just as much as it serves to show something. The obfuscating function of the image is particularly useful for neoliberal capitalism. Today, the image of the periphery

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‘produces blindness to the recidivist elements of the new economy, suppression of first world material dependencies, and ignorance of the warehousing of labor’.23 The periphery under contemporary capitalism can present zones of obscured visibility, which also have a value-producing function: ‘The periphery, the third world, the regions of carnage and fly-ridden faces so shamefully and luridly depicted in the travel writings of Robert Kaplan, V. S. Naipaul, and Gustave Flaubert, for instance, is wielded as an image of the fearful potential of our own futures, thus serving to discipline labor and silence the middle-class critic.’24 *** In closing this brief survey, I would like to take up the challenge of a materialist-semiotic reading of periphery by bringing Brennan’s concept of the image-function to bear on the contemporary idea of Africa, analysing the work it does on behalf of what we might term the spectacular normativity of the global bourgeoisie. If ‘periphery’ today refers to the industrialized backyard of the post-Fordist era of capital (only visible as such at the core), we might think of Africa as straddling the divide between periphery and ‘infra-periphery’. While extractive enclaves in the continent are highly integrated into the world-system as peripheral nodes of production, the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa is excluded even from direct forms of capitalist exploitation, while continuing to provide utility to the world-system by acting, among other things, as a large reservoir army of potential labour, which, while remaining unrealized, depreciates its overall value. Infra-peripheral terrains regulate the system by exerting pressure on it. They cannot be equated to Wallerstein’s external arenas because the latter refers to zones of production articulated into another system of production at different moments in history: they play little substantial role in the system under consideration.25 Furthermore, while the infra-periphery plays an indirect yet fundamental role in the material economy, it also plays a major role in producing and reproducing the semiotic values that the worldsystem requires for its stabilization and endurance. The image-function of the (infra-) periphery, its primary function, is to render the work – especially the dirty work – of capitalism invisible. Africa today plays a particular role in the hegemonic global imagination of economic, cultural and political existence. Africa most often functions as the exterior of imaginable life, of representable or domesticated space – an image of what falls outside the world as portrayed in TV news, airline magazines or shareholder reports. It is precisely their blurred or obliterated visibility that makes the images of the idea of Africa all the more haunting. Because they appear on the edges of our field of vision, or are demonstratively excluded from it as a pressing, doomed outside to the spectacular normativity of the global bourgeoisie, they mould that which is seen with all the greater force. The image of Africa that prevails today emerged in the early 1980s. Since the late 1960s, new transport and communication technologies led to the development of a New International Division of Labor,26 with peripheral regions – much of Asia and Latin America – increasingly providing cheap industrial labour power and not only raw materials, leaving the mirage of a clean post-industrial society at the core. Yet it is only through strenuous effort that Africa can be included as part of that periphery

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strictu sensu. As James Ferguson has argued, most industry in Africa today takes the form of capital-intensive mining and oil sites, walled off from neighbouring society, insulated from the local economy, often guarded by paramilitary forces. As Ferguson suggests, the French colonial distinction between ‘useful’ and ‘unusable’ Africa is pertinent now more than ever, the ‘vast terrain of “unusable” Africa … gets increasingly nongovernmental states … open to banditry and warlordism’.27 This ‘unusable’ and, even, ‘useless’ part of Africa constitutes the vast majority of the continent, in terms both of territory and population. As large parts of Africa fell out of the official sphere of global production and circulation of value (while remaining part of circuits of illegal trade, the war industry and macro-structural indebtedness), other areas outside the global core moved into what Wallerstein has termed the semi-periphery. Giovanni Arrighi (2002) identifies an interregional bifurcation among peripheral countries in the wake of the 1970s crisis. Failed by promises of modernization, forced into structural adjustment programs, and having to adapt to the reversal in global economic flows – with the United States as a major recipient of foreign investment – peripheral economies had now to compete directly with core and other peripheral countries in world financial markets. According to their particular histories – colonial and otherwise – they polarized into more successful areas (notably East Asia) and drastically declining ones, with subSaharan Africa as the most extreme example. Given Africa’s generally worsening economic situation, it is not surprising that the continent’s image as a dark, infra-world of starvation was reinforced. In one sense, nothing new: Africa was long the ‘Dark Continent’.28 Unprecedented, however, was a startling chronological reversal. The image of Africa was no longer rendered dark so as to show what ‘we’ had been in Western prehistory. Instead, it insisted on what ‘we’ could yet be, the depths to which we might descend. Africa’s ‘backwardness’ persisted, at the same time that it began to embody a terrifying potential future. This threat – play by the international rules, or you could be the next Zimbabwe – induces fear and self-surveillance. For those at the core, and in more integrated regions of the periphery and semi-periphery, it depicts exploitation as comparative privilege. Thus Africa is represented as the realm of the infra-human – infra-human meaning here both a precariousness that reduces people, at best, to mere survival and modes of life not codified according to the liberal humanist ideals that are, as part of the neoliberal advance, the very same ones to co-structure these conditions in the first place. Yet, in both popular mass-media and academic production, the images of Africa’s infra-worlds are marginal and evanescent apparitions, haunting reminders of an impending potential, too real to take in, or too aberrant to build a universalizing model from, but necessary to index.29 Since the 1980s, the gaunt faces of malnourished children took on an early form of virality: the semiotic correlate of the politics of aid, and the coming of NGOs as a major political force. These images are made more powerful by indexing the unfathomable but not exposing it all, so they mingle in with other horrors in the darkness of our imaginations. The threat is existential as much as it is economic and political: it is in the conflation of these fears that the image-function of the African infra-periphery acquires its force. Today, the image of the infra-periphery

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carries out a similar function (together with terrorism) to that of the atomic bomb during the bipolar world order.30 However, Africa’s image-function of potential and of futurity is not limited to negative aspects. At the apparently opposite end of the spectrum, a counter-image has emerged of Africa as the land of capital’s future, a continent of potential, of virtuality, and above all, of mobility. Today, as much as in the days of Von Thünen’s Isolated State, the periphery promises relief from the internal contradictions of the system. In the pages of the FT, Forbes or The Economist, Africa simultaneously becomes a neartabula-rasa for IBM, Google or Microsoft, with Chinese capital (at the vanguard of twenty-first century capitalism) venturing in and gliding through, a rich wilderness of potential markets. We are confronted with mobile, hyper-fluid African outposts of futurity, forts and bridgeheads of a kind of clean de-historicized next-wave capitalist future, in an otherwise swamp of disease and war. Africa as promise, rather than threat, lends the neoliberal project air, a sense of vast open space. This image of Africa taps into another great resource for the contemporary status quo: the desire for a future and the future as desire. The image-function of the infra-periphery is to naturalize the core-periphery relations, as they stand today – to stabilize the core-periphery binary from ‘the outside’, both economically and semiotically. But it might also stand as potential to be appropriated by counterhegemonic thought, operating on the indivisible strata of the economic and semiotic making of the world. If the periphery and its outside are to be transformed so must their image-function; and this is done by being pictured and thought anew by wordmakers and image-makers at the (infra-)periphery. This is a complicated task, because whose words and images we see, hear, read and quote are shaped by the conditions of our present economic history. The history of ‘periphery’ has been, and continues to be, a fraught struggle between contending imaginations of the world in its making.

Notes 1

2

3

There is another set of interrelated fields that constitute the second major area in which the concept has been theorized: cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind and visual perception. I will not go into that area here but, given the temporal coincidence of, for example, the coinage of the metaphor of periphery by the postanalytical philosopher W. V. O. Quine in the 1950s with the political epochs referred to in this essay, it might be interesting for future research to seek to correlate them. There is no single history of the existing literature on the subject. Yet there are a number of overviews that, if not all fully centred on the concept, elaborate on it at length; some consulted here are Dietmar Rothermund, ‘The Evolution of the Centre-Periphery Concept’, in Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: India and Its Diaspora(s), ed. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 75–80, providing a brief but useful historical outline; Hill (1975), covering its usage in modernization and dependency theories, leading up to Amin’s ‘peripheral capitalism’; Pratt (2002), focusing on the interrelation of the ‘periphery’ and ‘modernity’. David Harvey, ‘The Spatial Fix – Hegel, Von Thünen, and Marx’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 13.3 (1981): 1 (1–12).

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Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Here Harvey is referring to Bukharin, Luxemburg and Lenin. Only towards the end of his essay does he turn to contemporary neo-Marxists who engage explicitly with the term ‘periphery’. While Lenin, Bukharin and Luxemburg (as well as Marx himself) are key intellectual referents for any discussion of imperialism, the term ‘periphery’, as a concept, is not fundamental in their work, as it is in the work of the dependency theorists inspired by their doctrines. For this reason, in this essay, I concentrate only on the latter. 6 For a full account, see Trevor Barnes and Claudio Minca, ‘Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103.3 (2013): 669–87. 7 Jawaharlal Nehru is an example. Rothermund reports on his 1961 conversations with him: ‘I could see how much he was affected by these optimistic theories of global progress. He was a great believer in the benefits of industrialization, and he hoped that India would catch up; a “take-off into self-sustained growth” was precisely what he envisaged for his country.’ Rothermund, ‘Evolution of the Centre-Periphery’, 76. 8 See, for instance, Andre Gunder Frank, ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’, Monthly Review 18.4 (1966): 17–31. 9 Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 227–8. 10 His expulsion from Jamaica in 1968 prompted civil unrest known as the Rodney Riots. 11 Frank, Latin America, vii. 12 ‘Centro’ meaning both ‘centre’ and ‘core’ in Spanish; English language literature influenced by the dependentistas tends to switch easily between one term and the other. 13 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 133. 14 For further reference, see the following works by Wallerstein: The Modern WorldSystem I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (London: Duke University Press, 2004); The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980). See also Giovanni Arrighi and Walter L., eds., Journal of World-Systems Research (Festschrift for Immanuel Wallerstein, Part I) 6.2 (2000). 15 One important way in which this complex system of historical dynamics moves beyond the dependentista core-periphery dualism is in the third category of ‘semiperipheral’ territories. ‘Semi-peripheral’ spaces do not, for Wallerstein, represent a splitting of the difference between core and periphery, but rather a structural position in its own right, emerging coevally with them at the moment of capitalism’s emergence as world-system. In Wallerstein’s theoretical armature, the ‘semiperiphery’ – with territories on their way up or down in the hierarchy of the worldsystem – functioned as a key mediating element in the gradual changes to the system. Semi-peripheries, in political terms, served the function of system stabilization. 16 For an overview of criticisms of world-systems theory, see Walter L. Goldfrank, ‘Paradigm Regained? The Rules of Wallerstein’s World-System Method’, Journal of World-Systems Research (Festschrift for Immanuel Wallerstein Part I) 6.2 (Summer–

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19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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Fall 2000): 188–93 (150–95); and Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 19–22. The ‘theory’ wave of the postcolonial came later than elsewhere because, as Appiah has suggested, postcolonial studies (beginning in 1978 with Said’s classic) emerged largely out of – and in imitation of – the postmodern, as a geo-culturally hyphened version of the latter. Numerous authors have criticized postcolonialism’s dubious ideological complicities in what is now a long-standing debate between ‘theory’inclined scholars and neo-Marxist currents. See Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’ Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 336–57. And for one of the most recent and notable critiques of postcolonialism in that context see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013). A case in point is Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Young literally inverts the history vs language hierarchy by engaging in a metaphor that will help his implied readership (young US college students) to identify with the field. He compares the historical experience of subalterns in formerly colonized territories to the readers’ potential experiences of exclusion in their daily lives. The metaphor turns into a metonymic displacement when Young assures his readers that, in engaging with postcolonial studies, they will gain access to ‘a language and a politics in which your interests come first, not last’ (p. 2, emphasis added). Bill Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (1998; London and New York: Routledge, 2007), iiv. Take, for example, the edited volume Peripheral Centres. In the preface, Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn interrogates ‘the validity of the center-periphery paradigm within the context of contemporary globalization processes’. She is concerned with the question: ‘can the binarism of a colonially-predicated center and its subordinated periphery continue to be used as an analytic tool in today’s global situation which is increasingly marked by unprecedented shifts in power structures, be they political, economic or cultural?’ (p. 1). Edward Said, Cindi Katz and Neil Smith, ‘An Interview with Edward Said’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 (2003): 647–8 (635–51). Timothy Brennan, ‘The Economic Image-Function of the Periphery’, in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 100. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 117. See Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II. On the New International Division of Labor, see Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, The New International Division of Labour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 39. In contemporary academic narratives, Africa’s catachrestic exclusion from the worldsystem is also reproduced. Ferguson has argued: ‘When recent globalization theorists have addressed Africa, it has typically been as a negative case: an example of the price of the failure to globalize, as the IMF would have it; a “global ghetto” abandoned by capitalism, as the geographer Neil Smith (1997) would insist; a continent of “wasted lives” of no use to the capitalist world economy, as Zygmunt Bauman (2004) has recently suggested; or as “the black hole of information society,” as Manuel Castells

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(2000) would have it. Such negative characterizations risk ignoring the social, political, and institutional specificity of Africa and reinventing Africa as a twentyfirst century “dark continent”.’ Ferguson, Global Shadows, 29. 29 Because Africa does not fit existing models, Ferguson argues that it is an ‘inconvenient continent’ for globalization scholars: ‘not a lamentably immature form of globalization, but a quite “advanced” and sophisticated mutation of it’. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 41–2. 30 See Jean and John Comaroff, Theory from the South, or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012), 156, 163. They have suggested, the conjuration of the spectral is intimately linked with the ‘experiential contradictions’ of life in times of speculative capital, a popular anxiety epitomized in the overflow of ostensible zombie apparitions (embodying ‘the fear of being reduced to ghost labor’) in South Africa in recent years.

8

Exception Justin Clemens

The word ‘exception’ is unexceptionally common in English, as are its cognates in many other European languages.1 Even the briefest reflection turns up a slew of idioms and instances. ‘I take exception to that,’ one might say in response to an offensive or unjustifiable claim. ‘We can’t make an exception for anybody,’ the administrator remarks, citing the non-negotiability of process as a principle of equity. ‘It’s the exception that proves the rule,’ an interlocutor protests when I mention a counterexample. A programmer friend might be working on an ‘exception handling’ routine. ‘She is an exceptional student,’ I read in a personal reference. The Oxford English Dictionary pitilessly enumerates the diverse senses of exception as an abstract noun, including: ‘the action of excepting (a person or thing, a particular case) from the scope of a proposition, rule, etc.; the state or fact of being so excepted’; ‘something that is excepted; a particular case which comes within the terms of a rule, but to which the rule is not applicable’; ‘something abnormal or unusual’; ‘a plea made by a defendant in bar of the plaintiff ’s action’; ‘a plea tending to evade the force of an opponent’s argument’; ‘objection, demur, faultfinding’; ‘to make objection to, find fault with, disapprove’; and so on. The word’s etymology is straightforward. Exception enters English from Norman-French, a derivation from the Latin exceptio, comprised of ex-, out and capere, to take. Its semantic penumbra pulses with such words as ‘exceptionable’ and ‘exemption’ (from eximere, ‘remove, take out’) but also (as we shall see further below) to words such as ‘disposition’ (‘to put in order’, ‘inclination’, ‘transfer’). There is a remarkable – exceptional?! – range of situations in which the word is unremarkably, and perhaps even unreflectively, used. ‘Exceptions’ emerge at home and in the workplace, in legal and technical jargon, in ethical and political regimes, in serious and playful contexts. In the handful of examples given above, note not only the semantic and referential range of the word itself, but the set of verbs with which it can be effectively coupled: to take, to make, to be, to prove, to handle and so on. This set is by no means neutral, but comprised of verbs absolutely central to IndoEuropean languages (being, making, proving, taking, etc.). Following through some of the implications is instructive. In everyday and professional idioms, the exception makes a regular appearance. ‘She is an exceptional student’ suggests that a field of comparability of units, in this

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case, students, has been established, in which the person so designated is at the higher end of the distribution. Here, the exception designates an evaluation that is not dialectical or excluded from the field, but one of a subclass of special instances that is immanent to and consistent with the field itself. If this evaluation, therefore, presumes at least some kind of statistical regularity, it also, oddly enough, implies a certain non-comparability: this student, qua exceptional, is also beyond comparison with the other students, to the extent that it might be considered a disservice or falsification even to compare them. We find here – in a vague but definite fashion – a recurrent paradox of the exception, functioning irreducibly at once inside and outside the field for which it is an exception, simultaneously in relation and not in relation to these other terms. We can find comparable senses of exception turning up in all sorts of places: for example, in race and gender theory, where such paradoxes are often correlated with bitter struggles over affirmative action on the one hand and hierarchical divisions internal to marginal communities, on the other. In the former case, the difficulties stem from the necessity to treat certain persons differently in the name of rectifying inequality; this, at least in the eyes of its opponents, can then appear or be presented as a form of iniquitous exceptionalism in turn.2 In the latter case, one of the greatest literary examples is surely Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where the elegant Swann fits Hannah Arendt’s nomination of ‘exception Jews’: those members of a socially and politically marginalized population who, through wealth, education, luck and ambition, have managed to separate themselves from their community, thereby also taking on a sense of their own superiority.3 Yet such a separation remains ambiguous at best. As Proust’s novel (and Arendt’s study) testifies, such a status is constitutively volatile, can rapidly collapse or mutate, and is often easily instrumentalized as a target by a variety of social and political interests. This structure of exception as a polemical medium seems to hold across very many regimes of human action. ‘I take exception,’ for instance, which, if it now generally has the quotidian sense of ‘I am offended by and repudiate that imputation,’ has an august history stemming back to Roman law, where the exceptio or defence has an absolutely crucial function. In the classical period, civil procedure was dominated by the formulary system, which took place in two moments. The first was before the praetor, in which plaintiff, defendant and praetor contributed to the construction of the legal formula upon which the judge would decide in a second moment. These ‘formulae were built up of clauses, some mandatory, others optional, so as to encapsulate in a single sentence all the issues which the judge must determine’.4 The defendant might enter an exception to the plaintiff ’s charges in discussion with the praetor. In Adolf Berger’s summation, the exceptio was: A defense opposed by the defendant to the plaintiff ’s claim to render it ineffective and exclude the defendant’s condemnation as demanded by the plaintiff in the INTENTIO of the procedural formula. Formally the exceptio was a clause in the formula containing an assertion of the defendant who, without denying the plaintiff ’s claim in principle, opposed to it a legal provision (e.g., exceptio legis Cinciae, or legis Plaetoriae) or a fact not alleged by the plaintiff.5

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Following the classical period, the term exceptio expanded to apply to any kind of defence by the defendant. Moreover, accompanying the large number and variety of exceptiones to be found in Roman law are a number of other personages and provisions that, if technically and procedurally different from the exceptions themselves, share a similar sense of something that peremptorily neutralizes, modifies or is subtracted from an accusation or a regime of law. So we find exceptae personae, ‘certain persons or groups to whom some legal prohibitions were not applied’, the excipere, ‘to oppose an exception against the claim of the plaintiff ’, the excludere, ‘to exclude a person from certain legal benefits or from the use of a procedural remedy’, the exemptio, ‘taking away a person summoned to court, by force or fraud to frustrate the summons and make impossible his appearance before the magistrate’, and so on.6 Whether functioning as nullifying a charge, specifying a proper zone of application or subtracting certain persons, the exception is an explicit, integral and integrated moment of the process of law. The discipline includes the ‘exception’ as part of its normal functioning; indeed, law is founded on a problematic of exceptionality, all the way down. If, from the point of society in general, ‘crime’ might be considered exceptional – perhaps in the sense of being linked to contingent acts that contravene or disrupt the practical or idealized order of the polis or socius – the law takes crime as its own norm and foundation. Law might be considered that paradoxical zone of the polity which establishes and defends the norms of the polity itself through producing exceptions which threaten it. Leaving such speculative gestures aside, I will return to this question of the relation of the exception to law in more detail below. In computing hardware and software the role played by the exception is of particular interest, because modern technology introduces decisive new requirements in the establishment and handling of precision. Take the treatment of real numbers. ‘Floating-point arithmetic’ concerns a method of representing real numbers by approximations, crucial for computing, as ‘computers cannot represent real or complex numbers exactly’.7 Here one of the key issues derives from a basic feature of real numbers: we know that each number is absolutely unique but that its representation is necessarily problematic. To how many decimal places do we go, for example? Hence the development of routines that are unprecedentedly precise compared to all previous modes, because they so rigorously and carefully specify how imprecise the representations they produce must be. Yet these operations of precise imprecision simultaneously create new regimes of exception. Floating-point computation can run into certain problems: mathematically undefined operations, such as division by zero; well-defined but unsupported operations within the specific format, such as complex numbers; operations producing results unrepresentable within the format, such as being out of an intended range.8 Since such exceptions can threaten all sorts of disaster, the very possibility of their occurring must be taken into account in advance: this is so-called exception handling. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) created a standard for floating-point arithmetic in 1985. This standard is IEEE 754, which has now been adopted as the international standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 60559: 2011 for computing.9 In IEEE 754, an exception is defined as ‘an event that occurs when an operation on some particular operands has no outcome suitable for every reasonable application’.

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In this case, what is exceptional is essentially the inapplicability of an algorithmically generated result to the totality of its references: it requires the exception to be specially noted as exception and the referral to an appropriate subroutine to ensure continuing normal functioning. Let us also underline in passing the appearance of the term ‘event’ here, which expressly underlines, first and foremost, the link between an exception and contingency, as well as the need for a supplementary operation to handle it. This advance handling of exceptions invariably opens further difficulties. One commonly noted software issue is known as ‘the semipredicate problem’. As Mark Jason Dominus explains: ‘A predicate is a function that returns a Boolean value. A semipredicate can return a specific false value, indicating failure, or one of many meaningful true values, indicating success … We get into trouble when 0 is also one of the true values, because we can’t distinguish it from the 0 that means false.’10 What happens here is something like one of the paradoxes of indiscernibility that so exercised Leibniz: the very signs used to mark an exception (error, failure, undesirable results, etc.) belong to the accepted set of signs that emerge in standard functioning; this may naturally lead to the amplification of error through the reiteration of the sign of the false as if it were a mode of the true. Such problems – at the very least – suggest how the vital attempts to account in advance for the irreducible possibility of exceptions are themselves generative of new distinctions and new operations that, in turn, force out new exceptions, even new kinds of exception in an unending exacerbation of exceptions-to-the-exception. Each of the above examples – drawn from the spheres of quotidian professional life (that is, of inculcated-but-unreflective-daily-praxis), social and political struggles (concerning the relations between equality and separation within communities), Roman law (from which the word derives in many modern European languages, giving the sense of an intra-legal defence), and computer programming (now a condition of all forms of contemporary action) – offer important lessons regarding the significance of the exception. Perhaps most fundamentally, they suggest that an ‘exception’ can only emerge – and indeed cannot not emerge – with respect to an order of some kind. Whether that order is natural, social, legal, political, mathematical or of some other kind, an exception is a virtual consequence of ordering itself. This may seem the most banal remark imaginable, for it is surely a matter of definition that an exception can only be so with respect to an established norm or set of norms. The point here, however, is stronger: it is that any order produces exceptions, as if by ‘necessity’. Second, every exception is therefore both inside and outside the order for which it is an exception. Third, the possibility of exceptions requires the order to account for them, according to one or another supplementary operation. Fourth, if any order generates the possibility of exceptions in a general sense, any actual exception must be singular and contingent. Fifth, every singular exception must not only present locally but implicates the order as a whole. Sixth, something essential about ordering in general and any order in particular is illuminated by its exceptions, as well as how that order handles exceptions. Seventh, however, not all exceptions may be of the same order of exceptionality – opening the rather silly but nonetheless inexpungible question of whether there are in fact exceptions to any putative general law of the exception.

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Yet it is also because of the exception’s apparent universal import that one might start to suspect its value as a general category. What are the differences between the mere occurrence or actuality of exceptions and their explicit thematization and anticipation within an order (e.g., the reflexive attention to exceptions)? Are some orders or kinds of order more ‘tolerant’ of exceptions than other orders? Is the exception everywhere today because the exception has been normalized? If so, does this normalization of the exception make our times exceptional? From what perspective can such questions even be plausibly approached? Let me give an example from a relatively recent commentary on the work of Martin Heidegger, from which the lessons to be drawn are by no means limited to this particular metaphysical context. In Heidegger on Being and Acting, Reiner Schürmann, while tracing out Heidegger’s trail of the multiplicity and mutations of primordial metaphysical terms such as archē across Western history, pauses to comment on Duns Scotus’s revisioning of Aristotle: ‘Wherever there prevails an order, the manifold is referred to a first. Analogy in predication excludes pure and simple diversity. The order begins when a principle commands. This is the way substance imposes its order on accidents and God … his order on entities.’11 God, in other words, is a chronologically prior principle that, in commanding, creates the order for which it is an exception and from which it excepts itself. Yet, in doing so, God in Scotus functions altogether differently from substance in Aristotle, as do their respective constructions of priority and precedence regarding the functioning of principium and archē. This is the case even though Aristotle is expressly the origin and licenser of Scotus’s propositions. Yet not only does Scotus radicalize the gap between substance and accidents in a fashion that would be incomprehensible to Aristotle, but how they each relate inception and precedence is incommensurable. For Scotus, God functions something like the ways in which we have been speaking about the exception, although with specifics that make it irreducible to legal or technological dispositions. As for Aristotle, it is hardly clear that, say, hypokemeinon or even the primum mobile count as exceptions to the cosmos which they underlie or put into movement. What Schürmann’s account then suggests is that any attempt at a general theory of the exception is going to run into serious difficulties, not least because each historicalmetaphysical site instantiates an utterly different (non)relation of being and beings, at the same moment that each site is implicated in an extremely complex forwardand-backward manner with its antecedents and descendants. Is the ‘exception’ even a coherent or consistent category? Even if we could agree that it is, it may still not give us access to the most fundamental or interesting questions about, say, a theological structure. In other words, the question of how something becomes an exception also becomes paramount in this optic. It is then clearly not enough to speak of an exception as such, but necessary to examine the substructure or structuring of the becomingexception of the exception. These questions have become among the most pressing and important of our time. I will give two examples of contemporary thinkers – Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou – for whom the examination of ‘the substructure of the becoming-exception of the exception’ is not merely an intellectual exercise, but absolutely paramount for understanding and undertaking experiments in praxis across all aspects of human

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life. Indeed, these thinkers have become so influential partially because of their rethinking of the category of the exception. Both proffer radical theses regarding the constitution, extension and operations of the exception, which link it to a wide range of other thematics. Just as significantly, their accounts of these operations are radically different. I will discuss their work in turn, before concluding with a summary of some implications of the use of the category of the exception today. *** Agamben’s writings on the exception intermix metaphysical, theological, political and legal themes. Influenced by Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger, the development of Agamben’s own work from the late 1960s to the present can be assigned a provisional caesura with his controversial study Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1996). It is precisely in this book that he establishes the basic lineaments of his account of the relationship between biopolitics and sovereignty, which crucially depends upon the category of the exception. Agamben’s investigation begins in the wake of a problem opened by Foucault’s famous distinction between sovereignty and biopolitics: the former concerns a particular sequence of European history in which power, focused on the body (or bodies) of the monarch and the transgressions of his subjects, expresses itself most forcefully in the spectacular public punishment of criminal infractions; the second, by contrast, is identified with complex post-Romantic European societies in which disciplinary regimes infiltrate and inform, by a variety of surveillance and associated technologies, the lives of persons and populations. Foucault himself indicated that this radical transformation of power relations should also transform the methods of power’s study. For example, political theorists should no longer pose questions of legitimacy with an eye to the centrality of the state but examine technical modulations in the realm of a generalized governmentality. Where Foucault sought to disentangle the themes of state and biopower by severely circumscribing the limits of the former, Agamben wishes to reunite them: ‘[T]he two analyses [of sovereignty and biopower] cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.’12 One should mark here Agamben’s deployment of a Heideggerean approach to the metaphysics of distinction-making: what were discrete periods, powers and methods for Foucault are reconsidered according to a more complex historical destiny, dating back to the establishment of Western philosophy with the Greeks. Agamben uses Foucault to renovate the study of the operations of power relations by turning him against himself, against his own separatism and supersessionism, by reactivating a kind of Heideggerean historicity. Yet Agamben also relies heavily upon Benjamin’s work. Take the latter’s famous analyses in The Origins of German Tragic Drama (1925), where he identifies a particular shift in the structure of sovereignty:

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Whereas the modern concept of sovereignty amounts to a supreme executive power on the part of the prince, the baroque concept emerges from a discussion of the state of emergency, and makes it the most important function of the prince to avert this. The ruler is designated from the outset as the holder of dictatorial power if war, revolt, or other catastrophes should lead to a state of emergency.13

A ‘state of emergency’ is a quasi-technical term in European statecraft (of which more below). It designates, among other things, the declaration of martial law, the suspension of personal liberties and the devolution of full powers to an executive. If the power of the baroque sovereign is tied to the very catastrophes he is enjoined to avert, Agamben takes up this antinomy in order to articulate it with the larger history that he wants to tell. The ‘state of emergency’ also recurs in Benjamin’s well-known aphorism in his eighth thesis on the concept of history, where he announces: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.’14 From Benjamin, Agamben draws three lessons, the first of content, the second of development, the third of method. The first is that the sovereign and the state of emergency are essentially related, even when (they present as) antinomies; the second is that this relation mutates over time; and the third is that this relation, whatever its mutations, somehow remains at the very heart of the question of politics tout court. There is perhaps a fourth lesson, too: the proper perspective is, in Benjamin’s own view, history from below, the tradition of the oppressed. As the eighth thesis continues: ‘[I]t is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in this struggle against fascism.’15 This gives a fundamental emancipatory basis to the insight that what is supposedly ‘exception’ is and has always been the rule, at least for those who are the real subjects of power. We now have almost all the elements of Agamben’s project to see how and why the exception arises as a key category in his thought: from Foucault, the themes of sovereignty and biopolitics; from Heidegger, the necessity of a deeper history of their mutual becoming, demanding philological and conceptual reconstructions as well as empirical narration; from Benjamin, the exigency of the state of emergency as not merely a possibility inscribed in sovereignty itself, one only sporadically activated, but in fact a rule-masquerading-as-exception. Agamben here returns to the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt – whose own Nazi commitments should continue to give commentators pause for thought16 – in such a way as to incorporate Schmitt’s central category of ‘exception’, while disentangling the concept from some of its implicit reactionary intonations. Famously, the first line of the first essay in Schmitt’s little treatise Political Theology (1922) reads: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the [state of] exception’ [Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet].17 Schmitt immediately clarifies his own theoretical attitude, which, if expressly juridical, designates, from within the law, a borderline of the law itself: the exception is foundational for the very law that it exceeds. It is, says Schmitt, neither vague nor a construct, but a general concept simultaneously tied to concrete cases. As such, its extremity is keyed to the emergencies of the state itself under conditions of conflict and crisis. The exception is therefore the place at

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which law touches on its outside, upon that which Schmitt considered the very essence of the political. But it is not only the limits of law and the properly political decision that are at stake for Schmitt: theology underpins the lot. As Schmitt declares: ‘The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.’18 Schmitt’s language here is decisive: the exception is ‘more interesting [interessanter]’, ‘proves everything [beweist alles]’, and the means by which ‘real life [wirklichen Lebens]’ interrupts the mechanistic repetition of mere legalism. Given the oppositions at work in this passage – particularly that between mechanical repetition and vital force – Schmitt’s proposal is in some ways analogous to any number of contemporaneous theories across a range of fields, for instance, those of the Russian Formalists regarding the literary potential of ostranenie or defamiliarization.19 The powers of the sovereign exception are analogous to those of literary form. Schmitt concludes his essay with an explicit citation from Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition. Repetition (1843) is itself a notoriously complicated text, composed of various genres, and assembled under a pseudonym. The moment to which Schmitt alludes here is in the ‘Concluding Letter’ by ‘Constantin Constantius’, addressed to ‘Mr X, esq., the real reader of this book’. The letter contains a brief but tangled expectoration concerning the peculiarities of the dialectical relation of the exception and the universal, including the following passage: The exception also thinks the universal in that he thinks himself through; he works for the universal in that he works himself through; he explains the universal in that he explains himself. Consequently, the exception explains the universal and himself, and if one really wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception; he discloses everything far more clearly than the universal himself.20

One can easily see Kierkegaard’s direct influence upon Schmitt, but also the latter’s significant departures from his predecessor. Schmitt affirms the crucial inversion and displacement effected by Kierkegaard regarding the exception as a figure or agent. The exception is an actual instance, which exposes and analyses its own background conditions (of genre, tradition, law, expectation, etc.), precisely by suspending their dictates; in doing so, the exception also really brings about, incarnates, a limit to their effectiveness. For Schmitt especially, the repetition machine of law as a whole is suspended in the sovereign act of decision, which returns life to the community under conditions of a critical threat to that community. Crucially, the decision does not simply destroy the law but preserves the existence of the law in toto while rendering it inapplicable. Let us emphasize here the vitalism of Schmitt’s position on sovereignty, as well as its Romanticism – despite Schmitt’s own violently expressed rejection of Romanticism. But we also need to emphasize its theological aspects. As Schmitt remarks: ‘All significant

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concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.’21 For Schmitt, both genesis and structure are therefore implicated in the becoming-political of theology, to the point where the homology between the sovereign and God could not be clearer: the decision is and must be thought as a miracle. And the concept that binds all these elements of history, system, politics, theology, law and life into a coherent account of human action is the exception. It is clear that Schmitt’s identification of law, repetition and automatism, and their opposition and subordination to sovereignty, decision and life, cannot be sustained. Moreover, as per Benjamin’s remarks in his ‘Critique of Violence’ and elsewhere concerning the putative sacrality of life, or indeed Foucault’s critiques of biopower, the value of ‘life’ itself is not only highly questionable, but indeed must be seen as the essential material and object of the ‘machinery’ of contemporary power.22 From this perspective, it is Schmitt’s most reactionary elements that his vitalism expresses. For the supposedly sovereign ‘suspension’ of law is better understood as a moment of governmental expansion, rather than as the expression of a political revivification. While agreeing with Schmitt that the exception as suspension is the essence of sovereignty, Agamben gives Schmitt’s theses a decisive twist. Instead of being opposed to the rule of law that it intermittently suspends, Agamben identifies the exception as in systematic solidarity with its apparent antithesis. The exception functions by a designation of life by the law, a life from which the law immediately withdraws its prohibitions and protections. Hence the now-notorious figure of the homo sacer, ‘sacred man’, a figure from Roman law who is defined as somebody who might be killed but not sacrificed – that is, a human to which anybody might now do anything, without those acts being punishable by law. The law operates most forcefully in its withdrawal (abandonment, suspension), not its imposition. As Agamben puts it in a complex but perspicuous formula: ‘The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.’23 It is therefore crucial to underline the peculiar topology of the exception, which does not conform to classical Aristotelian logic, for here the antitheses function as a single machine. This structure or paradigm has developed over time: from the lonely Roman figure of homo sacer, through the medieval strictures concerning outlaws and wolf-men, the epoch of European revolutions which inscribe blood and soil in the definition of a people, up to the mass exterminations and denationalizations of twentieth-century fascisms, and into our own obscure present in which a kind of continual global civil war is regnant. From the ancient forms of executive or sovereign suspension of law in rare cases of political emergency, often with respect to well-delimited figures or crises, the situation today has turned into a kind of permanent global suspension of the law, opening up a radically unlimited sphere of possible and actual objects as its sacred vital matter: refugees, terrorists, ordinary persons.24 Agamben – like the other thinkers upon whom he relies – is not simply describing the world, but seeking to change it. Given the deleterious operations of the exception,

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then, Agamben simultaneously commits himself to bringing about an exceptionto-the-exception.25 Perhaps his most explicit account of what this might involve emerges in his study of St Paul in The Time That Remains (2000), where he examines the messianic ‘katargesis’, which Paul presents as simultaneously a suspension and a fulfilment of the law.26 But, Agamben asks, how does this differ from the fundamental operation of the exception as such? On the face of it, the exception and the messiah could seem homologous, just as the exception and the miracle are for Schmitt. For Agamben, however, there must be something to distinguish them, according to Benjamin’s own guiding principle that between our world and the messianic world there will be only an infinitesimal, if absolute difference. Here, the problem encounters another non-classical form of negation: what Agamben isolates in Paul’s strange little syntagm hos me, ‘as not’. In Agamben’s account, precisely because neither Jews nor non-Jews can be told apart in the state of exception, Paul must posit what he calls ‘a remnant’. Agamben explains: ‘This remnant – the non-non-Jews – is neither properly inside nor outside … The remnant is an exception taken to its extreme, pushed to its paradoxical formulation.’27 This ‘as not’ or ‘non-non’ is thus one of the formulae that Agamben provides for the messianic exception-to-the-exception, not a simple negation of the law but its ultimate realization.28 To sum up: for Agamben, the exception is the fundamental operation of ‘the political’, established in antiquity and globalized today. The exception is the modality by which law and life are integrated with one another: the law certainly imposes, prohibits, commands, judges, punishes and so forth, but its essential operation is the making-sacred of life, by designating and delimiting the creatures and territories from which it expressly withdraws. The essence of the exception is this self-suspension of the law with regard to life. This renders the history of politics at once continuous insofar as it is subject to this paradigm and hyper-differentiated, insofar as the modalities of its presentation undergo quite strenuous mutations over time. Today, we have arrived at an indistinguishability of legal and illegal actions, a confusion of executive and legislative power, the unceasing upsurge of extreme violence that is at once alegal and anomic, and a separation of law from the force-of-law. *** Whereas Agamben identifies the structure of the exception in political sovereignty with this self-suspending movement of the inclusive exclusion of life in law, Badiou separates the exception from this tight bond with politics, particularly in his thinking of action in zones that have nothing to do with politics proper. For Badiou, it is not sovereignty, but truth that is exceptional; indeed, truth is a process of self-exception from the law of the One. There are four, and only four, kinds of exception – science, love, art and politics – which direct Badiou’s account. Furthermore, there are two separate but compatible philosophical models of the exception in Badiou’s work: one deriving from the question of being and truth, which he treats mathematically in Being and Event (1988); the other on the question of appearing and truth, which he treats logically in Logics of Worlds (2006).29 Both accounts are highly technical, and due to

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the limited scope of the present context, I only sketch the first of these here, in as nontechnical a fashion as possible, which brings with it certain unavoidable simplifications. Although there has been a great deal of controversy over Badiou’s claim that ‘mathematics is ontology’, philosophy, from the Pythagoreans onwards, has always insisted on the fundamental importance of ‘mathematics’ (and ‘logic’) as integral to demonstrations of reason. If there are perhaps as many justifications for this general approach as there are philosophers, one can, in this context, adduce the following: such science is held to be independent of any particular personal or social inheritances; it is declarative and demonstrative, having to lay out all its presuppositions and prove its theorems step by step; in so doing, it becomes the model of consistency for all thinking. For Badiou, moreover, mathematics is not simply a model of reason but, in its axiomatic and systematized forms, makes claims not only about the consistency of possible worlds (a feature that it shares with logic), but about actual worlds as well. For Badiou, notoriously, it is set theory in particular that serves this function of rational necessity for our era. There are a number of reasons for this claim. Set theory is an axiomatized, foundational mathematics that, following its emergence in the late nineteenth century with Georg Cantor, is the first form of thought to rationalize infinity. If infinity has also been a crucial topic for mathematical and philosophical thought since antiquity – from Zeno’s paradoxes, through Aristotle’s apeiron, to scholastic and Renaissance theories of God as the infinite exception to the finite – it had only been able to enter mathematics proper as a paradox. Galileo, for one, had given both geometrical and arithmetical proofs that, when dealing with the infinite, we at once encounter the scandal that, say, there are as many squares (1, 4, 9, … ) as there are natural numbers (1, 2, 3, … ), even though intuition immediately objects that there must be many more of the latter than the former: in fact, the set of squares is a proper subset of the natural numbers. In a sequence of extraordinary demonstrations, however, Cantor showed that the ‘number’ (technically, the ‘cardinality’) of natural numbers, if infinite, must be ‘smaller than’ the number of real numbers (the number of points in a continuous line). Whatever the world-historical consequences for modern mathematics, Badiou emphasizes the consequences of Cantor’s demonstrations, and the subsequent development of set theory, for philosophy proper. Most importantly in the current context, infinity can no longer be thought of as an exception. On the contrary, infinity is now a banal, immanent determination of whatever exists. Infinity is radically pluralized: there is an unending hierarchy of ever-increasing infinities. As such, traditional identifications of infinity with ‘totality’, ‘the unlimited’, ‘the formless’ or ‘ineffable’ also cannot be maintained. So, if mathematics is indeed the model of consistent reasoning, philosophy must take on board these propositions as currently incontrovertible for us. Mathematics inscribes the necessity of Being. Badiou also strenuously underlines the systematic nature of axiomatized set theory. In the standard Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory upon which Badiou relies, there are nine basic axioms, each of which he transliterates into a formal philosophical lexicon. To give only a single example, a standard formulation of the axiom of the empty set might read: ‘There exists a set which has no members.’ In this case, Badiou rephrases this axiom as the existential assertion: ‘The empty set is the proper name of Being.’ What

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does this mean? Thinking encounters being at the place of the void (the empty set), out of which all sets in set theory are constructed, including infinite sets. The ancient philosophical category of ‘Being’ or ‘substance’ is thereby rigorously re-established on the basis of the void. Yet, in doing so, this void only appears insofar as it is ‘counted as one’: all sets are composed of their ‘members’ which, if they are ultimately founded upon the void, nonetheless must each be counted as one. The pure form of the one, that is, identity is itself non-negotiable. Comparable rewritings of other classical philosophical categories of ontology are accomplished in Badiou’s treatment of the other axioms.30 Let us pause for a moment on the implications this holds for the exception. For Badiou, it is crucial that mathematics functions as a very specific kind of absolutism: in mathematics, every point is rigorously established and held. We cannot simply protest that we do not like the sound of such claims: certainly, such dissent may well lead in turn to new developments in logic and mathematics (as was historically the case for twentieth-century intuitionist logics that reject the principle of excluded middle), but these must themselves submit to the travails of proof and demonstration to be anything more than irrational, inconsistent and irrelevant phantasms. Yet, if we left things here – the absoluteness of mathematics – we could give no account of how things change, not even of how mathematics itself changes. We would also thereby indiscriminate all forms of non-scientific presentation as phantasms of the same inconsistent kind: whether love, art, politics or what-have-you. There would be no exceptions. If certain philosophers have indeed held such positions, Badiou is not one of them. Indeed, he wants to show how ‘necessity’ can itself be transformed under the pressure of the work of truths. But to suggest this, he must also suggest that something must be able to happen; that is, an event of some kind must be able to occur. For that to be possible, it would have to evade the regime of consistency and the count-as-one; that is, it would have to be what is sometimes called ‘an extraordinary set’, one which belongs to itself. Yet the so-called axiom of foundation in ZF set theory precisely prohibits such an occurrence, as it ‘forecloses extraordinary sets from any existence … Ontology does not allow the existence, or the counting as one as sets in its axiomatic, of multiples which belong to themselves’.31 If an event can be said to happen, then, it must be that the axiom of foundation has somehow been suspended. The mechanism of such a suspension is perhaps not satisfactorily explained by Badiou, except by the invocation of ‘chance’. In any case, such a suspension is not enough, on its own, to account for real change. An event must occur. If such an event does indeed occur, it can have no ontological stability whatsoever, as that is still prohibited by the axiom of foundation. Its apparition must be fleeting, at once impossible and illegal: to encounter an event must be to be confronted by an undecidable. Although any event must be part of the situation in which it arises (otherwise there would be no form of presentation at all), it cannot simply belong to that situation (otherwise it would be subject to the count-for-one). Such an undecidable demands that a decision be made regarding its being, that is, does this non-thing belong to the situation or not? If not, then an event has not taken place, and the laws of the situation reassert themselves; if so, then the event is still annulled as event, precisely because it is held to belong to the situation. In the latter

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case, however, this supplement of the annulled-vanishing event finds a correlate in the birth of the subject. The subject is the function that emerges from an event by naming it. Such a subject, which has decided affirmatively regarding the belonging of the event to its situation, is then confronted by a pressing question: if such an event did happen, what are the consequences for my life, that is, for thought? Such a question instigates a process of inquiries by the subject regarding the world they are in. These inquiries are extra-rational, insofar as they by definition exceed the existing limits of the order of the world in which they take place; they are nonetheless not irrational, in that they emerge on the far side of that rationality; finally, the results of these inquiries contribute to the expansion of rationality itself, becoming part of the very world in which they take place. The movement of a truth process is what Badiou explicitly nominates as ‘subtractive’ and ‘exceptional’: a truth must subtract itself from being and knowledge of being, insofar as it begins in an undecidable event and proceeds through the subject’s discerning of an indiscernible, without any principle or predicates to support it; the ongoing succession of indiscernible choices starts to build a generic infinite set of references; yet such an infinity must also be limited, insofar as it contains a point that cannot be given any name without breaching one’s fidelity to the process. For Badiou, truths are exceptions to the law of being, which is mathematically established.32 *** Agamben’s claims regarding the exception take it as axiomatic that the establishment of its mechanisms was a local contingency that, in the contingencies of its further development, came to render itself a global necessity for us; and that, therefore, despite its current domination of our lives, must, in principle at least, be able to be displaced, even if such a displacement is risky, uncertain, difficult. Badiou, by contrast, takes mathematics as establishing necessity for thinking existence; it is by way of the contingent exceptions that are truths that such ‘necessity’ can itself be put to the test and transformed. These different theories nonetheless agree regarding the complexity of the topology of the exception and on the necessity of displacing necessity. If ‘the exception’ is likely to remain a crucial concept for our own time, it also suggests that thinking and action will have to find new ways to actualize any putative ‘exception-to-the-exception’. Such exceptions-to-the-exception will have to introduce new kinds of multiplicity, through forms of negation that are not reducible to opposition, contradiction or exclusion, and through works of affirmation that are indiscernible, imperceptible, indifferent, subtractive or move transversally to established powers and techniques. If the current presentation has severely restricted its focus to a handful of treatments of the concept of the exception – and must on that basis alone be supposed seriously lacking – it has nonetheless sought to establish some fundamental signposts for further inquiry. I have tried to show and justify the centrality of the problematic of the exception today. I have noted how it arises in all sorts of fields, from ancient law to contemporary computing, from quotidian moments to political economy, whereby any ordering whatsoever produces some kind of exception. Such exceptions can be

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variously understood as confronting or affronting the closure of the order by a kind of necessity or even as part of the essential operations of order by a paradoxical solidaritythrough-contradiction. Yet I have also outlined theories that, if they take the exception as one of the most significant problems facing our contemporary era, do so by insisting upon examining the ‘substructure of the exception’. This requires drilling down into component categories such as suspension, contingency, undecidability, indiscernibility and inconsistency, among others. Above all, any attention to the exception today necessitates a new account of the role of negation, which is no longer reducible to the role it plays in classical Aristotelian logic. The ‘exception’ is an exception to the principle of noncontradiction, which cannot be salved by a reimposition of that same principle. Rather, the accounts presented here suggest that the ancient dialectic of identity and difference must also be re-examined. If ‘identity’ is already self-differing, ‘difference’ cannot in itself function as an affirmative motivation, ideal or goal for epistemological, ethical or political action. On the contrary, our contemporary attempts to think the exception reveal that to make a fetish of difference is in fact to affirm what George Meredith once called ‘the army of unalterable law’.33 The challenges are extreme: if one cannot simply oppose oneself to the force-of-law, which works by neutralizing what it seems to affirm, or which forecloses the void and the event, action will have to experiment with such routes as the non-non (Agamben) or the indiscernible (Badiou) in order to avoid the world’s stampede to the worst.

Notes 1 2

3 4

I would like to thank A. J. Bartlett, Nicholas Heron and Adam Nash for their extensive feedback on a draft version of this chapter. Although the word or concept of exception as I am analysing it here is not always named as such, the ambivalent actions of its structure are evident throughout the history of such reparative attempts, for example, as delineated by Dennis Deslippe, Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the Civil Rights Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958). David Johnston, Roman Law in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113. As George Mousourakis writes regarding the practice of stipulatio, which was often so highly formalized that it integrally repulsed any claims of circumstance: ‘no remedy was provided by the ius civile in such a case. If the parties had observed all the prescribed formalities, the validity of the contract could not be questioned. To rectify the situation, the praetor could use his own authority to include an additional clause (exceptio) in the relevant formula that enabled the defendant to render the plaintiff ’s claim ineffective by showing grounds for denying judgment in the plaintiff ’s favour … Granting exceptions was an ingenious device that enabled the praetor to deliver appropriate relief in individual cases without questioning the validity of the relevant legal rule.’ See George Mousourakis, Roman Law and the Origins of the Civil Law Tradition (London: Springer, 2015), 51.

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Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1953), 458. 6 Ibid., 458–62. 7 Lloyd N. Trefethen, ‘Numerical Analysis’, in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, ed. Timothy Gowers, June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 292 (291–5). 8 For a clear and constructive introduction to the issues, see David Goldberg, ‘What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating Point Arithmetic’, ACM Computing Surveys 23.1 (1991): 5–48. 9 See http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=30711&filter=AND%2 8p_Publication_Number:2355%29, accessed on 1 August 2018. 10 Mark Jason Dominus, Higher-Order Perl: A Guide to Program Transformation (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann, 2005), 107. 11 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 108. 12 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6. 13 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, intro. G. Steiner, trans. J. Osborne (London & New York: Verso, 1977), 65. 14 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. IV, 1938–1940, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 392. 15 Ibid. 16 See Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: A Biography, trans. Danie Steuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), for an extremely detailed account of Schmitt’s highly volatile antiSemitism and relationships with the Nazis. If Heidegger’s encounter with Nazism, too, has long been well known, its implications for the relation between politics and thinking have once again recently been raised by the publication of his so-called Black Notebooks. 17 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 5. 18 Ibid., 15. 19 As Fredric Jameson points out regarding defamiliarization: ‘Art is in this context a way of restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct (automatization, as the Czech Formalists will later call it), and allowing us to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror.’ The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 51. 20 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, introduction and notes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 227. 21 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 22 For further details, see the essays collected in Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani, eds., Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 23 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18. This also means: ‘If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law (Schmitt), or the supreme rule of the juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it’ (28). 24 See Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 49–50. In his more recent 5

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treatises, Agamben has extended his researches to the history of the economy. In this regard, it becomes noteworthy that the problematic of the economy and that of the exception have been entwined since at least the sixth or seventh centuries, e.g., ‘The meaning of “exception” acquired by the term oikonomia in the sixth or seventh century, especially in the field of the canon law of the Byzantine Church, is of particular interest for its semantic history. Here, the theological meaning of mysterious divine praxis undertaken for the salvation of humankind coalesces with the concepts of aequitas and epieikeia originating from Roman law, and comes to signify the dispensation [dispensa] that relieves one from a too rigid application of the canons.’ He immediately continues: ‘The paradigm of government and of the state of exception coincide in the idea of an oikonomia, an administrative praxis that governs the course of things, adapting at each turn, in its salvific intent, to the nature of the concrete situation against which it has to measure itself.’ 25 Here it is necessary to refer to Agamben’s truly astonishing reconstruction of ‘an esoteric dossier’ that reconfigures the relations between Schmitt and Benjamin, whereby ‘[t]he theory of sovereignty that Schmitt develops in his Political Theology can be read as a precise response to Benjamin’s essay [“Critique of Violence”].’ Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54; also passim, esp. Chapter 4, ‘Gigantomachy Concerning a Void’, 52–64). 26 See also Agamben’s various remarks on Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, whose eponymous protagonist exemplifies, through his notorious utterance ‘I would prefer not to,’ an essential possibility of action, precisely insofar as he ‘resists every possibility of deciding between potentiality and potentiality not to’. Nonetheless, Agamben immediately continues, linking Melville’s character to certain propositions of Schelling, Nietzsche and Heidegger: ‘[T]hese figures push the aporia of sovereignty to the limit but still do not completely free themselves from its ban.’ Homo Sacer, 48. 27 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 106. 28 At this point, Agamben is forced to note the proximity, indeed the genealogical affiliations, to another great figure of German idealism, G. W. F. Hegel, ‘The messianic plerōma of the law is an Aufhebung of the state of exception, an absolutizing of katargēsis’, Homo Sacer, 108. 29 See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2005); Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). 30 For a more extended account of Badiou’s thinking in this regard, see my own ‘Doubles of Nothing: The Problem of Binding Truth to Being in the Work of Alain Badiou’, Filozofski vestnik 26.2 (2005): 97–111. 31 Badiou, Being and Event, 190. 32 One of the clearest explications by Badiou of the aforementioned process can be found in the essay ‘Philosophy and Truth’, in Infinite Thought, trans. Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 47–55. 33 George Meredith, Poems (London: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 185.

9

Migration Migratory Aesthetics for New Visions Mieke Bal

Introduction This is not an essay on migration – a social-scientific discussion of the movement of people, sometimes durably relocating, sometimes moving on. Instead, as I am coming from the Humanities, it is migration’s visibility in the transformation of public space in the so-called host countries that is the subject of this chapter. To discuss the subtle phenomenon under scrutiny I have developed the concept of ‘migratory aesthetics’. This indicates transformation, our attitudes to it and the way it makes people and things visible. In the early 1990s, I read a passage, barely more than a sentence, from science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s autobiography The Motion of Light in Water (1987), quoted in an article by historian Joan W. Scott (1992). In this well-known article Scott persuasively argued for the need to historicize the category of experience. Yet, upon reading Delany’s excerpt, my associations went in a direction different from historicizing. I had the heady sensation of seeing a video. Rather than historicizing an experience, for me the sentence created an experience in the present, one that mobilized the senses. This, in turn, brought to mind the old meaning of aesthetics as the experience of binding through the senses. An experimental video is what I saw, in a Derek Jarman-like blue, within a double frame – the frame from wall to wall and the frame of his vision. A video of double movement, of light on water and of bodies. Standing on the threshold of a ‘gymsized room’, dimly lit by blue bulbs, Delany saw ‘an undulating mass of naked male bodies, spread wall to wall’.1 From Scott’s quotation I went to Delany’s book and found many passages that have this effect of double movement. And to my surprise, several concepts of this section of the book are present in the description. I can see a threshold in seeing, between concrete, figurative elements (bodies) and abstraction that makes seeing otherwise possible (an undulating mass … ). Wall to wall suggests I wrote a first, more extended version of this article for the catalogue of the exhibition mentioned in Note 5. Then I revised it for the present volume, but as such it is also many years behind.

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a beyond the wall (or the moment) when the periphery takes centre stage. The view itself poses the question of exception: one may never have seen and be surprised by such a spectacle before Delany created it in words, yet recognize it. This double relation is fundamental to the idea of exception. But what does it have to do with migration? Delany’s literary prose and its descriptive style flicker with points of light, experiment with colour, surface and skin, and make ordinary movements beautiful and strange. The experience was one of (multi-sensate) witnessing gay sex multiplied into power. Video, aesthetics and power: this begins to suggest a sense of political aesthetics or an aesthetic sense of politics. The meaning of politics, here, changes from state politics into a cultural politics everyone has access to as well as is subjected to. Although historically specific and presented as such, Delany’s act of focalizing the movement in the room was, before all else, an act of making visible; that is what makes it political. The libidinal saturation, he says, ‘was not only kinaesthetic but visible’.2 But, if making visible is a political act, in that it opens perception up to others, this political aspect is not the only one. The combination of kinaesthetic and visible: is this not a definition of the moving image? And, given the intimate, unprepared, informal and improvised nature of Delany’s look, coloured in blue, is this not specifically a definition of video as today’s medium? While steeped in narrative, the story recedes in the background, leaving a strong, physical sensation of image in movement luring the viewer into corners of life so far unseen and unvisited. In view of the exhibition I co-curated a few years ago, 2MOVE: Double Movement, Migratory Aesthetics, the passage remains in my mind as a prophetic memory – the kind that science fiction writing according to Delany would make possible. As he wrote himself in his reflection on video qua science fiction: ‘What is valuable about science fiction is not that it predicts new things … but rather that it presents a range of possibilities … that exercise and open up the imagination.’3 The ‘blue’ passage suggests the experience of seeing the hitherto unseen, hidden or veiled. To be an experience of empowerment, that experience, in addition to having to be historicized, needed to be kinetico-visualized, in other words, turned into a video. In retrospect, it prepared me to see movements in video, traces, made out of light not as records but as creations of hitherto unseen and invisible things-as-(to be)-experienced. The political aspect of Delany’s description – or rather, his vision – is, thus, at the same time its videographic one. Making visible unexpected things, in new ways that absorb an affective and empowering quality: this is quite precisely what I mean by the concept ‘migratory aesthetics’ that is the topic of this essay. It concerns the transformation of the look of the world once we transform our habits of looking.4 The phenomenon of migration, the movement of groups of people from one area to another, is as old as the world. It is only since the relatively recent development of the idea and institution of the nation state that it becomes problematic. It is only because currently large groups of migrants come to the wealthier and safer countries from impoverished or war-torn areas, confronting ‘us’ in these countries with the injustices committed in the past of colonialism and the ongoing deepening of the gaps of inequality promoted by unbridled capitalism, that wealthier nations feel guilty. It is only because in an increasingly hostile climate, migrants become targets for suspicion and sometimes also hostility, that politicians instil fear in people. It is only because

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a nostalgic but false collective memory makes people believe that there once was a ‘pure’ mono-culture that signs of foreignness are not appreciated as liveliness but as transgression. Yet we all know that attempts to produce a monoculture led to such horrors as Nazism and Apartheid, segregation and religious intolerance, tolerated racism, and the terror performed by groups such as Boko Haram and IS. Another pernicious misunderstanding about migration is to think it is by definition a problem. Of course, I don’t want to underestimate the difficulty many migrants encounter. But those hardships are unnecessary and unjust. If only host societies were able and encouraged to enjoy the opportunities of encounter migration brings, the hardships would vanish. For, in my view, migration is not only of all times, but it is a positive, enriching, enlivening and, indeed, emblematic part of any culture. People move. It’s what they do. I take it as my project to make this view into a tool for a drastic change of attitude. And to achieve this, I enlist art. Through art it is possible to release the imagination and muster it against indoctrination. In a project from 2004–8, consisting of a travelling video exhibition, two workshops and three book publications, Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro and I attempted to approach this issue of migratory culture positively and outside of currently widespread preconceptions. To make as clean as possible a break from these, we took a very different point of departure: we developed a positive view of migration in exploring the aesthetic connections between migration and video art – two forms of movement. Thinking art as cognitively productive, we deployed video art as a mode of ‘reading’ migration. The project was called ‘migratory aesthetics’. Key terms for our search were ‘movement’, ‘time’, ‘memory’ and ‘contact’. Together, these terms indicate what can make migration a stimulus to transformation, of the aesthetic of the world, and of our attitude towards that change. Drawing on this earlier work in this chapter, I suggest that not the movement itself but the way it is denaturalized begins to demonstrate a specific bond between video and migratory culture, and by extension, allows us to see migration in an artistic light that makes new visions possible. Thus, movement becomes itself a medium. This denaturalizing process is due to the superposition of the two terms of the project – ‘aesthetics’ and the ‘migratory’. I refer to ‘aesthetics’ not as a philosophical domain, but rather, according to its traditional meaning, as an experience of sensate binding, a connectivity based on the senses; and the ‘-s’ at the end of the word is meant to indicate the plural form, not the ‘science of ’ or meta-meaning. ‘Migratory’ does not claim to account for the actual experiences of migrants but instead refers to the public domain we all share and where we encounter the traces, equally sensate, of the movements of migration that characterize culture as by definition diverse, a meeting ground rather than something fixed. Both terms are programmatic: different aesthetic experiences are offered through the encounter with such traces.5

Time and abstraction revisited To demonstrate the epistemological value of video art in understanding migration, I begin with Dutch artist Roos Theuws’s work Gaussian Blur (Figure 9.1), without doubt the most ‘difficult’ work we had in the exhibition, and the least thematically related to

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Figure 9.1  Roos Theuws, Gaussian Blur.

migration. This work, on one level, is simply a beautiful depiction of figurative tableaux, almost but unsettlingly not quite still: children, a horse, grass, trees. Due to the layered, experimental editing, the video work is clearly ‘abstract’. Instead of a resistance to form, as the opposite of figuration, abstraction is here the opening up, even within traditional forms, of the potential for new, not-yet-invented forms.6 The prominent tool to open form up to the as-yet unformed is surface. The blistered skin of the video not only makes the images less readable. It also makes them richer in forms, each layer offering its own form, not quite visible but most surely already burst open, ready for the viewer to see if she is willing to abandon perceptive mastery. What Theuws’s video does is open the door to a mode of looking that I like to see as both abstract and, I contend, thereby political in four ways. Theuws’s work explores that fourfold abstraction and thereby describes, by means of light, the heart of migratory aesthetics. The first mode engages movement on the dual level of the images and its figures, as well as between these. They are moving out of sync. As a result, the expected is veiled, so that the new comes to visibility. Forms of life not yet visible are looked into existence through this tool of movement for the political. Second, this work solicits a way of looking because it is abstract in the sense of showing glimpses of possible new forms, in terms of a splitting or doubling of time, through a ‘technics of time’ that over-layers fast (flickering) and slow (dreamy). Temporalities that are ordinarily distinct mingle uneasily.7

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Third, looking at (moving) images is steeped in memory, guided by acts of remembering and forgetting. Here, memories of paintings seen and of childhood experiences of pleasure and danger are evoked. Memory – and the veil of forgetting that inevitably obscures or contradicts it – is another key to migratory experience and its traces in the aesthetics of the migratory world. Memory in video often concerns someone else’s past, someone else’s memories, which, as a viewer, you cannot recall at all. These memories, in contrast, happen for the first time. Yet they are inalienably anchored in the alter-memory or hetero-memory that the exposure to the work stages for us. Developing and encouraging such hetero-memories contributes to a more coherent social fabric, hence its political potential, especially in view of migration. Last but not least, this is emphatically and self-consciously a work of art. This aspect carries its own politicizing form of abstraction. Fourth, then, by means of iconographic references but, much more importantly, by mood and lighting, as well as tensions between these two, Gaussian Blur invokes and thus reactivates cultural memories of exciting aesthetic moments, as well as of moments of looming or actualized natural disasters that confront us with their own beauty, as if staging – but barely visible in the background – the Kantian opposition between what can solicit the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime (Figure 9.2).8 This work solicits an abandoning of visual control that gives access to what might be termed unconsciousness or perhaps a social, physical unconsciousness of the visible. Walter Benjamin would have called it an ‘optical unconscious’.9 What we cannot see, through the images we do see, is what matters most, what entices us to make new forms. The work engages the act of viewing on a sensual, tactile level that offers the

Figure 9.2  Roos Theuws, Gaussian Blur.

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possibility of an intimacy hitherto deemed impossible, indiscrete and even voyeuristic. It solicits such an engagement on the basis of a mutuality and bodily appeal that does not yet exist but comes into being at the moment of looking. And it does this by means of its ‘look’ which, far from being itself intimate, is cold, sharp, sometimes violent. Behind the veil of that surface look is the object of ocular desire. In this sense, the work plays hard to get. The first form of abstraction emerges from experimenting with movement on the edge – movement, that is, dressed down to its bare essence. Since one of the instruments used is extreme slow-down, the second abstraction resides in the experimentation with temporality that video as a medium allows. The third comes from the uncontrollable figurations, the sensation of inadequacy of our routine templates and narrative fillers. The fourth is best characterized as an entirely new, sensate production of surface as skin. That the flickers of light seem to be blisters is no coincidence. They hurt; they touch us; they make contact, but not an easy, self-evident contact. The cuts from clip to clip, ‘behind’ the skin of the video, are significantly sharp, never mitigated by smoothing transitions. The flickering points of light as blisters are the skin of the visible, kinetic world. The second term of our project’s title – and the second movement – is derived from, but not to be conflated with, migration. Migration is the movement of people with often-undetermined destination and duration. While I do not wish to circumscribe the migration from which migratory is derived with ontologically dubious definitions, it is not the same as tourism – voluntary travel with a return ticket. Nor can the experiences I will not explicitly distinguish here, of exile and diaspora, or of politically or economically driven displacements, be conflated in my understanding of those experiences. Instead, I consider the traces of migration of all these kinds together, as traces of the movement of people.10 For those who perceive these movements, the people called migrants constitute, so to say, a moving image. Like video, they form images that move, and that move us emotionally. William Kentridge’s endless stream of shadow figures in Shadow Procession (1999), walking, some of them carrying household furniture on their backs, present such an image of migration, of people on the move (Figure 9.3). Using the technique of a Brecht-derived puppet theatre, the work shows movement relentlessly. Here, realistic representation is again cast aside in favour of a mode of presentation that leaves the viewer the option to flesh out in what mood to watch these rows of displaced people, figures with their burdens, their stacks, a miner dangling from the gallows, and workmen carrying entire neighbourhoods and cityscapes on their backs. This ambiguity of mood accounts for the visual and musical discourse of vaudeville, a merry entertainment that hits the viewer with its sudden moments of a ‘cruel choreography of power relations’.11 But lest the shadowy performance of the migratory be taken strictly thematically, we can, in continuation, look at another kind of shadow procession. This one shows a movement of people in Jesus Segura’s installation I Can Be You. The shadowy figures on New York’s Fifth Avenue, moving in one direction on one side, in another on the other side of the installation, back and forth, all slow and semi-transparent, demonstrate two aspects of the movement of people, although these people are more likely to

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Figure 9.3  William Kentridge, Shadow Procession.

be shoppers than migrants. But such categories can change; between migrants and shoppers, the message of the title, I Can Be You, holds. This is, indeed, the visual point this installation makes (Figure 9.4). It concerns a theoretical reflection on subjectivity that is timely in the face of migratory culture. On one hand, ‘I’ can indeed be ‘you’, as in the linguistic exchange that produces subjectivity. This happens here literally, since the opposite directions of the two screens give the viewer the option to join the one or the other stream, walking forwards or backwards from the corner. On the other hand, each shadow overlays more substantial figures, as if clinging like a parasite to our illusory autonomy, only to undermine it. These shadows are indeed ghosts. But the subject cannot shake off this shadow. Instead, ‘I’ can become ‘you’ and enrich the texture of my subjectivity by that exchange that, as we have known all along, is indispensable for the formation of subjectivity to begin with. This work yields insight into a more general situation. The mixed societies that have emerged as the result of migration have benefited enormously from the arrival of people from many different cultures. Cities have become more heterogeneous (‘colourful’); music and cinema have been enriched.12 And philosophy gratefully uses the potential offered by thinking along the lines of – and through metaphors and concepts relating to – migrancy.13 These metaphors can be questioned for harbouring an appropriation and idealization of the condition of migrancy. On the receiving end of the migratory culture of today, then, this exhibition embraces the enrichment that newcomers bring but at the same time attempts to avoid such hastily positive gestures.14 Meanwhile migrants also change so that their double relationship to host and home countries produces an aesthetic in and of itself, which, in turn, further contributes to

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Figure 9.4  Jesús Segura, I Can Be You.

changes in the host countries and their cultural expressions. Our project was about the aesthetics – plural – that emerge from this situation, not about the theme of migration itself. Some works were ‘about’ migration; they treat it as an urgent topic for reflection. Others bring the same sense of urgency to the exploration of the medium of video. Together, in an exhibition that aims to be an installation, they speak to each other. The ‘I’/‘you’ exchange that is the model for the articulation of aesthetics with the migratory, exemplified in Segura’s installation, suggests an overdetermined relevance for installation. We considered this exhibition emphatically as an installation in this sense. It is the movement that makes the images impermanent, in the double sense of moving along the frame, or screen, and of displaying the movement resulting from the migratory aspect of culture. Everything changes constantly, the look of space as well as the look of the collectivity that constitutes the population of cities, sports events, restaurants and streets.

Correspondence, intersecting: The epistolary metaphor The bidirectional but asymmetrical movement of migration is aesthetically elaborated in Mona Hatoum’s pioneering 1988 work Measures of Distance (Figure 9.5). This work was a crucial intervention in the flourishing artistic production of video in the 1980s. More importantly, though, we look back, ‘preposterously’, from the now, with Theuws, to this earlier work. It elaborates on video’s potential in ways that integrate the double

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Figure 9.5  Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance.

movement of migration. In her mother’s letters, there is a movement from ‘home’ to the far-away place where the daughter ended up; the other movement takes place in the memories of the daughter. These memories are presented through multiple layers, of the voice, the lettering, the body in the shower. Hatoum’s Measures of Distance has had a great impact on the migratory art as well as the video art in the 1990s and beyond. It also develops aspects of migratory aesthetics that we found crucial. The fact that the movement of the work is fabricated by means of blurs of still photographs is one of those.15 Another movement is the particular way that the epistolary character of the work is elaborated, with its layers of writing and voice. Hamid Naficy (2001) has proposed that ‘epistolarity’ is a primary characteristic of what he calls ‘third-world cinema’. Indeed, the epistolary elaborated with great complexity and poetry in Hatoum’s work has become a topos in migratory video, for the excellent reason that it opens insight into a migratory situation: the need to stay in touch. In this respect it is important that the movement is constructed, made, not recorded. Stills are blurred into one another. The movement, then, is only that of the surface, the screen, not of the figures ‘in’ the image. Hatoum’s work, layered like Theuws’s, makes the surface of the screen opaque and only slowly reveals the mother’s body. First covered by the opacity of the shower curtain so that it looks abstract, then by water, and all through, by the Arabic lettering of her own words, the mother is not given over to the viewer without several layers of protection. The transition from one still to the next, the rapid Arabic followed by a

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slower English voice, makes time a multifaceted experience – what I will term below a ‘heterochrony’. The delayed temporality of epistolary contact, moreover, is another layer that complicates visibility. The relationship to the homeland is fraught with ambivalence. In the conversations mothers of migrants have with a close relative about the absent child, anger and a feeling of having sacrificed the best of their lives sometimes transpire through the conventional discourse of acceptance in my video installation Nothing Is Missing (Figure 9.6). These relationships, in turn, also impact on the countries of arrival, where they circulate among migrants and their interlocutors, like ghosts – embodied in the shadow figures populating Jesús Segura’s I Can Be You and, though a different aesthetics, in William Kentridge’s shadow puppets.16 The metaphor of ghosts, just now, applies to relationships, not to either migrants or older residents. It is not the migrants but the relationships that are the ghosts. Ghosts exist in fragile time; they are insubstantial, ephemeral. These ghosts are barely visible, but they carry possibilities, according to the Theuwsian form of abstraction. The exhibition proposed to open up these possibilities, to acknowledge, even celebrate, the cultural benefits of migration for the so-called host societies, so as to strike a more positive note, an attention in which the absorption of the memories of the countries and communities of departure is fully integrated. This cannot be a simple appropriation and idealization, nor a condescending acknowledgement of loss and grief. Rather, it is based on an encounter that changes all participants.17 This is the first reason why the works were seldom primarily narrative or representational. There was a second reason for this reluctance to represent.

Figure 9.6  Mieke Bal, Nothing Is Missing.

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Representation tends to suffer from the contamination of its two primary meanings: the semiotic one, where representation is a form of depiction; and the political one, where one (elected) person represents a constituency. The artists whose work was presented in our show did not seek to depict others, with all the risks of stereotyping, voyeurism and misrepresentation; nor did they pretend to ‘speak for’ others. Both are traps of representation; both are unfixed, set in movement. Whether or not the artists are, or consider themselves to be migrants in one sense or another, their works are all characterized by a reluctance towards both these aesthetic and ethical traps. Video-and-migration, then, is considered through the conceptual metaphor of movement in the double sense – but a movement that cannot be taken for routine, ‘natural’ or realist. Articulating the intersections between these two clusters of meanings and effects of movement gives insight into migratory culture not otherwise so easily accessible. On the one hand, the moving image, with its video-specific effects, that multiplies and complicates, and then frames it; on the other, the moving people with the moving – including, emotionally – images they generate. Movement is always a struggle with the frame that captures the image, or in a different sense, the border that frames the newcomer as ‘different’. ‘Video puts a particular spin on the perennial question of framing the image,’ wrote Samuel Delany in an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of video installations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (in London 1995, 10).18 And he proceeds to sum up the history of the metaphor of the window on the world in amazingly succinct, yet profoundly fitting terms: ‘For most viewers, a human body visible through the video “window” gives one the sense of looking in … This is especially true if the body is nude. Conversely, if we see an animal through the video window, we sense that we are looking out.’19 This looking in, looking out, is the basic activity that video art works challenge, superimpose on one another, inflect in many different ways, experiment with, in order to make concrete and often literal use of the double movement of video and the migratory. Major political and ethical issues emerge in this intertwinement. Especially on the fine line between engagement with others on the level of intimacy, and voyeuristic enjoyment of other people’s private lives, the ethics and politics of the current use of video put their dilemmas on the table. Looking out through a semi-opaque skin, as in Theuws’s video – is that possible? The meeting of two forms of movement can thus be taken as a model, paradigm, or simple image of the intersections of culture and politics where sociality is constructed. Correspondence, or letter-writing, is a fitting metaphor for this intersecting.20

Timeliness of heterochrony: Now versus narrative One such meeting point that raises uneasy questions about the culture/politics bond is a phenomenon and resulting experience that characterizes both video and migration. This is the politics of time. It is well known that the experience of time is culturally specific.21 Video is the medium of our time, available to many, and put to many uses. It is also the medium of time; of time contrived, manipulated, and offered in different,

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multilayered ways. Migration is the experience of time as multiple, heterogeneous. The time of haste and waiting, the time of movement and stagnation; the time of memory and of an unsettling present not sustained by a predictable future. I call this phenomenon multi-temporality; the experience of it, heterochrony. Multi-temporality is a phenomenon that has always been there but seems overruled by the predominance of measurable, linear time in the organization of social life. Heterochrony is something one can be afflicted by, suffer from. You can ‘have’ heterochrony as you can have the flu. When multi-temporality becomes a problem, an inhibition and paralyzing contradiction, you ‘have’ heterochrony. But it may also lead to a pleasurable sense of fulfilment, when the multiple temporal strands in a day make that day particularly intense or meaningful. Video with its timework shows us how migratory culture intensifies the experience of heterochrony. Heterochrony is an important point of intersection between videographic and migratory mobility. The super-positions, tensions and incongruous encounters of different temporalities alert us to the simple but oft-forgotten fact that time is not an objective phenomenon. Although a relentless clock and the fixed schedules it prescribes regulate our lives, obviously someone who is bored experiences time differently from the hard worker who never quite manages to do what needs doing. Some people are always in haste; others not. People in situations of migrancy are often torn between haste and standstill. This simple experiential discrepancy is compounded by political and economic temporal multiplicities in the postcolonial era. Imagine the everyday life of someone who is waiting for legal residency, or for muchneeded employment permits, or for news from a far-away family. At the same time, the clock is ticking: that person needs to earn money to support his family ‘back home’ and thus justify the tearing apart of his family, his life. In such situations, the hectic rhythm of social and economic life, always too fast, contrasts sharply with the time of waiting, always too slow. Although temporal discrepancies and disturbed rhythms occur in all human lives, it is easy to realize that multi-temporality is specifically tangible in the life of someone who is permanently, as the saying goes, on the move. Time, in all its internal differentiation, is usually, sometimes forcefully, subjected to one of its aspects only, that of chronology. This linear logic has a profound sensate effect on everyone, and more strongly so on those whose relationship to the local chrono-logic is oblique. Heterochrony contributes to the temporal texture of our cultural world and thus, our understanding and experiencing it is a political necessity. This texture is multi-temporal. Video is technically able to make multi-temporality visible and the experience of heterochrony tangible. Theuws’s Gaussian Blur captures the profound and physical sensation of a multi-temporality that entails the experience of heterochrony in its bare essence. There is relentlessness in the slowness, an insistence on the ongoing quality of time, precisely due to the almost unbearably slow pace. The storm-lashed tree branches become more threatening as a result; the human figures, the horse, detach themselves through this slow movement from the still impressionist idyll. The time of the surface is disjunctive from the time of the images it covers. This disjunction determined the visual experience of this work. It trains the viewer to be sensitive to this aspect of temporal disjunction in the lives of people among whom we live.

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Video and migratory life have, thus, a complex and confusing, challenging multitemporality in common. Video is, arguably, eminently suitable to understanding what this means – to feel it in our own bodies. Through this medium and in particular, its manifestations in the works selected, as well as their installation together, we could grasp, perceive and experience traces of the lives of those who live among us, but of whom we know so little. In Kentridge’s Shadow Procession the temporalities are merged, first by the haunting music, then by the relentlessly ongoing procession. The rhythm of the figures’ movements is unreal in its regularity. This is yet another way of foregrounding and denaturalizing time. Implicit in this heterochrony is the double historical reference to two distinct, early forms of political art. The movement of the figures, their shadowy semi-visibility, and their brief presence on the screen can be seen as elaborations of Brecht’s anti-empathic theatre. The second, earlier form of political art is Goya’s ambivalently dark, yet often comical paintings, drawings and etchings, especially his series Los desastres de la Guerra from 1812–20.22 Political art can only be politically effective if it is ambiguous, so as to escape confinement to a particular cause and the risk of becoming propaganda. This is not to say that the singularity of a situation must be erased; on the contrary. But it is only if the singularity – here, of Kentridge’s post-apartheid migration refugees – can be translated into another singularity, often but not always via generality, that the political thrust of the work can effectively reach, hence, touch, the audience. Depicting horror, the awkward poses of Kentridge’s figures produce an openness and ambivalence of mood that ‘democratizes’ affect. The artist defined political art as follows: ‘I am interested in political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.’23 The theatre as play(ful) and as public ritual, and the still image as record, merge in this work.24 Time made so dense, contradictory and un-linear first sharpens and then overcomes the opposition between ‘still’ and ‘moving’ images. Among the consequences of this paradoxical ‘state’ is a complex relationship, not only with representation and figuration – the work with the human form – but also with another aspect of ‘human nature’, that of existing in time. The different aspects of temporality are important sites where the aesthetic and the migratory intersect: heterogeneous time, slowdown, the past cut off from the present, and the need for active acts of looking in actuality. The exhibition had the ambition to draw viewers into the heterochrony of video and the migratory. This is where it gained actuality – not or not only, political actuality, but aesthetic, social and semiotic actuality as well. Actuality is the experience of the now taken out of its drabness. Actuality can come across as a moment of shock. This is an effect of the temporal discrepancy between the times of the past and the present, when our acts of viewing become, suddenly, acts of a different nature rather than just that of routine looking in a continuum. Such moments deprive us of our temporal habitat. Something happens that links the violence of such moments, the disappearance of linear time itself, to us, now. It is a mobilization of actuality as a temporal unit, an experience, and a political urgency. Multi-temporality becomes effective as heterochrony when it works as a form of

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foreshortening – temporally, not spatially. Foreshortened time is distorted – made wider or thicker – and condensed. It thus comes forward to touch the viewer so that we experience the almost tangible push of time. It also challenges the ontological temporal cut made between past and present. In terms of grammar, time becomes what French linguist Benveniste called ‘discourse’ as opposed to ‘story’. It is expressed in the tenses and persons of verbs: in tenses that bind the past to the present, as opposed to ones that separate the two moments; and in verb forms of the first and second person between which speech emerges, rather than in those of the third person who is being spoken about. With foreshortened time, this also happens between the viewer’s present and the past that the work so precariously holds. Thus, video effectuates the visualization of duration, as can be sensed in works that are both time-specific and time-dependent, in terms of the works themselves, of the past they carry and of their relationship to the viewer. This time-specificity raises a question that is crucial to video in installation as a model of migratory culture: that of the meaning and performativity of actuality. Actuality – the actuality of viewing, the actuality of the transformations of migratory culture – is the arena in which this heterochronic aesthetics works. It is the Jetzt-zeit or ‘now-time’ of the viewer, the existence and significance of which is hardly noticed by the latter.25 Each moment of viewing takes one such instant – between the ticks of the watch, a dark moment between the flashes of ordinary life – and captures it, in an image, a frame, a slowed-down or sped-up sequence, where it then lingers – or in an encounter. This is how actuality makes time for memory.

Actuality of memory and forgetting: Stories, after all If heterochrony disrupts the traditional linear narratives onto which routine responses and images are grafted, it offers temporal shelter to memories. And memories are themselves heterogeneous, multi-sensate. The most important and perhaps counterintuitive thing to realize about memory is that it takes place in the present. Memory is not a passive recall, a kind of invasion of the mind by the past. It is neither passive nor past-based. People perform acts of memory, and they do so in their present moment. Without memory there can be no present. Without a position in the present one cannot ‘have’ memories. Without agency, happenings can affect, even destroy people’s lives, but they cannot become memories. This is why traumatic recall cannot be equated with memory. The unwanted and repetitive invasion of earlier horrors escapes the subject’s agency. In times of political and social hardship in the present, acts of memory become both indispensable for psychic survival and a comforting allure of a privacy one can fall back on. To make space for acts of memory in the hereand-now is an issue of survival for those who have so little other than memories. The fleeting instants of actuality within which a person who is subject to the chrono-logic of Western temporality lives do not have sufficient space to harbour the necessary memory acts. Video works fill actuality’s voids, stretching its space to make time for a remembrance of the past now lost but which is, often violently, present in actuality, irrupting when it is least desired.26

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Migratory experience exemplifies the presence of the past within the present. This is what, in Nothing Is Missing, the mothers of migrants reiterate all along in their talk about the missing child. It is what rhythmically defines the letters of the mother in Measures of Distance. Time is foreshortened to the extent that it is distorted, so as to reverse the black hole of linearity. Foreshortening remains an illusion, but one whose deception flaunts itself. This is what makes foreshortening so radically different from linear perspective. Likewise, foreshortened time is both irresistible and disenchantingly unreal. At no time does the foreshortened duration offer us a bridge to the past, to the other (life), yet it makes time so sticky it is as if the past touches us. For we cannot suffer or desire for or with the displaced among us. Sympathy, compassion, even identification do nothing to reduce the unspeakable traces of what is buried in another time. But what we can do is remember-with. French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote about art’s temporality: ‘Art freezes time, it is about a meanwhile, a duration in the interval, in that sphere which a being is able to traverse, but in which its shadow is mobilized.’27 Slow-down, in art, has political ambitions in itself. Beyond the everyday bombardments of fleeting images, art seems a suitable place for us to stop and invest with cultural duration the events from people’s past they carry on their backs (Kentridge) or that resonate with the epistolary reminiscing of Hatoum’s mother. Theuws’s work makes the point of temporal foreshortening clearly by thickening time to the extreme without entirely freezing it. This does not make the images still and available for contemplation. On the contrary, they are just barely, with difficulty, available for participation. Gaussian Blur posits the need to take, or rather, to give time. This experience of belatedness is, ultimately, the political arena in which these video works seek to deploy memory in order to transform the relationship to a past we cannot reverse, to a present in which we can work. It is the intersection of form and time as the construction site of a politically effective affect towards which the deployment of the video imagination works. The interval that separates us from the past where the violence, exploitation and depletion occurred is the moment, the sub-moment, of actuality that is foreshortened. Not quite frozen, but slowed down below perceptible time. As a result, we cannot ensconce ourselves in the ethical indifference of aesthetic contemplation defined in a misguided distortion of Kantian disinterestedness, for we are ‘touched’ by that moment even though we cannot appropriate it. But our identification with the ‘other’ cannot redeem past or present difficulty. There is no hope, no redemption, only the proximity of complicity, the threat of a second violation that would reiterate in actuality, in the here-now or Jetzt-zeit what has happened to people in the past. This now is the arena of ethics ‘after idealism’, of singular events with alterity.28 This threat can be countered by the offer of an affective engagement or ethical non-indifference, which is compelled by heterochronically moving images, reaching out to approximate a fuller version of heterochronic human time. And that present time, that here-now, is corporeal time. We all need the heteropathic memories that constitute the texture of the migratory culture we share in order to live in an actuality saved from its drabness.29 Many philosophers have attempted to theorize such a temporality. In an essay appropriately titled ‘Time Matters’ (2003), Cesare Casarino invokes Deleuze’s and

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Foucault’s dispute about desire and pleasure and confronts it with passages from Marx’s Grundrisse on the three meanings of money, ending up with a concept of corporeal time that overcomes that dispute. As he states, in a quite Deleuzian phrase integrating the two disputed concepts, ‘pleasure is the fold of desire’.30 In migratory culture, the time of memory is, rather, the time that attempts to steal memories away by the struggle of linear, capitalist time to unify temporality. But the present within which this remembering is performed is not set in opposition to that past. In terms of Casarino’s temporality of pleasure, I contend that the world in which migratory aesthetics circulate is one that juxtaposes pleasure with all sorts of other experiences, many of which emerge from forms of violence. I suggest that social violence – the violence of ignoring, of contempt, of refusing to engage – rather than pleasure – is the paradigmatic practice that transforms temporality. Both violence and pleasure pertain to the political without being reducible to it. Violence makes the experience of time not only corporeal but also heterochronous: it breaks the continuity, not only between present and past, but also among different presents. This includes the small violence of refusing to engage, a violence that takes place while you have no clue what is hitting you. The stark presence of violence in these thoughts on the temporality of memory, paired with the muted, marginal presence of violence in the works, is not a coincidence. Violence produces extreme heterochronies. It makes time immeasurable, extending it, slowing it down, cutting it off from any quantifiable series of instants. The instant in which victims of colonial or military violence became victims – their lives torn asunder, their intimacies shattered, their communities scattered – is, qualitatively, radically different from any instant in which our belated anxiety, fear, hurt or pain, all heteropathic and powerful, occurs. I do not mean to argue that the political can be reduced to violence, nor that all aspects of violence should be understood in political terms only. However, if ‘political’ means anything beyond powerless passivity and indifference, we can translate Kantian ‘disinterestedness’ as ‘detachment from particular interest’, into an ethics of nonindifference. Only then can the aesthetic experience return to its old task of sensate, corporeal binding.31 Taking on the participation in such experiences implies a refusal to accept powerlessness. It also implies considering the cultural field as a political arena of key relevance. This requires the critical translation of the imagination from narcissistic projection into an endorsement of the ‘remainders’. Remainders are the traces of the movement of migrants through our culture, as not only inevitably in the present, but beautifully of the present – co-making the present.32 This position can be seen as a kind of qualified presentism, necessary for a social texture of heterochrony. At the heart of this presentism lies the awkward place – the need, the redundancy, the impossibility – of memory. It is within this present of the actual that memory becomes something other than nostalgia. In such a present, the present engages the past, forcefully holding onto it without allowing repetition, without the softening of stylized representation. Instead, this heterochronous present allows neither erasure nor collapse. The present is ruled by a ‘meanwhile’ that is heterogeneous. It is this heterochrony – the variation of temporal density between moments in a time frame – that characterizes memory.

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The artist who reads in the present those letters written long before, and translates them from past to present, from Arabic to English, and from written to oral/aural, positions memory in that fleeting moment of actuality. We in the present are compelled to remember the events of the lives of others in an ungraspable past. Art that engages violence faces the dilemma of memory more strongly, poignantly, but also clearly than other topics. To be sure, representing violence in art leads to charges of having made beauty out of horror, fiction out of a reality whose realness it is so utterly important to maintain, and, also, given the experiential intensity of horror, representing the unrepresentable. Yet, important as these cautionary discussions are, it is equally important that for these very same reasons the violence should not be allowed to disappear from the cultural scene.33

Intimate strangers: Installation as contact zone In addition to the attempt to articulate intricate relationships between video as a medium of movement with time, and migration as a social phenomenon of movement through time, this exhibition was also a collective installation – a work as a whole that brought together artworks which had never before been installed in a single space. In Murcia, 2MOVE was presented in the set-up of a market, like the market across the street from the exhibition space, in the baroque church Verónicas. In Enkhuizen, the row of traditional Dutch houses by the waterfront that houses the Zuiderzeemuseum framed the exhibition in relation with the water that is often so significant for migratory movement. Other venues presented the works in an obsolete factory, suggesting that the migrants exploring opportunities for work are tragically belated (Belfast). But within the exhibition, several works are themselves installations, soliciting an intimate presence, a personal encounter with the viewer. Dalice by Brazilian artist Célio Braga is a portrait of a middle-aged woman. A close-up against a white background that leaves no opportunity for distraction. Just a face (Figure 9.7). The portrait is classically believed to be the genre that requires our presupposition of the reality of the sitter and his or her identity to the image. Gadamer called that relation of image to reality the ‘occasion’. And to be sure, the woman we see does exist in reality, and there was an ‘occasion’. There are two of these portraits, two identical videos positioned opposite each other so that the viewer must stand between them. Stand, not sit. They are on eye level, on dark grey pedestals. One wonders why this video is presented as an installation, rather than as a simple onescreen film.34 The installed videos produce an architecture of a qualified, disenchanted intimacy that enables an ethical engagement with the migratory ‘otherness within’ that characterizes contemporary culture. For this argument I will move through three theoretical motives that converge in the face: the architecture or, in terms of theatricality, setting of the installation works and by extension, the exhibition as a whole; the inevitable mirroring that insinuates itself when one moves through a space with multiple video screens; and the specific sense of space that emerges from the combination of these motives.

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Figure 9.7  Célio Braga, Dalice.

With a handheld camera Célio Braga has filmed his mother’s face in her own home. He filmed her during the long minutes he observed her inward-turned grief, her loneliness while engrossed in the task of absorbing the horror of her daughter’s death. This moment of mourning was, we could say with Gadamer, the ‘occasion’. The son witnesses his mother’s grief, is grieving himself, and yet, all he can do is film that silent face, himself invisible. The hand holding the camera is visually holding his mother. The only barely visible feature that distinguishes this image from countless other portraits is the slight movement, inevitable in handheld camerawork. This movement, once the viewer is standing there, concentrating on that face because there is nothing else to see, becomes an instance of foreshortened temporality: one can focus on the movement precisely because it is so hard to see – it is slight, slow and a-centred. While facing itself – looking someone in the face – is centralizing, the movement in this video is visible exactly at the edges of the face. Dalice, as it is installed, raises many questions: of the portrait, medium, the face, and the possibility of empathy, of intimacy. It raises these with some urgency, because the bare facts alone would easily bring up an unease related to voyeurism. The portrait is less a portrait of this woman, Dalice, than of the emotion that weighs her down and the act of witnessing of her migrated son. The slight movement of the face that seems to be the only difference between these two mediums of portraiture – eyes blinking, turning upwards – has a companion in the slight movement of the image caused by the hand that holds the camera (Figure 9.8). This hand, reduced to its essentials through the medium, caresses the face-asimage. When the face moves on its own, the image presenting the face moves. Small,

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Figure 9.8  Célio Braga, Dalice.

barely visible, secondary movements are the inevitable consequence of handheld shooting. This produces this double movement and, through it, powerfully exemplifies the poetics of video in intimacy. It asks if it is possible to read the face, to see grief? It asks if it is possible to empathize with an unknown woman across the gap, first, of her aloneness, second, of her son’s absence due to his migration, conflated here with death (the death of the other child); and, third, across the gap of our belatedness, our incapability to make contact. Can we see that this face is one of mourning, or do we need to have this intimate knowledge? Facing, taken ‘at face value’, is three things, or acts, at once. Literally, facing is the act of looking someone else in the face. It is also, coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down, by looking it in the face, instead of denying or repressing it. Thirdly, it is making contact, placing the emphasis on the second person and acknowledging the need of that contact in order, simply, to be able to sustain human existence. Looking someone in the face, the first aspect, can be seen as a thematic undertow of the exhibition, made explicit in several works. This is an aspect that hovers between ontology and epistemology. Can we see faces? Can we look someone in the face?35 The second aspect, coming to terms, harbours a sociopolitical agenda of migratory culture. It makes us aware of how often we fail to do this: facing what people go through, their losses and sacrifices. This question is of a political and ethical order.

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Its counterpart and supplement are the veiled face that refuses to be seen, considering the act of facing always inappropriate and misfired. The third aspect, making contact, contains the artistic agenda of the exhibition: the simple ‘let’s face it’ transforms into a challenge: can we really face it/her, and can we make that contact that is so badly needed? This is the question of aesthetics as the experience of binding. This is where, for Dalice, the installation aspect specifically comes into play. The viewer was forced to stand between the two monitors, the two pedestals that are bodysize. Only then could one face Dalice in the first sense and witness how she faces her loss. But while facing the woman was enforced on those who wish to see this work, so is turning one’s back to her. It is impossible to face her without, uncomfortably, also realizing that she is behind you, looking at your back turned to her, as if sending you away from the intimacy of her home. This double position is doubly moving, then, in the emotional sense of the affect of viewing. It is important to realize that at no time is the viewer trapped. The distance is enough to look away and walk away. But once you decide, freely, to look Dalice in the face, by necessity you also have to turn your back on her. The silence of the work adds to this double affect. Especially since the background noise of other works is as audible as street noise would be once the door of the house is closed. The small space is both inside and outside. The viewer-visitor is both admitted as a guest and not asked to stay. Dalice invites you in and sends you away; she invites the intimacy of the encounter and stipulates the ineluctable strangeness that remains. Due to this installation – as distinct from a single-screen showing – the woman figure is empowered, the face given agency, and the viewer’s voyeurism held at bay. Two philosophers have discussed the face in terms congenial to this work. One is Emmanuel Levinas, who complements Heidegger’s ethics of care. The latter’s notion is more spatially oriented in its insistence of reaching out and embracing. Levinas turns this into a presentist temporality of the face-to-face encounter. This encounter is temporally specific not only because it takes place (to use a spatial phrase) but more importantly because it transforms the self in stipulating the limitations of the individual’s freedom. The other is Gilles Deleuze, who considers the close-up, not exactly of the face but as the face, a tool to stop time and extend duration. The triple function of the face, for Deleuze – individuating, socializing and communicating – is destroyed in the same move.36 The camera signals the presence of the artist, his interest, his participation in the culture of movement, caught, as it were, in the act of listening. In Dalice, the slight movement of the image itself, accompanying the moving face with empathy, signals the intimate relationship between the artist and the portrayed individual. Hatoum’s Measures of Distance articulates the severance of migration. Here, too, the complicated intimacy with gaps, brought about by the migration caused, in the case of Hatoum’s Lebanon, by war, is braided with the multiple layering video as a medium allows. While not committed to literal facing, this work on facing in the second sense – accepting a situation of fact, hard as it is – is based on the relationship of mother and adult child. The intimacy in Measures is established from the beginning, when the voices of two women laughing set the tone of intimacy, against a background sound of running water. The image, at that point, seems as abstract as Theuws’s, in the same productive

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sense. Pink shapes on a blue background, with Arabic lettering in black. The abstraction foregrounds the layers of what later turns out to be a shower curtain (blue) behind which a woman’s body (pink) and before or over which the lettering in stark, straight lines speak of the law (of the father) behind which the mother’s nakedness must remain hidden. Sounds of a home environment and of a spoken language foreign to many, familiar to others, set the tone of this work without a literal face. The intimacy is established almost hyperbolically, with the shower as the most intimate space forbidden to strangers. The sense of intrusion is compounded by the awareness of division – as I hear the language as foreign, I am at the same moment made aware of its familiarity to others by the women’s laughing. The intimacy and estrangement come together when the first English-spoken translation in the daughter’s voice, reading her mother’s letter, says: ‘[I]t seems as if the house has lost its soul.’ The discomfort of the viewer that emerges from the potential collusion in this voyeurism is barely avoided by the aesthetic of layering that veils – not an innocent verb here – the mother’s nakedness. For the daughter, as this blurred and layered image intimates, the mother’s body is visible. It is perhaps not physically visible, due to their war-enforced separation, but it is visible in the daughter’s bodily memory, along with sound – audible to us, but without that intimate memory – and touch and smell, inaccessible for the visitors-strangers.37 Intimacy also implies physical contact. And the poignancy of the situation of many participants in migratory culture is that the physicality of contact is precisely what is cut off, made impossible. For each subject that is on the move, others stay behind, ‘back home’. Mothers can no longer caress their children before sleep. Coti, one of the mothers in Nothing Is Missing, yearns for those simple acts of touching. Husband and wife are separated for years on end. The texture of a child’s skin changes as she grows and the father misses out on these subtle changes. Skin, the body’s surface, is also the interface between outside and inside, as well as between self and other. It is the surface that, in a difference-phobic society, people decline to engage with. In video, the tantalizing quality of the surface is the subject of self-reflexive experiment.38 Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, famously compared photography with the skin as the interface. The glossy surface, he wrote, is ‘a skin we share’.39 ‘Sharing a skin’ can also be considered a kind of activist slogan against the irreducible, if mostly involuntary racism that prevents participants in a culture from fully enjoying the proximity of others. I am talking of such simple acts as looking away or looking no further once the assessment ‘foreigner’ has been made. Skin, in this context, does not attract, but repels, and this repellent quality projected on the skin of others is, precisely, the ground of racism and the exclusionary violence it produces. Just visually, just colour-wise.40 With gloss on the one hand and the opacity of the other’s skin on the other, the status of this largest of the human body’s organs becomes a feature of the double movement of migratory aesthetics. It is a frontier between self and other, inside and outside, access to the desirable touch and resistance to the undesired touch. This is even more relevant when we consider the gleam itself as a reflective surface – one that sends our image back to us. In good light (or bad, depending on your aesthetic expectation) the sheen of the video monitor also reflects his image back to the viewer. Inevitably,

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then, viewing gleaming surfaces entails a measure of proximity, of inclusion. This is very different from a projected video work, where sometimes the installation compels visitors to walk through the image and thus leave their shadow. Jesús Segura’s I Can Be You (Figure 9.4) plays with that possibility of shadowing. It doubles the layers and sends shadows to overlay the figures, which are made more distant because of it. The I-you exchange that this work’s title connotes acquires an additional significance. It stands for the most basic level at which intimacy is possible, even with acceptance and endorsement of the gaps and contradictions. The symmetry between the two screens of Segura’s installation recalls the mirror image as the visible skin of the self, and the various ways in which what we see in the mirror, as Jacques Lacan has argued, are by necessity a fiction.41 This is a timely reminder, for the fictional quality of the mirror image is key to the possibility of video to address self and other and the intimacy-with-gaps that is both its ‘nature’ and that of migratory culture. In our exhibition, the question of the mirror was raised through double concepts – double movements. One is that of the narcissism that threatens all engagement with otherness, novelty and change in a culture of diversity. The other was that of fiction and its acute need to get at a truth that is obscured by conventional attitudes and resistances. The sheen on monitors, the shadows on the moving images and the doubling in symmetry thus joined forces. They critically employed mirroring as a tool to evoke the attractive nature of inclusion and proximity.42 This brings me back to Dalice, the need to both face her and turn our back to her face. When no viewer is present, the two faces face each other, as if consoling the woman in her loneliness by offering, at least, her own mirror image. When the viewer stands between the two monitors, however, the question of the readability of the face emerges with irresistible force. What we see, in the end, is nothing but skin. A skin, a surface that both suggests and hides the emotional depth of the woman’s grief that, at this moment, makes up the entirety of her existence. A skin that is emphatically present, in the extremely fine grain the loving camera has captured. The skin that bears its age and displays itself as a testimony of time. Skin and the surface that stands in for it, covers it and mirrors it, all at once, presented the viewers of this exhibition with an alternative to the social ills of a culture obsessed with a national and racial homogeneity that has never existed. It did this critical work by means of a variety of aesthetics, that is, by means of offers of connection differently ‘phrased’, of binding through the senses. The surface that, on the one hand, shows and, on the other, withholds is the interface that characterizes video as a medium, now mingled with ‘migratoriness’. Finally, the mirror experience of seeing the other (face) as self, or the self as other, is also indispensable for acquiring a sense of space that is not distant and colonizing but based on the possibility of proximity, and on the implication of the self in the space, which, like a skin, we share. One of the reasons the skin and its representative in the medium of video, the surface, have the task of protecting and hiding, as well as of attracting and opening up, is that it positions the body in space. But the spatial positioning of the human figure through skin is very different from other possible positionings. Skin-in-space precludes distancing, turning one’s back, and indifference.

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Between skin and space, video installation proposes, there is a bond that grounds the aesthetic of video, and that is, at the same time, the ground of migratory aesthetics. Video installation is, in this sense, a ‘contact zone’ – a social space where cultures meet, clash and negotiate.43 Space is what Henri Bergson called a ‘natural feeling’ and not – as in Renaissance perspective – geometrical, and hence measurable and identical for everyone who perceives it. This natural feeling is heterogeneous, different for everyone wherever they stand. Such space can be neither divided nor measured. Bergson calls this space ‘extensity’. Emanating from the subject, it extends outwards, like the mirror image, hence the term. Extensity is like foreshortening, but in reverse. Foreshortened space extends from the ‘other’ towards the subject, not the other way around; extensity goes outwards again. This sense of space does not hold the subject at arm’s length but, on the contrary, all but compels the viewer to engage the figures in the fictions displayed through tactility. This tactility militates against the social fragmentation and isolation that individualism produces.44 In Creative Evolution, a book devoted to the enigma of life, Bergson wrote something to this effect in the chapter on ‘The Endurance of Life’. In his life-long effort to theorize life, time and the world in terms of a continuum, he wrote about the difference of what he calls the ‘real whole’: ‘The systems we cut out within it [the real whole] would properly speaking, not then be parts at all; they would be partial views of the whole.’45 As is well known, Bergson revolutionized the current conceptions of time. He replaced measurable, dividable time with continuous duration. The tension between fragment and detail is like that between part and partiality in Bergson’s passage. Apply this tension to time, as Bergson is wont to do, and the key to video art emerges; apply it to space, and installation comes to complement it. Apply it to matter and we approach a materialist theory of migratory culture. The bond between matter and time is a logical consequence of the ongoing effort to become (social) ‘details’ rather than remaining ‘fragments’. Comfort in the face of fragmentation is only possible when anchored in facing time, not escaping from it by hiding your head in the sand. Comfort becomes possible when fragmentary existence is the starting point, not a gruesome truth to be repressed. For, matter also matters because it is never only itself. We invent other things for which matter can be a home: forms, sense experiences, souls, minds, sociality, life. Matter is always matter-plus. Thus, fragments of matter are also, always, capable of acts we tend to reserve for humans: yearning for what is lost, hope for what is possible. They perform such acts by means of the porosity of their limits, their openness to contact, extension and mutuality.46 What I have argued through the installation aspect, and specifically, through the face, then, is this: space, like time, is thoroughly heterogeneous; like time, it is complicated by the subject’s position and agency in it. It is the link between the individual subject of the culture of migration – migrant or not, transitory or durative. As such, space frames the skin. It gives the skin body, the image depth. Thus, space as what emanates from the skin ultimately completes the specificity of the intricate relationship between video and migratory culture, put into operation in an aesthetic that binds through the senses. I call this a materialist take on migratory culture. Video helps us grasp the importance of fully engaging that culture.

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Notes Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957–1965 (New York: New American Library, 1987), 173. Quoted in Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 774 (773–97). 2 Delany, Motion of Light, 173. 3 Samuel R. Delany, ‘High Involvement’, installation at the Museum of Modern Art, 22 September 1995, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1995/videospaces/ delany.html 4 This is also what the exhibition, 2MOVE, which I co-curated with Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro in 2007–8, was meant to do. This text is a revised and shortened version of my catalogue essay for the exhibition. Since that catalogue was never widely distributed, it seems justified to recycle the ideas in this new context. See Mieke Bal, ‘Double Movement’ (exhibition catalogue), in 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration, ed. Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (Murcia, Spain: Cendeac, 2008), 13–81. 5 For the old meaning of aesthetics, see A. G. Baumgartner, Aesthetica, vols. 1 and 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1750 [vol. 1] and 1758 [vol. 2]; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1970). It remains relevant to consider the idea of the moving image as a background for our project; indeed, for any consideration of (especially but not exclusively modern and contemporary) art. This has been forcefully reconfirmed by the exhibition L’image en movement, by Philippe-Alain Michaud, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. See Michaud, ed., Le movement des images/The Movement of Images (Paris: Centre Pompidou/Adagp, 2006). 6 For this view of abstraction, based on Deleuze and Guattari’s, see Ernst van Alphen, ‘Opgenomen in abstractie’, in Windstil, ed. M. Breedveld (Staphorst: Hein Elferink, 2004), 5–25. See also John Rachjman, ‘Another View of Abstraction’, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts 5 (1995): 19 (16–23). 7 In Jonathan A. Carter, ‘Telling Times: History, Emplotment, and Truth’, History and Theory 42 (2003): 1–27. 8 The political downside of Kant’s concept of the sublime has been acutely analysed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 9 Discussed in Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). 10 James Clifford has written a very helpful analysis of the definitions of these terms; see ‘Diasporas’, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 244–78. On tourism, see Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’, in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 153–67. 11 Ari Sitas, ‘Procession and Public Rituals’, in William Kentridge, ed. Ari Sitas et al. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 59 (59–66). The backdrop of Johannesburg suburbs and the devastated landscape that surrounds them is extremely relevant for the artist’s work. For more context in Johannesburg, see the city’s illuminating ‘biography’ by Achille Mbembe, ‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’, Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 373–405. 12 See Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 1

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13 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. and foreword Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). 14 For an incisive critique of such gestures, see Inge E. Boer, Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal, Bregje van Eekelen, and Patricia Spyers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). Paul Patton offers an interpretation of Deleuze’s use – but not his followers’ use – of notions such as nomadism and migration as non-metaphoric; see Paul Patton, ‘Mobile Concepts, Metaphor, and the Problem of Referentiality in Deleuze and Guattari’, Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race 12 (2006): 27–45. 15 In the catalogue, Hernández-Navarro develops the concept of what he calls ‘secondhand technology’. Hatoum’s work would be a clear instance of the aesthetics of second-hand technology. 16 I have explained and justified my writing about my own video artwork in an article; see Mieke Bal, Helinä Hukkataival: Space between Ritual and Carnival (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2015). 17 For a relevant view of ghosts, see Esther Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 18 Delany, ‘High Involvement’. 19 Ibid. 20 On ethical aspects of looking, reading and imag(in)ing, see Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). Derek Attridge sees the ethical moment as doing singular justice to our ethical impulses and acts. He defines ethical and political acts in opposition to the usual way of conceiving of these domains; see J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 104–12. For Attridge’s understanding of singularity as the key to ethical engagement, see also The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). 21 Nancy D. Munn, ‘The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 93–123. 22 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, 1746–1828. The eighty aquatint prints of Los desastres de la guerra were made in the teens and published only in 1863, thirty-five years after Goya’s death. 23 Quoted in Neal Benezra, ‘William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection’, in William Kentridge (exhibition catalogue), ed. William Kentridge (Chicago/New York: Museum of Contemporary Art/New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 15 (11–29). 24 Adorno would agree with this; see Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 240–58. The term ‘public ritual’ in the context of Shadow Procession comes from Sitas, ‘Procession and Public Rituals’, an essay devoted to this work. On theatricality as a contemporary form of authenticity, see Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 174–212. 25 See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968). See also Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul, with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines (New York and London: Routledge, 1996). 26 For the various consequences of this view of memory, see the essays in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present

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(Hanover, NH/London: University Press of New England, 1999). For more on trauma as, emphatically, not-memory, see Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); also Janneke Lam, Whose Pain?: Childhood, Trauma, Imagination (Amsterdam: ASCA, 2002). 27 Quoted in Charles Merewether, ‘After the Fact’, in Éxtasis del Sueño, ed. Charles Merewether (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2000), 137–8. 28 Chow, Ethics after Idealism, 137–8; Attridge, Singularity of Literature. 29 I borrow the concept of heteropathic memory from Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). This study is, in its entirety, extremely relevant to our topic. 30 Cesare Casarino, ‘Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben and the Corporeal’, Strategies 16.2 (2003): 185–206; quote on 2004. 31 I have developed the concept of ‘ethical nonindifference’ at length in a book that compares biblical, Quranic and Western painting versions of the same story; see Mieke Bal, Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 32 I borrow the term ‘remainder’ from translation theorist Lawrence Venuti. In three different uses of the term this author makes a fabulously productive, differentiated use of this concept. See Venuti, ‘Translation and the Formation of Cultural Identities’, Current Issues in Language and Society 1 (1994): 214–15; Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995); and Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Philosophy, Materialism’, Radical Philosophy 79 (1996): 24–34. 33 I am alluding to Adorno’s famous indictment of art after Auschwitz. For a discussion, see Mieke Bal, ‘Introduction’, in Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 34 On portraiture, see Gadamer as quoted in Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 8. For a radical critique of this conventional view of portraiture, see Ernst van Alphen, ‘The Portrait’s Dispersal: Concepts of Representation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 239–56. And, on Braga’s work, Van Alphen, ‘Sharing a Common Skin: Cutting, Perforating, Sewing, and Stringing in the Work of Célio Braga’, in Deliriously, ed. C. Braga (Staphorst: Elferink, 2006), 5–57. On video installation, see Mieke Bal, Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 35 Robin Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). 36 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macqarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 235–44; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 90. Deleuze’s view of the face as doing, not expressing, is discussed in Richard Rushton, ‘What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces’, Cultural Critique 51 (2002): 219–37. See also Jalal Toufic, Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (Sausalito, CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 2003), 41. On the Deleuzian close-up, see Mark B. N. Hansen, ‘Affect as Medium, or the Digital-Facial-Image’, Journal of

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38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

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Visual Culture 2.2 (2003): 205–28, and also Paola Maratti, Gilles Deleuze. Cinéma et philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 35. Joanne Morra wrote about this work in relation to Akerman’s News from Home. Her analysis elaborates the aspect of trans-generational ‘translation’ between mother and daughter, a highly relevant theoretical theme of both works. See Joanne Morra, ‘Daughter’s Tongue: The Intimate Distance of Translation’, Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007): 93–110. Coti is the only mother in the project who is herself the migrant and left her children behind. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 80–1; also Lam, Whose Pain? On contemporary racism, see Chow, Ethics after Idealism, 14–32; also 55–73. Didier Anzieu famously calls the skin as seen from the outside – or the fictionality – of the mirror, a sack of skin. See The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Ecrits: A Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1–7. For a commentary and integration into a theory of the production of images that is relevant for this exhibition, see Kaja Silverman, ‘Apparatus for the Production of an Image’, in World Spectators, ed. Kaja Silverman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 75–100. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (1896; New York: Zone Books, 1994). Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (Landham, MD: University Press of America, 1983 [1907]), 31. These remarks on matter are derived from a catalogue essay I wrote for a book on Jeannette Christensen’s work. Bal, Fragments of Matter: Jeannette Christensen (Bergen: Bergen National Academy of the Arts, 2009).

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Privacy ‘Die Gedanken Sind Frei’ Alexander García Düttmann

‘I never looked at it like that. It was part of what was normal, what was there,’ notes Colm Tóibín.1 Having commented on the recognition of a painted scene in a poem by Elizabeth Bishop and turned to a similar moment in his own life, he refers to the difference between a painter’s way of looking at a particular landscape and the manner in which someone who is not an artist, and a child, looks at it. The canvas shows that, although the two visions, views or looks, seem to coincide, the painter sees the landscape differently because he has set himself free from normality, from the inconspicuousness of what is there. It is as if in order to present what is there and perhaps suggest its invisible temporal and historical layers, even its erasure, the artist has had to annihilate the landscape first, the landscape entrapped in the blindness of a channelled and channelling vision. Normally, we relate to what we see by turning it into something that has always been there and will always be there. As we memorize it, its inconspicuousness makes our memory indistinguishable from a kind of forgetting. Normality isolates inconspicuousness, if it does not engender it – the inconspicuousness that pertains to what is there, a landscape looked at repeatedly but never ‘like this’ or ‘like that’ – and the artist’s act of annihilation directs itself against this isolation, or production, of inconspicuousness, or against the ideology of normality. Annihilation allows the artist to depict a landscape that will undergo enormous changes with time. In the years and decades to come, the painted landscape, ‘this literal small backwater’2 in Bishop’s poem and in the ‘sketch’ it describes, the ‘sketch done in one hour, “in one breath”’,3 will cease to be the same; it will be dismantled. Erosion, as Tóibín says while looking at the Irish beach he remembers from childhood, changes the landscape, making it increasingly difficult to remember what was there, what was once normal and memorized, memorized to the point of being self-evident and hence forgotten, or no longer noticed. The artist preserves what is there. He preserves the literal, because he annihilates it. His intense gaze creates from memory, without looking, and hence from the verge of forgetting, where the compression may collapse into a depression, causing an irretrievable loss. In so doing, in hovering between compression and depression, he precedes the annihilation that awaits everything that is there. By placing the literal between two annihilations, so to speak, he enables whatever is there to come into existence, rendering it all the more palpable as, on the canvas, it must remain

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untouchable. What is there thus becomes a thought or an idea. The literal, or the letter, acquires a life of its own, an element in which it unfolds because nothing, no meaning, has been imposed upon it from the outside. Hannah Arendt puts it succinctly: ‘In order for us to think about somebody, he must be removed from our presence.’4 So withdrawal, the creation of an annihilating distance that undermines the channels of normality, of what is there inconspicuously, proves to be the beginning of freedom, in the case of the artist and perhaps more generally, too. Yet is it also the beginning of privacy? If privacy institutionalizes withdrawal, if it encloses withdrawal and its freedom within a frame of normality, there is at least one form of withdrawal that cannot be understood in terms of privacy and that takes the one who exempts himself from normality beyond the separation of the public and the private. It is such a form of withdrawal that renders thinking possible in the first place. When I think, when I try to capture what is there outside of normality, I do not think private thoughts, just as I am not an individual dwelling in the privacy of a retreat, in an allegedly safe place. At best, then, privacy will be a compromise, an external shelter for a freedom of thought that has already crossed the boundaries between the private and the public by aiming at ‘the little that we get for free’, at the ‘earthly trust’ mentioned in Bishop’s poem.5 For aiming at the ‘earthly trust’ is, let us not forget, to aim at what is there, not at what one simply imagines or randomly asserts to be there, nor at what one could withhold and choose not to make public for reasons of self-interest alone, of private ambition, or drivenness. A thought must be free to constitute itself as a thought, or as an insight that cannot simply be traced to its inception in other insights. Only when a thought is free can it be an insight, can it glimpse ‘the little that we get for free’.6 Traditionally, the concept that best encapsulates what the phrase ‘the little that we get for free’ seems to designate is the concept of truth. But such truth is not an abstract truth, burdened by the awkwardness that empty generality confers upon it. Truth as ‘the little that we get for free’ is a truth in flesh and blood, a truth that does not draw its strength from mere flesh, or from opinion, but that still amounts to an ‘earthly trust’, inseparable from the world thought discloses. Only when a thought is free can it get something ‘for free’, can it be true, can it remove itself from the world and return to it anew so as to disclose it, or one of its aspects, as if for the first time. Inasmuch, however, as such freedom of thought must be wrested again and again from the ideology of normality, inasmuch as withdrawal belongs to it as essentially as the courage that cuts through inhibitions and intimidations, there is no freedom that would not stand in a relationship to unfreedom, and no thought that would not stand in a relationship to stupidity, to the stupor or the insensibility triggered by the normality of what is there and that, being there, belongs to an established realm, to the private or the public. It is the stereotype, especially the stereotype of freedom associated with the realm of the private, that curtails free thought and arrests the hovering between compression and depression without which thought reproduces, stupidly and slavishly, what is there. Privacy may enable the withdrawal in which the emancipation that clears the way for a free comportment on which thought depends originates. Yet this emancipation must also be an emancipation from privacy and the relative protection it affords. We get nothing for free as long as we take the intractability of withdrawal from normality for granted because the private is supposed to shield our thoughts from public inspection.

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The reason lies in that the freedom of thought itself stems from the release inherent in ‘the little we get for free’, not from the leeway privacy grants and perhaps guarantees. Conversely, the involvement that proves inseparable from thought’s withdrawal from normality, and no less intractable, may have a transformative effect on the public sphere and may trigger all kinds of interventions, but cannot be contained within it. Only when measured against the standards that emerge after the private and the public have been consolidated as distinct and often opposed social realms can withdrawal be considered a symptom of resignation and involvement a symptom of actionism. Nothing is for free, and hence nothing is free, in the realms of the public and the private. In both we must constantly negotiate what we get and what we do not get, and redrawing the dividing line that runs between these realms is part of the negotiation. The ‘little we get for free’ is not negotiable, even though an effort must be made for us to open up, and remain open, to it. Of course today we may deem ourselves lucky if we can still choose to travel in a quiet car when boarding a train, or stay out of sight of a drone’s camera when moving about our flat, or engage in an exchange without being surveilled by the state, especially since anyone who is not an exhibitionist, or who prefers not to share everything immediately – most significantly his own vulnerability – must be suspected of insurrection against the community into which he has been forced, and of subversiveness against society at large. Also, who will insist on privacy when his ability to be mobile and flexible, infinitely adaptable and exploitable, is required to make a living, or to survive under the threat of inflicted scarcity, ongoing violent conflicts, or a devastating civil war? ‘In the type of society that announces itself ’, the French linguist and philosopher Jean-Claude Milner writes, ‘the one ruled will be called upon so as to make himself accountable. He will not merely be obliged to obey, he will also have to give an account of how deep his docility reaches’.7 Increasingly, then, evaluation, as an instrument of power, or as the manner in which power expresses itself, extends into a depth that tends to be referred to in terms of privacy. And the euphemism used to justify such an extension, used by both the ones who seek to legitimate the ruling powers and the ones who seek to resist them, is the word ‘transparency’. Accountability, the evaluation of thought and the transparency imposed upon it, must be regarded as the contemporary form of servitude to normality that abolishes thought’s freedom and truth. Where the value of everything is measured against how transparent everything is, transparency becomes the means to entrench a repressive normality in society that allows it to function as smoothly as possible and to minimize the ‘little that we get for free’. What is there is there, is safe and secured, by virtue of the evaluative account that renders it transparent, no matter how much it may not quite fit, or not fit at all, into the available grids. And, as Milner observes, the repressive aspect of such normality, the aspect of power, must also be detected in that the grids, submitted to a process of constant revision and amplification in the name of perfection, are designed not to permit anyone, or anything, to ever meet the expectations raised by the criteria of evaluation. Yet it is not privacy that Milner advocates when he discusses possible ‘active resistance’8 against the effects of evaluative ubiquity. Rather, he defends an individual ‘right to secrecy’, a right to ‘impenetrability’ that he calls a ‘material’ right because of the quality of resistance attributed to matter. Although it may seem tempting to claim

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that there is a close link between secrecy and privacy, secrecy in fact actively resists the invasion of public evaluation into every domain of life. However, secrecy is different from privacy in that it does not entail the establishment of a distinct social realm, or of society’s acknowledgement of a division of its individual members into an exposed and a secluded part. For, ultimately, one cannot conceive of a more impenetrable and irreducible secrecy than the secrecy that consists in the very fact, or in the very act, of thinking; not because of the withdrawal which thought involves, but because of the impossibility of ever making the instant intelligible when thought touches upon truth and gets something for free, comes into its own. Getting something for free is the very definition of secrecy, and when this happens, when a being is suddenly illuminated, as it were, and able to dwell in freedom, something of the nature of a thought or an insight has been communicated to it, to its flesh and blood, in whatever fashion. What remains peculiar, irresistible and ungraspable, forever withdrawn, about the secrecy inherent in getting something for free – what remains out of reach for the giver as much as for the taker, for a giver who, in a sense, gives nothing and for a taker who, in a sense, takes nothing – is that it is impossible to place such secrecy in opposition to a revelation, an outing or publicity in general, since a true thought is a universal thought, a thought that can always be conceived of twice at the very least and from which, consequently, no one can ever be deprived. The more a thought attests to its universality, or the more it sheds light on the singular and thereby enlightens what has no resemblance, to paraphrase Milner,9 the more secret and impenetrable it is, too. In short, the ‘right to secrecy’ should be comprehended as a right to thinking – a right that does not precede thinking in a body of law but that is affirmed, audaciously, by every single thought. It is affirmed in the guise of the encouragement and the enthusiasm, the exhilarating and contaminating force of liberation from what is there, that, released by ‘the little that we get for free’, a thought carries with itself. Hence we must identify a double impenetrability or two aspects of a materialism of thought. We must distinguish between, on the one hand, an impenetrability at the heart of thought itself, a resistance that the mind encounters at the moment when its thoughts are freed, or when, free, it gets something for free; and, on the other hand, an impenetrability that withstands the sublimating elevation of flesh and blood, the detachment from a singular embeddedness within the world and its numbing normality. But what if the impenetrability of the mind and the impenetrability of the body were connected? What if ‘earthly trust’ alone could get something ‘for free’? What if Adorno had intuited this connection when pleading for a transformative ‘migration’ of metaphysics into a ‘micrology’?10 In any event, privacy seems too institutional a concern to be receptive to the anarchy of a secret consisting in a revelation, and it also seems too normalizing a business to be receptive to the singularity of material abidance, to ‘our abidance / along with theirs: the munching cows / the iris, crisp and shivering, the water / still standing from spring freshets, / the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese’.11 Summoning inspiration from Les créatures, a rarely seen early film by Agnès Varda, which advocates the idea that an artist should strive to find an adversary in order to achieve creativity, one should, today, denounce the opponents of thought and its speculative freedom by pointing at those who support an understanding of privacy as

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a therapeutic ‘safe place’ where one does not have to look at things ‘like this’ or ‘like that’, and of the body and the mind as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘precarious’ and ‘fragile.’ An article published recently in The New York Times describes such a ‘safe place’ set up at Brown University for students, presumably undergraduates, to recover should they feel upset, disturbed, hurt, unstable, perhaps even traumatized by an unwanted, triggering exposure to critical views and dissenting arguments perceived as aggressions against beliefs they hold dear about themselves, others or the world: ‘The room was equipped with cookies, colouring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.’12 The author of this article, Julie Shulevitz, suggests that the price paid for the installation of such ‘safe places’ and the instauration of a private environment that resembles the environment of a spoilt child is an ever-worsening confusion of two levels of speech: the level on which terms are used and the level on which they are mentioned. Indeed, it may not always be easy to draw a line between these two levels. Yet the difficulty of keeping use and mention apart, and the inquiry into the reasons of this difficulty, must surely be one of the challenges that students, especially students in the humanities, should meet, and learn how to meet, while at university. Shulevitz also makes a sharp remark in relation to what could be considered a transformation of privacy. By becoming an allegedly ‘safe place’, privacy ceases to be an allegedly ‘free space.’ And ‘once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe’. Shulevitz adds: ‘It follows that they should be made safer.’13 But does it? Does whoever draws such a conclusion not follow the very logic of safety to which a contemporary understanding of privacy yields? The university is under attack from two sides. On the one hand, it is under attack from neoliberal administrators and their henchmen. On the other hand, it is under attack from students, academics, administrators and intellectuals, who wish to ensure that the university prevails as a ‘safe place’, a place where thinking is no longer free but truncated by the assumption that some thoughts are dangerous and need to be banned because they can be harmful and haunt vulnerable subjects. Neoliberalism and militant exclusion of ideas are strictly complementary. In each case, it is the freedom of thought that is eliminated. In each case, the reorganization of the university as a ‘safe place’ amounts to an elimination of individuals who think for themselves not privately, but in a place neither private nor public. The struggle against the dismantlement of the university is the struggle against a new form of fascism. In another recent and much-discussed article on the shifting grounds on which Higher Education stands in the United States, and more specifically on the puritan and repressive normalization of sexuality on campuses across the country, on the curtailing of what used to be relegated to the private sphere, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern, points out that melodrama reigns supreme among students, academics and administrators: ‘The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.’14 Kipnis reminds her readers of ‘a distressing little fact about the discomfort of vulnerability, which is that it’s pretty much a daily experience in the world, and every sentient being has to learn how

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to somehow negotiate the consequences and fallout, or go through life flummoxed at every turn’. If privacy, or the ideology of privacy, sheltered freedom in the past, it has become, in the present, a haven for servitude, for all who are enslaved to a rigid sense of themselves, others and the world. In antiquity, Arendt recalls in The Human Condition, it was precisely the slave who had no ‘private place of his own’,15 and the new, contemporary sense of privacy as a place where one’s innermost convictions are kept safe, denotes a reaffirmation of the private that deprives the individual of privacy and makes him into less than an individual. The private sphere is no longer a supplement that offers some relief from the public sphere, as it was in modern times, but rather an extension of the public sphere entirely controlled by it. However, when everything can be said to be under control, and visibly so, the public collapses yet again into the private, into the meaninglessness of secrecy forever sealed. Privacy, rather than encouraging the free development of thought, turns into a place where stereotypes and standardized opinions, normality at its most alienating and reifying, stifle freedom. Although privacy’s relationship to thought was always external – no matter how empowering it may have been for a withdrawal that outstripped both the public and the private, and no matter how much the strange and dark intimacy of the mind may have averted damage from thought in the most private of all public places, in the place of solitary confinement – its redefinition as a safe place for vulnerable creatures who relinquish their freedom to a stiffening of their selves crushes the annihilating power of ideas without which there is no art, for example. It is as if, paradoxically, nothing were less contingent on an outside than vulnerability itself, or as if the moment vulnerability is claimed, bad faith must take hold of it. Vulnerable creatures have a strange habit of surviving, as Nietzsche knew well enough. Inevitably, and ironically, vulnerability raises the question of who is more vulnerable: the one who clings reactively or resentfully to a menaced identity, or the one who refuses to do so? Should it not be possible to ever give a satisfying answer to this question, one would need to speak of a vulnerability of vulnerability; of a vulnerability that would expose vulnerability and leave it unprotected; of a vulnerability that would render vulnerability all the more elusive, all the more intangible and impenetrable, all the more unassailable. Can vulnerability not become the site of a fortress, the safest of all places? Nowadays, to ask whether one may have some privacy, please, means asking whether one may have some vulnerability, please. And it means renouncing ‘the little we get for free’.

Notes 1 Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 198. 2 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Poem’, in Complete Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 177. 3 Ibid. 4 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 78. 5 Bishop, ‘Poem’, 177. 6 Ibid. 7 Jean-Claude Milner, La politique des choses (Paris: Verdier, 2011), 15.

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8 Ibid., 23. 9 Jean-Claude Milner, Clartés de tout (Paris: Verdier, 2011), 33. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 399. 11 Bishop, ‘Poem’, 177. 12 Judith Shulevitz, ‘In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas’, The New York Times, 21 March 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitzhiding-from-scary-ideas.html. For consistency with Shulevitz’s article the term ‘safe place’ has generally been preferred to the alternative, ‘safe space’. 13 Shulevitz, ‘In College’. 14 Laura Kipnis, ‘Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 February 2015. 15 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 64.

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Ruptures and Disruptions

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11

Catastrophe Jean-Michel Rabaté

It all begins annoyingly. We follow an irate, obnoxious and arrogant director who terrorizes his secretary; huffing and puffing, he claims to be in a hurry yet wants his cigar lit and relit; he lingers on minute details of colour and gesture yet checks his watch, eager to go to a political meeting after he is done with his theatrical business. He orders his assistant around while she instructs an old man silently standing on a podium. They try out hieratic poses for him: his hands move and join as in prayer; he bares some flesh despite the cold; his skin will need to be whitened for better effect; he must not speak or lift his head; one single projector will highlight his head when he is exhibited as a living statue or tableau vivant in a forthcoming official gathering. If the old man is docile, if the eager assistant follows the orders dutifully jotted down in a notebook, the show will be a success or at least will be greeted by loud applause from the audience. One will have recognized in this sketchy summary one of Beckett’s later allegories, his short play of 1982, tantalizingly entitled Catastrophe. Why this title? The word is mentioned once, when the director is finally satisfied with the awkward pose: ‘There’s our catastrophe. In the bag. Once more and I’m off.’1 Most commentators have seen the key to the meaning of the play – which was performed at the Avignon festival in 1982 at the request of a French association defending imprisoned artists – in the dedication to Václav Havel, the Czech dissident, later to become the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia. At the time, Havel, charged as a subversive, was in jail for his political work with Charter 77. The Protagonist who stands exposed and mute on a podium calls up the dire fate of Havel who had been prevented from writing in his cell. Beckett’s Protagonist is made to strike a pose without any possibility of expressing himself, as we see from this exchange. The assistant asks tentatively: ‘What about a little … a little … gag?’ which makes the director explode: ‘For God’s sake! This craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death! Little gag! For God’s sake!’2 However, she insists: ‘Sure he won’t utter?’ He replies confidently: ‘Not a squeak.’ The original French is less ambiguous. ‘Un petit bâillon’3 means literally a ‘gag’ in the mouth, which loses the possibility of being understood as a quip or prank. Nevertheless, a hermeneutic problem arises. If the director and the assistant are afraid that the Protagonist speak out in public, why would the use of a gag be an ‘explicitation’? The play’s dotted i’s seem to contain many submerged puns – hence, the old man’s shivers: he is frozen in order to ‘freeze’ at

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the last minute in a perfect petrification. Does this mean that the dictatorial director is denouncing or promoting his politics? We are once more in the sordid world of endless torture, the quest for a final avowal from a helpless victim depicted in Rough for Radio II. There, a similar couple made up of an ‘Animator’ and a ‘Stenographer’ forces a poet called Fox to confess by alternating coaxing and blows. In Catastrophe, the insinuation of torture is limited to the director’s enjoyment at being told that the old man shivers in the cold. When the assistant suggests that the Protagonist might lift his head, the director rejects this innovation vehemently: ‘Raise his head? Where do you think we are? In Patagonia? Raise his head! For God’s sake.’4 Beckett slyly alludes to the then recent Falklands War, a military conflict opposing a dictatorial Argentina sullied by a ‘dirty war’ against ‘subversives’ and a no less muscular UK. In spite of the warning, the gesture to be avoided at all cost takes place at the end: the old man raises his head and stares at the audience, which is enough to silence the recorded applause. The stage directions end with: ‘The applause falters, dies. Long pause. Fade-out of light on face.’5 In what sense does this short play explicate the concept of ‘catastrophe’? One might say that catastrophe is allegorized at three levels. A first meaning is the exhibition intended by the director, the idea of presenting an old man on a stage as a degraded victim or enemy. The protagonist’s hands twisted by disease (perhaps contracted in jail), his bald head and his whitened skin debase him, making him look weak, contemptible, barely human. The political spectacle that the director organizes for his own ends, however obscure, calls up the sinister Stalinian trials with their absurd accusations and displays of broken but consenting victims. In fact, it is the entire system of totalitarian regimes that can be called a ‘catastrophe’ as soon as it turns into a spectacle. Catastrophe is to be understood as a profane apotheosis, as the deified reification of battered humanity. A second meaning of catastrophe is closer to its etymological meaning and refers to a final reversal. At the last second, the mute victim manifests his agency by his defiant stare. The catastrophe intervenes as the last act in a play whose condensed logic allows for a single gesture, albeit minimal, to undo all the rest. Here is the root of Beckett’s ethics of courage and resistance that Alain Badiou has described powerfully.6 There is a third level of meaning implied by Catastrophe. The play was first performed on a stage in Avignon. It was successful, among other reasons, because the news reached Havel in his jail and boosted his morale.7 However, the French audience was caught up in a bind: could they clap at the end? Should they express their solidarity with the defiant protagonist by remaining silent? This was Beckett’s innovative way of alerting spectators to what can be construed as their ethical or political role, a role that may come closer to the sense of the ‘consternation’ that he saw deriving from his own texts than any aesthetic elation.8 Beckett’s play mobilizes the main meanings I attribute to the term catastrophe. It is a Greek word that has a specific meaning in poetics, its first usage bound by the stage, and entailing a sudden reversal, a ‘turning’ or literal ‘strophe’ going against or down, which somehow is tied to a situation that we perceive as theatrical. In the same way as there is a theatre of war, there will be a theatre of catastrophe. The ‘overturning’ entails a ‘change’ that does not remain at an aesthetic level, for it mobilizes the whole ethical or political perspective brought to bear on the spectacle.

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The second meaning has to be explicated further. It is what Malone Dies calls ‘catastrophe in the ancient sense’. Malone is lamenting the loss of his stick and then reflects that because he is deprived of the object, he understands the concept of the stick in itself; he comments: ‘So that I half discern, in the veritable catastrophe that has befallen me, a blessing in disguise. How comforting that is. Catastrophe too in the ancient sense no doubt. To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of.’9 With this oblique reference to the last circles of Dante’s Inferno, Malone deplores the absence of a catastrophe in the sense given to it by Greek rhetoricians: an overturning, a conclusion, a close, the event precipitating the end of a play, whether a tragedy (usually the death of a hero) or a comedy (usually a marriage or a sudden happy event). The term does not appear as such in Aristotle’s Poetics who prefers that of ‘peripeteia’ (reversal of fortune), but it was systematized later as the last act of a classical play. Stephen Dedalus remembers the term when he evokes the theme of banishment that he sees recurring in Shakespeare’s plays: ‘[I]t repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.’10 Beckett learned from Joyce the trick of not concluding any novel or play: any literal catastrophe is avoided. All of Beckett’s plays eschew the final dénouement: there is no final closure or disclosure, no conclusion, no last ‘turn’ of the plot. This avoidance may have something to do with Beckett’s frequentation of psychoanalysis in the thirties. The two years he spent on W. R. Bion’s couch brought about a sense that he had never been properly born, as Jung had explained in London, but that this provided a relief, a new ‘turning’: if this was the case, he would never really die either, an insight that allowed him to go on writing, finishing Murphy by killing off the main protagonist, and then launch other projects. He had found his main theme: death is not a catastrophe; it is the impossibility of dying that is a catastrophe. The forever dying Malone echoes this fantasy: Yes, an old foetus, that’s what I am now, hoar and impotent … has anything happened, anything changed? No, the answer is no, I shall never get born and therefore never get dead, and a good job too. And if I tell of me and of that other who is my little one, it is as always for want of love, well I’ll be buggered. I wasn’t expecting that, want of a homuncule, I can’t stop.11

What Beckett’s novels at the time of the trilogy and his later plays mobilize, even when they insist on bleakness, despair and post-apocalyptic situations as in Endgame, is that we have to live by confronting a catastrophe that has already happened. The combination of Jung’s sudden revelation of the possibility that one can die because one has not been truly born paved the way for an insight that later found a perfect formulation. It was the key statement made by Donald W. Winnicott in his last, posthumous, paper, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, published in 1974.12 This fear finds a striking translation in Roland Barthes’s last book on photography: ‘I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already happened.’13 Here, Barthes is meditating on his own catastrophe, his mother’s recent death. Its sheer tragedy is encapsulated in a photograph of the mother when she was five, a photograph that he decides not to reproduce in Camera Lucida. All the other

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photographs contain the future death of the subjects who posed at the time. This is the case of the portrait of Lewis Payne made by Alexander Garner in 1865, when the subject was awaiting his execution. Barthes comments that he is both dead now and going to die, forever. The invisible photograph of the mother would convey the same message: she is both dead and going to die, which is unbearable. Barthes generalizes by stating: ‘Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.’14 By a strange coincidence, Winnicott had already died in 1971 when his wife Clare published this famous essay in 1974. In ‘Fear of Breakdown’, the main theme is that psychotics have not been able to experience a psychic catastrophe from their first years. They keep imagining and fearing an impending breakdown, while it replays this originary lack or absence, which is worse than a trauma. If they are treated as neurotics, the cure cannot progress. The solution will be found when the analysis makes them understand that there is no need to fear, since the collapse or breakdown happened in the past. It took place without being experienced, and the experience can then be staged through the transferential relation of analysand to analyst. Winnicott discusses the case of a schizophrenic patient who would tell him: ‘All I ask you to do is to help me commit suicide for the right reason instead of for the wrong reason.’15 He failed to give her a good reason to commit suicide, and thus she committed suicide for the wrong reason, in despair. It was only later that Winnicott understood that she wished him to tell her that she had already died in infancy: ‘On this basis I think she and I could have enabled her to put off body death till old age took its toll.’ The patient committed suicide because she had never experienced her earlier psychic death; at the time, she was not mature enough to feel it, but she partly guessed this psychic demise in a premature awareness rendered more acute by her own mother’s panic at her birth. Winnicott expands this view and includes all attitudes entailing a radical fear of death. It would be too simple to reduce this to a birth trauma as Otto Rank had tried to do. The temporality sketched by the essay implies that the past and the future become matters of life and death in the here and now. Such is the root of the twisted and reversible logic deployed by the concept of catastrophe. Winnicott insists on the future anterior tense kept in store by any catastrophe, which evokes other theories about primeval catastrophes. One of these is the recurrent theory that life on earth in its most varied geological and biological forms is not due to gradual evolution but to a violent revolution commonly labelled a catastrophe. Among the many natural cataclysms that struck contemporaries with such force that they called them catastrophes, from the total destruction of Pompei swallowed by hot ashes and lava in 79 AD to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, no other disaster impacted the very definition of a catastrophe as much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Walter Benjamin wrote a narrative for children about it in 1931.16 He pointed out that the destruction of Lisbon was unique, not because of its extraordinary magnitude but because of the intellectual and moral scandal it represented. The event baffled contemporary expectations. Lisbon was at the time one of the main capitals of Europe and the hub of a colonial empire; it was a Christian city famous for its pomp and decorum. The moral shock was such that almost all writers and thinkers in Europe responded to the catastrophe, from Voltaire, who wrote his famous ‘Poem on Lisbon’s Disaster’, to Kant, who wrote no

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less than three essays about the catastrophe in the following year. Of a population of 200,000 people, around 50,000 people were killed, and more than 80 per cent of the buildings were destroyed. There was no way one could make sense of the cataclysm if one followed a religious discourse: the catastrophe took place early on All Saints’ Day when most people were in churches that collapsed on them, while the red-light district of the Alfama, located much higher, was spared havoc. Kant, who was twenty-four then, became one of the most vocal commentators to argue that the catastrophe was due to natural causes, even if he wrongly attributed these to fiery gases arising from the interior of the earth. Beckett mentions this attitude in a French poem evoking the sequence of past catastrophes that may have led to the extinction of the mammoths and then envisions Kant: ‘Sur Lisbonne fumante Kant froidement penché’ (‘Kant on still smoking Lisbon coldly meditating’).17 Indeed, Kant’s rationalistic point of view found an equivalent in Voltaire’s line: ‘Of destruction Nature is the empire.’18 A new rationalism had to be born, and it would have to examine as ‘coldly’ as possible the connection between nature, reason and destruction. While the Marquis de Sade concluded that destruction was the only law of nature he recognized, which would justify his repeated outrages to other people and to civilized morality, that other thinkers were busy integrating catastrophe into their systems. This was the case with Charles Bonnet, who curiously managed to elaborate at the same time a philosophy stressing the unbroken continuity of all life, from the lowest plants to humans, and a theory of nature regularly regenerated by cataclysms. Michel Foucault analyses this school of thought as caught up between ‘Continuity and Catastrophe’ in The Order of Things and insists that it remains in a classical mode of thinking despite its stress on catastrophe: In its concrete from, and in the depth that is proper to it, nature resides wholly between the fabric of the taxonomia and the line of revolutions. The tableaux that it forms under the very eyes of men, and that it is the task of discourse of science to survey, are the fragments of the great surface of living species that are apparent according to the way it has been patterned, burst open, and frozen, between two temporal revolutions.19

Thus in Bonnet’s last magnum opus, his Philosophical Palingenesis from 1769,20 we get a magnificent picture of a continuous progression among organisms, from leaves presented as quasi sentient since they breathe when dipped in water, and thus exchange with the environment, to human beings whose future is seen with eschatological optimism: there is not much to fear since they will survive the inevitable future cataclysms by being transformed into angels! Meanwhile, animals will also move up and will develop some higher form of intelligence. Each time a new catastrophe occurs, it is willed by God or Providence and pushes all organisms further on the scale of evolution. The periodical upheavals undergone by the globe lead to a positive metempsychosis: a better order will succeed the previous one. Even after the worst of cataclysms, life survives and regenerates itself, in an ascending dialectics ranging from the minute germs contained in plants to the homunculi hidden in the fertility organs of men and women.

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A radically new note was sounded with Georges Cuvier, perhaps indeed because he was writing after the huge shock brought about by the French Revolution. In his Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Earth (1825),21 Cuvier apparently follows the same logic as Bonnet: changes in the earth’s geology as well as mutations in animal species are the consequence of regular and massive upheavals that he calls ‘revolutions’. By a careful observation of mountain tops, of glaciers and river beds, he deduces that the surface of the earth testifies to serial cataclysms, each of which destroyed all life. He debunks the biblical myth of a unique flood to argue that there were at least three similar upheavals or earthquakes marked by an excess of water or fire. He founds his speculations on his advanced knowledge of palaeontology and comparative anatomy. With the most recent catastrophe only a few thousand years ago, Cuvier’s work forces us to re-envision ‘man’ as a recent creation, an insight which is confirmed when one notices that there are no human fossils, whereas there are many animal fossils. In fact, as Foucault explains, Cuvier’s logic was entirely different from that of Bonnet. Cuvier broke with the classical project of a unified taxonomia: ‘From Cuvier onward, it is life in its non-perceptible, purely functional aspect that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of a classification. The classification of living beings is no longer to be found in the great expanse of order; the possibility of classification now arises from the depths of life, from those elements most hidden from view.’22 The lesson brought by comparative anatomy was a multiplication of differences and not a stable order. A new science of biology became possible when it broke away from the foundation in a nature considered as an ordered and teleological totality. Cuvier marked a modern epistemological break with Classical Nature, even though his general thesis was discarded because of his unabashed biological ‘fixism’. What is surprising in Foucault’s account is not so much that Darwin is not named but that Cuvier’s meditation on sudden revolutions leading to catastrophic upheaval is not even mentioned. There is a rationale for this avoidance. If Cuvier’s catastrophism was not of the classical type, as we have seen, if his modernity ushers in the thought of discontinuity found in the philosophy of Nietzsche, it is because Cuvier announces Foucault himself. Indeed, the famous last sentence of the book, predicting the disappearance of man whose figure would be erased ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’,23 seems to come straight out of Cuvier. Foucault’s structuralist neo-catastrophism echoes a century and a half later Cuvier’s scepticism facing the legendary history of the human. Cuvier had argued that the history of man as a species could only go back to five thousand years before. To buttress his figures, he found an unexpected confirmation in Chinese historians and sages like Confucius. For Cuvier as for Foucault, in the ‘human sciences’ like history and philosophy, there are only revolutions and no gradual evolution. While Cuvier proved scientifically that some species (like the mastodon) had been extinct, Foucault heralded the parallel extinction of the not-so-ancient regime of thought defined by humanism. The next step consisted in giving oneself the possibility of calculating the breaking points that constitute catastrophes. This was the work launched in the late sixties by René Thom, who had great affinities with Foucault’s genealogy. Thom showed under which conditions minimal changes in the features of a non-linear system could cause

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a sudden imbalance. These small changes generate a modification of the whole system. Bifurcation points occur in definable patterns following quantifiable geometrical structures. Here are just a few in the panoply of catastrophes: fold catastrophes, cusp catastrophes, swallow-tail catastrophes or butterfly catastrophes. The first time I read Thom’s papers, I was surprised to see that he was taking as examples the breaking point of a wave or the capture of a prey by animal predators. The richly metaphorical language should not blind us to the fact that Thom and his followers managed to produce a mathematization of the small or large instabilities in any system, whether in mechanics, animal behaviour, astronomy or the apparently irrational fluctuations of the stock exchange. In 1983, Salvador Dalí, who had become interested in mathematics, exemplified the work of Thom in a series of paintings that all illustrated different catastrophes. One of his last paintings, entitled The Swallow’s Tail, dated May 1983, owes its curious shape to Thom’s four-dimensional graph. It is combined with a second graph, the S-curve which Thom termed a ‘cusp’. It was exemplified by Dalí as the curve of a cello, its apertures evoking a mathematical symbol, the large italicized S representing an integral in calculus. At the same time, one will not be surprised to recognize the painter’s signature mustaches in this shape. Perhaps Dalí was confessing that his later work was to be subsumed under the category of ruins and catastrophes? Indeed, catastrophe in art can be understood as an undoing that reverses creation, a traversing that leads to de-creation. Such de-creation finds its first expression in Leonardo da Vinci’s concept of disfazione. The term ‘disfazione’ is no longer used in Italian but was common in the Renaissance to refer to disasters, cataclysms and all sorts of catastrophes. Leonardo’s notebooks render it as ‘ruin’ or ‘destruction’, and it is used in evocations of tempests or in a recurring apocalyptic fantasy of the deluge.24 A more philosophical usage of the term appeared in Leonardo’s ‘disputation’ on the question of whether the law of nature is that of life or of universal destruction. Should animals, should all living creatures, live by killing each other? There are two distinct voices in this disputation, the stronger of which belongs to a materialist voice. It asserts forcefully that man is no better than predatory animals; man is caught up in the universal rhythm of creation and destruction: Behold now the hope and desire of going back to one’s country or returning to primal chaos, like that of the moth to the light, of the man who with perpetual longing always looks forward with joy to each new spring and each new summer, and to the new months and the new years, deeming that the things he longs for are too slow in coming: and who does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. (E’ non si avveda che desidera la sua disfazione)25

Man is the creature of catastrophe. Leonardo here developed a theme that he had found in Lucretius. In 1939, Georges Bataille echoed Leonardo’s enthusiasm for universal destruction in an essay published in his review Acéphale, ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’. Bataille associated the joy of being alive with sadistic violence unleashed in the middle of universal catastrophe. He ended the essay with a ‘Heraclitean Meditation’ welcoming the prospect of total dissolution:

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Before the terrestrial world whose summer and winter order the agony of all living things, before the universe composed of innumerable turnings stars, limitlessly losing and consuming themselves, I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendors whose very movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding consumption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give itself to be annihilated.26

Beckett, who had met Bataille after the war, and who had used the term ‘disfazione’ to discuss Proust even earlier, quoted it again in his commentary on the paintings of Bataille’s brother-in-law, André Masson: ‘(Masson’s) so extremely intelligent remarks on space breathes the same possession as the notebooks of Leonardo who, when he speaks of disfazione, knows that for him not one fragment will be lost.’27 However, in the end, unlike Bataille, Beckett ultimately rejected the concept of disfazione. Beckett was suspicious of this all too keen endorsement of catastrophes. Leonardo and Masson, almost eager to catch the minute details of destruction, appear guilty of capitalizing on catastrophe. In his notebooks, Leonardo can be seen gloating over the panicked disarray of men and animals, the ruins of cities commingling with the ruins of mountains, in a strange hyper-realistic fantasy in which no detail gets lost, from the leaves to the eddies in the lakes into which palaces have crumbled. Bored with this predictable Schadenfreude, Beckett left disfazione to Masson and Bataille whose frantic acquiescence to universal ‘undoing’ ended up looking glib. Beckett was wary of ready-made catastrophes, which is why he wrote to Georges Duthuit: ‘Greatly enjoyed your lack of enjoyment of the all-purpose disaster, à la Bataille.’28 The ironical ‘désastre à tout faire’ is a good send-off of Bataille’s acephalic frenzy. What bothered Beckett then was that the praise of universal destruction entailed a sleight of hand. Even when they embraced catastrophe, Leonardo and Bataille relied on a substantial permanence by imagining a recombination of atoms after their dissolution. Such calculations will always be defeated by the circularity of time. This was the dramatic irony well perceived by Leonardo: the more we desire the return of the spring, the more we approach our dissolution, and yet we desire this return because we know that dissolution approaches. However, this psychological paradox should not lead to a position of omnipotence that would end up placing the artist beyond good and evil. Leonardo’s partiality to catastrophe was indeed positioned beyond good and evil. Freud had noticed that Leonardo, who was so fastidious and would free caged birds in markets, never betrayed any compassion for other people. He followed, without equanimity, criminals led to their execution so that he might study, for his paintings, their faces distorted by fear. ‘He often gave the appearance of being indifferent to good or evil,’ Freud notes.29 Everything in his world would fall under the domination of scientific knowledge or aesthetics, a tendency also present in Masson. Beckett rejected the dialectical sleight of hand, the glib exchange, in which loss, death and catastrophe turn into the artist’s gain. Dismissing an all too easy ‘turning’, he refuses to make a strophe of the catastrophe. Thus Beckett rejected the ‘strophic’ great works of art in which death and loss find a dialectical resolution as was the case in Proust or Joyce. By contrast, he praised

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Beethoven’s late musical style, an inspiration for a verbal artist like him who was interested in negativity and gaps, abysses and dehiscence. This is what Beckett expresses in his famous ‘German letter’ from 1937. His programme consisted in bringing all language into disrepute: To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today … Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence?30

By a remarkable historical coincidence, Theodor W. Adorno developed similar ideas in his essay on Beethoven’s late style, written in 1934 but published in 1937.31 Rejecting any biographical reading that would highlight the artist’s subjectivity, requiring only formal analyses, Adorno insists on the return of clichés and conventions in the ‘late style’ of an artist like Beethoven. This is because these conventions function as the ruins of art as such: The power of subjectivity in late works of art is the sudden flaring up with which it abandons the work of art. It burst them asunder, not in order to express itself but so as to cast off the appearance of art. What is left of the work is ruins, and subjectivity communicates itself, as if by means of ciphers, only through the hollowed-out forms from which it escapes. Touched by death, the hand of the master liberates the mass of material that it previously shaped; the cracks and crannies it contains are testimony to the ultimate impotence of the self in the face of existence; they are the master’s last achievements.32

It is fascinating to see Beckett and Adorno, both in their early thirties, embrace ruin and impotence as the key to an artistic expression that deliberately destroys the concept of art at exactly the same time. Adorno concludes with the famous sentence: ‘In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.’33 Beckett elaborates his new aesthetics of impotence against the sublime power of art still deployed by Joyce and Proust. One might conclude, as Ben Hutchinson has done,34 that all of modernism is the deployment of the logic of catastrophe and that a writer like W. G. Sebald would be its best representative. Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis provides another model, since this mass was meant as a testimony to the Napoleonic wars and was so moving that it was followed by stunned silence rather than applause. Another model would be the demonic compositions of the fictional artist in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn, whose theories of music are partly based on Adorno’s discussion of Arnold Schönberg. Whether modernist or classicist, this art is new only in so far as it can be conscious of its lateness, adhering to the consciousness that it is an art of the catastrophe. This modernist catastrophe is one that we can enjoy, whether as a missa solemnis or as a missa parodia, but that we should be ready to greet without any applause.

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Notes Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), 460. 2 Ibid., 459. 3 Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe et autres dramaticules (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 77. 4 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 460. 5 Ibid., 461. 6 See Alain Badiou, On Beckett, trans. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003). 7 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 598. 8 Beckett told Israel Shenker in 1956: ‘You notice how Kafka’s form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller – almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time – but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form’, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. L. Graver and R. Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), 148. 9 Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, in Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 254. 10 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed H. W. Gabler (London: Penguin, 1986). 11 Beckett, Malone Dies, 225. 12 Donald W. Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, publication overseen by Clare Winnicott, International Review of Psychoanalysis 1 (1974): 103–7. 13 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday Press, 1981), 96. 14 Ibid. 15 Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, 105. 16 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–4, ed. M. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 536–40. 17 Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems, ed. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (London: Faber, 2012), 98. 18 ‘De la destruction la nature est l’empire.’ Voltaire, ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’, accessed on 1 August 2018, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Poème_sur_le_désastre_ de_Lisbonne. 19 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 150, translation modified; see Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 163. 20 Charles Bonnet, La Palingénésie Philosophique, ou idées sur l’état passé et l’état futur des êtres vivants, 2 vols (Genève: Claude Philibert and Barthelemi Chirol, 1769–70). 21 Georges Cuvier, Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Earth, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington: Richer Resources Publications, 2009). 22 Foucault, The Order of Things, 268. 23 Ibid., 387. 24 Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks, ed. and trans. Edward MacCurdy (New York: George Braziller, 1955), 914–20. 25 Ibid., 75. 26 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1985), 239. 1

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27 Samuel Beckett, ‘Three Dialogues’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Fragment (London: John Calder, 1983), 141. 28 Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 2, 1941–1956, ed. George Craig et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 187. 29 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 16. 30 Beckett, Disjecta, 172. 31 T. W. Adorno, ‘Spätstil Beethovens’, publ. Der Auftakt, 1937, vol. 17, 5/6, in English as ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 295–8. 32 Ibid., 297. 33 Ibid., 298. 34 See Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Event Mark Currie

An event is a moment more than ordinarily involved in change. It is a happening that we do not foresee, but which we understand later to add to the set of possibilities of what might happen, and in this basic sequence, of looking forwards and not seeing, then looking back and understanding, we are given the structure of the event as a distribution of knowledge through time. This is a structure that places special importance on the notion of surprise, since surprise is an expression of our failure to foresee. But the surprise arrives after a delay, as a reaction to what happened, when we return to or recollect the past in the light of what transpired. There is a sense, therefore, in which the event can only be perceived as a moment more than ordinarily involved in change by retroaction, after the event. To understand this structure, to distinguish it from change in general, or from retrospect in itself, we need to take questions of unforeseeability and retrospection step by step. In doing this, I will be concerned to show that there is a specialist meaning of the word ‘event’ which distinguishes it from the commonplace meaning of a more or less momentous incident or happening. This can be thought of also as a process of mediating between two dictionary definitions of the word: on one hand the sense of ‘what is happening’, and on the other a sense of outcome or eventuality. Derrida makes it clear that the specialized philosophical meaning of event is bound up with the problems of prediction, anticipation and expectation: There are those of us who lean toward the assumption that an event worthy of the name cannot be foretold. We are not supposed to see it coming. If what comes then stands out horizontally on a horizon that can be anticipated then there is no pure event. No horizon, then, for the event or encounter, but only verticality and the unforeseeable. The alterity of the other – that which does not reduce itself to the economy or our horizon – always comes to us from above, indeed, from the above.1

Some events are pure and worthy of the name by virtue of the fact that they cannot be foretold. A happening that we can see coming, or that stands out on a horizon of expectation, is not an event, which must fall from above, unanticipated, and in principle, unforeseeable. The first step in separating the pure event from the everyday is

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that the pure event is not merely something unforeseen, the foreseeability of which can be established later, but rather something which could not, under any circumstances and in principle, have been foreseen, predicted or anticipated. The pure event has the property of alterity, and its otherness consists in nothing other than unexpectability. We can gloss this notion of unexpectability with reference to categories that express different kinds of uncertainty in game theory. The game theorist commonly distinguishes between aleatory variability and epistemic uncertainty. Aleatory variability is the kind of unforeseeability that pertains when we roll a dice, knowing that there are six possible outcomes, where nothing will help us to know in advance which of these possible outcomes will eventuate. This is distinguishable from other kinds of uncertainty which might be reduced by the acquisition of knowledge and therefore derive from a lack or absence of knowledge. Epistemic uncertainty can be reduced by further knowledge, and it is important for us all to know the difference, so as not to waste our time trying to know what cannot be known. Aleatory variability is susceptible to calculations of probability, exactly because the set of possible outcomes is enumerable and finite so that outcomes are all foreseeable and known in advance as possibilities. Neither of these kinds of uncertainty about the future fall under the compass of the event, because they are not in principle, unforeseeable: the aleatory offers us a number of foreseeable outcomes without certainty of which will eventuate; and the epistemically uncertain future is susceptible to further investigation and can be reduced by research and knowledge. The event is, by contrast, ontologically uncertain, which is to say that it could not have been foreseen under any circumstances. The uncertainty of the event is ontological in the sense that it is part of this event’s being that it could not, under any circumstances, have been predicted. Nor is there any knowledge that we could have possessed that would have helped us to see it coming. This, then, is the first step in any account of the event: that it is an unexpected and in principle unforeseeable occurrence; it came from above or from nowhere. We find this quality attached to the concept of the event in almost any philosophical account, and particularly in the work of Deleuze, Lyotard or Derrida. In this distinction between epistemic and ontological uncertainty we can see the basic problem or dichotomy of event philosophy: that unforeseeability can be a matter of ignorance or chance. That is to say, we are either ignorant of the chain of causation that produces the unforeseeable occurrence, or we have to regard that occurrence as having no cause from which the event could be inferred as an outcome. For this reason we tend to find the notion of the absolute or ontological unforeseeability of an event entangled with the question of chance or hazard. Consider this passage, in which Peter Hallward establishes the basis of Alain Badiou’s account of the event: ‘What is an event? For Badiou, first and foremost, an event is “purely haphazard [hasardeux], and cannot be inferred from the situation”. (EE, 215) An event is the unpredictable result of chance and chance alone. Whereas the “structure” of a situation “never provides us with anything other than repetition,” every event is unprecedented and unexpected.’2 Here then is the conjunction of unforeseeability and chance: the event cannot be predicted, and it is the result of chance alone. In contrast to the event, the situation offers us only repetition or the unfolding of precedented occurrences in a predictable pattern. I use Hallward here

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because he is more specific than Badiou himself ever manages to be about the ‘event’ in its relation to chance, since the event is the result of ‘chance alone’. For an event to be unprecedented and unexpected, it must be the result of chance, where chance is not mere aleatory variability, nor mere ignorance of the chain of cause and effect, but the arrival of something which is ontologically uncertain, and which could not have been foreseen, no matter how much knowledge we hold of the chain of cause and effect, even as a possibility, from the situation in which it occurred. On this point, anyone struggling to distinguish the event from any other hazardous occurrence, or to distinguish chance from ignorance, would do well to turn to Žižek for clarification. Žižek’s shortest explanation of the philosophical concept of the event begins from the following definition: ‘At first approach, an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes – and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap which separates an effect from its causes.’3 It is, in other words, the inexplicability of an effect from the specification of its cause or causes that makes the event unforeseeable. Rather than simply extracting the notion of the event from its cluster of associations (unpredictability, chance), this definition takes us into the very heart of philosophy. Not only does it pose the fundamental problems of causation (‘Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?’) but it also takes us back to the dichotomy of the previous paragraph, between epistemic and ontological uncertainty, or ignorance and chance. Preferring, as most philosophers do, to talk of contingency rather than chance, Žižek defines the problem in this way: ‘The trouble with contingency resides in its uncertain status: is it ontological, i.e., are things in themselves contingent, or is it epistemological, i.e., is contingency merely an expression of the fact that we do not know the complete chain of causes which brought about the allegedly “contingent” phenomenon?’4 This uncertain status is of course fundamental, defining as it does two basic approaches in philosophy, referred to by Žižek as the ‘transcendental’ and the ‘ontological’ or ‘ontic’.5 This is fundamental because we need to know how to answer this question of the event: ‘[I]s an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or is it a shattering transformation of reality itself?’6 The problem as it is set up by Žižek turns on the question of whether the contingency of the chance event is attributable to the subject or to the object, the person (or people) comprehending events, or the nature of reality itself. It is tempting to think that we can distinguish different kinds of event on the basis that the surprise of some events must derive from the limits of what we know and of others from the absence of sufficient reasons in nature. Such an approach is ruled out by Žižek, who prefers to recognize the more basic feature of the event: ‘the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme’.7 In fact, when Žižek introduces this basic problem (is it ontological, or is it epistemological?) he almost immediately abolishes it as a problem, not merely through some preference for or disposition towards this common feature, but because Hegel, according to Žižek, made the problem vanish. When we distinguish between the event as a change in the way reality appears to us and an event as a shattering transformation of reality itself, we encounter the possibility that contingency itself might be just the appearance of necessity: that contingency is just the way that things appear when we are in the middle of things and that when we

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have temporal distance or retrospect on events, we perceive them as being governed by a necessity that was imperceptible in advance. This, according to Žižek, was one of the fundamental recognitions of Hegel’s dialectic, and it translates the dichotomy of contingency and necessity into a question about the relationship of two temporal positions: the appearance of contingency in prospect and the recognition of necessity in retrospect. Hence, for Žižek, ‘the retroactive glance allows us to discern the contours of inner necessity, where the view immersed in events can only perceive an interplay of accidents’.8 In addition to the question of what is in relation to what we know, we also have this new possibility, that the passage of time might be described in this way, as the conversion of contingency into necessity, as prospect transforms into retrospect. In short, things appear contingent when they have not yet happened, and they appear necessary when they have taken place. Žižek calls this a ‘leap from the not yet to the always already’, and in this way he translates the question of the gap between an effect and its causes, or the problem of an event, into a dynamic between two temporal positions – between the view immersed in events and the retroactive glance: ‘The key philosophical implication of Hegelian retroactivity is that it undermines the reign of The Principle of Sufficient Reason.’9 The very concept of the event, in other words, the happening which exceeds its causes or erupts from nothing, draws our attention to the retroactivity involved in the perception of causality and, in particular, to the way that the causal chain is apprehended in retrospect: we add retroactively to the set of possible outcomes those we could not perceive in prospect. In this dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, the ‘contingent process takes on the appearance of necessity: things retroactively “will have been” necessary’.10 The ‘will have been’ is one of the most important structures that Žižek offers in his account of the event, helping us to understand not only the relation that we live out between prospect and retrospect in the Hegelian reversal of contingency into necessity, but also the basis of Badiou’s complicated structural description of the event. Žižek finds in Hegel, and in Lacan as a reader of Hegel, a motif based on the relation between prospect and retrospect which he calls ‘the great motif of the future anterior’. Perhaps it is important to state the obvious here: that between the moment of an event’s emergence (the view immersed in events) and the position from which we understand in retrospect, there is no reconciliation. We cannot occupy both of these positions at the same time: the emergence of an event cannot coincide with any actual retrospect, and we are stuck in an ineluctable present from which we can only speculate on what is to come. From the point of view of the situation in which an event emerges, we can, in other words, only envisage a future moment of hypothetical retrospection, in which certainty is ours. This is the structure of the future anterior: that we refer forwards to a future moment in which this one is complete. For Hegel, this future from which we can look back goes by the name of absolute knowledge, a state that we never attain, but constantly envisage in the mode of future anteriority. For Lacan, this future on which we speculate is a moment of ‘accomplished symbolization’, a state that we never reach but constantly desire, imagine and perhaps even pursue in the process of therapy. It is not, then, that we never attain retrospection on events, but that we never attain retrospection on events from the standpoint of the situation in which they emerge, and

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the future anterior is the only available mode for our speculations on the future from which the event can be recognized and understood. With the help of Peter Hallward, we can then begin to translate the question of the leap from the not yet into the always already into the language of Alain Badiou: ‘Since the event has no present and leaves no durable trace, the temporality of the event as such is necessarily confined to the future anterior: thanks to a subsequent subjective intervention, the event “will have been presented”.’11 This is how events come into being. In the situation in which it emerges, the event is invisible. It comes into being, thanks to a subsequent ontologizing moment which presents what cannot be seen from the situation. I began by saying that the event was a distribution of knowledge through time, and in this transformation of what cannot be seen in prospect or in the present into that which can be apprehended, ontologized, counted or recognized, we find again this basic structure of the unforeseeable and its retroactive construction. As Hallward points out, this subsequent moment is referred to by Badiou as an intervention, which presents the event after the event, because it cannot be seen in the situation. The delay between the event and the intervention which recognizes it is all important here because it specifies the distance between the not yet and the always already, or the transformation of the potential into the actual. For Hallward, ‘from within the situation, the existence of an event cannot be proved; it can only be asserted. An event is something that can be said to exist (or rather, to have existed) only insofar as it somehow inspired subjects to wager on its existence’.12 The language of gambling – of speculation, wager and bet – is pervasive in Badiou’s account of the event exactly because speculation is the only relation we can adopt to a future moment from which an outcome will be known. Like Hegel’s notion that we must envisage the absolute retroactive knowledge that we have not yet attained, Badiou’s wager is one that makes a choice between possible outcomes or envisages the future significance of that which we cannot see when immersed in the situation. We must, as Badiou formulated it in Being and Event, decide from the standpoint of the undecidable. It might be useful to pause here on the similar, and yet different, conceptions of truth that operate in Hegel and Badiou. For Hegel, truth is understood as the absolute knowledge that arrives with retrospection, but this absolute knowledge in fact never arrives. Even so, the notion of truth operating in this concept is that of an endpoint from which all will be known, with all the certainty that is entailed in retrospection upon what has been. But because it never arrives, the truth of absolute knowledge is only ever encountered as an anticipation of what will have been. For Badiou, the truth is similarly deferred and anticipated, as the element of a situation that will have been presented. But Badiou does not want to give the name of truth to this unreachable eventuality and prefers to distribute the notion of truth across the whole process of living through the situation, identifying its choices, betting on the future intervention from which the once indiscernible event is recognized as an element of the situation, and maintaining a relation of fidelity to that bet. Truth, for Badiou, is a procedure which is fundamentally circular, projecting forwards from the situation to this potential ontological moment of naming and recognition, and looking back from the actual subsequent moment to see the event that could not previously be seen. Hegelian teleology denotes this end-oriented conception of truth, even when the telos is merely

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hypothesized from a present that cannot partake of its retrospect. It points us directly to the dialectical circle of prospect and retrospect that pertains in Žižek and Badiou and which falls under the compass of the future anterior. There is one section of Being and Event where the notion of the future anterior comes into the foreground. This is Meditation Thirty-Five,13 close to the end of the work, where he sets out a theory of the subject in relation to chance. In this section it is more apparent than elsewhere that most of the terminology of Badiou’s philosophical scheme falls into the orbit of one or other of these basic temporal positions which I have been calling the event and the intervention, or traverses the space between them:

Figure 12.1  Badiou: Event

Hence, in Figure 12.1, the event (E) is invisible from within the situation (S) to which it belongs and is presented or recognized only from the subsequent moment (I). But because (I) cannot be lived at the same time as (E), and apprehends it only in retrospect, the only option open to a subject from the standpoint of the situation is the anticipation of and wager upon the nomination which is to come. Badiou also speaks, in Meditation Thirty-Five and throughout, of the event as a multiple and claims that it is one part in particular that is invisible or indiscernible in the situation, namely the generic part. This, for example, is the way that we should understand the concept of nomination: With the resources of the situation, with its multiples, its language, the subject generates names whose referent is in the future anterior: this is what supports belief. Such names ‘will have been’ assigned a referent, or a signification, when the situation will have appeared in which the indiscernible – which is only represented (or included) – is finally presented as a truth of the first situation.14

Though Badiou often speaks of nomination as one of the retroactive elements of an intervention, here it is seen as divided between an initial act of naming and the subsequent assigning of referents to those names, and it is the latter, the signification of names, that are suspended, in the future anterior, from the ‘to-come’ of a truth. Names, in other words, do arise in the situation, but their nominations, significations or referents arrive later in ways that cannot be foreseen. ‘Every subject’ Badiou says, ‘can

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thus be recognized by the emergence of a language which is internal to the situation, but whose referent-multiples are subject to the condition of an as yet incomplete generic part’.15 Again we see the basic structure of the event as a distribution of knowledge through time and in its conjunction with chance: ‘A subject is separated from this generic part (from this truth) by a series of aleatory encounters’ and it is ‘quite impossible to anticipate or represent a truth, because it manifests itself through the course of the enquiries, and the enquiries are incalculable’.16 There are two basic models in Badiou’s Being and Event for delineating the structure of an event: the first is Mallarmé’s poem ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’, and the second, the notion drawn from set theory of an immanent rupture. The importance of Mallarmé’s poem had in fact been evident from Badiou’s earlier book, Theory of the Subject, where he sets out the series of vanishing moments that give the poem its strange sequence: the vanishing of a ship into the abyss of the ocean, the arm of the Master that rises, clutching the dice, from the foam, and the range of possible outcomes for this suspended situation which include the poised pen that writes the scene itself. The language of Mallarmé’s poem pervades both Theory of the Subject and Being and Event, and perhaps most significantly, in the evocation of what Jean-Michele Rabaté calls Mallarmé’s ‘most perfect of future perfects’:17 ‘Nothing will have taken place but the place.’ This sentence is taken by Badiou in a negative spirit, to designate the eventless situation, in which some stable structure is allowed to remain without disruption, despite what has taken place there in the aleatory encounter of the shipwreck. The future anterior, or future perfect, of Mallarmé’s ‘nothing will have taken place’, is a kind of demonstration that the event is governed not only by the possibility of an act of nomination of what happened, but also subject to the denial that anything happened at all. That ‘nothing will have taken place’ is a possibility, for Badiou, that the event, which manifestly took place, can be cancelled or rendered invisible by this negative form of the future anterior. We find him saying something like this in many expositions of the event and perhaps most clearly in his shorter discussions such as ‘Thinking the Event’, a lecture that aims to summarize his philosophy: ‘The reactive denial that the event took place, as expressed in the maxim “nothing took place but the place”, is probably the only way of undermining a universal singularity.’18 Here we can see more clearly the wager that Badiou sees at the heart of ‘A Throw of the Dice’ between a procedure that recognizes the event as an element in the situation and that which cancels or annuls it. The second of Badiou’s models for the event – the immanent irruption – requires us to think a little further into the question of sets through which much of his philosophy is formulated. Some of the language that has already shaped this discussion – the notion that the event belongs to a situation, and that it is an element of a situation, or that it is itself a multiplicity made up of different parts – signals this allegiance to the descriptive power of set theory. To avoid mathematical symbolization, however, one can take Badiou’s example, in Being and Event, of Bertrand Russell’s famous set theoretical paradox. Russell’s paradox begins from the recognition that sets can sometimes contain or belong to themselves. We might say this about the set of mathematical concepts, a set which is member of itself by virtue of being a mathematical concept, or more obviously about the set of all sets, which is irrefutably a member of itself. No great cataclysm

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announces itself through this self-inclusion, but it does present a hint of paradox akin to the mise en abyme, in which a work of art contains some part which resembles the work as a whole. Something more worrying happens, however, when we contemplate the set of all sets which are not members of themselves. This set cannot be a member of itself without contradicting its own predicate, and yet, in not being a member of itself it also satisfies that predicate. There is something straightforwardly undecidable about this predicament, which prevents us from making a judgement either way on whether the set of all sets that are not members of itself is a member of itself or not. Set theory cannot tolerate this undecidability and so has a rule that prevents it from arising, known as the axiom of foundation, formulated by Zermelo in 1906 ‘precisely to block the paradoxical possibility of sets belonging to themselves’.19 For Badiou, this kind of paradox corresponds to the structure of an event understood as immanent rupture: that a set might contain some element which somehow disrupts the consistency of set theoretical language itself. An event is an event because it is immanent in a situation, but it contains some element itself capable of rupturing the very set to which it belongs and even the logical language that guarantees sets in the first place. We need to remember that Badiou regards set theory as the logical language of ontology itself: it describes being in the most abstract and mathematical way possible. The fact that the axiom of foundation exists at all, to prevent paradox, means that ‘the event is forbidden’ and that ‘ontology rejects it’.20 The set of all sets that are not members of themselves produces a rupture from within because it contains an element that defies its own definition as a set and perhaps even threatens the whole language of inclusion and exclusion on which set theory is built. This is exactly what ‘situations’ are to Badiou – multiplicities that contain an element capable of this kind of disruption. Such elements are exceptions. They are unusual emergences of something new which undermine the stable scheme of a situation. They are, in other words, emergences from within that prevent us from carrying on as normal, but which inaugurate a new time through a rupture that results from the excess of one element over the set itself. This is the formal language in which Badiou speaks of moments more than ordinarily involved in change. We can therefore summarize this structural account of the event as a distribution of knowledge between prospect and retrospect, where the event exceeds its cause or causes, seems to emerge from nowhere, and yet can be understood as a potentiality which exists, unrecognized, inside a situation. One of the problems with such a scheme is that its articulation in a formal language such as this ensures a high level of abstraction. We might object, for example, that the structure so described is not specific to the moment more than ordinarily involved in change but in fact describes the structure of existential moments more generally. We might, for example, see this objection as a key claim in Martin Hägglund’s account of succession in general: ‘The experience of an event is always given too late (in relation to what is no longer) and too soon (in relation to what is not yet). Every experience is thus characterized by a retroactive temporality, since what happens exceeds any given anticipation and can be apprehended only in retrospect, when it has already passed.’21 This is not an argument that can really be challenged, except to say that it leaves behind the most important characteristic of the event, which is that it is, in addition

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to sharing the retroactive temporality of moments in general, an exception. It is no surprise to find that the event shares its temporal structure with all other moments, in terms of being suspended between what is no longer and what is not yet, but the content of the event must nevertheless be rupture. We must, in other words, remember that the event is the surprising emergence of something new, and it is the novelty that matters. Events, for Badiou, must have a valence that ordinary moments lack, and it is to the exception that we must direct our attention: philosophy ‘will tell us that “we must think the event”. We must think the exception. We must know what we have to say about what is not ordinary. We must think the transformation of life’.22 The emphasis on novelty and transformation declares a special interest in those moments that facilitate the passage from the old to the new. It is as if these special moments tell us something extra about the retroactive temporality at work in all ordinary moments, and we find this repeatedly asserted in contemporary discussion of time. Quentin Meillassoux, for example, is one of the thinkers who has pursued Badiou’s notion of the event as an immanent rupture into questions about general causation. For Meillassoux, the very notion of an irruption from nothing tells us something about time in itself: I accord to time the capacity to bring forth new laws which were not potentially contained in some fixed set of possibles; I accord to time the capacity to bring forth situations which were not at all contained in precedent situations; of creating new cases, rather than merely actualizing potentialities that eternally pre-exist their fulguration. If we maintain that becoming is not only capable of bringing forth cases on the basis of a pre-given universe of cases, we must then understand that it follows that such cases irrupt, properly speaking, from nothing, since no structure contains them as eternal possibilities before their emergence: we thus make irruption ex nihilo the very concept of a temporality delivered to its pure immanence.23

The irruption from nothing here is the event that does not merely actualize some pregiven potentiality in the manner of the roll of the dice. We can see that the emphasis here falls on the question of what is considered possible before the event, which, for a roll of the dice, amounts to six outcomes. But Meillassoux advances a different conception of time, capable of accommodating the unexpected outcome: [T]ime is not the putting in movement of possibles, as the throw is the putting in movement of the faces of the die: time creates the possible at the very moment it makes it come to pass, it brings forth the possible as it does the real, it inserts itself in the very throw of the die, to bring forth a seventh case, in principle unforeseeable, which breaks with the fixity of potentialities. Time throws the die, but only to shatter it, to multiply its faces, beyond any calculus of possibilities.24

According to this view of time, the knowledge of causation that would allow us to predict an occurrence can only apply to ordinary moments that leave the situation in which they occur intact and stable. The philosopher takes an interest in ‘radical

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novelty’ exactly because it ‘brings forth a virtuality which did not pre-exist in any way, any totality inaccessible to time, its own advent’.25 Again we meet a thinker capable of a kind of clarity on the situation that Badiou himself never quite manages. There is no ambiguity here between chance and ignorance. It is not, in the case of a radical novelty, that we are merely ignorant of the chain of cause and effect that pre-exists an event or that we are simply not in possession of the full physical picture of the universe that would allow us to predict the radical novelty. This ‘virtuality’ which the event brings forth did not pre-exist its own advent in any way, and in fact the irruption ex nihilo is the very concept of a temporality delivered to its pure immanence, which is to say that it is the immanent rupture in the concept of causation itself. We might ask what it is in the contemporary world that drives this kind of interest in radical novelty. What is it that interests us about the idea of an event, of the kind of novelty that constitutes an exception, and causes us to rethink the possibilities that we once thought presided over a given situation? These questions arise because of a kind of regime change in the network of ideas that informs all of our thought about continuity and change. This is what we might, for a period of the twentieth century, have referred to as a ‘paradigm shift’, an account of intellectual change derived from Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions. The key characteristic of Kuhn’s conception of the paradigm was that a certain regime of analytical concepts and words would suffer an internal crisis at the moment that those concepts failed to meet the interpretative requirements of the scientific community. At such moments, scientific communities would enter into periods of crisis until a new consensus could be established for the methods, procedures and assumptions of scientific investigation. Perhaps the second most important characteristic of the Kuhnian paradigm was that the new consensus could not be foreseen and could be described only in retrospect. The authority of scientific investigation, for Kuhn, was not the authority of truth, but the authority of consensus, and this could only be described after the event. This important emphasis in Kuhn’s account could not prevent scientists, and by extension social scientists, philosophers and literary critics, from adopting the concept of the paradigm as a basis on which the authority of their own analytical practices was established, as a kind of prediction of what ‘will have been’ established as a new paradigm. In this particular abuse of the concept, the paradigm became a kind of wager on the importance of one’s own research, recruiting to a new consensus rather than observing it afterwards. Nothing, it would seem, can prevent the authority of retrospect being invoked in advance. The Kuhnian paradigm, in other words, offered a similar framework for thinking the exception, with a similar interest in the immanent rupture from which change often begins, without necessarily being focused on temporality itself. The interest in the contemporary regime change, which takes novelty, invention, inauguration, creativity, the event, the advent, the irruption from nothing and the unforeseen arrival as its content, is that it seems to double the concept of emergence: that what is emerging at the moment is the concept of emergence itself. Irruption is irrupting. Arrival is arriving. We see this double structure in most thinking about time and period. A phrase such as ‘epochal temporality’ has this doubleness because it proposes that the experience or comprehension of time itself might be used to characterize a period of history, but the epoch is also a temporal concept in the first

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place. Any claim that a period of time can be characterized by its experience of time is doubly temporal in this way. The emergence of emergence represented by the thinking of the event again specializes this approach by focusing the epoch on the exception, a focus that differs markedly from the emphasis placed by postmodern cultural theory on notions of repetition, recycling, recontextualization, citation, the blocked future and the end of history. For a while, in our tired old century, everything seemed to be about exhaustion and at the same time concepts of novelty, emergence, invention and originality were sidelined or discredited. But these are, it must be remembered, changes of social self-understanding as much as they are transformations of social reality itself, and our collective interest in repetition and eventhood are subject to the question that Žižek posed about contingency: is it epistemological or ontological? It is difficult to resist the conclusion that grand epochal pronouncements, whether they denounce novelty or re-establish it, are going around in a circle, re-enacting at the level of epochs the drama of difference and repetition that inhabits all thinking about time and change. But we might also want to observe that the core commitment in the concept of the event is to contingency itself – to the valence of transformative moments and therefore to the possibility of change. For Badiou and Meillassoux the possibility that we might usher in a different future rests on the view that contingency itself – the proposition that things could have happened and could happen otherwise – is the only necessity.

Notes Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6. 2 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 114. 3 Slavoj Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 3. 4 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 153. 5 Žižek, Event, 4. 6 Ibid., 5. 7 Ibid., 5–6. 8 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 155. 9 Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 213. 10 Ibid. 11 Hallward, Badiou, 115. 12 Ibid. 13 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 391–409. 14 Ibid., 398. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 399. 17 Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘“Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu”: Mallarmé and Postmodernism’, in Writing the Future, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1990), 39 (37–54). 1

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18 Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Philosophy in the Present, ed. P. Engelmann, trans. P. Thomas and A. Toscano (London and New York: Polity Press, 2009), 41. 19 Hallward, Badiou, 116. 20 Badiou, Being and Event, 184. 21 Martin Hägglund, ‘On Chronolibido: A Response to Rabaté and Johnston’, Derrida Today 6.2 (2013): 189 (182–96). 22 Badiou and Žižek, Philosophy in the Present, 11–12. 23 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’, trans. Robin Mackay, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (London: re.press, 2011), 232 (224–36). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.

13

Revolutions Aleš Erjavec

Introduction: Revolution and the avant-gardes Most of us would agree that today revolutions are rare. In the past, revolution affected innumerable human lives and determined the course of communities of sense. Even a decade ago issues around communism, revolution and class antagonism still exercised a certain force over the imagination, but since the economic crisis of 2008 there has been a significant absence of viable theories of social change and conflict relating to issues such as social justice, revolution and social antagonism. Consequently it became generally accepted that new times required new theories, and since revolutions were no longer taking place, the term ‘soon’ lost much of its subversive meaning, becoming a quotidian word, one used in everyday speech in an inflationary rather than radical sense. For instance, we are now more likely to encounter talk of a revolutionary antiageing formula that reduces wrinkles by 64 per cent, of a revolutionary financial gimmick that allows one to spend more than he or she earns, or of a gastronomic revolution brought about by fusion cooking than of political or social revolution. It is necessary in this light to return to the term its fuller historical sense. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witness several parallel revolutionary movements: a revolution of thought (Kant referred to his transcendental philosophy as a Copernican revolution), an aesthetic revolution (a term embraced by Romantic philosophers such as Friedrich von Schlegel) and sociopolitical revolution, the paradigmatic example of which remains, in Western history, the ‘French Revolution’ (1789–99), an event of such historic proportion that it frames not only similar events that followed it but also, in an important sense, our understanding of the significance of those revolutions that precede it. This holds true for the English Revolution of 1642 and the ‘American Revolutionary War’ or ‘American War of Independence’ (1775–83), as well as the later European revolutions of the nineteenth century (of 1830, 1848 and 1871). The other historic sociopolitical revolution of the last two centuries was the ‘October Revolution’ (1917), which, like the French Revolution, sent waves of fear, hope and anxiety across Europe. It was at this historical moment that ‘revolution’ also decisively entered the vocabulary of avant-garde artists, helping to engender the idea of an ‘alliance of political and artistic radicalism, this parallel of the two avant-gardes’.1 In the

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first quarter of the twentieth century prominent aesthetic movements gathered around the idea of revolution: the Dadaist artist Hugo Ball referred to ‘the Dada revolution’; the leader of the surrealist movement André Breton made repeated references to the surrealist revolution; and the leader of Italian futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, elaborated on the futurist revolution and the ‘Italian revolution’. In these last cases it seems reasonable to infer that the omnipresence of the term is linked to the October Revolution. In the Italian case, early on the term signifying the ‘aesthetic act of gigantic significance’ was ‘war’, which was only later fully replaced by ‘revolution’. Another permutation of the vocabulary of revolution arrives in the concept of ‘scientific revolution’ which was used by French philosopher of science, Alexandre Koyré, in the 1930s to distinguish several revolutions in the modern physical sciences that were all characterized by discontinuity: the Greek development of the idea of Cosmos, the revolution of Galileo and Descartes, an unspecified revolution in the nineteenth century, and finally the more recent revolution of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. In his view the scientific discoveries in Europe in the decades around 1600 constituted the paradigmatic revolution: ‘Earlier concepts and theories lost their meaning because they no longer made sense in the context of the new world-view; the new concepts and theories at once began to look seductively self-evident for the same reason.’2 The ‘intellectual mutation’, as Koyré called it – borrowing the term from the French philosopher and historian of science Gaston Bachelard – consisted of the replacement, by Galileo and Descartes, of the closed, purposive, qualitative Cosmos of the Greeks and of medieval Europe with the conception of the infinite space of Euclidean geometry … The concept of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ denoted, in its original guise, not a historical period so much as an event, or rather a highly interconnected range of events.3

More recently the concept of scientific revolution has been developed in Thomas Kuhn’s famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn, too, saw the main precondition for a revolution in the capacity of the natural sciences to create a radically new viewpoint and a novel way of looking at, and explaining, natural phenomena – in other words, in their capacity to create an intellectual mutation. An issue related first to scientific revolution was the question of whether a revolution is a single and unique (specific) historical event or rather a part of a recurring (or potentially recurring) pattern. The prevalent view is that such scientific revolutions were numerous but that the revolution around 1600 is pre-eminent among these. Another revolution was the philosophical one, made by Immanuel Kant. Kant, who saw his own philosophical endeavour as ‘scientific’, regarded his transcendental philosophical project as an essential turning point in modern philosophy and thus a veritable scientific revolution. In the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant twice likens his own philosophical ‘revolution’ to that of Copernicus: the latter dared, ‘in a manner contradictory of the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator’.4 Similarly, claims Kant, ‘Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects.’5 Contrary to this common sense approach, we must, argues Kant,

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‘suppose that objects conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis’.6 In social revolutions, as with scientific revolutions, the ambiguity of the term ‘revolution’ was often played upon, for it could denote both a mechanical circular motion, and thus a recurrence of the same, and an instance of radical historical change intrinsic to human knowledge or historical progress, based on the negation of the past and a vision of a future. The principal sociopolitical revolutions of the twentieth century were arguably the October Revolution in Russia (1917) and the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (1966–76) in China. Of course, social and political revolutions also existed elsewhere: in Latin America, for example, where major revolutions take place in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua. In the case of Cuba, the idea of a social and political revolution took the characteristic form of a cultural revolution marked by the ideal figure of a ‘New Person’ (an idea initially conceived by Leon Trotsky) who would resemble a kind of a communist superman. Since the nineteenth century and especially in the first half of the twentieth, the agent of sociopolitical revolution was, according to Marxism, the proletariat (or working masses), with class struggle serving, in the sense of Louis Althusser, as the engine of history. Such revolution, led by the communist party, which constituted the vanguard of the proletariat, was often designated as a ‘proletarian revolution’. An alternative agent of such revolutions was the nation. Marinetti thus claimed in 1921 that ‘[t]he Nation is nothing other than a vast political party’,7 while in 1920 Chen Duxiu (1880–1942), one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, argued: ‘I recognize the existence of only two nations: that of the capitalists and that of the workers … At present, the “nation” of the workers exists only in the Soviet Union; everywhere else we have the “nation” of the capitalists.’8 ‘Political revolution’ is related to social revolution, which, from a Marxist perspective, is the pivotal form of revolution, around which other revolutions – the political, the economic and the cultural – are clustered. Together with the political, social revolution designates a radical (and often violent) transformation of the political and social system as a whole. Such an interpretation was not limited to Marxists: Mussolini claimed that ‘[f]or a revolution to be great … it must be a social revolution’,9 and it is indeed the case that since the French Revolution, modern revolution has been driven by ideas of social justice, often effecting a radical change that opposes extant laws. In the nineteenth century social justice became an important aspect of the communist political agenda and its belief in an ontological antagonism that manifests in terms of a clear polar division of society and is materialized also in state institutions and their repressive or ideological mechanisms which Louis Althusser terms ‘ideological state apparatuses’ and Jacques Rancière the ‘police’. Another possible cause for social upheaval – more common under populist regimes – is the creation of an enemy on ethnic or racial grounds. The concept of cultural revolution in its conventional sense concerns both social and political revolution and is usually carried out within the political sphere with the intention of achieving results in the social sphere. In Marxist terms, cultural revolution

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aims to remould a society from its economic base to its superstructure. Thus, while social revolution aims primarily to transform the economic base of a society, thereby effecting a transformation in the means of production, cultural revolution aims either to transform segments of the already extant culture (by pursuing a certain cultural policy) or – and in such instances we might speak of cultural revolution proper – to transform the very mentality and mindset of a people. As Jameson notes: ‘[A]ll systemic revolutions have had to confront this problem: … the production of a new culture in the narrow and specialized sense of literature, film, and the like; and the remolding of the culture of everyday life in the more general sense.’10 Lenin employed the notion of ‘cultural revolution’ in 1917, and as a specific term of reference in 1923, when he argued that ‘in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, the cultural revolution that now confronts us. This cultural revolution would now be sufficient to transform our country into a completely socialist state’.11 The need for rapid cultural transformation of society was especially urgent in underdeveloped countries such as the Soviet Union or China, prompting the respective communist parties to accentuate the need for a cultural revolution so as to accelerate the pace of economic transformation. It was within this context that Joseph Stalin referred to writers and cultural workers as the ‘engineers of the human soul’. Later, the cultural revolution led by Mao Zedong in China attempted to change not only the property of the means of production and thereby the class composition of Chinese society, but also the essential subjective and existential conditions of the lives of the Chinese people by transforming norms, values and culture as such, subsuming all forms of social and private lives to the aims of the revolution. This model of cultural revolution offered the point of departure for the New Wave movement of the 1980s that attempted ‘to effect an aesthetic and ethical transformation of Chinese society and to redefine the Chinese identity’.12 ‘Artistic revolution’ offers another field in which revolutionary ideas manifest, often designated by the emergence of a new style or technique, a new mode of expression or language of art that may be relatively independent of simultaneous historical, political or social transformations. Cases abound: impressionism (1870s and 1880s), expressionism (1905), cubism (1907) and abstract expressionism (1950s) were all instances of unprecedented artistic invention. Artists were well aware of the capacity of art to transform our perception of the world and perhaps even to contribute to the transformation of the world itself. This conviction lies behind the claim of Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, that cubism constitutes a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that has previously been said and done in art. It held nothing sacred. As the new world would soon blow itself apart, never to be the same again, so Cubism broke down forms as they had been seen for centuries, and was creating out of the fragments new forms, new objects, new patterns, and – ultimately – new worlds.13

A related point was made by Herbert Marcuse in his book Aesthetic Dimension (1977): ‘Art can be called revolutionary in several senses. In a narrow sense, art may

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be revolutionary if it represents a radical change in style and technique. Such change may be the achievement of a genuine avant-garde, anticipating or reflecting substantial changes in the society at large.’14 Nevertheless, both statements also imply that the ‘revolutionary’ gesture is essentially that of a novel form of representation as opposed to the transformation effected by a movement, Italian futurism for example, which as early as its initial 1909 ‘Futurist Manifesto’ announced its intent not only to change the established representations of the world, but to transform the world itself.

The avant-gardes and revolutions The link between political and artistic revolution on the one hand, and the artistic and the political avant-garde on the other, was highlighted by the Hungarian researcher of avant-gardes, Miklós Szabolcsi, who observed that ‘a [political and social] revolution without an avant-garde [in art] is really a pseudo-revolution’.15 He furthermore argued that ‘we can speak of a true avant-garde only if it overlaps with a political revolution, realizes it or prepares it’. In essence, what Szabolcsi claims is that without a connection to some kind of political avant-garde project, a true artistic avant-garde cannot succeed. In Szabolcsi’s view the converse also applies: without the identification of avant-garde artists with a political revolution (and their ensuing commitment to its aims), this revolution is destined to fail – not because artists make good revolutionaries, but because authentic revolution contains an essential emancipatory kernel that is to be found in art. In other words, if political and social revolution can be regarded as avantgarde, these movements find affinities with similarly revolutionary (avant-garde) art. As Jaroslav Andel notes: The avant-garde movements saw the artistic and the social revolution as an interdependent process, as a single continuum. That is why artists and critics often described the October Revolution as a continuation of the revolutionary process started in Cubism and Futurism in the early 1910s. They believed that artistic and the social revolutions complement and reinforce each other.16

The affinities between political and artistic avant-gardes are manifold: they often share a certain Weltanschauung or world view; they both find themselves in a marginal and subordinate position and thus in similar circumstances; and both are forms of emancipation, much as in the case of broader social revolution. Such affinities most frequently do not last long: soon the anarchic spirit of the avant-gardes in art comes into conflict with the emergent institution-building spirit of the political avant-gardes. What, then, is avant-garde art? The term ‘avant-garde’ is originally used in the military to designate the advance guard – a small unit of soldiers who moved ahead of the main military force to explore the path on which the main unit would proceed. Its use in politics can be traced to the nineteenth century and in particular is applied in the context of Marxist (and later Leninist) thought which identifies the communist party as a political avant-garde. Accordingly, the transitional period of socialism, which is intended to lead to a classless society, requires the proletariat – and society as

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a whole – to be guided and led by the advance guard as representative of the working class as a whole. The communist party is thus a collective revolutionary subject. This is why it is anonymous and why its members are replaceable: they are but cogs in the wheels of a machine that is taking them – alas, with much effort and friction – to a classless society. In the Soviet case the party claims to possess the objective truth of history, this being possible only if it considers itself to be simultaneously exterior and interior to history. It is here that the difference occurs between avant-garde art that involves changes in style and technique and avant-garde art that involves the ‘descent into the street’. The early meaning of the avant-garde is perhaps best explained by Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant in 1845: to know ‘whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is’.17 In other words, as in politics, we can speak of an avant-garde in art only if the avant-garde artist knows where society is heading, what its historical purpose is – something that is possible only if the artist ascribes to certain political ideas and visions of the future. Of course, in art these visions of the future are not as obvious as in politics; in art this future can also be present as an opposition to the past, as its transgression by new styles and expressive inventions – something that is typical of avant-garde art as well as of modernism as a whole. Nonetheless, Laverdant’s description of avant-garde art differs from its contemporary meaning, one that has been formed on the basis of twentiethcentury experiences both with Realsozialismus (‘real socialism’ where it was the ‘real’ that aborted the spirit of the revolution) and with its socialist aesthetics and cultural policies. If in the nineteenth century we speak of avant-garde artists (forming what Stefan Morawski named ‘proto-avant-gardes’),18 then in the twentieth century we witness the constellation of avant-garde movements – loose groups of artists who often reject the very designations applied to them and instead proclaim their aim to transcend art in the classical sense. These movements share some common features: working as groups; publishing manifestoes; scandalizing society by provocative statements, behaviour and actions; being active in different artistic genres, or ignoring borders between them altogether; and, often, being also politically provocative and actively revolutionary in their aims. But there is also an important difference within the avant-gardes, making it necessary to distinguish between those that limit their revolutionary actions to the realm of art – cubism for example – and those that demand ‘that art move from representing to transforming the world’19 – that it step out of museums, galleries and into ‘life’ itself, whether as political propaganda or with the aim of transforming society and the individual in other ways. This transformative potential comes to light as soon as art is grasped as revolutionary social praxis, a situation foreshadowed in many senses by Marx in the eleventh of his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845): ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’20 All we have to do is replace ‘philosophers’ with ‘avant-garde artists’ in order to discern where avant-garde artists were heading – to the demand ‘that art move from representing to transforming the world’. We see that there is thus a deeper unity or resemblance between the political and artistic avant-gardes – a feature that, to a

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different extent, can be found throughout the previous century when appearances of avant-garde art coincided with political revolutionary events. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere,21 in the twentieth century there were three waves or generations of avant-garde art: the early avant-garde (between 1905 and 1930), the neo-avant-garde (after the Second World War) and the post avant-garde (in the eighties in former or present socialist countries). In some cases politicized aesthetic avant-gardes found a political avant-garde with which to share their ideas and visions, but in the many cases where this identification was not imminent, these movements took on the role of both political agent and the artistic creator. Some of the early avant-garde – futurism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, constructivism foremost among them – wanted to change the world, society and art, frequently with little concern for profit. Completely devoted to their causes, these aesthetic revolutions were pursued simultaneously in the artistic, political and social spheres. Other instances of aesthetic avant-gardes will be discussed in the closing part of this essay.

Revolutions through art In this light, the purpose of the political avant-garde is to carry out a sociopolitical revolution, while the purpose of the aesthetic avant-gardes is to carry out an aesthetic revolution that changes not only artistic styles but also the ways in which we perceive the world and life in general. At first glance all revolutions seem to fail, not only as attempts to ‘move from representing to transforming the world’ (to recall Groys), but also in their efforts to revolutionize life and society: in the 1920s Marinetti and the Italian futurists abandoned their ambitions to lead the vanguard of an independent and progressive politics and started to support or coexist with fascism, sharing the latter’s nationalist affinities; Russian futurists – soon to be identified with the radical journal Lef – became increasingly exclusivist and in 1925 lost the support of the prominent politician and intellectual, Anatolii Lunacharski, who dismissed the Lef group as ‘an almost obsolete thing’;22 the Constructivist artists Rodchenko and Lissitzky turned to publication design, making the propaganda magazine USSR in Construction (1930– 41) the means of their increasingly solitary constructivist research; surrealists in the 1930s underwent a transformation from a movement into a school, slowly losing or abandoning their special role as ‘[a]doptive children of the revolution’,23 no longer supporting Stalin but rather Trotsky and the Fourth International. Yet despite the apparent decline of their revolutionary fervour, the decades following the Second World War witness a resurgence and remodulation of early avant-garde energies: ‘[T]he failure of the avant-garde utopia of the unification of art and life coincides with the avant-garde’s overwhelming success within the art institution.’24 At the same time ‘the avant-garde project is predisposed to failure, with the sole exception of movements set in the midst of revolutions’,25 such as Italian futurism and Russian constructivism. Bürger was the first to make this claim, predicated in the first instance, as Joseph notes, on the fact that he

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viewed the situation from the perspective of the avant-garde rather than the traditional arts, and he therefore judged success not according to lasting aesthetic potential but according to radical political effect … [A]s he argued, the avantgarde’s failure lay precisely in its being accepted as nothing more than the producer of legitimate works of art.26

The historical position of the avant-garde thus poses several questions: should the fact that the radical early avant-gardes ended up progressively influencing subsequent art in the same way that the non-radical avant-gardes have done be considered a failure or success? Moreover, should the fact that these radical avant-gardes did not transform the world by fusing art and ‘life’ be regarded as a sign of their ultimate failure or not? In this respect their success equalled that of the ‘purely’ artistic avant-gardes such as cubism. The answers to these questions are important in assessing the nature of the aesthetic revolution: ‘[A]n aesthetic revolution could only be realized in conjunction with a total overhaul of society,’27 the latter being contrasted with the ‘partial, the merely political revolution, which leaves the pillars of the house standing’.28 The ‘bare’ definition of a revolution runs as follows: Revolution is a term with a precise meaning; the political overthrow from below of one state order, and its replacement with another … [R]evolution is a punctual and not a permanent process. That is: a revolution is an episode of convulsive political transformation, compressed in time and concentrated in target, that has a determinate beginning … and a finite end.29

The opposite opinion is that of revolution as a continuous process and as a permanent revolution. Such revolution is a ‘déroulement’ – an unfolding that transgresses the ‘end as a necessary failure’ paradigm. In this light, revolution can be described either as an event or a process or indeed as a tension between the two. As Stathis Kouvelakis notes, ‘[R]evolution must be conceived … as an irreducible duality oscillating between process and event.’30 Its nature as a temporal process causes it to remain unfinished and therefore conscious of its potential failure or defeat: ‘[S]elf-criticism of the revolution … is the very condition for its reactivation, the condition for the “inversion” of the void into a new opening on to the event.’31 That revolution is best grasped as a combination of a process and an event is true of social and political revolution, but is it true also of aesthetic revolution? This appears to be the case, albeit to a lesser extent, since the sensible and senseperception that mark aesthetics are not easily defined and articulated. Here we might recall Laverdant’s description in 1845 of the avant-garde and his claim that to know ‘whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is’.32 The Croatian literary theorist Aleksandar Flaker attempted to resolve this issue, a part of which concerns the almost standard question of political and aesthetic utopia. Flaker introduced the notion of ‘optimal projection’ – a term which recalls its etymological sense of pro-jectio, or a shot forward, into the distance. He argued that the self-designation of individual avant-garde movements such as futurism, constructivism, Zenitism

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and Ultraism contained a projection towards the future. According to Flaker, what is significant in such instances is not a static ‘utopian ideal, but precisely an emphasis on a sense of movement’: ‘The notion of the “optimal projection” does not signify for us the same as the notion of “utopia.” “Utopia” already with its original semantics designates a nonexistent “place” or “land”, while the texts that formed utopia regularly designate it as a closed, delimited space with an ideal social structure.’33 Instead, the avant-garde is the opposite of utopia, opposing ‘reification of the ideal, incessantly realizing its proper, individual, and poetic selection’.34 Utopia is a static entity and therefore the opposite of a movement: ‘The utopian project is a structure projected into the future, while optimal projection is only the direction of the movement. When we say: utopian project we by that very designation disqualify it as unrealizable while when speaking of optimal projection, we speak of a movement, which is realizable.’35 In this way a range of avant-garde activities – manifestoes, public statements, political agendas, imaginary representations of the future – acquire their sense. It is because such projections are so easily overturned that Marx abstains from concretely depicting the classless society towards which his thought is always moving. Some of these same activities appear on the side of political avant-gardes, especially once they gain power. Exemplary in this regard is the seemingly infinite planning in former socialist countries: detailed projections of the future are matched by equally fictitious reports of the present, constituting an imaginary movement into a socialist future that exists in documents and political speeches but not in historical reality. It is perhaps for this same reason that avant-gardes ‘theorize endlessly’.36 Upon closer scrutiny, ideas regarding the failure of aesthetic avant-gardes seem premature, for an important element of the anticipated ‘transformation of the world’ includes not only punctual events within a revolution, but also a profoundly changed sense perception and a redistribution of the sensible, engendering new visions of world and of life that lead not only to a transformation of the expressive means of future art, but also to already lived as well as imagined or projected life all at once. The following passage from a 1913 article by the futurist Giovanni Papini in the journal Lacerba exemplifies this point: I am a futurist because futurism signifies a total appropriation of the modern civilization with all its enormous wonders, its fantastic possibilities and its horrible beauties … I am a futurist because I am tired of Byzantine tapestries, false intellectual profundity[,] … of harmonious rhymes, pleasant music, pretty canvases, photographic painting, decorative, classical, antique and ambiguous painting … I am a futurist because futurism signifies love for risk-taking, for danger, for what didn’t attract us, for what we have not tried, for the summit that we didn’t expect and for the abyss that we have not measured … I am a futurist because futurism signifies a desire for a greater civilization, for a more personal art, for a richer sensibility and for a more heroic thinking. I am a futurist for futurism signifies Italy as it was in the past, more worthy of its future and its future place in the world, more modern, more developed, more avant-garde than other nations. The liveliest fire burns today among the futurists and I like and I am boasting that I am and remain among them.37

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Statements such as these show that a transformation of the world does not have to be deferred to an imaginary or distant future but exists in the present. Within such a framework ‘life’ ceases to be an empty concept and becomes instead ‘a concept designating all material being and all that is immediately present to the senses’.38 Life can also designate the shared life of individuals, of a social class or of a community. It is what they all have ‘in common’, with art being at the same time their expressive means and an experiential object of their perception. Although an aesthetic revolution may be announced by an event – the founding manifestoes of various movements would count as such events – it necessarily involves a process whereby the extant, assimilated (and therefore often unnoticed) kinds of sensibility are replaced by other kinds of sensibility, with this change being constituted by, and affecting, different spheres of life. An aesthetic ‘revolution’ thus always involves a profound change or transformation of perspective that necessarily exceeds the limits of art as ‘pure’ art – that is, an art that aims to interrogate its proper expressive means (or ‘language’) or one that possesses no function except to be without one. In comparing the provocative and disorderly serate of the early Italian futurists or Giacomo Balla’s 1914 Il vestito antineutrale (with ‘shoes ready to deliver merry kicks to all neutralists’)39 on the one hand, with the pastoral artefacts of developed cubism from across the globe on the other, the difference between the radical and the artistic avant-gardes, and therefore between different facets of art, becomes clear. In this light it also becomes possible to address more directly the question regarding the supposed ‘failure’ of the avant-gardes: they transformed life, but not necessarily its political positions. When they were commercially successful, they simply joined their more conventional artistic counterparts. These two avant-gardes – let us take as examples Russian constructivism and cubism – both represented a revolution within art, but the first represented also a revolution in the political realm, namely as aesthetic revolution. As already mentioned, there is a link between aesthetic, artistic and political revolution. According to Rancière: ‘The coming Revolution will be at once the consummation of and abolition of philosophy; no longer merely “formal” and “political”, it will be a “human” revolution. The human revolution is an offspring of the aesthetic paradigm.’40 In this way the politicized avant-gardes represent, in art, a particular parallel and complement to the revolutionary political avant-gardes: they both strive to transgress the borders between the relatively autonomous spheres of life that were erected in modernity and which art, by its very nature, transgresses incessantly. The avant-garde movements of the previous century – whether the ‘early’ (the ‘classical’, the ‘historical’) avant-gardes, the neo-avant-gardes or the post-avant-gardes – have been characterized by revolt, be it against art, tradition, the bourgeoisie, society or all of these. But, significantly, not all avant-gardes have bound revolt to revolution; not all have bound the often individual and always counter-reactive action and discourse of revolt to the often programmatic and always collective and future-oriented project of a revolution. Those that did experienced the conflicts inherent to political struggle: they seem to have been unsuccessful in welding the individual experience of freedom to the collective revolutionary experience. Since our understanding of avant-gardes is very often limited to those movements that proclaim their autonomy, their political aspirations and involvement (arising from

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this striving for the ‘marriage of artistic and social revolution’) generally fall victim either to the charge of co-option of art by politics or of the wilful desire to transform revolt into revolutionary action.

Aesthetic revolutions As conceived by Friedrich von Schlegel (1773–1829), a major aesthetician in the Romantic Movement in Germany, the notion of ‘aesthetic revolution’ is expressed in two principal theses. The first is that the art of Schlegel’s time (as well as any art of the present or the future) is not restricted by the seemingly unattainable ideals of Greek antiquity but is ‘futuristic or, to use Walter Benjamin’s terminology, a messianic one, considering art within a process toward ever higher achievements’.41 In Schlegel there thus exists no historic closure of art as in Hegel. Instead, art continues on a trajectory which is determined by philosophy: art of different epochs, whether of modernity or futurity, meets on the same comparative theoretical ground and in every epoch, be it present or future, continues on its path. Schlegel’s second thesis regarding aesthetic revolution claims that, in the light of the fading aesthetic categories inherited from the classical world, modern art collapses conventional boundaries of genre, thereby setting the stage for the emergence of a general notion of art as such, which arguably becomes the dominant mode of art’s self-understanding. This claim is echoed by Rancière who holds that in the so-called aesthetic regime of art different genres and works coexist within an undifferentiated realm of art.42 Another author who explores the notion of aesthetic revolution is André Malraux (1901–76), outlining his own revolutionary schema in La Métamorphose des dieux (1957). The uncanny resonances of Malraux’s understanding of aesthetic revolution with those adopted, several hundred years apart, by Schlegel and Rancière, likely rest on their common reference to Kant and his Copernican revolution, which resulted not only in the transcendental position as regards our interpretation of the sensible world, but was also related to the ‘“way” of seeing’ in the aesthetic sense. In Malraux’s work, ‘aesthetic revolution’ refers to the enormous expansion of the realm of art that has occurred since 1900: The metamorphosis of the past was first a metamorphosis of seeing. Without an aesthetic revolution, the sculpture of ancient epochs, mosaics, and stained glass windows would never have joined the painting of the Renaissance and the great monarchies; no matter how vast they might have become, ethnographic collections would never have surmounted the barrier that separated them from art museums.43

What caught Malraux’s attention and the reason why he designated it an ‘aesthetic revolution’ was the phenomenon that occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century where Europeans for the first time started to regard – and thus to see and interpret – artefacts from historically and geographically distant cultures as subsumable under the general category ‘art’. This takes place even in instances where such artefacts

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were created in contexts that were unfamiliar with the notion of art altogether: ‘There seems in short to have been a puzzling transformation. An object that was (for example) once created to be a god, in a culture that had no word for art, has become a “work of art” in a Western culture that, often enough, is unsure even of the name of the god that the object once embodied.’44 What happened towards the close of the nineteenth century was that objects that were previously valued by Europeans for their material value only were transformed in the eyes of their beholders: coins or statues composed of precious metals, for example, that were previously simply melted down started now to be regarded as precious objects, their value to a large extent unrelated to the material from which they were made. It was this essential transformation of the interested look into a disinterested aesthetic ‘gaze’ that was of concern to Malraux: ‘The Egyptian statue that we now admire as “art”,’ he suggests, is not ‘timelessly or essentially art any more than it was timelessly or essentially the Pharaoh’s double. It is both – and neither: “both” in the sense that it has been a “double” and is now a work of art; “neither” in the sense that it is not essentially either’.45 Malraux touched upon the issue of artefacts that have become art due to their being exhibited in museums, thereby joining Renaissance and modern Western works in the ‘imaginary museum’ of ‘art’. In other words, by detecting the changed stance of the European public and art establishment, what he terms ‘a metamorphosis of our way of seeing’ towards a whole body of artefacts that until then had not been considered art but rather judged as ethnographic objects or even reduced to the base elements from which they were minted, Malraux diagnosed a hitherto unnoticed ‘aesthetic revolution’ through which the realm of art (and of the beautiful) was substantially broadened, setting the stage for its further expansion in the remainder of the twentieth century. It is important to clarify both the similarities and dissimilarities in the ways that Schlegel and Malraux employed the notion of aesthetic revolution. For Schlegel aesthetic revolution applied both to the theory and to the object of its inquiry. For Malraux it applied to material reality only, tracing the hitherto disregarded transformation of the way of seeing art objects and thereby to a profound reconfiguration of the field of art itself. In this respect the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière resembles the logic of Malraux, since they both allow us to see the essential transformation of art itself through shifts in the manner in which certain objects are regarded. Ranciere distinguishes three regimes of art: the ethical regime of images, the representative regime of art and the aesthetic regime of art.46 The prerequisite for the creation of the aesthetic regime is a so-called aesthetic revolution. Rancière’s conception of an ‘aesthetic revolution’ concerns a hitherto unrecognized (or incorrectly designated) move from the representative regime of art – which is normatively based on representational criteria of veracity to the depicted referent – to the aesthetic regime of art – which is much more democratic and transformative of the extant relations between the visible and the invisible: ‘In this regime, the statue of Juno [Ludovisi] does not draw its property of being an artwork from the conformity of the sculptor’s work to an adequate idea or to the canons of representation. It draws it from its belonging to a specific sensorium.’47 This new

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sensorium is based on ‘aesthetic free play’ – which Rancière regards as an essential characteristic of the novel regime of art that emerged two centuries ago. According to this view the ‘Kantian revolution’ engendered an aesthetic ‘silent revolution’ that created the conditions of possibility for perceiving modern artefacts as art (in a manner which echoes Malraux’s argument). Aesthetic free play thus ‘ceases to be a mere intermediary between high culture and simple nature, or a stage of the moral subject’s self-discovery. Instead, it becomes the principle of a new freedom, capable of surpassing the antinomies of political liberty’.48 An ‘aesthetic revolution’ is realized by spontaneous collective action – contrary to a political revolution, which is most often realized by a directed political action. The former involves not individuals, but movements. These represent cases where the discursive, practical and material activity and creativity of a group (or sporadic singular instances of this group) eventually generate an ‘enthusiasm’ that transforms isolated cases into historically recognizable and mutually related events realized by groups. Such movements are today traceable through material and discursive repositories of art and culture. Once again it becomes clear that Italian futurism, surrealism and other aesthetic avant-garde movements are not ‘just’ a series of artistic phenomena that have been politicized simply by coincidence, but that they are intentionally political from their inception as movements, a fact that shapes the ways in which their historical innovations and consequences must be approached. As instances of the ‘aesthetic’, they have intentionally attempted to unify the artistic and political components of human and social existence in a ‘futurist moment’ or an ‘optimal projection’. In Schlegel, Malraux and Rancière we thus encounter different, albeit related, senses of ‘aesthetic revolution’. For Schlegel, ‘aesthetic revolution’ is less a concept than a descriptive term referring to aesthetics and to its object, the beautiful in art. At the same time it contributes to Schlegel’s development of a different historical interpretation of art. Malraux’s use of the term involves a shift in the ‘way of seeing’ – in this respect it is uncannily close to Rancière’s position – pointing to the transmogrification of anthropological artefacts into works of art in the eyes of the public in an ‘imaginary museum’.49 At the same time, however, ‘aesthetic revolution’ does not carry much conceptual weight in Malraux’s work. Rancière’s aesthetic revolution is different in this regard: he traces this revolution to Schiller’s commentary on the statue of Juno Ludovisi, recognizing in it a ‘silent revolution’, which marks the emergence of a new ‘aesthetic regime of art’.50 Moreover, he connects this revolution to the Kantian ‘Copernican revolution’ and to aesthetic experience, judgement of taste and the sensible. In this way, Rancière transposes Kant’s ‘revolution’ into the realm of the sensible, proclaiming aesthetics to be the transcendental precondition for a contemporary notion of art. While Rancière shows much sympathy for aesthetic avant-gardes, he nonetheless does not assign them a special place within the frame of his aesthetic regime of art. What is characteristic of an aesthetic revolution is that it is carried out by aesthetic avant-garde movements and that it accomplishes a pivotal modification in what Rancière designates as the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (or, rather, its ‘redistribution’), in the sense that it represents a unity of art and politics, which are ‘consubstantial insofar as they both organize a common world of self-evident facts of sensory perception’.51 An

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aesthetic revolution is realized by aesthetic avant-gardes that strive for a unity of art and ‘life’. Like the artistic revolution it also produces a new sensibility and engenders a ‘new way of seeing’. At the start of this essay I pointed out that the notion of revolution has lost much of its former subversive potential. However, this should not be taken to signify a permanent or unchangeable state of affairs, nor that contemporary or future revolutions are subject to necessary limitations of their truly ‘revolutionary’ significance. Yet a contemporary return of a revolution may well transgress its hitherto Western paradigm which has been dominant since the French Revolution, through the October and even the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The 1979 Iranian (or Islamic Revolution) was for some time regarded (by Michel Foucault for example) as an authentic ‘modern’ revolution but was later to lose such status. If a new revolution were today to arise, it would have to reflect the fact that contemporary society is organized differently than in the previous two centuries. Although revolution remains an operative or organizing concept, its future meaning is bound to reflect the dispersion and variety of the contemporary world. Even though the world today is one, a future revolution is bound to reflect its local and regional specifics. Revolutions are, furthermore, internally divided, in the light of which it has been argued that ‘[t]he French Revolution … was really three revolutions – a democratic republican revolution, a moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism invoking Montesquieu and the British model as its criteria of legitimacy, and an authoritarian populism prefiguring modern fascism’.52 Every revolution can be divided in similar ways. In this essay I have looked to explain the relation between revolution and avantgarde art and movements, a pairing that has very often existed together and that reached its apogee at the start of the twentieth century. At this time, and somewhat later, the emergence and existence of aesthetic avant-garde movements such as Italian futurism and Russian constructivism emerged in the context of a strong state, pervasive political ideologies and often clear identification of the enemy, which, although situations of the past, arguably remain preconditions for the re-emergence of revolutionary avant-gardes.

Notes Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 11. 2 Floris H. Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 75. 3 Ibid., 495. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 25. 5 Ibid., 22. 6 Ibid.. 7 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Beyond Communism’, in F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 341 (339–51). 1

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Quoted in Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 28. 9 Benito Mussolini, ‘Address to the National Corporative Council’, in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. and intro. Jeffrey Schnapp, trans. Jeffrey Schnapp, Olivia E. Sears, and Maria A. Stampino (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 163–4 (154–71). 10 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010), 267. 11 Quoted in ibid., 270. 12 Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989, A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: Timezone, 2003), 182. 13 Quoted in David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 11. 14 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon, 1978), x–xi. 15 Miklós Szabolcsi, ‘Ka nekim pitanjima revolucionarne avangarde’, Književna reč 3.101 (1978): 14. 16 Jaroslav Andel, ‘The Constructivist Entanglement: Art into Politics, Politics into Art’, in Russian Constructivism 1914–1932: Art into Life (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 225. 17 Quoted in Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 9. 18 Stefan Morawski, ‘On the Avant-garde, Neo-Avant-Garde and the Case of Postmodernism’, Literary Studies in Poland 21 (1989): 83 (81–106). 19 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14. 20 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 15. 21 See Aleš Erjavec, ed., Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 22 Anatolii Lunacharski, quoted in Halina Stephan, ‘Lef ’ and the Left Front of the Arts (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1981), 53. 23 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Selected Writings 1927–1934, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith; trans. Rodney Livingston and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 209 (207–21). 24 Peter Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde’, New Literary History 41.4 (2010): 705 (695– 715). 25 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 15. 26 Brandon W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 12. 27 Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 47. 28 Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, quoted in Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, ed. Stathis Kouvelakis (London: Verso, 2003), 326. 29 Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review 144 (1984): 112 (96–113). 30 Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution, 27. 31 Ibid., 341. 32 Quoted in Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 9. 8

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33 Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution, 68. 34 Ibid., 69. 35 Ibid., 336. 36 Stefan Morawski, ‘The Artistic Avant-Garde: On the 20th Century Formations’, Polish Art Studies 10 (1989): 88 (79–107). 37 Quoted in Giovanni Lista, Le futurisme (Paris: Hazan, 1985), 91–2. 38 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 101. 39 Catherine Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 194. 40 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. by Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 120. 41 Ibid., 60. 42 Ibid., 116. 43 André Malraux, La Métamorphose des dieux (Paris: NRF, La Galerie de la Pléiade, 1957), 21. 44 Derek Allan, ‘André Malraux and the Challenge to Aesthetics’, Journal of European Studies 33.1 (2003): 28 (23–40). 45 Ibid., 31. 46 The paradigmatic formulation of the ethical regime of images was provided by Plato; here images are not yet art proper. The representative regime of art liberated the arts from the moral, religious and social criteria of the ethical regime of images and separated the fine arts, qua imitations, from other techniques and modes of production. The aesthetic regime of art destroys the system of genres and isolates ‘art’ in the singular and calls into question the distinction between art and other activities. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 81, 86, 91. 47 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 29. 48 Ibid., 99. 49 Ibid., 122. 50 Ibid., 29. 51 Gabriel Rockhill, ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’, in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 196 (195–215). 52 Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 695.

14

Interference Emily Apter

In his Death Penalty seminar, Derrida expounds on the legal rationale offered in Plato’s Laws for Socrates’s condemnation to death, focusing on the following passage: If he [the ambassador] seems to have returned corrupted, let him keep company with no one, neither young man nor old, in his pretence of wisdom; if he obeys the rulers, let him live as a private citizen; if not, let him die, if he is convicted in the law-court for illicit interference in education and the laws.

Derrida observes: The council, the syllagos, receives visitors, consultants, observers, experts returning from abroad where they went to study the customs and laws of other countries. Well, if one of them comes back spoiled or corrupted, if he continues to make a display of his false wisdom, to refer willy-nilly to foreign models and if he does not obey the magistrate, “he shall have sentence of death (tethnatô) if the court convicts him of illicit interference in any matter of education or legislation (peri ten paideian kai tous noumous)” Laws 952d. Once the court of justice has proved that he is intervening wrongly, on behalf of the foreigner, in the formation of the youth and the formation of the laws, he is punished with death.1

In addition to revealing how the stranger, and by extension the teacher-translator, when held responsible for imparting foreign ideas, becomes criminalized, this moment in the Laws illuminates core principles of Athenian democracy, political justice and legal custom. The phrase ‘peri ten paideian kai tous noumous’, which focuses on the infraction of ‘illicit interference’, or ‘intervening wrongly’, refers to a political subject who, on the one hand, ignores the virtue of political usefulness and behaviour of the proper citizen (extolled by Thucyidides in the funeral oration of Pericles)2 and, on the other hand, traduces the ideal of aristocratic non-interference conventionally associated with Odysseus when (as Plato recounts in a myth told by Er in the final book of the Republic) his soul chooses to be reborn into a life without public involvement (as ‘one lying off somewhere that had been neglected by the others’).3

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A footnote by Peggy Kamuf, the translator of Derrida’s seminar, indicates how the Greek phrase becomes a translation flashpoint: ‘In this quotation, Derrida has significantly modified the published French translation by substituting d’ingérance illicite [rendered here as “illicit interference”] for de s’immiscer [“interfering”; A.E. Taylor translates: “meddling.”].’ The Penguin edition of the Laws, translated by the British classicist Trevor J. Saunders, also has ‘meddling’.4 Meddling connotes the character of the busybody, whose latter-day equivalent might be the lobbyist or the quasi-seditious politician; consider Speaker John Boehner’s smug defence of his interference in foreign policy with his invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress by claiming that it was necessary because when it comes to terrorism, the president [Obama] ‘is trying to act like it’s not there’. Meddling does not fall wide of the mark of the French verb s’immiscer (meaning to get mixed up in, to fiddle with) selected by Plato’s French translator Auguste Diès in the edition used by Derrida. But Derrida wants to ramp up with something stronger than meddling. As Kay Gabriel informs us, [T]he Greek word that Derrida re-translates as ingérance illicite is πολυπραγμονῶν, polupragmonôn, from which πολυπράγμων, polupragmôn, the figure of the ‘busybody’, is derived. This busy-body runs active interference, to the point of threatening Athenian justice; and thus making sense of the moment in Plato’s Republic (433a) where Socrates defines justice as ‘to do one’s own task and not to polupragmonein’.

While the Republic may run counter to a lot of civic ideology of Athenian democracy, it remains evident that polupragmonein is a condemnable offence. It violates the principle of usefulness by implying political involvement in all the wrong ways: it is an impediment to the exercise of power, and, at worst, it exposes power’s arbitrary basis. Ingérance captures the full thrust of the negative, referring to one who forces him- or herself on the polity. Obstruction of justice, sedition, government shutdown – all these threats to the demos issue from the term. In its broadest ascription ingérance spans dirigisme (top-down administration, state autocracy, ingérance étatique), political inoperability (including désoeuvrement, blockage, work-stop, direct action, the politics of autonomia), and the impact of the pharmakon, the parasitic host, which, introduced into the system, functions like interferon, a compound of protein molecules released by host cells to block viral replication whose harmful side effects include the triggering of autoimmune disorders. From the gaps and jumps in translation, from the effort required to reconstruct what is not translated, a greater appreciation of the politics of interference comes to the fore. Departing from Derrida’s retranslation from the French of Plato’s Greek phrase we thus move full throttle into what it means to run interference, from (as in football) blocking players from the opposing team to secure a way through for the ball carrier which, when applied to politics, might take the form of aides throwing themselves in harm’s way in order to distract public attention from shady manoeuvres by their superiors, to procedural acts of parliamentary obstructionism, to tactics of

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civil disobedience including dine-ins, cyberattacks and data intercepts, to catastrophes of autoimmunity. Each of these political takedowns can be connected to education, specifically to Socrates’ dialogic pedagogy and scepticism towards the educational status quo. As a teacher, Socrates is a polupragmôn par excellence, even if, as the Republic attests, he is on record opposing interference in affairs of state. I think of it as a political theory of the impolitic crossed with subversive pedagogy – itself arising directly out of translation-trouble, which, on a purely linguistic level, is of course a form of interference with texts, laws of grammar and logic, protocols of the political, and grooved ways of thinking, articulating and socially comporting. Barbara Cassin has an expression for this translation-trouble. She calls it ‘philosophizing in languages’.5 In the ensemble of her writings on the pre-Socratics and the Sophists she developed the construct of the ‘intraduisible’, the Untranslatable, to point up the instability of meaning and sense-making, the equivocity of homonymy and amphiboly, the performative dimension of discursive sophistic effects, the risks and rewards of ‘consistent relativism’.6 Cassin gives herself over to a praxis that involves relinquishing the hold of words and conceptual networks and engaging fully with the symptomologies that emerge when we keep on (not) translating. For Cassin what follows from this point is entrance into the labyrinth of Lacanian sophistry, a psychoanalytic doxography in which nonsense is the incontrovertible core of signifying practices that elicit rhetorical workarounds.7 Psychoanalysis becomes a linguistic process philosophy, present and perpetual. Following Cassin, I have defined the Untranslatable not as the name of a concept, but as a dual practice of theoretical interference and workaround – as a praxis of cognizing philologically, deconstructively and politically. The starting point consists of particularities of translational resistance that account for a text’s singular unreadability, an effect duly noted, in the case of the Plato’s Laws for example, by translator Trevor Saunders: Plato’s Greek in the Laws is difficult: emphatic yet imprecise, elaborate yet careless, prolix yet curiously elliptical; the meaning is often obscure and the translator is forced to turn interpreter. How should such an extraordinary text be rendered into English? Any translation which preserved every note of the original would be doomed to failure more surely in the case of the Laws than of almost any other classical text: it would be quite unreadable.8

The Untranslatable imposes an exigent relation on the translator; it makes impossible demands, bringing the translation to the brink of failure or brooking that failure in translations that never materialize. In his review in the London Review of Books of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Christopher Prendergast took issue with the notion of the Untranslatable. Noting that the English editors (Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) chose to foreground the term in the main title whereas it appeared in the subtitle in the original French edition, Prendergast, like David Bellos and other noted critics in the translation field, deemed the Untranslatable to be a red herring:

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This is a term that conservative fundamentalists like; it puts up barriers and ringfences cultures. What’s it doing here? A short (and uncharitable) answer is: not very much. Apter claims that ‘it is by no means self-evident what “untranslatability” means’. But that is far from being self-evidently the case. ‘Untranslatable’ normally means exactly what it says: that which cannot be translated. Cassin wants to deny this: ‘untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question … are not and cannot be translated’. In no way? One possible answer to that is: in every way. There does seem to be here a confusion between the untranslatable and the untranslated. The former is essentialist all the way down (which is why fundamentalists like it), an absolute blockage on transmission. The untranslated is an altogether more open and porous category. It has to do more with difficulty than impossibility (‘difficulty’ and ‘difficult’ recur often in the actual work of the volume), although not typically of the same order of difficulty as that faced by the translator of poetry (Valéry described this as dancing in chains) or of paranomastic prose (Finnegans Wake, while it has been translated into several languages, remains basically untranslatable into anything other than what it itself is made of, ‘Eurish’).9

While it should be acknowledged that much of what the Untranslatable does concerns the navigation of what Prendergast characterizes as ‘hits and mishits, convergences and divergences, continuities and breaks, incomplete and imperfect translation, or even plain vanilla translation’, he fails to take account of its distinct abilities. Not a reified essence of linguistic singularity, nor a simple remainder, it refers to how concepts assimilate actually existing ways of speaking and being and how ways of speaking and being interfere with concepts. And while the Untranslatable might well be taken as proscriptive, its force of interdiction is hardly reducible to a defence of universal dogma, political absolutism, censorship or ‘fundamentalism’, a term charged with Islamophobic overtones, not to mention complicity with the intolerant politics of the Christian right. Rather, the Untranslatable operates like interferon, affirming the presence of Unverständlichkeit, un-understandability, unintelligibility and inoperability. The political Untranslatable, in this sense, is what disables the workings of instrumental language – ushering in the ‘foreign’ on a plurilingual surge and injecting the language of the street into the system of the laws. Experimenting, then, with doing things with political Untranslatables, one is led to further theorize interference within micropolitics. Consider how the word ‘occupy’ – freighted with the connotations of colonial occupation and violent resource extraction in economically vulnerable regions of the planet – was interfered with by Occupy Wall Street. Something similar happened to the phrase ‘Blocchiamo tutto!’, a phrase that appeared on a Turin wall in 2012 as part of the tag, ‘Il potere è logistico. Blocchiamo tutto!’ (Power is logistic. Let’s block everything!), a phrase taken as a declaration of war on infrastructure by a range of militant small groups.10 ‘Zone’, in French, has a similar trajectory; normally associated with zones of detention, camps or dangerous neighbourhoods, it was transfigured by the acronym ZAD (Zones à défendre), often used as a synonym for squatting in fallow property or for actions against environmentally damaging construction projects (which resulted not long ago

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in the killing of Rémi Fraisse, who was protesting the construction of a dam at Sivens). Consider too, Maidan, the Ukrainian term for central square. As Timothy Snyder wrote in an article in The New York Review of Books on the Kiev uprising: What does it mean to come to the Maidan? The square is located close to some of the major buildings of government, and is now a traditional site of protest. Interestingly, the word maidan exists in Ukrainian but not in Russian, but even people speaking Russian use it because of its special implications. In origin it is just the Arabic word for ‘square’, a public place. But a maidan now means in Ukrainian what the Greek word agora means in English: not just a marketplace where people happen to meet, but a place where they deliberately meet, precisely in order to deliberate, to speak, and to create a political society. During the protests the word maidan has come to mean the act of public politics itself, so that for example people who use their cars to organize public actions and protect other protestors are called the automaidan.11

Maidan in its philology connects Arabic, Greek and Ukrainian notions of public politics. It is site-specific, yet connected transpolitically to places of assembly and occupation all over the world where insurrection erupted: Syntagma Square, Tahrir, Taksim, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, Zucotti Park, Ogawa Plaza in Oakland. It designates a particular instance of competing nationalisms in Eastern Europe (Putin’s envoy officially denounced ‘the nationalist-revolutionary terrorist Maidan’), as well as strategic solidarity among regionally, ethnically and religiously conflictual groups. It is a lodestone of language politics, as well as a breakout scene of sexual politics, with feminists and LGBT volunteers well represented at hospitals and emergency hotlines. The sexual politics are a particularly important feature of Maidan’s untranslatability: for, as we know, gay-bashing in Russia is part of a Kremlin-backed effort to galvanize anti-European Union factions and to force groups that might otherwise be strongly critical of Western neoliberalism into alignment with it. The Maidan political map is configured unpredictably according to its case-sensitive retranslation. Keywords are always inflected by language, but most dictionaries of philosophy tend to forget the politics of translation in adopting transhistorical approaches to concepts. The transiting of ‘occupy’ to unfixed forms and sites of global interference, ranging from resistance to oligarchic repression to anti-capitalist pushback, reminds us that political glossaries and lexicons have a historic role in opposition politics. Think here of the glossary that Althusser’s English translator Ben Brewster appended to For Marx. Terms like Alienation, Epistemological Break, Conjuncture, Consciousness, Contradiction, Humanism, Ideology, Dialectical Materialism, Practice, Problematic and Theory project an encapsulated political program, and it is perhaps for this reason that Althusser gave them close attention. ‘Thank you for your glossary,’ he wrote to Brewster, ‘What you have done is extremely important from a political, educational and theoretical point of view. … I return your text with a whole series of corrections and interpolations (some of which are fairly long and important, you will see why).’12 After noting the genealogy of ‘break’ and ‘problematic’ from Gaston Bachelard’s early coinage of ‘epistemological break’ to Georges Canguilhem’s unsystematic usage, to

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Michel Foucault’s Althusserian appropriation, he underscored the importance of ‘correction’. Althusser’s political activation of theory in the form of an ‘interfered with’ glossary of his own critical lexicon brings to mind Alain Badiou’s philosophical lexicon of riots and uprisings in The Rebirth of History (Le Réveil de l’Histoire) – his response to the Arab Spring. Badiou proceeds through a tripartite typology. The first term, ‘immediate riot’, is defined as a tumultuous assembly of the young, characterized by weak localization, and a lack of distinction between universalizable intention and random rage, between demonstrating and pillaging. The second is ‘latent’ or ‘prepolitical’ riot, marked by a qualitative extension outward from the local. The example he gives is the emergence of a single slogan endorsed by disparate voices, ‘Mubarak, clear off!’ ‘Thus is created’, Badiou affirms, ‘the possibility of a victory, since what is immediately at stake in the riot has been decided … The movement can persist in anticipation of a specific material satisfaction: the departure of a man whose name – a short while before taboo, but now publicly condemned to ignominious erasure – is brandished’.13 The third term is ‘historical riot’ and it is closest to reaching the bar of what Badiou recognizes as an event. The event is really an advent, the emergence of an ‘intervallic period’ that reboots the revolutionary sequence by nullifying the ‘natural harmony between unbridled capitalism and impotent democracy’.14 For the riot to become historical, it must become political, which is to say, come to embody the ‘subjective sharing of an Idea’ and demonstrate that ‘[t]he inexistent has arisen’.15 It must, as it turns out, run interference in the affairs of state. Badiou reprises Mao’s injunction issued during the Cultural Revolution: ‘Get involved in the affairs of state!’16 but he remakes it into a slogan for the new times of insurrection via Fragment 2 of René Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos where one line rings out as a rallying cry: ‘Don’t linger in the rut of results.’ [‘Ne t’attarde pas à l’ornière des résultats.’]17 One might keep on translating this line as ‘Gum up the works of affairs of state! Dare to interfere! Commit the crime of polupragmonein!’ With each act of translation, from political event to event glossary, from poetry to call to arms, the lexicon of historical riot joins the language of the poets in answer to the query about how to translate the untranslatable at the very opening of the book: ‘What is happening to us in the early years of the century – something that would appear not to have any clear name in any accepted language?’18 Badiou will adopt a similar politics of renaming in The Communist Hypothesis as he distinguishes four typologies of May ’68. Of particular urgency is the need to recall the word ‘Communism’ from its derisive and corrupted usage in neoliberal circulation, thus returning it to its signification prime as a word equal to egalitarianism, and coincidental with the reauthorized right to words and expressions like ‘the people’, ‘workers’ and ‘the abolition of private property’. The recourse to political Untranslatables in this instance is not (as it is with Cassin) a matter of creating political solidarity in and through philosophizing in languages, but a labour of rescuing radical political philology from the censors: ‘We have to put an end to linguistic terrorism that delivers us into the hands of our enemies. Giving up on the language of the issue, and accepting the terror that subjectively forbids us to pronounce words that offend dominant sensibilities, is an intolerable form of oppression.’19 Language is crucial to

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Badiou’s reformulation of the communist hypothesis, as when he inversely retranslates Guizot’s hortatory prescription at the dawning of French capitalism – ‘Get rich!’ – as ‘Live without an Idea!’ And thence: ‘Have the courage to support the idea, and it can only be the communist idea in its generic sense.’20 The Egyptian poet Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, gunned down in a demonstration commemorating the events of Tahrir four years later, makes language a placeholder of the ‘idea’ in this proleptic way, using it to transvaluate the forces of negation, both in the poem ‘I’m the Girl Banned from Christian Religion Classes’ (which ends with the line ‘I, the girl banned from saying no, will never miss the dawn’)21 and in ‘A Letter in My Purse’ where the purse becomes a symbol of a political advent impossible to live without: ‘I am not sure / Truly she was nothing more than just a purse / But when lost, there was a problem / How to face the world without her.’22 Ayman El-Desouky has notably worked the political Untranslatable in his scansion of the early days of the Egyptian Revolution with reference to ‘the amāra on the Square’. A term with a long history, it comes back in the context of Tahrir as the name for the conflation of political connective agency with aesthetic praxis: The terms amāra and amār have their roots in classical Arabic, originally denoting a pile of stones set up in a waterless desert to signal the right direction to those who may have lost their way (according to al­Fayrūzābādī’s lexicon, al­Qāmus al­muh ̣īt ̣ and Edward Lane’s Arabic­English Lexicon). Amāra has also evolved into denoting signs, marks, signposts or elevated ground and has come to indicate an appointed time – lexical metaphors rather appropriate for the resonant revolutionary acts in Tahrir … The specific usages current in Egyptian Arabic have been noted by El-Said Badawi and Martin Hinds in their Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic, defining it as sign or indication or as evidence of good faith, an example of which is given from everyday mundane practice: ‘give me an amāra so that your home helper will let me into your flat’. This example of a social amāra captures the potential range of the forms of amāra as either particular signs or details and information only the participants are privy to, or a narrative of an incident known only to them. The visual forms of recognition are encapsulated in the stock phrase ‘on his face are the amārāt of … ’ (‘ala wishshu amārāt … ) The narrative offered in the exchanges, emphasizing a shared identity or a common bond, usually begins with the stock phrase: ‘by the amāra of … ’, which traverses social boundaries. … the import of this spoken phrase was transmuted into the lexical and syntactic patterns of the slogans and the visual iconicity of the signs, street art and performances on Tahrir Square, and beyond. Unspoken but extending into the dimensions of social reality, invisibly as in the suggested extension of a gesture, amāra constructions offered the forms in which the verbal as well as visual resonances that seemingly individual and disparate acts have struck with the collective Egyptian imaginary.23

Referring to Badiou, El-Desouky extends the auguring force of the expression ‘by the amāra of … ’ to something ‘hitherto untheorized’, associated by Badiou with

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‘movement communism’ and by Žižek with a ‘new political reality’ posed against ‘ideological objective reality’. Unlike ‘movement communism’ or ‘new political reality’, however, amāra is less aporetic; its contents are substantiated with specific aesthetic practices accessed on the oblique of Arabic philology.24 Taking up the issue of aporetic politics, I conclude by addressing Žižek’s use of the expression ‘Bartleby politics’ to allude to a consummate politics of interference, akin to stonewalling all questions that beg their response. He writes: We can imagine the varieties of such a gesture in today’s public space: not only the obvious ‘There are great chances of a new career here! Join us! – I would prefer not to’; or ‘Are you aware how our environment is endangered? Do something for ecology!’ – ‘I would prefer not to’; or ‘What about all the racial and sexual injustices that we witness all around us? Isn’t it time to do more?’ – ‘I would prefer not to.’ This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference.25

For Žižek, Bartleby’s gesture of withdrawal is no mere ‘No’ of resistance as such, nor simply a distance-taking from the ‘what is’ of politics as preparatory to a new alternative order. It is, rather, a parallax shift, aporetically manifest as ‘what remains of the supplement to the Law when its place is emptied of all its obscene superego content’.26 And it is an assertion of resistance to the ‘rumspringa of resistance, all the forms of resisting which help the system to reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it – today, “I would prefer not to” is not primarily not to participate in the market economy, in capitalist competition and profiteering’, but – much more problematically for some – ‘I would prefer not to give to charity to support a Black orphan in Africa, engage in the struggle to prevent oil-drilling in a wildlife swamp’.27 This opting out of bien pensant liberalism, this adamant imperviousness to any form of ‘hegemonic interpellation’ is a formal gesture indicative for Žižek of the symbolic order’s collapse. It founders on the ‘holophrastic’ signifier-turned-object (embodied in ‘I would prefer not to’) and thrives on the violence inhering in ‘immobile, inert, insistent, impassive being’.28 If I have rehearsed Žižek’s three principles of ‘Bartleby politics’ – subtraction, the aporia of the legal supplement and the formal gesture of refusal as symptom of the demise of the symbolic order – it is in part because they claim the empty formal gesture for a non-optimized, non-instrumentalized, unaccounted for ontology. But the aporia leaves me hungering for a different kind of meddling in affairs of state. Retreating from the political, living passively and resistantly, abstaining by withholding, waiting into worklessness – all these strategies undo neoliberal pieties and flush out the new hegemons lurking in the names of new activisms. Moreover the aporetic political – espoused in divergent ways by Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Negri, Badiou, Esposito and Žižek – models a rigorist right of refusal that can be downright aspirational. But what still remains unformulated or insufficiently potentialized is a translational politics of the term responsive to subversive pedagogy, impolitic interventions and the connective agency afforded by actions in the square – in short, a politics of interference, of ingérance illicite.

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Notes Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Geoffrey Bennington et al. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 31. Hereafter cited as DP. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Geoffrey Bennington et al. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 7. Originally published as Séminaire: La peine de mort, vol. 1, ed. Geoffrey Bennington et al. (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2012), 31. The French edition of Laws cited is Platon, Les Lois, Libre X11, 951d, Oeuvres Complètes, trans. and ed. Auguste Diès (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1956). 2 Pericles’s funeral oration in Thucydides is a summary, in a certain sense, of Athenian civic ideology and shows that Plato took a dim view of the aristocratic virtue of non-interference: μόνοι γὰρ τόν τε μηδὲν τῶνδε μετέχοντα οὐκ ἀπράγμονα, ἀλλ’ ἀχρεῖον νομίζομεν. ‘We alone consider the one who does not take part [in politics] not apragmôn but rather akhreion, totally useless.’ The opposite of ἀχρεῖος is χρήσιμος, ‘useful’, and this is the mark of a good citizen: one who is involved in the polis in the right ways. Euripides’s Orestes (l. 910) uses χρήσιμος in this precise sense and specifies the meaning as usefulness to the polis. Polupragmosunê violates this principle of usefulness because it is involvement but in the wrong ways – one might think involvement that gums up the system, that puts a halt to the exercise of power, even (and this might have been on Derrida’s mind) that exposes the arbitrary basis of power. 3 In the final book of the Republic, narrated, Socrates says, by someone named Er, the souls are the choosing lives in which they will be reincarnated (Plato Republic 620 c-d):κατὰ τύχην δὲ τὴν Ὀδυσσέως λαχοῦσαν πασῶν ὑστάτην αἱρησομένην ἰέναι, μνήμῃ δὲ τῶν προτέρων πόνων φιλοτιμίας λελωφηκυῖαν ζητεῖν περιιοῦσαν χρόνον πολὺν βίον ἀνδρὸς ἰδιώτου ἀπράγμονος, καὶ μόγις εὑρεῖν κείμενόν που καὶ παρημελημένον ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλων, καὶ εἰπεῖν ἰδοῦσαν ὅτι τὰ αὐτὰ ἂν ἔπραξεν καὶ πρώτη λαχοῦσα, καὶ ἁσμένην ἑλέσθαι.[Er said that] by chance the soul of Odysseus had drawn the final lot of all the souls and went forward to make its choice. Remembering the desire for honour of its many former toils it went about its search carefully and for a long time, looking for the life of a man, a private citizen and apragmôn, and found only one lying off somewhere that had been neglected by the others, and seeing it said that it would have done the same thing even had it drawn the first lot, and chose that life with delight. 4 Derrida, DP, 7. 5 Barbara Cassin, ‘Philosophising in Languages’, Nottingham French Studies, trans. Yves Gilonne 49.2 (2010): 17–28 (18). 6 For an overview of her writings in English, see Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 7 See Barbara Cassin, Jacques le sophiste. Lacan, logos et psychanalyse (Paris: EPEL, 2012). 8 Plato, The Laws, trans. and intro. Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin, 1970), 39. 9 Christopher Prendergast, ‘Pirouette on a Sixpence’, London Review of Books 37.17 (10 September 2015): 35–7. 10 Comité invisible, ‘A nos amis’, accessed on 15 August 2017, https://ainostriamici. noblogs.org/files/2015/05/Cap.-3-Il-potere-%C3%A8-logistico.-Blocchiamo-tutto.pdf 1

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11 Timothy Snyder, ‘Fascism, Russia, Ukraine’, The New York Review of Books 61.5 (20 March 2014). 12 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 257. 13 Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012), 35. Hereafter cited as RH. 14 Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’historie (Paris:Lignes, 2011), 38, 40. 15 Ibid., 56, italics in original. 16 Ibid., 81. 17 Ibid., 147. 18 Badiou, RH, 1. 19 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010), 65. Checked against Badiou, L’Hypothèse communiste (Paris: Lignes, 2009). 20 Ibid., 67. 21 Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, ‘I’m the Girl Banned from Christian Religion Classes’, trans. Maged Zaher, accessed on 5 February 2015, arablit.org/2015/01/30/a-poem-fromshaimaa-el-sabbagh-im-the-girl-banned-from-christian-religion-classes/ 22 Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, ‘A Letter in My Purse’, trans. Maged Zaher, accessed on 5 February 2018, arablit.org/2015/01/26/a-letter-in-my-purse-from-slain-poetshaimaa-el-sabbagh 23 Ayman El-Desouky, The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture: Amāra and the 2011 Revolution (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), 81–2, 83, 84. 24 In a similar way, the artist Silvia Kolbowski’s repurposes the aesthetics of ‘virtuosity’ for political work. It is cast as public action ‘clarified by means of an ancient, but by no means ineffective, category: virtuosity – defined as the special capabilities of a performing artist, the activity that finds its fulfillment in itself and exists only in the presence of an audience, without an end product or object which survives the performance’. Silvia Kolbowski, ‘Do You See What I Hear?’, blogpost accessed on 28 December 2014, https://silviakolbowskiblog.com/2014/12/28/do-you-hear-whati-see. Though the objection could be raised that ‘virtuosity’ fuels capitalist markets of the performing arts, Kolbowski is translating the word, enjoining it as a term for uncapitalized collective experience and connective agency. 25 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 382. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 383. 28 Ibid., 385.

15

Irreversibility Claire Colebrook

Nothing would seem to be more self-evident today than that the dreams of both unending progress and expansion, and the capacity to remake and renew any event that scars human history, are over. Once upon a time – from Charles Darwin to Ray Kurzweil – it was possible to imagine life moving ever upwards in a trajectory of ‘grandeur’1 and even to predict that the intelligence of life would liberate itself from its bodily or ‘merely living’ home.2 There are those, today, who argue for a mode of techno-science that would (given the evident power of humans to destroy the planet) be equally capable of rendering the planet as bountiful as it was in the good old days, and there are also those who champion de-extinction, immortality and various modes of geoengineering that would allow the earth to be our happy home once more. Popular culture, deploying conventional heroic narrative structures, has managed to represent anthropogenic climate change, resource depletion and seemingly intractable systems of world terror and volatility as isolatable villains that are – like any other adversity in a romance plot – capable of being vanquished and brought to heel. Perhaps the most flagrant example of this logic is James Cameron’s Avatar of 2009 where an evil, militaristic, capitalist, rapacious and monomaniacal humanity colonizes an ecologically attuned and communitarian land of Pandora in order to mine ‘unobtanium’. The exploited but ultimately victorious Na’vi offer an image of another mode of humanity that would vanquish Anthropocene man in order to live another day. Less ‘subtle’ examples would include Stephen Quayle’s B-grade Into the Storm (2014), where extreme weather becomes the occasion for community and familial bonding, or Marc Forster’s World War Z (2013), where a viral pandemic is given the form of a puzzle to be solved by an ingenious human spirit. In all cases, love and community conquer all to yield a new humanity. And yet, for all the cultural production that presents an imaginary of complete and felicitous reversibility, it is this very shrill insistence that testifies to a panic regarding the motif of reversibility or unmaking that is at the heart of the very conception of the political. If one thinks about the gesture of politicization, or of what it means to protest that an issue is political (rather than natural, universal or ‘just the way things are’), reversibility comes to the fore. Things might be otherwise, and – indeed – one might be insistent, against ‘capitalist realism’,3 that there can be political events, revolutions

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and renewals, and that it is possible to destroy capitalism, sexism, colonialism and all the other emergences that have generated seemingly intractable and lawful universals. But if not accepting that the march of empire, progress, capital and ‘reason’ as irreversible counts for one form of radical politics, there is another way of thinking about the polity as having a far more nuanced relation to the line of time. If, as we are increasingly doing today, one accepts the non-linearity of time, then any notion of unmaking what had been made, or reversal of what has come into being, would remain blind to the messy, volatile, multiple and inhuman fluxes of time and matter that preclude us from turning back the clock. As Hannah Arendt insisted, political activity is not an act of ‘making’ that simply follows a blueprint that can be clearly discerned, and – by the same token – any notion of political ‘unmaking’ or reversal relies upon oversimplifying the distributed, plural and collectively formed nature of political processes: To have a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end is the mark of fabrication, which through this characteristic alone distinguishes itself from all other human activities. Labor, caught in the cyclical movement of the body’s life process, has neither a beginning nor an end. Action, though it may have a definite beginning, never, as we shall see, has a predictable end. This great reliability of work is reflected in that the fabrication process, unlike action, is not irreversible: every thing produced by human hands can be destroyed by them, and no use object is so urgently needed in the life process that its maker cannot survive and afford its destruction. Homo faber is indeed a lord and master, not only because he is the master or has set himself up as the master of all nature but because he is master of himself and his doings. This is true neither of the animal laborans, which is subject to the necessity of its own life, nor of the man of action, who remains in dependence upon his fellow men. Alone with his image of the future product, homo faber is free to produce, and again facing alone the work of his hands, he is free to destroy.4

Today, against the dreams of geoengineering, transhumanism, finding another pristine planet where we can believe that (once again) ‘in the beginning all the world was America’,5 one might insist that attributing all ills to the capitalism of an other who can be targeted and swept away sustains the logic of human indomitability that is almost certainly the disease that mistakes itself for the cure. If there is a frenzied insistence at the imaginary level that we can turn back the clock, this may well be because genuinely political options are narrowing or have disappeared. In the absence of action or possibility, one can dream. The relation between reversibility and irreversibility has been theorized across a series of disciplinary domains including political theory, physics, economics and living systems. In chemistry reversible processes occur by extreme isolation, enabling the reduction of factors such that both initial and final states can be identical; this form of reversibility is ideal and in practice never occurs.6 I would suggest that it is telling that in the hard sciences reversibility operates as a function, not something one actually experiences but something akin to a postulate that would occur if one could establish

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a theoretical case. In any complex natural system processes are irreversible, to the point that time itself may be defined as nothing more than irreversibility.7 Without the increase in entropy that distinguishes one state from another, time would not be an arrow, but rather a series of rearrangements of the same matter that would always, in theory, be capable of returning to its exact initial state. The notion of the universe as an eternal matter or substance that is altered through time but that is not itself temporal renders all change at once temporary, eternal and reversible. This postulate was crucial to Nietzsche’s conception of the eternal return: if the universe is timeless, then any end state would have already taken place and would continue to take place over and over. If something were to occur once, then it must occur again and again. Nietzsche’s eternal return is not a scientific claim so much as a thought experiment or postulate: how would we act or think if all things were to return, if there were not some completely different world that would be other than just this one here with these possibilities? The notion that time is not irreversible, and that everything that could happen has happened and will therefore happen again, generates a counter-thought of irreversibility: there is no other world, and one should live this world and all its possibilities without the hope or thought of a higher world: The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’8

Reversibility and irreversibility are not quite opposites; nor are they mutually exclusive. If one thinks of time (as Nietzsche suggests) as cyclic rather than linear, then everything is at once reversible (or will return to an earlier state) and irreversible: there is no other world and accepting the thought of eternal return is accepting this life and no other. Far from being unique to the thought of Nietzsche or even metaphysics, a counter-dialectical relation between reversibility and irreversibility marks the relation to politics and its outside more generally. On the one hand, negotiating any action harbours the idea of irreversibility: what do we risk losing in undertaking this course rather than another? And yet, on the other hand, that mode of speculation entails an ideal or virtual reversibility: what could be saved, retrieved or regained after a possible loss? For all its abstraction one can discern this logic in everyday political thresholds: the bank bailouts of 2008 relied on a threat of irreversibility (for if the banks were to fail there would, supposedly, be irretrievable loss), and yet the notion that one could avoid failure or shore up the current system was tied both to the notion that one could not exit this financial system and its intricacies, and that financial crises were temporary events (depressions, recessions, boom and bust) in which life would always revert to some supposed norm of stability. To say that banks are too big to fail is to assume that some changes are too catastrophic for the system to bear without irreversible harm; it

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is also to assume that buoying up the system will allow for a return to supposed prior conditions of stability. The various specific disciplinary senses of irreversibility – in economics, chemistry, physics and ecological systems – all rely on an idea, rather than actual possibility, of regaining a prior state. In economics one might think of any decision taken as foreclosing a whole series of opportunities. The investment of resources in one direction rather than another, along with the possibility of investment not coming to fruition, not only generates the loss of what was invested, but also forgoes all the possible profits from speculations not undertaken. It is this economic sense of irreversibility, and the ramifications that it holds for the calculation of risk, that intersect quite directly with environmental policy. Because of the volatility of positive and negative feedback forces of living systems, when economic calculations of irreversibility confront estimations of environmental harm, the possibility of any command of the future is unlikely at best. On the one hand, investment in green technologies, mitigation procedures or geoengineering must occur before irreversible damage is done, and yet doing so before all the evidence is in leads to an apparently immediate loss of growth in the currently flourishing modes of production. On the other hand, it is because ecosystem damage is, strictly speaking, irreversible, that waiting until all the evidence is in is a high-risk endeavour. Calculating the costs of ecosystem damage opens questions of risk and loss (and reversibility and irreversibility) that transcend economic inquiry, but it also forces a consideration of the embedded and ideological force of the dream of reversibility. If nothing is truly reversible, how does the idea and ideal of reversibility operate to create certain types of political field and relations among disciplines? As Cass Sunstein has suggested, economic notions of irreversibility need to take account not only of the irreversible loss of paths of investment not pursued, but also of the possibly immeasurable loss of unique ecological goods that may have no ‘value’ or ‘use’ now, but that harbour potential values that one should not discount.9 The various senses of irreversibility that pertain to specific disciplines are highly technical and nuanced, but – as I have already suggested – even the briefest consideration of irreversibility as it pertains to economics or to ecosystems generates deeply political questions. Even the highly technical sense of irreversibility in physics, down to the quantum level,10 should give us pause in thinking about reversibility in its broader sense. In order to claim that a process is reversible – that there has been no loss, no change from initial conditions – one would have to isolate what supposedly has been reversed from the complex processes that offer far too many variables and uncertainties for anything like a return to initial conditions. Perhaps nothing is more political than the opposition between the reversible and the irreversible; perhaps politics as such, or at least politics as it has been defined in Western thought, is inextricably tied to the distinction between the reversible and the irreversible. To say that something is political (or to say that something needs to be politicized or considered politically) is to make a claim for its reversibility. Reversibility, here, can have two senses. One could look back to a time when things were otherwise in order to question the present as in the manner of Foucault’s genealogies, which ask, ‘[W]hat is it impossible to think, and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here?’11 Alternatively, political reversibility might take the form of reviving a world

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that seems to have fallen away from its proper condition (finding, once again, the spirit of democracy, community or nature). Appeals to the communal Athenian polity, to matriarchal cultures, to pre-exchange societies of the gift might all suggest a return to a more authentic mode of dwelling. Even the most nostalgic of philosophers – such as Martin Heidegger who lamented the ways in which language’s proximity to the world had fallen into a detached logic – never saw full reversibility as possible or desirable, but he did insist on some retrieval of an earlier condition, an at least partial return to a world in which language, the world and human existence might recall and revive proximity.12 Heidegger’s politics was bound up with a motif of reversibility that still has purchase today: what appears to be simply the way the world is – ‘man’, ‘language’, ‘logic’ – actually emerged from an earlier condition and can be ‘destroyed’.13 Or, at least, our historical understanding can be pulled apart, and our history traced back from the condition of the present to its point of emergence.14 Closer to our own time, and with a different political inflection, Bernard Stiegler has argued that the very technological conditions and tendencies that have generated the malaise and stupidity of the twentyfirst century can (and should) be understood by looking back at the genesis of human subjectivity and recognizing that the tendency that has caused today’s misery does have a counter-tendency that can be retrieved.15 In addition to that narrow sense of reversibility, where one looks back to a world that was otherwise in order to retrieve counter-tendencies, one might say that politics relies upon a sense of the possibility of unmaking. Unmaking is far more destructive and (for some philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt) less collective than the historical awareness of counter-tendencies or that things might still be otherwise. In her discussion of reversibility, Arendt sees Western political thought as increasingly dominated by the privilege of making over action. Action, on Arendt’s account, is collective, distributed and subject to ongoing negotiation, without any clearly defined sense of a single end, outcome or output. Arendt’s argument is at least in part inflected by her attempt to form a political theory responsive to totalitarianism. If one thinks of the polity as something made, then its form can be imposed in advance, and whatever stands in its way can be unmade, erased or destroyed. In this respect Arendt’s criticism of man as homo faber is indebted to Heidegger’s broader account of the relation between physis and techne.16 How, Heidegger asks, did we start to think about being as something that moves towards its end, with the end being something akin to a model or prototype, rather than an open potentiality that unfolds from itself towards the world? Heidegger’s own politics relied upon thinking of time, being and becoming not as matter that takes on a specific form and that might always be rearranged or reversed to its original substance, but rather as intrinsically relational and temporal. Heidegger’s complex relation to reversibility nevertheless became compatible with a form of fascism: if the notion of being as mere matter to be arranged and rearranged as so much ‘standing reserve’ was tied to a forgetting of being’s own temporality and its ongoing disclosure or unfolding to which we ought to be attentive, then one way of ‘destroying’ this history would be to think a more authentic proximate mode of dwelling. This return to proximity was not one of a simple reversal or unmaking, but it did require a more profound retrieval of what had been forgotten.17 Such a relation

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could only be achieved if one were to override all the noise, chatter and ungrounded empty speech of modern polities, returning to the authenticity of the emergence of the polity. As Jacques Derrida observed in relation to Walter Benjamin, this criticism of inauthentic democratic banter and the appeal to a divine violence that would retrieve the origin was not unique to Heidegger and was profoundly resonant with modernist anti-Semitism.18 It is perhaps for this reason that Arendt maintained Heidegger’s criticism of the modern conception of political ‘making’ and ‘fabrication’ but did not endorse any sense of possible unmaking. If making and unmaking were ways of thinking about the polity as a detached form that could be created and taken away at will, Arendt suggested that rather than reversibility one should think about forgiveness: ‘The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing – is the faculty of forgiving.’19 One might want to agree with Arendt that the notion of making and unmaking does tend towards the totalitarian horrors of her own time (and that such wilful annihilation and the drive to retrieval and purification have intensified with projects of ethnic cleansing, cultural revolution and fundamentalism). The past cannot be erased, and the present cannot be returned to some pristine prior state. If politics is action rather than creation ex nihilo, one cannot sweep away the toxins of the present in some event of historical hygiene. Forgiveness rather than unmaking is how one deals with an irreversibility that necessarily follows from the complex and multiple forces of political action. One might argue that Arendt’s forgiveness – realized in the ongoing processes of ‘reconciliation’ after colonialism and apartheid – avoids confronting more radical potentials for political revolution, where revolution carries the sense not only of rebellion (revolt) but also of overturning, erasing and unmaking. To take only one example of the ways in which forgiveness precludes a more just unmaking, one might consider indigenous claims to sovereignty, despite the seemingly irreversible course of political history. Australia’s indigenous population (after two centuries of violence that took the form of declaring Australia to be terra nullius) erected a tent ‘embassy’. Having been denied land rights (which would have been a decision within a polity of ownership, property, and modern rights), the Aboriginal people made a claim for sovereignty. In some respects, this claim was a strategy tied to reversibility: if later projects of reconciliation were attempts to move forward, ameliorate the past and assimilate the Aboriginal people, the ongoing claim to sovereignty was in many respects a bet on reversibility. Rather than accept property or rights to their own land, and rather than accept the process and symbols of reconciliation, the Aboriginal peoples sought to revoke the previous 200 years that had determined Australia as crown land.20 If Arendt is astute in tying making and unmaking to a totalitarian politics of the will and a conception of the polity as a closed form or end, her refusal of reversibility precludes other possibilities of radicalism, including genuine events.21 Arendt’s outlined ‘human condition’ and its narrative of nations, personhood, will and the collectively formed polity that is defined against mere biological life are – of course – the ‘human condition’ of the history of Western capitalism and imperialism. One might want to ask if there are other modes of temporal reversibility that are distinct

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from totalitarian erasure of the past. If Arendt privileges a historical awareness coupled with forgiveness, she does so because of a certain conception of human history: the past is carried into the present in the form of memory and archive. What she does not acknowledge is a past that is outside the human, and that might – whether ‘we’ like it or not – make a claim on the present and its seeming lack of exits. On the one hand, then, a great emphasis by thinkers such as Arendt, Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben is placed on retrieval, on returning thought to its originary point of emergence such that it might be otherwise.22 And one of the ways this appeal is justified is by tracing the notion of life away from its current mode – life as that which can be manipulated, engineered, fabricated – back to a notion of life unfolding from itself in a complex, dispersed, volatile and unpredictable manner. What has occurred in modernity, according to Arendt, is a loss of the complexity and plurality of human existence; politics has become not action in common but imposed making. Agamben not only laments the intensification of modern biopolitics or the loss of the experience of human life as having a political and open potentiality that is not reducible to ‘bare life’ (where political order is imposed by decision, constituting a life that is nothing more than the blank exteriority that allows sovereign power to operate); he also appeals to a conception of poiesis that, like Heidegger before him, is a mode of creation that allows the world to be brought into presence. If, following Heidegger, we think of modernity as increasingly enslaved to techne, or the determination of the world according to a model that is given in advance, then we lose both the sense of physis, a becoming that unfolds from itself, and poiesis, a making that sets the world apart, allowing it be experienced as present. A lot about temporality and reversibility is presupposed here: the retrieval of the proper sense of ‘our’ political vocabulary from Greek origins will allow for a more proximate relation between thought and world. We cannot be Athenian, but we can retrieve a sense of political life that – by way of a thought of life in general – is not determined in advance by political models, logics or sovereign paradigms. According to this way of thinking, the notion of the political order as something made or occurring by way of decision or sovereign fiat is tied (for Arendt) to a loss of communal political action, and (for Agamben) to a loss of thought’s practical calling, and (also for Agamben) to art’s shift from collective disclosure of the world to an individual work that is passively viewed by mere spectators. Irreversibility is a doubleedged sword: to demand that things can, and should, be reversed risks a certain form of nostalgia accompanied by a blindness to irremediable loss. To forsake reversibility and simply seek recompense is to abandon the radically political notion that capitalism is not an unavoidable and incontrovertible reality. If one remains committed to the notion that the polity and the political field are always open to revision and reversal, one loses the profound sense of loss and debt that ought to be owed to a long past of slavery, theft, ecological destruction and barbarism in the name of enlightenment. And yet, the desire to restore life to a state of things past, has the effect of tying change to the way things were. And just how far back, how reversible, would we want life to be? If we accept the claims of the Anthropocene – that humans as a species might now be recognized as a destructive geological force – would we reverse history, erase humanity with all its

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suffering and conclude that it would be better if we had never been?23 If we object to totalitarian and hyper-capitalist conceptions of a humanity that can make and unmake the polity, and if we insist that there are some harms that cannot be willed away (such as environmental damage, or colonial violence and enslavement), are we abandoning all hope that humanity might not take the trajectory of barbarism and the Anthropocene? In short, does politics as such require at least some commitment to reversibility and irreversibility? Without reversibility one might find oneself landed with all the narratives of inevitable progress or destruction, ranging from capitalist realism, ‘game over’ political abandonment, the evolution of God or the ‘end of ideology’.24 Without irreversibility one would not recognize claims from the past that cannot be swept away by reconciliation; nor would one take seriously the volatility and complexity of environmental loss. One might argue that the very notion of the polity, even according to Arendt’s definition as something that comes into being collectively rather than by a single will, includes a possibility of reversal. Why else would Arendt outline a ‘human condition’ that once upon a time was not bound to notions of political making and unmaking? If the relation between reversibility and irreversibility was complex in Arendt’s own time, faced as she was both with Nazism’s politics of purification and with the emergence of a biopolitical management of the polity that posited an ahistorical living substance as the basis for political management, a twentyfirst-century awareness of ecological destruction and earth-systems science can only make matters more difficult or more political. That is, just what counts as reversible or irreversible, and whether one values reversibility or insists on irreversibility constitutes the modality of one’s politics. The depoliticizing gesture par excellence is that ‘this is just the way things are’. The clearest statement of this logic was given recently by Bruno Latour in his essay on the affective power of capitalism. There was a time when nature appeared immutable, sublime in its eternal majesty, while human affairs were exposed to the flux of contingency. Today that has been reversed: while we witness the catastrophic change in nature and perhaps the irreversible loss of many forms of life (at both the level of species and certain modes of existence), the economy appears to be unchangeable or simply the way things are: There is nothing native, aboriginal, eternal, natural, transcendent in the habits that have been framed during the few centuries ‘market organizations’ have exercised their global reach. No feature of Homo oeconomicus is very old: its subjectivity, its calculative skills, its cognitive abilities, its sets of passions and interests are recent historical creations just as much as the ‘goods’ they are supposed to buy, to sell and to enjoy, and just as much as the vast urban and industrial infrastructure in which they have learned to survive. What has been made so quickly can be unmade just as quickly. What has been designed may be redesigned. There is not fate in the vast landscape of inequalities we associate with the economy and their unequal distribution of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’, only a slowly built set of irreversibilities. Now that historicity has shifted from the stage to the backstage of human action – namely, from second to first nature – activists should ally themselves with the globe against the global.25

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Latour’s claim is that the relation between the reversible and the irreversible ought to be reversed. Economists write about markets in the way we once thought about laws of nature; in response to the bank bailouts of 2008 it seemed as though economists were simply to be believed regarding the necessary measures in order to keep the system in place. If the economy could appear as something that yielded simple and straightforward operating directions, this is because capitalism has taken on the appearance of an immutable and incontrovertible reality. What has emerged historically is no longer experienced as a temporal and contestable set of contingent relations, but simply as reality. Economists diagnose and issue prognoses as though the laws of capital were facts to be observed and obeyed, conveniently overlooking that ‘what has been made so quickly can be unmade just as quickly’.26 Climate scientists, by contrast, appear not to have the authority that would yield similarly immediate and exigent responses, as though their science and incontrovertible fact were so much merely political fabrication. Latour insists that the response to this reversal of the contingent and the eternal should not be to assert science or nature’s timeless and incontestable reality, but to see everything as composed and therefore re-composable.27 Oddly, the experience of the climate going through change elicits neither panic nor deference to scientific reason. One of the explanations – perhaps – for the lack of response could lie in the much-touted notion of reversibility; if humans have had significant impact on the earth as a living system, then those same technological skills could be used to return the world to an original or better condition, even to the point of bringing back extinct species or removing them should they prove to be not so useful.28 Should we really sacrifice the economy and our way of life if geoengineering or mitigation gestures will allow us to go on just as we are? If capitalism is deemed to be historical progress that has no reversal, the degradation of the climate seems to be fully capable of reversal. We will swallow any number of bitter pills to keep capitalism in its place, allowing all the emergency measures of 2008 to save the banks that were too big to fail, and yet we also defer acting on climate change (despite the manifest and alarming signs of irreversible ecological damage). Nothing could be more politically significant than this current configuration of what appears as immutable and what is open for recomposition: capitalism has become ‘reality’, while nature is there to be engineered. This, for Latour, needs to be reversed. First, he suggests alliance with the ‘globe’ against the ‘global’, hinting perhaps that capitalism should be allowed to fail for the sake of the globe. But this returns us to the threshold of reversibility: just how far one would want to go with acting for the sake of the globe against the global constitutes the range and scale of the political and – more importantly – allows us to think about our commitment to the notion that what is made can be unmade. Let us imagine that we really want to side with the globe rather than globalization: we would then put the planet and its operations before capitalist networks. Doing so would require us to relinquish and reverse all the practices that enabled the harnessing of energy from the planet that contributed to altering the earth as a living system. If we were committed to a complete ‘unmaking’ of all that had been produced in the name of capitalism, globalism and energy extraction – if we were to ‘unmake’ or reverse history for the sake of the globe, arriving at initial conditions – a great deal would need to be erased. Just what counts as a sacrifice worth making might

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be the ultimate political question. I can imagine that those who suffered the worst ravages of imperialism and industrialism would quite happily agree to the blessedness of a counter-factual human history where even intensive agriculture practices did not yield the sorts of human communities that could, then, in turn develop hierarchies, kleptocracies, armies and eventually complex archival practices capable of generating late modern techno-science, industrialism and imperialism. Today, when many mourn the ‘tipping point’ that has been passed and are already announcing the end of the world, it is a certain type of privileged and violently enslaving world that seems to be irretrievably lost. Or when many insist bravely that all is not lost, and even see the present as the opportunity to overcome capitalism, it is the world of affluent technoscience that is being invoked as savable, although now more evenly distributed.29 Reversibility or unmaking raises two deeply political problems. First, what counts as the political? If one were to follow Latour or Naomi Klein, the unmaking of capitalism would not be a return to a state of nature but would (for Latour) reverse the relation between the seeming immutability of economic ‘reality’ and the blithe acceptance of a changing nature. It would leave a different type of polity, one that includes non-human actors, one that would have a sense of the composition of the world. Science would not be the purveyor of timeless truths, but would – like everything else – be open to revision. To say that the world might be otherwise is to politicize the world, and – for Latour – it seems that politics goes all the way down. One should not try to claim some truth (such as the truths of climate science) that would not be contestable and that would not be the outcome of specific interests, concerns and modes of existence. There is no great divide between nature and the political; what counts as natural is the outcome of modes of existence. Modes of existence – in turn – are the outcome of an encounter or ‘taking a foothold’ of a nature that is never fully ours, but never fully other. What counts as the polity, and what questions are deemed to be political (as opposed to ‘scientific’ or economic), is the outcome of a dynamic field of relations. This, then, yields the second problem as to what counts as reversible. If what has been made can be unmade, we must then ask about the limits of ‘making’. Can we say that capitalism was made or does this reinforce a certain (highly capitalist) notion of humans as the conscious creators of the socio-economic field? Again, at what point or threshold do we encounter the relation between the reversible and the irreversible? We might all readily agree that certain specific outcomes of collective decision-making, such as the deregulation of finance, might be unmade. And we might also agree that allowing the banks to fail would have been an unmaking that might also have been the reversal of a great deal of what counts as capitalism. We might agree that certain measures for the sake of the globe would be destructive of a great deal of the global system of capitalism, and we would then have to dispute whether that degree of unmaking or reversal would be so destructive as to leave us with nothing but chaos, or whether it might usher in a more just world. Would unmaking need to go so far as to give justice or an equal footing to all aspects of the globe? Would such an intense unmaking bring ‘us’ back to the threshold between our making of the world and the world’s making of us? Would ‘we’ want to agree in part with economists and finance ‘experts’ who claim that dealing with climate change would be too destructive for the economy and that there would be something radically destructive of the capitalist way of life if we

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introduced measures to stall (if not reverse) climate change? If that were so we would either say that there is indeed nothing we can do: if acting for the globe (the planet) would require sacrificing the global (the world-system of production and economic activity), would such action then destroy everything that composes the political? Continuing along these lines one might say – if one considered politics to consist of relations among humans who enter into free exchange for the sake of everyone’s supposed mutual benefit and who are constrained by nothing other than these free relations – that truly caring for the globe rather than the global would be the end of politics. Politics would, on such an understanding, require some difference from a state of nature in order to achieve at least the minimal ‘favorable conditions’ that would generate enough time for reflection, judgement, deliberation and what Bernard Stiegler has referred to as the otium required for the formation of a body politic.30 For Stiegler at least, politics and techno-industrialization are twinned; without the complex archives and without the technologies enabling free time one could not have entered into the trans-temporal and trans-individuating circuits that enable a person in a polity to say ‘I’ and to have a sense of themselves as part of a world with a future. Politics for Stiegler may not be reducible to capitalism, but it does require production, exchange, storage, archives and conversation. When Bruno Latour objects to the seeming immutability of the economic world order and insists that what has been made can be unmade, he nevertheless refers to ‘a slowly built set of irreversibilities’.31 This might at first appear to be a contradiction between an insistence on the possibility of unmaking the world while nevertheless positing a set of irreversibilities, and yet I would suggest that these two movements can (and must) be thought together. What we get from Latour is a sense of the political as such as having to do with an odd border between the reversible and the irreversible; the notion that capitalism is the only way, or that things just are the way they are, relies upon forgetting that what has been made can be unmade. If one talks about irreversibilities as ‘slowly built’, then it would appear that they are not really irreversible at all and that the built or made nature of such seeming permanence would allow for an unmaking. But is it truly the case that ‘what has been made can be unmade’, and how much depends on the mode of this making? Latour’s argument taps into a broader notion of the political that is tied not merely to formation, but to self-formation – or, more specifically, human self-formation. Latour is certainly no Marxist, but this concept at least has a Hegelian/Marxist genealogy and is tied to a broader modern emphasis on temporality and reversibility. Again, Latour is no more a modernist than a Marxist, and yet an emphasis on a specific notion of political history and reversibility marks his work, and most political theory that aims to think against capitalist conservatism, or the sense that there is no other way. If Marx was able to insist that men make their history, this was because he inherited a notion of qualitative historical becoming. The world is not simply given as a divinely ordered and immutable whole; it not only goes through time and change but is transformed when humanity/reason/consciousness recognizes itself as that which generates change. In its Hegelian mode this movement is one of interiorization: a history that appears as subjection to the flux and contingency of the world would be overcome when reason recognizes that the variation and becoming of the world are nothing more than reason’s own relation to itself. Marx famously overturns and politicizes this

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movement by emphasizing relations of production or the making and building of the world in a far more concrete sense. To live in the world is at once to be other than the world, but this negativity or negation of the world yields a transformation of the world, altering the earth by bringing the world into line with one’s needs and desires. The division of labour brought about by this historical trajectory generates a distinction between those who labour to transform the world and the masters whose idea of the world is hegemonic. This is the essence of proletarianization: from Marx to Bernard Stiegler, it is when those who make the world are alienated from that making that the genuine transformation of the world no longer appears as a possibility. Revolutionary consciousness occurs with the recognition that history is not fate. What has been made can be unmade, and if irreversibilities are built (however slowly and therefore indiscernibly) they can be unbuilt. The resources for rendering this idea problematic, if not impossible, lie within Latour’s own work and in the notion of social systems (or dynamic systems more generally). If something is made, fabricated or built, does this necessarily imply a maker who might once again seize hold of production? If matter is not self-organizing then there must indeed be a maker. And if there is a maker who gives order to an otherwise formless matter, then that matter could always be otherwise. This is especially so if one abandons the notion that the imposer of form and order on the matter of the world is some timeless deity whose reason would necessarily be eternal and unchanging. This is the foundational principle of Marxism and also perhaps modern political history and theory in general: if there is no transcendent order, then political reality is composed from the ground up and the agents of that composition are ‘men’. It would follow that whatever has been made could be unmade and that there would be nothing at the historical level that would count as immutable. One way of understanding ideology would be as the presentation of the fabricated and historical as natural and timeless. When Roland Barthes (1972) argued that myth is frozen history, he implied that history is mobile and – like Latour after him – that the recognition of that mobility would yield a liberation from a certain affect of capitalist realism (or the feeling that this is just the way the world is). To see the world as dynamic and open to change – as historical – is to imagine that things might be otherwise; to place agency at the base of that dynamism is to arrive at politics in its radical sense. Change would occur not just by the whim of fate, but would emerge from making, building and transforming. One could perhaps mark the beginnings of modernity with just this awareness of the making of history, with a turn from transcendent to immanent social and political orders, and with the triumph of anti-foundationalism. To politicize an event or entity would be to see it as reversible, as made and therefore capable of being unmade. One sees this insistence upon political reversibility not only in Latour’s objection to the economy’s appearance as natural, but in both the classic affirmations of sexual politics, objections to essentialism and biologism, and in responses to climate change. When Kate Millett (1970) declared that the personal was political, her statement had performative force: what seems to be private, interior and perhaps as natural and unchanging as one’s own person is – indeed – the outcome of historical-political forces (where these forces in turn can be traced back to interests and therefore challenged). If feminism objected to biologism and essentialism and instead focused on social

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construction and performativity, it did so in order to see the normal as the effect of the normative and normalizing and to see norms as the effect of patriarchy. To say that something is political (rather than universal, natural, essential, genetic, sexual or racial) is to claim that it can be changed and that such change is the result not simply of an individual decision, but has to do with the composition of the social order. And yet, as I have already suggested, it is work on social systems such as Latour’s that renders the problem of political reversibility more complex. First, Latour (like many others) has rejected the grand modern separation between human agency and the passivity of matter. The modern divorce generated the possibility of a science of pure facts in its masterful grasp of objective nature and then a distinct realm of politics that would have to do with human agency. Nature, presumably, would take the form of incontrovertible fact, while culture and politics could be subject to change and contestation. But we have never been modern and that division has always been a sham.32 This is why, in the face of climate change and the supposed scandal that some dire predictions were ‘political’ rather than pure science, Latour insists that all science is political. Any ‘fact’ is composed as the outcome of interactions and posed questions; there is no such thing as ‘matter’ that might be grasped outside of all the relations that make up the various worlds and perceptions that compose what exists. Rather, then, than claim that what is natural is irreversible and that what is political is reversible, one might say that there is no such thing as nature that suddenly becomes subject to change in the Anthropocene. There is no such thing as ‘the human’ – no being whose essence is nothing other than pure will or self-making. In this respect, everything is ‘political’, and nothing is political. There is no timeless nature outside all change, and there is no transcendent human existence that forms itself and generates a realm of bios distinct from zoe. The distinction between natural facts and political norms, between the timeless or eternal, and the realm of decision and making is itself an ongoing political event (where the ‘polity’ is not solely human). To say that climate change is a fact and that we must do something now is not to pass directly from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ or from fact to value; it is to say that the way facts are composed has to do with matters of concern and that bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) exist because we live in a world that is changing, and those changes prompt certain questions because of the modes of existence that we inhabit. The reason, today, for the study of climates, for the new modes of geological questioning that have constituted the Anthropocene debate, and for asking and answering questions at the level of earth system science has been generated from our co-constitution as consuming humans with the ecosystems that we are observing (and co-creating). The problems ‘we’ pose constitute us as much as we co-compose the world in our manner of inquiry. Second, this composition of the world may mean that what has been made can be unmade, but it does not mean that the world is reversible, nor that unmaking will result in the world as we would have it. This is where the politics of reversibility and politics as reversibility fall apart. And this is also where a conception of political reversibility must come to terms with material irreversibility and deal with the impossibility of maintaining both concepts. One would not want to pass too quickly from thermodynamics to politics, but even in thermodynamics, reversibility is an ideal

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rather than an event that may actually occur. Let us imagine an ideal reversible process, which would entail the initial and final states being identical. Such a situation could only occur if one were to choose the most isolated sections of existence. The more factors and the more time involved, the more variables and slight changes would occur. One cannot find any instances of reversible processes at the natural or macro level of existence, where complexity and variables are such that the direction of time involves far too many changes and alterations for any return to exact initial conditions to be possible. Reversibility is an ideal condition that can only be achieved by isolation and abstraction. The only way a process would be truly reversible would be if the process were an alteration that involved no change in the degree of entropy, or as Stephen Hawking explains, ‘Entropy increases with time, because we define the direction of time to be that in which entropy increases.’33 This definition seems to suggest that time is irreversibility. It is not that there is time moving forward, and within that trajectory some things occur that cannot be undone; rather, there is irreversible transformation and it is that irreversibility (with entropy increasing) that generates the order of time. Time is not the shifting around of matter that otherwise remains the same; transformations are ongoing alterations of the very composition of the world. As I have already suggested, if one were to conceive of matter in the classically modern manner – as substance devoid of any quality, tendency or motion – then one can imagine the stuff of the world being organized one way and then another. Matter could be arranged and rearranged; one could understand history as the passage of what exists through time. If this were so then one could, also, take any arrangement and rearrange it. One could redistribute wealth or power or, more pertinent to the present, find a way of sequestering carbon dioxide, reforesting, reducing ocean acidification and so on. But matter is not something that is arranged and rearranged with no change in entropy; nor is matter something that exists prior to time and the relations and movements it encounters. Everything is irreversible: what has been made emerges from processes that are so multiple, complex, volatile and inhuman that no single or collective will could retrieve the prior state. There is no such thing as the polity. Everything is reversible: if nothing has been ordained for all time, if capitalism and imperialism are as fragile and dispersed as all living and non-living systems, then it is possible to imagine a future when the man of modernity may as well not have been. There is no such thing as nature.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: New York University Press, 1988). Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005); Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ripley: Zero Books, 2009). Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 144.

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John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 326. 6 D. J. Pine et al., ‘Chaos and Threshold for Irreversibility in Sheared Suspensions’, Nature 438 (2005): 997–1000. 7 Robert Marsland III, Harvey R. Brown, and Giovanni Valente, ‘Time and Irreversibility in Axiomatic Thermodynamics’, American Journal of Physics 83.628 (2015). 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams; trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 597. 9 Cass R. Sunstein, ‘Two Conceptions of Irreversible Environmental Harm’, John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, Working Paper No. 407 (2008). 10 T. B. Batalhão et al., ‘Irreversibility and the Arrow of Time in a Quenched Quantum System’, Physical Review Letters 115 (2015): 1–5. 11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2005), xvi 12 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). 13 Samuel Ijsseling, ‘Heidegger and the Destruction of Ontology’, in Man and World, trans. Wilson Brown 15 (1982), 3–16. 14 Ibid. 15 Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). 16 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 17 Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 18 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Carlson (London: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. 19 Arendt, Human Condition, 237. 20 Paul Muldoon and Andrew Schaap, ‘Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 534–50. 21 Oliver Feltham, ‘Singularity Happening in Politics: The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra 1972’, Communication and Cognition 37 (2004): 225–46. 22 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 23 David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); Tom Cohen, ‘Escape Velocity: Hyperpopulation, Species Splits, and the Counter-Malthusian Trap (after “Tipping Points’ Pass”)’, Oxford Literary Review 38.1 (2016): 127–48. 24 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). 25 Bruno Latour, ‘On Some of the Affects of Capitalism’, accessed on 1 August 2018, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/136-AFFECTS-OF-K-COPENHAGUE. pdf. 26 Ibid., 12. 27 Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’, New Literary History 41 (2010): 471–90. 28 Perhaps the two clearest examples of human self-regard and felt grandeur are the notions of the ‘good Anthropocene’ and ‘de-extinction’. The first will use all the 5

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Future Theory powers of technology that transformed the earth at a geological scale to render the earth more liveable, primarily by way of geoengineering, while de-extinction will not only restore lost species but will also annihilate them again at will should they prove to do more ecological harm than good. On the good or great Anthropocene see, John Asafu-Adjaye et al., ‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’, accessed on 9 October 2015, http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto. For a powerful criticism of the de-extinction movement, see Ben A. Minteer, ‘The Perils of De-Extinction’, Minding Nature 8.1 (2015) 11–17. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). Latour, ‘On Some of the Affects’, 12. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Stephen Hawking, ‘The No Boundary Condition and the Arrow of Time’, in Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry, ed. J. J. Halliwell, J. Perez-Mercador and W. H. Zurek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 348 (346–57).

Section Four Assemblages and Realignments

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Fragmentation Maebh Long

The fragmentary, in all its guises, has long been positioned on the margins of literature and philosophy. Disparaged alternatively as a writing of incomplete shards, whimsical proclamations, arrogant maxims or totalizing dicta, its ruptured, contradictory form has also been embraced as the embodiment of broken eras, an escape from the false illusion of completion and an opening to the aleatory. The fragment’s brevity precludes systematic exposition or narrative development, and as such it has been interpreted as a form of interruption and rupture, of authority and totalization, or an ironic negotiation between the two. Thus, for Francis Bacon the aphorism’s pithiness and lack of development rendered it knowledge in flux, encouraging further engagement and refinement: ‘[K]nowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth; but when it once is comprehended in exact methods, it may perchance be further polished and illustrated and accommodated for use and practice; but it increaseth no more in bulk and substance.’1 For Friedrich Schleiermacher, however, the fragment’s independence aped authority and encouraged simplification, as ‘from disconnected pieces … or only masses capriciously and unnaturally separated from the whole body, [it] professes, notwithstanding, to make Philosophy comprehensible’.2 In either form the fragmentary has always been a writing of risk, and at risk – risk that its selflegitimizing authority will be undone, or risk that its incompletion or rupture will become closure. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, the fragment is exposed to ‘the ambiguities of a freedom represented simultaneously as disengagement, as a surpassing of all rules and of all literary genres, and as a concentration of self-constitution and self-sufficiency. Because they are essential to the brevity and discontinuity of the fragmentary form, these ambiguities cannot be removed’.3 In the midst of generic debates about the differences between the various appellations of the fragmentary – fragment, aphorism, epigram, maxim, dictum, slogan – is a form that is always more than just a style and more than a simple questioning of style. It is an exploration of writing, signification and being, as at its most fundamental the fragmentary performs the complex, contradictory, excessive engagement that takes place between singularity, totality, system and meaning. With these complexities in mind, this chapter explores expositions of the fragmentary that study the form’s impact on thought, before moving to a reading of fragmentation as performed in Jacques Derrida’s ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ (1988) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Sense of the World (1993).

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Embodying ambiguity, the fragmentary can be read as a form of contradictory excess, an interposition between opposites. Friedrich Schlegel, the grandfather of the fragment, once argued that ‘it’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two’.4 So he turned to the fragment, a form embodying ironic negotiation, combination and interruption, and whose referral to itself does not enable unity and presence but an interruptive excess that, as Jean Baudrillard writes, ‘remains inexhaustible for thought’.5 The play between oxymoron and tautology in so many definitions of the fragment performs its excessive movement between conjunction and interruption, discourse and silence, and enacts the fragment’s overdetermination. Thus for Theodor Adorno the ‘fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality’.6 Similarly, for Friedrich Nietzsche the aphorism is ‘too hard for the teeth of time and whole millennia cannot consume it, even though it serves to nourish every age: it is thus the great paradox of literature’.7 Nietzsche’s fragmentary aphorisms cannot be eaten and yet are endlessly nourishing, as unchanging as stone and yet applicable to every different generation. Along similar lines Maurice Blanchot conceives of the fragmentary as the ‘interruption of the incessant’ whereby interruption has ‘the same meaning as that which does not cease’.8 As such, descriptions of the fragment echo the paradoxical excess that extends beyond the fragment from within the fragment, denoting a form which is ‘everywhere sharply delimited, but within those limits limitless and inexhaustible; … completely faithful to itself, entirely homogeneous, and nonetheless exalted above itself ’.9 A full stop within ellipsis, the fragmentary is of limits, liminality and limitlessness. Although the fragmentary is most commonly understood to perform the incompletion and chance relation of signification, the form’s economy and contextual fluidity can render its openness a rigid, closed imperative. That is, if the fragment is an ‘[i]nsaturable context’,10 it is both that which can be endlessly filled and that which is resistant to any addition. This ironic ability to take both or either side of a binary is the fragment’s strength as well as its weakness and renders the fragment autoimmune, always potentially attacking itself. As Derrida writes, ‘[W]hat if the aphorism, like ellipsis, the fragment, the “I say almost nothing and take it back immediately”, potentializing the mastery of the whole discourse being held back, placing an embargo on all the continuities and supplements to come, were sometimes the most violent didactic authority?’11 This concern is echoed by Blanchot, who argues that once the fragment turns on itself in perfect enclosure there is ‘something sombre, concentrated, obscurely violent about it, something that makes it resemble the crimes of Sade’.12 When Zygmunt Bauman describes modernity in terms of fragmentation, he deliberately employs its ambiguities to designate false order and assimilation and thereby to signal a certain perversion within the contemporary. He writes: ‘Modernity prides itself on the fragmentation of the world as its foremost achievement. Fragmentation is the prime source of its strength. The world that falls apart into a plethora of problems is a manageable world.’13 Modernity, for Bauman, is embodied by biopolitical control through categorization and classification, and fragmentation in this instance creates isolated, contained concepts as objects of containment and observation. In separating an individual, object, genre, structure, era or nation from the complex web of connections from which it arose, we give the

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illusion of a world comprising discrete objects of knowledge, with stable beginnings and endings and traceable causes and effects. But the world, as Bauman argues, is not orderly; an illusory mode of controlled fragmentation can make it seem so, but this is a deception. Neither being, meaning, nor fragments are units to be separated and then neatly slotted back into place; all are of an extra-systemic excess, whose multiple connections, liminal borders and intersections render them complex, interlocked and chaotic. Order is not the dominant sign of modernity, but desire, not least of all desire for a logically, rationally, scientifically comprehensible whole of orderly parts, a longing that stems from an anxious awareness of its impossibility. It is, after all, the fragment’s incompletion that engenders desire and its structure of projection that enables longing. In playing with the fragment’s tendency to move between ordered separation and chaotic relation, Bauman points to the form’s most fundamental negotiation: between the avowal and disavowal of totalization. Colloquially, ‘fragment’ denotes a part severed from a pre-existing whole – a scrap of pottery, a section of an ode, a portion of a painting – but the term also designates a form that failed to be completed, as interruption, intellectual impasse or death intervened. Both of these forms presume, or at least desire, wholeness, but either lost it or failed to achieve it, and so the fragment embodies a discourse of mourning for lost unity, value and relation, and a rhetoric of ruptures, wounds and failures. It is from this position that Linda Nochlin reads Fuseli’s Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins as depicting modernity’s ‘irrevocable loss, poignant regret for lost totality, … vanished wholeness’.14 Of course, the ruin and incompletion of involuntary fragmentation lead, perhaps inevitably, to the deliberate adoption of the fragment as a deliberate performance of ruin and incompletion, and so, as Schlegel wrote, ‘many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written’.15 Late modernity was not, however, the birthplace of appreciation for the ruin, nor origin of a form of manufactured incompletion. As Leonard Barkan argues, the Italian Renaissance saw the creation of deliberate fragments: ‘The non finito is not a mere romantic anachronism but a real expression of early modern artistic culture.’16 This said, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a rise in the literary and philosophical use of the form, so much so that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s naming of the fragment as ‘the romantic genre par excellence’17 applies to Romanticism across Europe and the fragmentary in all its guises. While for Schlegel the fragmentary represented a new negotiation between classicism and a contemporaneity marked by infinite becoming, its form was also used innovatively, and derivatively, by writers from Keats to Hölderlin, with the nineteenth century seeing hundreds of fragmentary poems on the theme of loss, death and ruin published in newspapers and periodicals.18 The ruptured was considered an inevitable part of existence, as is nicely exemplified in Heather McHugh’s recounting of a Benjamin Haydon anecdote. In England, 1817, two men stand before the shattered giants of the Elgin marbles: ‘“How broken they are, a’ant they?” uttered one. “Yes,” the other answered; “but how like life”.’19 Since then, while incompletion and destruction remain, the fragmentary form has become less immediately ubiquitous. Outside of the mainstream, however, the fragmentary has had a consistent, if avant-garde or anti-institutional, presence in the literature and philosophy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A deliberate and self-conscious form of hybridity, rupture and assembly has persisted, ranging from

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novels of interrupted stream of consciousness to disassembled, physically ruptured texts, surrealist montage to postmodern anti-poiesis, modernist quotations to fractal hypertexts.20 Once we posit the fragment as the formal embodiment of incompletion, we have already stepped from the fragment as representation of the loss of totality to the fragment as performance of the absence or impossibility of totality. This is fragmentation as the form of a priori rupture, ‘the pulling to pieces (the tearing) of that which never has preexisted (really or ideally) as a whole, nor can … ever be reassembled in any future presence whatsoever’.21 If fragmentation is to be associated with grief – which is by no means inevitable – then the differences between the forms of the fragment can be figured in the difference between mourning and melancholia. If the former mourns a lost totality, the latter is a melancholic lamentation for a unity that never existed. Totality is understood to be an illusory desire, and modernity becomes marked by the loss of that which it never had, an impossible nostalgia for a never experienced wholeness. In this case we begin with fragmentation and melancholically acquire the dream of the finished work from the shards we have to hand. However, the danger of this preconceived fragmentation is, as Hans-Jost Frey argues, that its planned rupture might become a form of closure, as ‘that which, by its essence, cannot be finished fulfils its essence by remaining unfinished and is thereby whole. Its incompletion is in this case explainable and understandable: it stops where it should, at the end’.22 It thus becomes the deadening predictability of perfect self-presence and self-relation, of the kind that has been read into Schlegel’s most famous definition of the fragment: ‘[A] fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog.’23 Schlegel’s fragments were thought by Blanchot, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy to be too close to ‘the closure of a perfect sentence’.24 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argued that the ‘logic of the hedgehog’ does not destabilize totality and closure but disseminates it so that fragmentary totality is ‘simultaneously in the whole and in each part … identically the plural totality of fragments, which does not make up a whole (in, say, a mathematical mode) but replicates the whole, the fragmentary itself, in each fragment’.25 That is, from their perspective the multiple relations and connections between Schlegel’s fragments proliferate totalities rather than negating them. While Schlegel’s fragments present totality as an impossible aspiration or an infinite becoming, his anti-systematic system is, for these later readers, predicated on a double, synchronized closure and the shifting grounds of a progressive, if infinite, becoming. It is in response to this (mis)reading that Derrida’s aphorisms designate ‘the memory of a totality, at the same time ruin and monument’.26 Totality is neither becoming nor to come, but in the past, a distant memory of an illusory closure. That said, Derrida’s aphorisms play, like Schlegel’s fragments, on the concept of the both/and. When he describes his aphorisms as singular and plural, however, we see a discourse of disassociation predicated on contamination, one whose complicity renders aphorisms neither independently whole – even a whole deferred or to come – but contaminated, excessive and interrupted. The structure that we see so often in Derrida’s texts is one of the hyphenation of fragmentation: the dual medicine and poison of the pharmakon, the double inside and outside of the hymen and tympan,

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the addition and replacement of the supplement, the conjunction and separation of the hyphen. What proliferates in these relations is not system or totality, but excess. We can follow this movement in Derrida’s exploration of the relation between the systematic and the non-systematic through the architectural and aphoristic. Playing on content and form, Derrida prefaces a book on architecture with a series of aphorisms. While the architectural implies order, logic, authority and system, all of which can be intellectually inhabited, the aphorism is, he writes, usually thought to be that which is never wholly self-present, always less than or more than itself – a point, a plan, a project, a problem. As such it cannot be occupied or made an object of knowledge. However, the aphorism’s seeming isolation and independence makes it a self-legitimizing structure, which means that ‘[t]here is nothing more architectural than a pure aphorism’.27 Likewise, the architectural is at its most authoritative as a piece of architecture, rather than a building with a purpose, when it revokes the traditional demands of the edifice, ‘when it does everything to save itself [faire économie] a structural demonstration’.28 The architectural/systematic cannot thereby shore itself up on length, argument and style, presuming itself thus impregnable, as the system shares the fragment’s contradictions and incompletion. Conversely, the aphoristic partakes of much of the system’s self-justification. Derrida thus reveals the contamination between supposed opposites, and we arrive, without closure, at the oxymoronic tautology of the architectural aphorism. Taking this structural contamination further, Groarke argues that the sudden insight or burst of inspiration associated with a fragmentary form is precisely the inductive logic that underpins classical philosophy. Thus for Plato dialectic leads to a burst of intuitive, aphoristic comprehension, while for Aristotle inductive, inspirational first principles lead to retrospective deductive logic. Tracing the structure of thought in Plotinus, Aquinas and Pascal, Louis Groarke positions philosophy on the fractured foundations of the aphorism, ‘the kind of memorable, terse expression that can only come about through a nonargumentative act of cognition or intellection’.29 However, in moving from the contamination of the system and non-system to the (re)appropriation of the non-systematic into the system, do we not work against the radical potentiality of the fragmentary by further institutionalizing it? Does it become graffiti sprayed on an officially sanctioned wall, its potential for revolutionary critique of forms of thought impoverished? Or do fragments, in the process of reading, tend inevitably to the systematic and the homogenized? To the last question we surely have to answer ‘yes’ but must also understand that the dynamism, contradictions and imperfect negotiation associated with fragments prevent any final, normalizing recuperation. Movement can take place in varied directions without leading to a closure of assimilation; there is always a shifting, protean relation that prevents there being a final step. Furthermore – there is always another step with the fragmentary, a pas au-delà – perhaps a certain thinking of ‘open totality’ is now necessary. For many who wrote in the wake of the world wars, absolute systems and ideologies of unity were deeply tainted by violence and totalitarianism. I raise this point with some trepidation, but totality does not necessarily have to be malignant. For Timothy Morton, a thinking of totality is necessary for us to envisage and be positioned within the closed system we are swiftly destroying. Thus Morton turns from an othered, isolated nature to the

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‘ecological view’, a fragmentary sense of relation that recognizes the ‘vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre or edge. It is a radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient or otherwise’.30 Following the structure of the fragmentary, the mesh is of ‘the holes in a network and threading between them. It suggests both hardness and delicacy … Since everything is interconnected, there is no definite background and therefore no definite foreground’.31 The mesh names an interdependence of risk and threat, as it forces us to realize the instability of our position and our potential loss. Morton argues that the excess of fragments’ connections does not make the protean whole more than the sum of its parts, but rather a unity full of atrisk, interconnected life. While this totality might arise from our incomplete, lacking, interconnected selves, it is nonetheless a closed system. There is no outside or escape, and thus for Morton a refusal to think in terms of totality and closure is dangerous, as it presumes we can evade the damage we have done. We need to recognize that ‘“[t] otality” doesn’t mean something closed, single, and independent, nor does it mean something predetermined and fixed; it has no goal’.32 Totality might be inescapable, but a fragmentary, ecological view can perhaps be used to move beyond it from within it, by changing it and the world’s fate. But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. In a discourse on fragmentation, it is impossible not to. To return to the avoidance of pure self-relation, the fragment must be of interruption and rupture without this embodiment being its essence. It must fail to be perfect incompletion, without that failure becoming its dominant sign. Its content and form should be precisely the language that is not entirely language, not entirely itself but something other than, and different from language itself: a fragment would be that in which the face of language passed behind or beyond it; a fragment would be the language in which something other than itself – nothing, for example – also spoke and, therefore, a language in which at least two languages always spoke – a broken language, the break of language.33

This broken language, which Blanchot describes as a ‘faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains’,34 is the whispering of near failure, a haunting by the impossible, pure fragment that can never be without causing fragmentation to complete, and thereby extinguish, itself. Thus the fragment operates at its own limits, never quite realizing its own fragmentation. As Schlegel writes, ‘as yet no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form and in content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual, and completely objective and like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences’.35 Instead the fragmentary produces a speech ‘whose task is not to say things (not to disappear in what it signifies), but to say (itself) in letting (itself) say, yet without taking itself as the new object of this language without object’.36 In never quite realizing itself, the fragment lives on – its spaces, ambiguities and excesses a resistance that for Schlegel performs an infinite becoming, for Blanchot an infinite unworking (désoeuvrement) and for Derrida an infinite coming. As ‘a play of limits in which no limitation plays’37 fragments’ content and form are a writing of blanks and spaces. That is, fragments are

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unfinished separations … For fragments, destined partly to the blank that separates them, find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them, or what makes them await their prolongation – what has already prolonged them, causing them to persist on account of their incompletion. And thus they are always ready to let themselves be worked upon by indefatigable reason, instead of remaining as fallen utterances, left aside, the secret void of mystery which no elaboration could ever fill.38

The gap between fragments is not a boundary that concludes and isolates, but a paratactic space engendering changing, aleatory signification. The lacunae that figure between fragments and aphorisms are paths that allow for an infinite number of routes to be taken between fragments and hence an infinite possibility of readings: ‘[a]phorism: that which hands over every rendezvous to chance’.39 At the same time, however, the caesuras present an unbridgeable abyss between fragments as the fragments are too isolated to be in opposition or contradiction. A collection of aphorisms presents ideas that can radically refute or consolidate an argument; these agreements or resistances are not, however, part of a set system, and any attempt to systematize them should recognize that the system is imposed and wholly born from the act of reading. The aphorism is thus always in a series, hyphenated internally with the array of all its potential meanings, and externally, with a changing, random selection of other aphorisms. Hence the fragmentary proffers synecdoches – parts of a whole – that point to the general absence of a stable, uncontaminated whole, be it of the thing itself, or that from which it supposedly originated. The risk and rupture that Blanchot, in particular, sees in the fragmentary render it a form of unending, self-fragmenting poiesis, an unworking which removes the fragment from the rational and the product-driven. This is not to say that for Blanchot the fragmentary is nihilistic, its openness leading to the absence of position or value. Instead, the fragment is in excess of nihilism; it is neither affirmation nor negation nor a refusal of both, but an opening that is beyond control.40 Schlegel once wrote, ‘“Nothing is yet said.” – ’.41 For Blanchot, writing ‘belongs to the fragmentary when all has been said’42 – when writing is always a rewriting or citation without definitive origin, without this exhaustion leading to closure. The fragmentary is not a base or a ground on which to form identity and presence, nor is it an other against which to position meaning or origin. It is a radical otherness as possibility, where possibility is the suspension, interruption, weakness, silence, contingency and referral of writing and the self. It is on the non-grounds of the fragmentary, and for Blanchot, the neuter and the disaster, that writing and life are possible. As such, the non-essential essence of the fragmentary, the neuter and the disaster is a shifting assembly of contradiction, impossibility, undecidability, ambiguity, mutability, perilousness and risk. The serial (il)logic of the fragmentary is such that each ‘aphorism in the series can come before or after the other, before and after the other – and in the other series’.43 Each aphorism is the centre of a series and the border of (another) series, and the fragmentary thus introduces a radical temporality in which linear temporality and lines of influence are undone. Like the complex inheritance that Derrida maps out between Plato and Socrates in ‘Envois’, there is always ‘the one in the other, the one in front of

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the other, the one after the other, the one behind the other’.44 Linearity, progression and teleology come apart as the fragmentary undoes beginnings and endings, and cause and effect. The time of inception and disruption are, like Tristram Shandy’s conception, contaminated, as fragments interrupt (‘normal’) rhythm, producing an off-beat, irregular time, a time out of joint, where, as Hamm says in Beckett’s Endgame, ‘the end is in the beginning and yet you go on’.45 We thus see in the fragmentary an ‘exemplary anachrony, the essential impossibility of any absolute synchronisation’,46 which means that the fragmentary denotes an impossible contemporaneity. No era can be complete in itself, or present to itself, as each epoch has its beginnings outside of itself. As Giorgio Agamben argues, to be contemporary is to be out of joint with one’s own time, to ‘neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust […] to its demands’.47 Contemporariness is a relationship with one’s time that ‘adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it’.48 To be contemporary is to be sufficiently disconnected from the age to see it clearly and see not that which is in focus but that which is in the dark. To be a contemporary is to see that which is out of time, ‘like being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss’.49 In the contrapuntal, non-synchronous relation of the contemporary the fragmentary refers to a time which is ‘anterior to all past-present, as well as posterior to every possibility of a present yet to come’.50 *** The attributes of the fragmentary that we have discussed – contradiction, excess, anachronism, discontinuity, relation, vulnerability, movement, self-legitimization and self-interruption – can be further explored in the dialogue between Nancy’s conception of the fragmentary and the infinitely finite, and Derrida’s elaboration of the poematic and the absolute nonabsolute. While Nancy’s The Sense of the World is an engagement with Derrida’s ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, and Derrida’s ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ is an engagement with the fragmentary, this is a silent, interrupted, unacknowledged hyphenation. Derrida denied that his text engaged with the fragmentary, and Nancy makes no reference to Derrida’s essay. Yet in this section we see a web of connections that shift and move through exegetical excess, bringing – despite avowal and disavowal – the works of Schlegel, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe together. Each echoes the other; each – in a performance of fragmentary lines of double inheritance – influences and provokes the other. In ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ Derrida formulates the poematic as that which is neither process nor product, never the object of thetic knowledge, but ‘the aleatory rambling of a trek, the strophe, that turns but never leads back to discourse, or back home’.51 The poematic is never an event but the ‘advent of an event’52 and thus is the permanent coming or endlessly delayed arrival of determination. Its haphazard forays across the road lead to infinite commentary but will always resist a final, thetic word. Derrida gives to the poematic the body of the hedgehog, a sliver of life that turns in on itself only to imperil itself, an animal of defensive vulnerability hidden under the false protection

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of spines, a thing ‘which in the same stroke exposes itself to death and protects itself ’.53 Derrida’s poematic hedgehog of course recalls Schlegel’s hedgehog fragment, and yet Derrida states quite categorically in ‘Istrice 2: Ick bünn all hier’ that his hedgehog is not Schlegel’s. Despite this denial, however, the vulnerability, alterity, impurity and tautology that Derrida embodies in the hedgehog poematic are of the fragmentary – a sibling of Blanchot’s fragments, a cousin of Schlegel’s. Derrida’s creature ‘has no relation to itself – that is, no totalising individuality – that does not expose it even more to death and to being-torn-apart’.54 It is, writes Derrida, not a moment of selfrelating production, but that which ‘lets itself be done, without activity, without work, in the most sober pathos, a stranger to all production, especially to creation’.55 It is the ruin of a totality that never existed, an assortment of paratactic phrases that longs to exist rather than represent, to simply be, ‘without external support, without substance, without subject, absolute of writing in (it)self ’.56 Blanchot describes the German romantic project in almost identical terms, depicting it as that which introduced the work’s power to be and no longer to represent; to be everything, but without content or a content that is almost indifferent, and thus at the same time affirming the absolute and the fragmentary; affirming totality, but in a form that, being all forms – that is, at the limit, being none at all – does not realise the whole, but signifies it by suspending it, even breaking it.57

As Blanchot continues, for the Romantics ‘to speak poetically is to make possible a non-transitive speech whose task is not to say things (not to disappear in what it signifies), but to say (itself) in letting itself say, yet without taking itself as the new object of this language without object’.58 The consanguinity of the hedgehogs is clear, and even more so when Derrida employs a formulation of oxymoronic relation to singularity and totality: the ‘absolute nonabsolute’, which is later echoed in Nancy’s ‘infinitely finite’. As I have argued elsewhere, the poematic, as the absolute nonabsolute, is a longing for absolute inseparation, a paradoxical, fragmentary desire that is expressed by Derrida through entangling formulations of tautologous and oxymoronic contamination.59 He writes: ‘Literally: you would like to retain by heart an absolutely unique form, an event whose intangible singularity no longer separates the ideality, the ideal meaning as one says, from the body of the letter. In the desire of this absolute inseparation, the absolute nonabsolute, you breathe the origin of the poetic.’60 The ‘absolute’, we recognize, is self-referential, unconditional and totalized, while the ‘nonabsolute’ is contingent, conditional and inseparable from the other. The absolute, as itself and as theory, exegesis and performance of itself, contains itself and that which is more than or different from itself and is thus a priori nonabsolute. In a similar movement, if the nonabsolute is a referral always to the other, it then incorporates everything and acquires a certain completion. As such, the absolute nonabsolute refers to itself through the other and in referring to the other refers to itself. It is an identity predicated on difference, a drive to embody alterity and to extinguish alterity, to relate to itself through singular alterity such that it ceases to be.

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For Nancy the fragment is, like the poematic, vulnerable, a murmuring. It ‘vacillates … between its own decay and a future coming of its devolution. Between its failure and its chance, art begins once again’.61 The fragment is thus not that which has fallen off but is a vulnerable, chance befalling – its protection an exposure, its exposure also its strength. As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe write elsewhere, echoing Blanchot, ‘[t]he fragment is indestructible, which is to say that destruction is assured’.62 Like Derrida’s poematic hedgehog, Nancy’s fragment is inextirpable because it is already a fragility, a whispering, a trembling. The fragment exists as the plea/imperative ‘noli me frangere’: ‘Don’t shatter me, don’t fragment me.’63 The phrase does not voice a fear of separation or disintegration but a quiet request/dictation: ‘[D]on’t wish to fragment me – fragmentation goes on, and I’m fragmented enough; anyway, it’s not up to you.’64 Fragmentation is always a priori and is not a tool that can be picked up and then put down. Inherent, of course, in Nancy’s noli me frangere is the noli me tangere that Jesus utters in John’s gospel – don’t touch me as you cannot touch me, and because you don’t know what it is you would be touching. This injunction also contains a warning: don’t break me down into pieces you can understand; don’t make me an object of perception, because what you will arrive at is not me. For Nancy, fragmentary art as exemplary of a fragmentary existence is predicated on the openness, mutability and exposure of a movement towards – a seemingly intransitive phrase whose lack of an enunciated object does not make it a general movement, but a specifically localized movement towards an object that is differentiated each time. The phrase is, as such, a phrase of fragmentary openness. Being in the world renders sense and meaning not an intellectual position but a physical, emotional, dynamic relation to or movement towards the world and towards community. Thus ‘the world no longer has a sense, but it is sense’,65 as there is no transcendental signifier, grand myth or encompassing narrative underpinning meaning. There is just the fractal excess of existence as coexistence, of being in the world, or ‘being singular plural’. This understanding of the world, sense and being is fragmentary and relational, as we are positioned as syntactic fragments in an open chain of excessive relations between the absolute and the relative, and the ideal and the material, rather than semantically placed within stable truths. As Nancy writes: ‘[T]ruth is semantic, sense is syntactic … syntax enchains, enchains itself, involves itself, and carries itself away across semantic punctuations … these punctuations in turn have value and validity only insofar as each is swept along toward, involved in, and even carried away beyond, the others.’66 Nancy’s enchaining is not a restriction but a protean connection of kaleidoscopic fragments which are focused on the event, an act or doing, rather than completed works, projects or lives. This is because the art fragment, as an expression of being, is not that which dedicates itself to sublimation towards a whole or a teleological orientation towards a totality. It is, rather, ‘[p]resentation without presentness [présentité], or pres-ense, [which] does not transcend any more than it immanates: it comes, it comes and goes’67 – a communication through concatenations and interruptions of touch and jouissance. Art is, as such, ‘a counterpoint without resolution’, ‘open to this fragmentation of sense that existence is’.68 Art, sense and the world are, thereby, the relation to, towards and between fragments.

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With the absence of a creator, ideology or myth, underpinning sense, what supports and gives meaning to the world is the world itself. As such the horizon, frontier or limit of the world is the world; there is no transcendental signifier on the other side. The world is turned towards itself, but inasmuch for the humble hedgehog on its surface, this is not a closure of unity, but rather a fractal or fragmentary excess. Neither the fragment nor being carry their end in themselves, as this would constitute an autonomy of self-enclosure, where ‘[e]xposition itself ends up as introjection, return to self ’.69 Instead, we have the ‘[f]ragment: no longer the piece fallen from a broken set, but the explosive splintering of that which is neither immanent nor transcendent. The in-finite explosion of the finite’.70 Neither ideal nor material, the fragment dwells in ‘the realm of essenceless existence. This realm lacks both domain and sovereignty’.71 For Nancy – how can we not hear Derrida’s hedgehog here? – the fragmentary is the performance of ‘the event of being that one also calls existence … [one which] comes and “essentially” does nothing but come’.72 The event is then incommensurable with ‘taking place’,73 that is, it is absolutely other to the taking place of the event, which means that the event, as an occurrence or happening, is incommensurable to itself. If it cannot relate to itself, it must then relate to others and be nonabsolute. The singular event which comes is nonetheless an event relating to all others, and as such the event is in fragmentary relation to Derrida’s absolute inseparation or the absolute nonabsolute. Nancy positions ‘finitude’ as interruption and noncompletion. But the essence of this interrupted and noncomplete finitude cannot be one of privation, because absolute or pure privation ‘would annul in itself its own privation, would constitute itself immediately as an absolute, having absolutely and without remainder arrived at itself, as itself as in itself even before existing, existence not taking place, pure essential without esse’.74 As absolute privation cancels itself, the essence of finitude cannot be lack, absence, limit, imperfection, fault. For Nancy, finitude denotes instead nonabsolute ‘ex-istence’, whose mutability, connectivity and existence outside of itself render it effectively without essence. Our finitude is not a curling in ourselves, containing our beginning and our end, but is being affected by our end as that which is outside or beyond us. Hence the fragmentary subject is a ‘being-toward-infinity of what does not have its end in itself – does not contain its end – because it is infinitely affected by that end’.75 That which carries its end in itself is absolute, ‘finished, achieved, accomplished, and perfect, infinitely perfect – [it] is at most pure truth, but truth deprived of sense: and it is exactly due to this that God, as such a being, is dead’.76 We are, instead, as living fragments, infinitely finite, infinitely exposed to our existence as a nonessence, infinitely exposed to the otherness of our own ‘being’ (or that being is in us exposed to its own otherness). We begin and we end without beginning and ending: without having a beginning and an end that is ours, but having (or being) them only as others’, and through others. My beginning and my end are precisely what I cannot have as mine, and what no one can have as his/her own.77

Thus we come to Nancy’s fragmentary definition: ‘That which, for itself, depends on nothing, is an absolute. That which nothing completes in itself is a fragment. Being or

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existence is an absolute fragment. To exist: the happenstance of an absolute fragment.’78 The absolute does not depend on anything; it is complete in itself. The fragment is never completed and as such is nonasbsolute. To exist is to be in the paradoxical relation of the absolute fragment, that is, the absolute nonabsolute, the infinitely finite; on the chance, unpredictable border between the ideal and the material, the unconditional and the conditional, and to exist in relation to the self as other. Of course, Nancy’s seemingly laconic definition pivots on the play of ‘nothing’ as a presence of absence and an absence of presence. As such, it can be read in reverse, thereby stating that the absolute depends on nothing, that is, on difference, absence, isolation, and in this dependency is nonabsolute. The fragment is the completion of nothing, that is, the self-enclosure of nothing, and is thus the absolute. Going further, as Nancy has used the term ‘fragment’ to denote both that which is absolute and nonabsolute, the sense of the terms begins to combine and blur, until we are left with happenstance,79 with existence in the midst of the complex, contradictory and contingent – in all its senses – movement of chance, between Nancy, Derrida and the fragmentary. ‘The idea of the book’, writes Derrida, ‘which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing’.80 Hence we ‘have played the post card against literature’,81 and turned to the fragment, because, after all, ‘is this interruption that condemns one to the aphorism not the condition of every conversation?’82 The fragmentary is the contrapuntal relation of interruption that enables signification while disrupting it, and in an era of high consumption and consumerism, is there not a deep need for a form of thought, writing and being that highlights process and passage rather than product and port? A form that doesn’t simulate systematic, completed knowledge and ownership of the world, but implicitly acknowledges insufficiency and lack. A writing that works to encourage complexity and undercut the segmentation of the world into commodified units. A textuality that, in denying full possession and interiority, insists that meaning and change will always come. A relation of difference, a negotiation between self-sustaining systems and open, free radicals. And so we close with the words of Roland Barthes: Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure: that is why he writes fragments: so many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures (but he doesn’t like the ends: the risk of the rhetorical clausule is too great: the fear of not being able to resist the last word).83

Notes 1 2 3

Francis Bacon, ‘Advancement of Learning’, in Advancement of Learning, Novum Organon, New Atlantis, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 33, Book 1, aphorism 4. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson (Cambridge: Pitt Press, 1836), 6. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 148.

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Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Athenäum Fragments’, in Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1971), fragment 53. 5 Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnet, trans. Chris Turner and Mike Gane (New York: Routledge, 2004), 29. 6 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 45. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 250. 8 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 21. 9 Schlegel, ‘Athenäum Fragments’, fragment 297. 10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’, in Deconstruction and Criticism, trans. James Hulbert (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 107 (62–142). 11 Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 80. 12 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 152. 13 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 12. 14 Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 7. 15 Schlegel, ‘Athenäum Fragments’, fragment 24. 16 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 207. As quoted by Andrew Allport, ‘The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Performance of Form’, Studies in Romanticism 51 (2012): 399 (399–417). 17 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 40. 18 See, for example, Allport, ‘The Romantic Fragment Poem’, 399–417. 19 Heather McHugh, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 86. 20 Which means that the fragment has a certain ubiquity as a subversive or radical form, and in that pervasiveness is, at times, little more than the form of normalized, institutionalized pseudo-rebellion. 21 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 60. 22 Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 30. 23 Schlegel, ‘Athenäum Fragments’, fragment 206. 24 Blanchot Infinite Conversation, 359. While Schlegel plays on the dissolution of the principle of non-contraction – his fragments are simultaneously absolutely whole and absolutely part of a wider becoming – Blanchot’s are never absolutely whole. They are thus less paradoxical and rather more pointed towards non-signifying excess. For Blanchot, whose interests lie more in the fragmentary than the fragment, this form pertains to a writing of risk and exhaustion, a writing whose laws are not accessible and knowable, a writing that is of the impossible and unpredictable. The fragmentary, for him, is intermittent and discontinuous and is not of the order of signification but is of dislocation. It is non-identical to itself, and it is of the between – a writing which ‘de-scribes’ (Writing of the Disaster, 7). If Schlegel’s fragments are an attempt to express the paradoxical intermingling of the system and the non-system or work to 4

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articulate the incomprehensible, Blanchot’s fragments are a more radical unworking of the system and an articulation of the silent, ‘the limit, [which,] in as much uncrossable, summons to cross, affirms the desire (the false step) that has always already … crossed the line’ (The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 24). Similarly, if Schlegel’s fragments are a ‘subject-work’, an act of production which simultaneously produces the author as well as the fragment, as they are his or her consciousness made into a work, Blanchot’s conception of the fragmentary ‘dismisses, in principle, the I, the author’ (Writing of the Disaster, 61). See also Derrida’s, ‘Istrice 2: Ick bünn all hier’, in Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., ed. Elizabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Here Derrida states that The Literary Absolute clarified the reservations he had always felt regarding the fragment and totalization, as it pointed to a ‘certain cult of the fragment and especially of the fragmentary work which always calls for an upping of the ante of authority and monumental totality’ (Points, 302). See also Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in The Literary Absolute. 25 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 44. 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword’, trans. Andrew Benjamin, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), aphorism 46 (117–26). 27 Ibid., aphorism 43. 28 Ibid. 29 Louis Groarke, ‘Philosophy as Inspiration: Blaise Pascal and the Epistemology of Aphorisms’, Poetics Today 28.3 (2007): 431 (393–441). 30 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 8. 31 Ibid., 28. 32 Ibid., 40. 33 Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 225. 34 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 33. 35 Schlegel, ‘Athenäum Fragments’, fragment 77. 36 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 357. 37 Blanchot, Step Not Beyond, 44. 38 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 58. 39 Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), aphorism 11 (127–42). 40 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 159–60. 41 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘1797–8 Fragmente zur Litterature und Poesie I’, in Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (London: The Athlone Press, 1957) xx, fragment 180. 42 Blanchot, Step Not Beyond, 42. 43 Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, aphorism 9. 44 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 19. 45 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 126. 46 Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, aphorism 11. 47 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’, in What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40 (39–54).

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48 Ibid., 41. 49 Ibid., 46. 50 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 60. 51 Jacques Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 225 (221–40). 52 Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia’, 227. 53 Ibid., 229. 54 Derrida, Points, 303. 55 Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia’, 233. 56 Ibid., 237. 57 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 353. 58 Ibid., 357. 59 See Maebh Long, ‘Absolute NonAbsolute Singularity: Jacques Derrida, Myles na gCopaleen and Fragmentation’, in Singularity and Transnational Poetics, ed. Birgit Mara Kaiser (New York: Routledge, 2015), 95–115. 60 Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia’, 229–31. 61 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 132. 62 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 268. 63 Nancy, Birth to Presence, 267. 64 Ibid., 267. 65 Nancy, Sense of the World, 8. 66 Ibid., 15. 67 Ibid., 134. 68 Ibid., 139. 69 Ibid., 125. 70 Ibid., 132. 71 Ibid., 139. 72 Ibid., 127. 73 Ibid., 126. 74 Ibid., 30. 75 Ibid., 32. 76 Ibid., 32. 77 Nancy, Birth to Presence, 155–6. 78 Nancy, Sense of the World, 152. 79 Happenstance does not mean idle chance, nor does it mean giving the decision to fate or destiny, but knowing the unpredictable can occur, and acting anyway, in the knowledge that you cannot master chance. 80 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 18. 81 Derrida, The Post Card, 9. 82 Jacques Derrida, ‘Et Cetera’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 290 (282–305). 83 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 94.

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Hybrid Roger Luckhurst

The hybrid is the product of catastrophic and discontinuous change. It is a conjuncture that defies neat taxonomy and brings forth sports and monsters, unforeseen newness into the world. Hybrid is a technical term of botany and biology, derived, the Oxford English Dictionary states, from the Latin hibrida, ‘offspring of a tame sow and wild boar’. The famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica added the speculation that it had possible etymological links to the Greek hubris, ‘an insult or outrage, and a hybrid or mongrel has been supposed to be an outrage on nature, an unnatural product’.1 The hybrid is a bastard, a monster, something worse than a mongrel (which is merely a mix of varieties rather than species). The analogy that dominates thinking about the hybrid is the mule, the crossing of a horse and an ass that can be put doggedly to work but remains infertile, unable to reproduce itself. The hybrid is an impure monster, but a one-off, a dead end. Yet some hybrid offspring are also marked by the observable phenomenon of hybrid vigour, a marked increase in qualities superior to either parent, including heightened fecundity, the capacity to reproduce. This inversion is typical of meanings associated with the hybrid: ‘Because of its ambiguity, the term hybridity is bothersome.’2 It is not only conceptually worrying, but historically so: it carries the freight of a complex genealogy that cuts across diverse fields. Some of this genealogy – its transfer from biology to racial science in the nineteenth century – is well known, but often only in truncated, partial form. To grasp its full range of reference is a challenge, because the hybrid hybridizes hybridity: that is, it demands the inter-mixing of ostensibly discrete knowledges in a conceptual repetition of the strange conjunctures the word purports to describe. ‘Hybrid’ was not one of Raymond Williams’s ‘keywords’, perhaps because in 1976 it was only just on the verge of transferring into the vocabulary of cultural studies. Yet it has since become a crucial concept in the attempt to describe key aspects of our contemporary world. This essay is an attempt to sketch out a fuller genealogy of the concept, to mark the significant traces the word still carries, and to observe its continuous and ongoing conceptual transformation.

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Fairchild’s mule, 1720 The word ‘hybrid’ is rare in usage until the eighteenth century, but more common after the first artificially manipulated hybrid plant was displayed at the Royal Society in London in 1720 by the nurseryman Thomas Fairchild. In botany, the hybrid is defined as ‘the progeny of two plants that are distinct in some way; they could be separate species or other discrete naturally occurring entities … or man-made entities, such as cultivars, or simply just two genetically different plants’.3 At his nursery of rare and exotic plants just beyond the boundaries of London in Shoreditch, Thomas Fairchild had engineered a hybrid pink, possibly as early as 1718, a cross between a carnation and sweet William, both members of the genus Dianthus. When this sensational hybrid became widely known it was first called the ‘bastard flower’ but soon enough ‘Fairchild’s Mule’.4 It was displayed and discussed in a paper before the Royal Society in 1720 by Patrick Blair (Fairchild was not gentlemanly enough to speak himself), an exemplary exotic object for this nascent community of men of science in transition from curiosity to knowledge. An early instance of the mule was preserved in Sir Hans Soane’s exotic herbarium and thence carried to the archive of the Natural History Museum. Fairchild’s mule was an extraordinary object in a number of ways. It definitively demonstrated that plants were sexed – sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes hermaphroditic – and that in particular cases, although by an as-yet obscure mechanism, human ingenuity could intervene in nature to encourage crosses. This proof was still being celebrated sixty years later, in the second part of Erasmus Darwin’s discursive poem, The Botanic Garden, called ‘The Loves of the Plants’: Caryo’s sweet smile, Dianthus proud admires And gazing burns with unallow’d desires; With sighs and sorrows her compassion moves, And wins the damsel to illicit loves. The Monster-offspring heirs the father’s pride Mask’d in the damask beauties of the bride.5

Erasmus Darwin’s own footnote to the passage explains: ‘There is a kind of pink, called Fairchild’s mule … Vegetable mules supply an irrefragable argument in favour of the sexual system of botany. They are said to be numerous; and, like the mules of the animal kingdom, not always to continue their species by seed.’6 Darwin’s ‘not always’ problematized an absolute boundary between purity and admixture and revealed that the limited understanding of the biological laws governing hybridity left the possibility of crossing the borders between species definite yet weirdly unpredictable. It is surely significant that the botanical hybrid emerges at exactly the same moment that Linnaeus began to set up his classificatory systems to taxonomize all living things in his Systema Naturae (1735), and for botany in his Species Plantarum (1753), the text that fixed the binomial cataloguing system. This was the era of the Enlightenment tabula, Foucault argued in The Order of Things, the ordering device ‘that enables thought to operate

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upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences’.7 Yet it was the taxonomic impulse itself that generated the grid in which anomalous hybrids, the transgressors of system and order, shifted from being marginal sports to central evidence for transformism. Knowledge fixes a synchronic grid that is then monstered by the diachronic creep of hybrid changelings. Fairchild’s mule also implied something quite alarming for the belief in Divine Creation. Historians speculate that Fairchild worked hard to hide his active, scientific intervention into the sex lives of the Dianthus, the frottage of pistil on stamen. Instead, he presented his mule as a happy accident in the crowded harem of his nursery. Is there a clue, though, in Fairchild’s bequest for an annual lecture on the theme of ‘The Wonderful World of God in the Creation’, that he feared his experiment muddied the divine order of the species? This was sometimes raised as an objection to the emerging forms of horticultural science. The argument was long held that vegetable and animal mules of all kinds were infertile or had only limited fertility and a tendency to reversion, precisely to preserve the fixity of God’s natural order. This early eighteenth-century story anticipated the more familiar agonies surrounding Charles Darwin’s working out of his theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection, research that relied on systematizing the common wisdom of horticulturalists, farmers, pigeon fanciers and cattle breeders, all attuned to making advantageous changes in stocks by processes of selection and, more rarely, crossbreeding. Darwin also came to suspect that the hybrid was one of the critical pieces of evidence that ultimately broke down any fixed boundaries not only between varieties, but also species. In fact, his accumulation of evidence seemed to show that there were many hybrids that could reproduce themselves, that did not die infertile or revert to parent types, but carried on, multiplying, branching out – the vehicle of an exhilarating yet terrifying biological transformism. By 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on ‘Hybridism’ confessed that ‘no exact line can be drawn between the various kinds of crossings from between individuals apparently identical … Hybridism therefore grades into mongrelism, mongrelism into cross-breeding, and cross-breeding into normal pairing’.8 The hybrid was the mark of the plasticity, the protean frenzy of nature, its unbounded creativity, its epic wastefulness, the trace of its non-teleological transformation. The increasingly active pursuit of selection and hybridization in nineteenth-century agriculture and animal husbandry never receded: it was in fact crucial to the economic logics of imperial occupation and transformation of territory through settlement and agriculture, whether in the hybrid wheat crops introduced into North America and the dominion of Canada, or engineering of new strains of Egyptian cotton.9 Hybrid horticulture was one of the central scientific interventions underpinning the economic dominance of the West. Famously, Darwin struggled to theorize the biological process by which inheritance was passed on or hybridized by combination. Even his close allies could not quite support his theory of ‘gemmules’ which proposed that minute granules carried in the blood transmit inherited characteristics.

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The experiments of the monk, Gregor Mendel, with cross-breeding sweet peas in his monastic garden in the 1850s and 1860s – the foundation for the modern understanding of genetics – were rediscovered in 1900. In England, Darwinian biologists resisted the new theory because hybridization implied sudden, discontinuous leaps in combination and development, rather than the gradual, continuous accumulation of variations emphasized by Darwin. Thus horticulture rather than biology was the vehicle for establishing the importance of Mendelian theory. Addressing a congress on ‘genetics, hybridisation and cross-breeding’ in 1906, the key English theorist William Bateson noted: When formerly we looked at a series of plants produced by hybridisation we perceived little but bewildering complexity. We knew well enough that behind that complexity order and system were concealed. Glimpses indeed of pervading order were from time to time obtained, but they were transient and uncertain … As casual prospectors we picked up occasional stray nuggets in the sand, but we had not located the reef, nor had we any machinery for working it if discovered.10

Then came the revelation of Mendel’s clue, with all the manifold advances in knowledge to which it has led. The most Protean assemblage of hybrid derivatives no longer menaces us as a hopeless enigma. We are sure that even the multitudinous shapes of the cucurbits, of the polychromatic hues of orchids – though they may range from one end of the spectrum to another – would yield to our analysis. Methods for grappling even with these higher problems have been devised. The immediate difficulties are chiefly of extension and application. Thus the study of hybridisation and plant breeding, from being a speculative pastime to be pursued without apparatus or technical equipment in the hope that something would turn up, has become a developed science, destined, as we believe, not merely to add new regions to man’s knowledge and power, but also to absorb and modify profoundly large tracts of the older sciences.11 This new science, Bateson continued, ‘itself is still nameless … To meet this difficulty, I suggest for consideration of this Congress the term Genetics’.12 Grafting, amalgamation and the hybridization of knowledge itself were taking place under this name.

Josiah Nott’s mulatto, 1843 Early in the course of the evolutionary controversies in the nineteenth century, the category of the hybrid was definitively transferred to the matter of human races and their mixing. English slang had long adopted ‘mongrel’ as a term of racial abuse; the hybrid, however, was a matter of science. It addressed the incendiary question of the ‘amalgamation’ of white and black races, the term ‘miscegenation’ being coined in the midst of the American Civil War in 1863. In the age of slavery, abolitionism and empire, the hybrid, the half-breed, the mulatto was the hinge that took all the pressure of racial ideology – the impossible, disallowed, interstitial category that was nevertheless obsessively catalogued and taxonomized.

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It was Edward Long, the plantation owner, slaver and colonial lieutenant-general, who first argued in his authoritative three-volume History of Jamaica (1774) that the infertility that marked the hybrid mule could also be found in the husbandry of men, in the half-breed or mulatto: The Mulattos are, in general, well-shaped, and the women well-featured. They seem to partake more of the white than the black … Some few of them have intermarried here with those of their own complexion; but such matches have generally been defective and barren. They seem in this respect to be actually of the mule-kind, and not so capable of producing from one another as from a commerce with distinct White or Black … Some examples may possibly have occurred, where, upon the intermarriage of two Mulattos, the woman has borne children; which children have grown to maturity: but I have never heard of such an instance; and may we not suspect the lady, in those cases, to have privately intrigued with another man, a White perhaps? … The subject is really curious, and deserves a further and very attentive enquiry; because it tends, among other evidences, to establish an opinion, which several have entertained, that the White and the Negroe had not one common origin … For my own part, I think there are extremely potent reasons for believing, that the White and the Negroe are two distinct species … It is certain, that this idea enables us to account for those diversities of feature, skin, and intellect, observable among mankind; which cannot be accounted for in any other way, without running into a thousand absurdities.13

Edward Long developed this theory at almost exactly the same time that Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry catalogued, in precise taxonomic language, the inter-mixture of races in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (shortly to be renamed Haiti after a successful slave rebellion), tracing these hybrid combinations down nine generations. This is the lost language of the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulatto, the quadroon, the mongrel, the mameluco, the quateronne and the sang-mêlé. Although for some, the octoroon (1/8th black blood) was a threshold of reversion back to original type, the sang-mêlé, or ‘mixed blood’, was considered to carry 1/64th black blood and was still regarded as black. Some taxonomies traced the taint of black blood back to the 1/512th fraction. This is what Werner Sollors has called the ‘calculus of colour’ and was at first tied specifically to the economy of slavery.14 The worth of a body and the possibility of freedom were calculated in these fractions. The evidence was plain that colonialism constituted what biologists would call a ‘hybrid zone’, with the frontier almost always a frantic contact zone of sexual transaction.15 In colonies across the world, this created whole new populations of those Kipling called ‘beyond the pale’ in India, which place ‘beyond the Borderline where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in’.16 Kipling’s early stories emerged from this unknown and unknowable hybrid terrain, where ‘the Black and the White mix very quaintly in their ways’, in a situation so new and unacknowledged that ‘any stories about them cannot be absolutely correct in fact or inference’.17 In southern Africa, meanwhile, Griqualand was a whole territory populated

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by products of interracial contacts between white Cape settlers and the Khoikhoi: they were also known, in Afrikaans, as the ‘Bastaards’ and moved to new territory to escape persecution. The Caribbean colonies each had their own intricate hierarchical systems to parse the intermixing of races. Despite all this evidence, these plain tales of everyday blurring of the colour bar, the legal injunctions against miscegenation and the ideological denial of the possibility of hybridity remained long in force in the American south and the European colonies, renewed with the same obsessive focus on the purity of the blood in apartheid South Africa until the 1990s. The crucial figure in America in insisting on either the infertility of the mulatto or their inevitable degradation and reversion to type was the Alabama medic Josiah Nott. In 1843, he wrote a short essay for the American Journal of Medical Science, insisting that the lifespan of the mulatto was ‘decidedly the shortest lived’ and that it was curtailed even further in ‘free people of colour’ outside the protection of the slave plantation system. His empirical observations as a long-serving medic in the southern states led him to the following conclusions: 1st. That the mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between the whites and blacks. 2nd. That they are less capable of endurance and are shorter lived than the whites or blacks. 3rd. That the mulatto women are particularly delicate – are subject to many chronic diseases, and especially derangement of the catamenia, prolapses uteri, leucorrhea, and other diseases peculiar to females. 4th. That the women are bad breeders and bad nurses – many of them do not conceive at all – most are subject to abortions, and a large portion of the children die at an early age. 5th. That the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific, than when crossed on one of the parent stocks. 6th. That the above facts apply with more force to the Terceroons and Quarteroons than to Mulattoes.… This I do believe, that at the present day the Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are, according to the common acceptation of the terms, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a Hybrid.18 In 1854, Nott published the very influential book, Types of Mankind, which tried to espouse an ethnological theory of racial difference as species difference. In chapter eleven, ‘Hybridity of Animals, Viewed in Connection with the Natural History of Mankind’, Nott showed that this was not absolute difference, however, and he introduced the idea of remote, allied and proximate races, with differentiated capacities for crossbreeding. ‘The species of men are all proximate, according to the definition already given.’19 Nott confessed that ‘nevertheless some are perfectly prolific; while others are imperfectly so – possessing a tendency to become extinct when their hybrids are bred together’.20 To his mind, this explained how the Teutons, Celts, Iberians and even Jews might inter-breed without difficulty, while the hybridization of Caucasian and Negro produced a different result. ‘Their mulatto offspring, if still prolific, are but partially so; and acquire an inherent tendency to run out, and become eventually extinct when kept apart from the parent stocks.’21

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Nott attempted to provide a polygenic, ethnological justification both for slavery and the ethnic genocide that attended American Manifest Destiny. Liberal abolitionism and free intermixing of the races, however, only held out the prospect ‘that, through the operation of the laws of hybridity alone, the human family might possibly become exterminated by a thorough amalgamation of all the various types of mankind now existing upon earth’.22 The discourse of ‘race suicide’ recurred in the American nativist campaigns against immigration and intermixing into the 1920s. Madison Grant, the founder of New York Zoo and a pathological eugenic racist, argued in The Passing of the Great Race in 1916 for a hierarchy even within the white races (with the Nordic at the top, and the suspiciously tainted Mediterranean and Alpine strains below) but that intermixing with the blacks was disastrous: ‘Races must be kept apart by artificial devices … or they ultimately amalgamate and in the offspring the generalized or lower type prevails.’23 Degeneration, race suicide and the decline of the West are thus forced into alignment. As Werner Sollors has observed, while the discourse of race pathologized the hybrid, the culture remained transfixed by this contradictory figure that at once linked and separated the races. The ‘tragic Mulatto’ became a necessary fetish, acknowledging hybridity but condemning the cross-breed to a life of interstitial misery, neither one thing nor the other. Quite where the limit of cross-breeding was positioned was insecure. In some cultures, the octoroon, the woman with seven parts white blood to one part black, was regarded as the vanishing point, the moment of reversion back to racial purity. For others, however, the octoroon was a dangerous lure for men who might prove unable to detect the hybrid ‘taint’ of black blood. Dion Boucicault’s play, The Octoroon, premiered in New York in 1859 in the explosive years of race debate just before the Civil War. A liberal abolitionist, Boucicault made the central figure Zoe a tragic one, her secret taint something she is forced to confess to her wealthy white suitor before the notorious scene of her being sold at a slave auction: That – that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black – bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the blood. Those seven bright drops give me love like yours, hope like yours – ambition like yours – life hung with passions like dew-drops on the morning flowers; but the one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing – forbidden by the laws – I’m an Octoroon!24

As Boucicault himself explained in a note: ‘The word Octoroon signifies “one-eighth blood” or the child of a Quadroon by a white. The Octoroons have no apparent trace of the negro in their appearance but still are subject to the legal disabilities which attached them to the condition of the blacks.’25 The Octoroon was a sensation on its transfer to the London stage in 1861, although public reaction forced Boucicault to rewrite the tragic ending. The play appeared at about the same time, Nick Daly notes, as Wilkie Collins published The Woman in White and James Whistler’s series of paintings, Symphony in White, began to appear.26 Darwin’s smudging of the absolute line between species and varieties led to a spectrum of investigations into the nature and limits of

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whiteness. That normally unmarked, unexamined and normative category of whiteness was suddenly placed in crisis, its boundaries now uncertain.27 The Victorians produced a technical language of ethnology that was at once a monument to and a disavowal of the vast sexual economy of interracial mixing that Robert Young calls ‘colonial desire’.28 The hybrid is an affront to the doomed fantasy of racial purity, a monstrosity that is nevertheless required to establish the exact boundaries of transgression. In the twentieth century, the grand synthesis of evolutionary biology and genetics of the 1930s gave another source of legitimation to this racial science. The hybrid becomes the ‘state of exception’ in the discourse of negative eugenics.29 In the totalitarian regimes that learnt their lessons in the laboratories of their colonies, the hybrid becomes one of the categories of citizen increasingly excluded from the political and social system.

The post-colonial hybrid: An interlude A recent collection of essays on ‘hybrid identities’ begins with an enthusiastic embrace of the category by the editor Keri Smith: Initially a term of derision, the meaning of hybridity is changing in the globalized world … With globalization and increasing modernization, being a hybrid is now a benefit. The ability to negotiate across barriers … is an asset … Those who occupy hybrid spaces benefit from having an understanding of both local knowledge and global cosmopolitanism. Those who can easily cross barriers in a world of amorphous borders have an advantage.30

The history of the term is breezily overlooked in this account of multicultural interaction. Any trace of the underpinning history survives only in a passing metaphor: Smith claims that ‘exposure to global communication and culture plant the seeds for the formation of culture’.31 The cultural slant of this contemporary revival of the language of hybridity entirely severs itself from the sciences that have freighted the meaning of the term with problematic consequences. Smith offers an inversion of the value and a wholesale erasure of the history of the abjection of the hybrid, too. In this vision, hybridity always marks a ‘subversion of hierarchy’.32 Oddly, this ignores even the reservations of her own contributors to Hybrid Identities, the first of whom opens by stating that ‘hybrid identities do not have the liberatory potential which some postcolonial and postmodern theorists have endowed them’.33 Smith retains her dogged insistence on hybridity as positive thinking, however. This is the sunniest possible interpretation of the postcolonial theory most commonly associated with Homi Bhabha. For Bhabha, ‘the notion of hybridity’ is the linchpin for cultural theory, because if … the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But

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for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge … The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.34

Bhabha’s rhetorical performance turns the hybrid from the monstrous or marginal anomaly into the cultural norm, the keystone for the entire structure, seemingly the generator for ‘all forms of culture’. This strategic inversion of the history of the hybrid belongs to a very particular passage of critical theory in the 1980s, when the translations into English of French post-structuralist theory became an important cultural front in the resistance to the rise of neoliberal conservatism in Britain and America, particularly when organized leftist politics appeared to be in disarray and acts of cultural resistance carried heightened power. Bhabha fused Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of binary thinking (of self and other, centre and margin, masculine and feminine, West and East, and so on) with a focus on colonial and postcolonial contexts, consistently undoing the authority of the Western discourse of power by emphasizing its secret dependency on its abjected Other: It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity.35

This, for Bhabha, was why the hybrid was always so violently abjected: it revealed a foundational relation and dependency and slyly began to unravel any and every claim to purity and authority. There have been many potent critiques of Bhabha’s position from within a field attempting to navigate the brutal legacies of colonialism and the rise of new forms of Empire. As David Theo Goldberg has commented: Hybridity has become invested with impossible conceptual promise, hope bound to be dashed, faith destined to turn bad, in the desperate drive away from race as it at once predicates itself on racial distinction, in the rush to theorize the betwixt and between of cultural expression, group formation, and social conditions. Hybridity itself is taken as conceptually catching the in-between, as the product if not the very expression of mixture, of the antipure, of Becoming in the face of Being’s stasis.36

The most telling intervention was Robert Young’s book Colonial Desire, which appeared in 1995, the year after The Location of Culture, Bhabha’s only book to date. It was Young who took the pains to recover the atrocious history of the racial science that underpinned the notion of hybridity, revealing it as a Victorian discourse of polygenist, pro-slavery ethnologists like Edward Young and Josiah Nott. It seemed problematic, at best, to forget this history or simply hope to invert its value, particularly in an era

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marked by renewed aggressive racial demarcations and abjections accompanying a new stage of globalization. ‘The sovereignty of Empire is realized at the margins,’ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued at the turn of millennium, ‘where borders are flexible and identities are hybrid and fluid’.37 The implication of this argument was that the post-national cosmopolitanism celebrated by Bhabha could be easily reinscribed to constitute new forms of biopolitical subjectification. Although Young sought to correct the culturalist bias of postcolonial theory by recovering the scientific history of the hybrid, it is notable that he offers only the biological and Darwinian section of that long history, largely effacing its horticultural origins. Young references this in passing, only to get the science wrong: hybridity, Young says, ‘implies a disruption and forcing together of any unlike living things, grafting a vine or a rose on to a different root stock, making difference into sameness’,38 when in fact a graft does not create a hybrid at all. This is a symptomatic limit perhaps, for the extent of Young’s critique does not move very far beyond the culturalist focus he shares with Bhabha. Beyond these horizons of cultural theory in the 1990s, the biological sciences and science studies were again transforming the concept of the hybrid. This long remained invisible inside the knowledge silo of cultural studies, however much it proclaimed itself to be an inter-disciplinary, metaphorical hybrid.

Boundary crawlers: Hybrids, cybrids and cryptids For Bruno Latour, the ‘modern constitution’, set up by the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century in the West, neatly divided the world into nature and culture, object and subject, science and society. It sorted, catalogued, listed and separated everything into authoritative taxonomies and compartmentalized languages. The hybrid, the quasi-object, obsessed the taxonomists precisely because it defied this act of mastery. If the modern constitution never quite worked, Latour proposes that now it is collapsing into crisis because we are incontrovertibly facing a world made up of hybrids, no longer objects for subjects to master and control, but what Latour variously calls imbroglios, tangled objects, or risky attachments.39 We cannot quite decide where nature and culture begin and end with such phenomena as ozone holes, mad cow disease, AIDS, global warming, species extinction, ecological change, Gulf War Syndrome and pandemic events. Are we in the messy, ragged space of the end of the Holocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene? These new hybrid objects ‘have no clear boundaries, no well-defined essences, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel and their environment. It is because of this feature that they take on the aspect of tangled beings, forming rhizomes and networks’.40 Latour’s provocation, that ‘we have never been modern’, is an injunction to respond to a world of hybrids by abandoning the knowledge silos temporarily quarantined by modern disciplines (science studies, cultural studies, sociology, the humanities) and instead to follow the path of the quasi-objects themselves as they cut across our increasingly problematic categories.41 Since Latour’s injunction in the early 1990s, the biological sciences, in particular, have undergone a revolution that not only perfectly exemplifies this requirement to

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abandon old categories, but also incorporates the language of hybridity to explain itself. The ability to manipulate biology at the molecular level in complex social-scientifictechnological assemblages has opened up what Nikolas Rose has called ‘the politics of life itself ’: As human beings come to experience themselves in new ways as biological creatures, as biological selves, their vital existence becomes a focus of government, the target of novel forms of authority and expertise, a highly cathected field of knowledge, an expanding territory for bioeconomic exploitation, an organizing principle of ethics, and the stake in a molecular vital politics.42

Cellular bio-engineering can cut across categories of living and non-living, human and animal, organic and non-organic. Silicon cells generate digital life that ‘breeds’ across computer networks. Tissue and organs from dead bodies can be increasingly capitalized and recirculated into living ones, following medical redefinitions of death and a whole new army of ‘neomorts’ and ‘undead’ that occupy the space between the declaration of death and actual physical cessation. Stem cell research has created bovine-human cytoplasmic hybrid cells, sometimes called ‘cybrids’, in which the human nuclear genes are mixed with mitochondrial genes of a cow, creating an artificial hybrid embryo allowed to ‘live’ only in vitro and only for a very limited time to harvest its stem cells for research. Where the boundary between human and animal lies in this scenario has been fiercely disputed in law, with the definition of what constitutes the human changing according to jurisdiction.43 In America, during the George W. Bush presidency, where stem-cell research was unfunded by a conservative government, laboratories had to develop parallel systems of public and private benches and fridges, where life was defined and redefined according to funding stream. Biology as a discipline has been radically adjusting its focus to consider life in larger symbiotic systems, finding it ever more difficult to separate human and the microbial life with which it is genetically and epigenetically intertwined. ‘Functioning biological individuals are typically symbiotic wholes involving many organisms of radically different kinds,’ John Dupré has suggested making the human intrinsically hybrid at the most foundational level.44 This work at the molecular and genomic level has the ability to undo racial science as the fantasy of separation and hierarchy that it always has been. As these new kinds of object and conceptual frames multiply, we seem to ‘inhabit a transitional zone’, Nikolas Rose argues.45 ‘We see hybridization everywhere,’ announce the editors of a collection called Bio-Objects, things that they term ‘boundary crawlers’ with an ‘unstable ontology’ that ‘contest the boundary lines between entities we have been accustomed to take for granted’.46 These might seem arcane matters, but they register everywhere in a popular culture obsessed with monsters and exploding the boundaries of the human. We have been overrun by zombie hordes, monstrous gene splices cooked up in laboratories hybridizing human and alien DNA, gigantic tentacular others that haunt the no-go zones of a catastrophized America, protean transformations that unravel the limits of the human and animal, human and machine. For the horror theorist, Eugene Thacker, the ontology of life itself has been weirded out, anthropocentrism dethroned, the human

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forced to confront its interconnection and intrinsic hybridity with others. This is why so-called weird fiction has been at the core of philosophical attempts to think after life, beyond the limit of anthropocentric metaphysics.47 Here, for instance, is the much less worse half of the offspring spawned in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’: It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated. Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer fantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with sucking red mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system.48

It is not the monsters that are the mosaic beings, the zoological cryptids: it is us.49 This condensed genealogy of the hybrid in four short sections struggles at the limits of cohesion, because the tracking of the hybrid necessitates the discontinuous yoking of apparently incompatible discourses. Robert Young correctly observes in his truncated history that ‘there is no single or correct concept of hybridity: it changes as it repeats, but it also repeats as it changes’.50 The process of hybridization is one of the crucial ways of understanding how change occurs across many different scales, but it also requires a constant reinvention of critical language.

Notes Peter Charles Mitchell, ‘Hybridism’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. XIV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 26, accessed on 1 August 2018, https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabri14chisrich 2 Deborah A. Kapchan and Pauline Turner Strong, ‘Theorizing the Hybrid’, Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999): 240 (254–67). 3 Noel Kingsbury, Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 423. 4 For a detailed account, see Michael Leapman, The Ingenious Mr Fairchild: The Forgotten Father of the Flower Garden (London: Headline, 2000). 5 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1781; New York: T & J Swords, 1791), 310, Book II, Canto IV, ll, 303–8. 6 Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Book II, 310. 7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), xvii. 8 Mitchell, ‘Hybridism’, 26. 9 See Kingsbury, Hybrid; and also Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2014). 1

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10 William Bateson, ‘The Progress of Genetic Research’, in Report of the 3rd International Conference (1906) on Genetics; Hybridisation (The Cross-Breeding of Genera or Species), the Cross-Breeding of Varieties, and General Plant-Breeding, ed. W. Wilks (London: Royal Horticultural Society, 1907), 91 (90–7). 11 Ibid., 90–7. 12 Ibid., 91. 13 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica: Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws and Government, 3 vols (1774, reprinted Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), vol. II, 335–6. 14 See Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 15 See Richard G. Harrison, ed., Hybrid Zones and the Evolutionary Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 16 Rudyard Kipling, ‘His Chance in Life’, in Plain Tales from the Hills, ed. David Trotter (1890; London: Penguin, 1990), 91. 17 Ibid. 18 J. C. Nott, ‘The Mulatto a Hybrid: Probable Extermination of the Two Races, If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry’, American Journal of the Medical Sciences 6 (1843): 253 (252–6). 19 Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind, or Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races (London: Trubner, 1854), 397. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 398. 22 Ibid., 407. 23 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History 4th edn (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), 222. 24 Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, ed. Sarika Bose (1859; Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2014), 43. 25 Boucicault, ‘On Slavery’ (1861), in The Octoroon, ed. Sarika Bose (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2014), 118. 26 Nicholas Daly, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27 Ross Chambers, ‘The Unexamined’, in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. M. Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 187–203. 28 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 29 See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 30 Keri E. Iyall Smith, ‘Hybrid Identities: Theoretical Examinations’, in Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations, ed. Keri E. Iyall Smith and Patricia Leary (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 4 (3–11). 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 5. 33 Patrick Cunninghame, ‘Hybridity, Transnationalism, and Identity in the US-Mexican Borderlands’, in Hybrid Identities, ed. Smith and Leary (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 15 (13–40). 34 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 211 (207–21).

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35 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Commitment to Theory’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 37. 36 David Theo Goldberg, ‘Heterogeneity and Hybridity: Colonial Legacy, Postcolonial Heresy’, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. H. Schwarz and S. Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 72 (72–86). 37 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2000), 39. 38 Young, Colonial Desire, 26. 39 Bruno Latour’s theory about the modern constitution is formulated in We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993). For quasiobjects as imbroglios, see Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. C. Porter (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22. 40 Ibid., 24. 41 There are many critiques of Latour’s narrative. See, for instance, Mark Elam, ‘Living Dangerously with Bruno Latour in a Hybrid World’, Theory, Culture and Society 16.4 (1999): 1–24. 42 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4. 43 See N. Brown, J. Kent, M. Michael, A. Faulkner, ‘Regulating Hybrids: “Making a Mess” and “Cleaning Up” in Tissue Engineering and Xenotransplantation’, Social Theory and Health 4.1 (2006): 1–24. 44 John Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9. 45 Ibid., 48. 46 Andrew Webster, ‘Bio-Objects: Exploring the Boundaries of Life’, in Bio-Objects: Life in the Twenty-First Century, ed. N. Vermeulen, S. Tamminen and A. Webster (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 5, 6 (1–10). 47 See Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012). 48 H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Dunwich Horror’, in The Classic Horror Stories, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 97–8 (80–120). 49 See Stephen Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 50 Young, Colonial Desire, 27.

18

Network Graham Harman

The first philosopher of networks, and still the most important today, is Bruno Latour (b. 1947). His actor-network theory (ANT) – developed in concert with Michel Callon, John Law and others – has brought about a revolution in the social sciences.1 As the role of inanimate objects becomes increasingly important in social science disciplines, there has already been talk of an impending turn from Michel Foucault to Latour as the standard interdisciplinary authority. That said, Latour is not yet sufficiently well known in philosophy.2 This cannot be blamed on the usual contempt for French thinkers found among mainstream Anglo-American philosophers, since even Englishspeaking aficionados of continental thought ignore Latour and remain preoccupied with an earlier generation of Parisian thinkers: Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou. In what follows, I develop a picture of what networks can offer to philosophy, but also offer a warning about how networks might lead us down the wrong path. After beginning with some general reflections on network philosophy, I turn to Latour himself, considering his attempted modification of ANT in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013). Having concluded that this modification is insufficient, I propose a different approach.

Network philosophy Part of the appeal of the term ‘network’ is its suggestion of an admirable balance between two different principles: (1) there are individuals, and (2) they are inter-connected. This balance is necessary. For if there were no individuals, then we would have not a network but an undifferentiated, holistic blob. And if there were no connections, we would have isolated individuals not linked together at all. It might now be asked if these two worries are not just a ‘straw man’. Are there really any philosophers who deny the existence either of individuals or of connections between them? In the first case, the answer is obviously yes. A good number of philosophers have proclaimed that the cosmos is basically a unified lump and have allowed for the existence of true individuals either not at all or only in a derivative sense. Among these are the pre-Socratic philosophies of the apeiron (or alternatively, of ‘being’), found in varying forms in such thinkers as Anaximander, Parmenides, Pythagoras and

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Anaxagoras. The cosmos in its true state, whether this state lies in the past, the present or the future, is a basically indeterminate and unified real. How then do we account for the fact that there seem to be many things? The world is not really made of such objects as triremes, candles and dogs, which are too specific and limited to masquerade as the whole of reality. Anaximander treats all such individuals as forms of ‘injustice’ and is content to await their annihilation at some point in the distant future. Parmenides dismisses them as the product of doxa or opinion but fails to explain why such doxa should ever arise in the first place if we assume that being is one. Pythagoras and Anaxagoras opt for creation myths that explain how a primeval apeiron was destroyed and replaced by the many. For Pythagoras this happened when the apeiron inhaled the void, giving rise to the many whose being can be found in number; Anaxagoras offers an alternate myth in which nous or mind causes the apeiron to rotate so rapidly that it shatters into countless pieces, each of them containing elements of all the other pieces. This is not merely the stuff of ‘naïve’, ancient philosophers, since similar ideas are found in more recent thinkers. Emmanuel Levinas, in his early masterpiece Existence and Existents (1978), conceives of an indeterminate il y a (‘there is’) that is revealed in insomnia and broken into pieces only by the work of human consciousness, and JeanLuc Nancy appeals to an indeterminate ‘whatever’ that takes on definite local shape only through its relations with other parts of the same ‘whatever’, which ought to be impossible given the purported indeterminate oneness of this ‘whatever’.3 An even more recent formulation of this sort of monism has been ventured by Jane Bennett: ‘[We] understand “objects” to be those swirls of matter, energy, and incipience that hold themselves together long enough to vie with the strivings of other objects, including the indeterminate momentum of the throbbing whole.’4 Here, as with the aforementioned pre-Socratics, the whole is primary, while her use of the word ‘throbbing’ implies a vague pre-Socratic solution as to how the many should emerge from the One. The throbbing of the One apparently refers to an energy that allows it to break apart whenever necessary, just as with the mind-driven rotation and vibration of Anaxagoras. Presumably none of the thinkers just mentioned, from Anaximander to Bennett, would be satisfied with a philosophy of networks, since this word implies the existence of full-blown individual elements able to join or detach from networks as the case may require. The second extreme avoided by a philosophy of networks, that of a cosmos of countless disconnected individuals, appears much less threatening, since it is much harder to find historical precedents. I am aware that object-oriented ontology (OOO) is often misidentified as such a theory by those who complain about OOO’s vacuumsealed withdrawal of objects while forgetting that OOO only forbids direct contact between entities. The OOO theory of vicarious causation is specifically designed to explore an indirect form of contact between beings.5 The same holds true for the socalled occasionalist philosophies of early Islamic philosophy and seventeenth-century Europe, which employ God as the sole link between otherwise separate substances.6 Yet, just as Parmenides holds that only being truly is and accounts for individual beings as derivative productions of doxa, there are certain philosophies that only take substances to be genuinely real while dismissing relations as something accidental or derivative. It is important to note that this does not apply to OOO, which treats

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relations as objects in their own right and therefore places them on the same footing as durable mid-sized physical objects and all other objects. It does however apply to Aristotle, for instance: in his case it makes little sense to speak of a ‘network’ linking different entities into a society or a machine, since his focus is on things that exist by nature. Thinking in terms of networks makes even less sense in the case of Leibniz, since the windowless monads he conceptualizes are defined precisely by their absence from any network, to the point that a substance is networked only with God and never with other substances. To reiterate, the network seems to avoid the extreme attitudes of ‘everything is connected’ and ‘nothing is connected’. At least in principle, network philosophy considers individuals as both separate from each other and as essentially linked. In this way, it aims at something both one and many: a unified network that nonetheless allows its individual components to exist in their own right. But as a rule, we find that existing network philosophies are less than balanced in their attitude towards these two extremes. In practice, the network is almost always meant as a concept of connectivity, aimed against the radical disconnection of everything. Consequently, it swerves too far in the opposite direction towards holistic connectivity, with the result that network theories tend to engage in boastful trumpery at the expense of the ‘naïve’ philosophy of individual objects, opposing the latter to the supposedly higher wisdom that things exist only through their interconnection. This is obviously true of a philosopher such as Karen Barad, who denies interaction between separate objects in favour of an ‘intraaction’ between entities that do not pre-exist their relations.7 We will now consider the extent to which it is also true of Latourian ANT.

Latour’s passage from networks to modes The key to Latour’s network philosophy can be found in his early work ‘Irreductions’, an aphoristic appendix to his widely read The Pasteurization of France.8 In one of many sparkling passages in this work, Latour shares a personal anecdote about a thought that occurred to him in his early twenties: At the end of the winter of 1972, on the road from Dijon to Gray, I was forced to stop, brought to my senses after an overdose of reductionism … I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.’ This was like an exorcism that defeated demons one by one … It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free.9

Latour was not the first philosopher to attempt a ‘flat ontology’ in which all things are initially placed on an equal footing rather than being divided up according to pre-existing hierarchies such as real vs fictional or human vs non-human. Among other examples, this had already been done by Alexius Meinong’s theory of objects10 and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology,11 with its flattening of all things into their

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appearance to consciousness. Yet Latour’s intellectual career did not bring him into dialogue with these Austro-Hungarian theorists of objects, and ultimately he is a less anthropocentric thinker than either Meinong or Husserl. Latour’s flat ontology does not make all things equal by claiming that they all appear in some way to human consciousness (as for Husserl), but rather by claiming that all things act. What makes the comic book superhero Batman just as real as an electron is not that both appear to our minds, but that both have an effect on something else. As Latour puts it in a key passage of Pandora’s Hope: ‘Why is an actor defined through trials [of strength]? Because there is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the [actor] that is the focus of attention.’12 It is little surprise, then, that Latour chooses the term ‘actor’ as his term for any entity, as opposed to ‘object’ in the manner of Meinong, Husserl and present-day OOO. For Latour an entity is only real insofar as it acts, and anything that acts even a tiny bit must be considered real. However, if Latour considers everything as equally real, he does not take everything to be equally strong. For instance, where Batman’s existence is evidenced mostly by his effect on the imaginations of adolescents and a few adult enthusiasts, the electron has withstood rigorous testing and theoretical delving for more than a century, and in this way the electron is ‘stronger’ than Batman. This use of strength as a criterion of reality has much to do with Latour’s early fondness for Hobbes, in which he joins the great political philosopher in his contempt for any ‘reality’ – religious, scientific or otherwise – that supposedly exists beyond the immanent trials of strength between publicly visible things. In Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political I tried to show how Latour gradually softens his Hobbesianism in favour of a political openness to that which is not currently expressed in terms of immanent force.13 Nonetheless, he is only able to soften this view by going beyond his theory of networks proper, which is Hobbesian to the core. This begins with his renunciation of Shapin and Schaffer’s own Hobbesianism in We Have Never Been Modern (1993).14 It continues in his praise of scientists and moralists as detectors of the unknown in Politics of Nature (2004) and peaks when he follows Noortje Marres in reading the famous debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey in terms of politics viewed as the act of thematizing issues that are not yet part of the political network. Yet nowhere does Latour treat this unknown political outside as a challenge to actor-network theory as such. In his recent work on Gaia,15 he even seems to drift away from Dewey and back towards the immanent politics of Carl Schmitt, an upside-down Hobbes who would rather face up to the dangerous state of nature than tame it with what he takes to be bourgeois liberal mediocrity. Yet Latour does claim to surpass actor-network theory with his recent masterpiece An Enquiry into the Modes of Existence, which hereafter we will abbreviate as Modes. For some time, Latour had already expressed misgivings about the theory with which he is so closely linked. Late in the twentieth century, he even wrote that ‘there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory: the word actor, the word network, the word theory, and the hyphen!’16 What, then, is wrong with ANT? Latour gives his best answer almost a generation later, when he reports the experience of an imaginary ethnographer who has just learned the tradecraft of ANT:

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to her great confusion, as she studies segments from Law, Science, The Economy, or Religion she begins to feel that she is saying almost the same thing about all of them: namely, that they are ‘composed in a heterogeneous fashion of unexpected elements revealed by the investigation … ’ [Moving] from one surprise to another … somewhat to her surprise, this stops being surprising … as each element becomes surprising in the same way.17

Latour seems to think that the problem with ANT’s flatness is that it cannot account differently for different domains of experience. Hence the publication of Modes, the fruit of a project in preparation since the late 1980s. Though there seems to be fifteen modes arranged in five groups of three, this assumption proves misleading: one of the fifteen, double-click [DC] is not really a mode, but a way in which the modes are misunderstood. Once we remove [DC], the true structure of the Latourian modes is revealed: four remaining triads, with two overarching modes: network [NET] and preposition [PRE]. What is most noteworthy about Modes as a supposed replacement for ANT is that it represents an expansion of ANT rather than a correction of its concept of networks. Latour seems to think that the real problem with networks is that they are able to link all sorts of heterogeneous things in various combinations, but entirely unable to account for the specific character of various zones of reality. The best example can be found in the most accessible of his modal triads: politics [POL], law [LAW] and religion [REL],18 all of them explicitly contrasted with science as described by the mode of reference [REF].19 Though in the modern era natural science is usually viewed as the final court of appeal when it comes to truth, it has always been widely recognized that law works by different criteria. No one is surprised when a judge rules that certain facts are to be ‘taken as true’ or when a critical piece of evidence is excluded due to missed filing deadlines or other procedural failures. We moderns have generally been much less kind to politics and religion as separate modes of existence, treating the former as an empty realm of corrupt demagoguery and the latter as a mere opiate for the gullible and deluded. But for Latour each of these modes is also dignified and real, and each has its own proper methods of veridiction. An equally astute move occurs late in Modes, when Latour decomposes economics into the three separate modes he thinks it unjustly conceals: attachment [ATT], organization [ORG] and morality [MOR].20 Of the fourteen Latourian modes we know today, the one that always dominated ANT was of course networks [NET], though it was not yet described as a mode. For ANT the network was the horizon of the cosmos as such, encompassing any possible subject matter, no matter how heterogeneous: Newton’s laws were actors, and so were lollipops, cartoon characters, cobras, shipping containers and the Turkic diaspora. In Modes Latour pushes back against his early work by arguing that specific networks are cut from each other by way of what he calls prepositions [PRE], breaking the global empire of networks into specific kingdoms such as politics and law, each with its own rules. There is no sign in Modes that the network itself has been critiqued or reimagined. It has simply been broken into fourteen fragments, just as when the AT&T telecommunications monopoly was broken up in 1982 beneath the gavel of an American judge.

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But what exactly was the problem with networks in the first place? We brushed against the answer above, with Latour’s claim that ‘there is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the [actor] that is the focus of attention’.21 As this phrase indicates, Latour did not just have a theory of how objects engage with one another through a network, but rather a theory of objects that exist only through their engagement in that network: hence his preference for the term ‘actor’, as if a thing were nothing when not acting. Given the implicit claim that actors are nothing when not involved in reciprocal interactions in a network, we might well use Barad’s coinage ‘intra-action’ to speak of Latourian networks as well.22 Yet the comparison would be misleading, given that Barad views intra-actions as consisting always of one ‘human’ term and one ‘world’ term, whereas for Latour actions can in principle occur between any two actors whatsoever, whether human or not. By defining actors solely in terms of their actions, Latour drains them in advance of any positive individuality. Though each actor might play a specific colourful role in a network, it is nothing outside this network. If we think in terms of our earlier discussion of the One and the many, and the mandate of networks to avoid both extremes, where can we place Latour’s theory? There is little trace of the One in Latour’s multifarious networks, insofar as he allows nothing to exist outside those networks – except in his brief and ill-fated appeal to an unformatted ‘plasma’.23 Yet there is also no room for individual entities in the full sense of the term. What really exists for Latour are actions, effects, events, perturbations. We might even speak of them as actions without actors, given that actors for Latour do not precede their actions in any real sense.

Re-engineering networks Many philosophers today are drawn to monistic philosophies of flux, becoming and networks without objects, despite the easy objections that can be lodged against such positions. I suspect that this has much to do with the inherent appeal of opposing the supposed ‘folk’ philosophies of individual objects by appeal to independent qualities sitting around in empty space waiting to be tied to objects through consciousness. There is an easy temptation to oppose such apparently vulgar doctrines with a more sophisticated theory in which the object only has qualities or even existence through its relations with other things. This is one of the impulses behind the widespread acceptance – for the wrong reasons – of Martin Heidegger’s famous tool analysis.24 According to the usual reading, Heidegger’s analysis shows that objects are not just lumps of independent stuff that then enter into relations after the fact. Instead, objects are primarily relational and only become independent (or present-at-hand) through some sort of abstraction. The problem with this perspective is that the supposed examples of ‘independence’ cited by Heidegger are in fact relationally dependent through-and-through. Consider the case of physical matter sitting somewhere in time and space with certain palpable identifying qualities. Nothing could be more relational than this. Its spatiotemporal coordinates serve to differentiate it only by comparison with other such

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coordinates. Those of its properties that we are able to detect are detected by us and are therefore relational in the manner that all secondary qualities are relational. Even more importantly, the tool-analysis does not teach us only about the relationality of things that are working smoothly together to achieve a result, but is, moreover, about broken tools. Yet if tools were nothing more than their current, successful, smoothly functioning relations with other tools, then there is no reason they should ever break. The same holds for Latour’s actor-networks, though Latour at least avoids Heidegger’s anthropocentric error of tracing the entire network back to its significance for human Dasein. Though Latour has been the primary focus above, it is worth concluding by turning our attention to the work of Barad. Though not really a network philosopher in the same sense as Latour, she does share his view that nothing exists outside of the actions or intra-actions that constitute the network. One way that Barad (a former professor of physics) clarifies her theory is by referring to a key disagreement between the physicist Werner Heisenberg and his mentor Niels Bohr. According to the original formulation of Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, we cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously – to measure one renders a measurement of the other impossible. This formulation was rejected by Bohr – a complex character at once kind and opinionated – who reputedly bullied the younger Heisenberg into accepting his own differing interpretation. In the words of Barad: For Bohr, what is at issue is not that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously (as Heisenberg initially argued), but rather that particles do not have determinate values of position and momentum simultaneously … In essence, Bohr is making a point about the nature of reality, not merely our knowledge of it. What he is doing is calling into question an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own independent sets of determinate properties.25

Barad pulls no punches here. By enlisting Bohr in an attack on ‘the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own independent sets of determinate qualities’, she advocates a full-blown idealist ontology in which the world only is what it is in interaction (or rather, intra-action) with us. We have seen that Latour’s position is the same on this particular point, except during his brief ‘plasma’ phase during which the real was no better than a pre-Socratic apeiron anyway. In other words, the sort of philosophy of intra-action endorsed by both Barad and Latour is the most anti-realist philosophy imaginable, even though both authors try to finesse the word ‘realism’ out of its usual meaning for their own purposes: see Barad’s use of the term ‘agential realism’ for her own philosophy throughout Meeting the Universe Halfway and Latour’s brief attempt to claim the mantle of realism in the opening pages of Pandora’s Hope. At the very least, a credible use of the term ‘realism’ in philosophy requires the notion that there are entities that have intrinsic properties pre-existing any relations into which these entities might enter, something that is denied both by explicit network philosophies such as Latour’s and their cousins such as Barad’s intra-activity model.

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The problem with such theories more generally is well illustrated by Barad’s endorsement of the shift from Heisenberg’s view to Bohr’s: ‘For Bohr, what is at issue is not that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously (as Heisenberg initially argued), but rather that particles do not have determinate values of position and momentum simultaneously.’ Stated differently, Barad holds with Bohr that position and momentum are both co-produced by acts of measurement and therefore that it makes no sense to ask about what a particle’s position and momentum would be prior to such measurement. But from the fact that position and momentum are co-produced by measurement, Barad jumps to the radically idealist conclusion that there are no independent properties or things in the universe at all, rather than considering the possibility that both position and momentum simply have to be relational properties rather than real ones. We saw that the lesson of Heidegger’s tool-analysis was not that everything is relational, but that the relational properties of equipment are superficial when compared to the unmasterable and surprising depths that allow equipment to break in the first place. If we join Barad in reading Bohr as a relational ontologist (and admittedly this reading is more than plausible), we risk the same mistake as mainstream Heidegger scholars. From the fact that position and momentum exist only in relation to measurement, and do not exist at all in the absence of such measurement, it does not follow that all properties are dependent on measurement. Nor does it mean that the particle might just as well be a unicorn as a beach ball prior to its properties being measured as a particle.

Notes For good introductions to his ANT, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2 For an account of Latour’s strengths and weaknesses as a philosopher, see Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009). 3 See Graham Harman, ‘On Interface: Nancy’s Weights and Masses’, in Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense, ed. P. Gratton and M. E. Morin (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2012), 95–107. 4 Jane Bennett, ‘Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton’, New Literary History 43.2 (2012): 227 (225–33). 5 Graham Harman, ‘On Vicarious Causation’, Collapse II (2007): 171–205. 6 Steven Nadler, Occasionalism: Causation among the Cartesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 8 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. by A. Sheridan and J. Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 9 Ibid., 162–3. 10 Alexius Meinong, Über Gegenstandstheorie. Selbstdarstellung (Frankfurt: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988). 1

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11 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 2001). 12 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 123. 13 Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (London: Pluto Press, 2014). 14 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 15 Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa (Paris: La découverte, 2015). 16 Bruno Latour, ‘On Recalling ANT’, in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. J. Law and J. Hassard (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 15 (15–25). 17 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 35. 18 Ibid., 295–379. 19 Ibid., 69–149. 20 Ibid., 381–411. 21 Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 123. 22 Barad, Meeting the Universe. 23 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 50, note 48. 24 For a critique, see Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002). 25 Barad, Meeting the Universe, 19.

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Dissemination How information lost its meaning Jon Adams

Dissemination, the spread of information, has always presented a primarily logistical problem: how to get ideas from one place to another and how to scale up the transmission of useful knowledge from person to person. The advent of digital communication largely solved the distribution problem, but in so doing, it generated new ontological and epistemological problems: the mathematical theory of information which had made the digital revolution possible also changed the meaning of information. Drawn into the service of the physical sciences, ‘information’ acquired an additional quantitative definition, and its connection with knowledge was severed. Meanwhile, as information became easier to disseminate, the role and value of expertise would be called into question. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the next, as the meaning of information changed, so did the social and political significance of its dissemination. In what follows I propose two separate but related ways to think about dissemination as marking what this volume calls ‘dynamic critical transitions’. Along one axis, we can think of dissemination as performing and capturing anxieties about the relation between the citizen and the expert. These anxieties emerge from an inherent tension between democracy and expertise, where the epistemic supremacy of expert knowledge cuts into the decision space available to the citizen. By this I mean that freedom of choice does not necessarily increase in proportion to the supply of information, but may be constrained by it. Where there is public controversy but expert consensus – climate change or evolutionary theory for example – the more information we are given, the more we are expected to converge on the same conclusions. Having more information does not ensure a free choice so much as it ensures the correct choice. I examine this first axis of dissemination through the popularization of science as an exemplary case in which the dissemination of information aims to produce consensus with expert opinion. On the other axis is a concern with misunderstanding, with being properly and fully understood. Dissemination here broadens out to include not only particular messages, but all exchanges of information between subjects and increasingly between inanimate objects as well. For many issues, where consensus is sought through the dissemination

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of ‘useful’ information, clarity seemingly decreases with the volume of information made available. This happens not only because viewpoints compete in a marketplace of ideas but more fundamentally because the very act of interpretation has been rendered problematic. Throughout the twentieth century, and across the disciplinary spectrum, a nineteenth-century confidence in the steady progress toward stable meanings and shared interpretations was being eroded, to be replaced by ‘ambiguity’, ‘incompleteness’, ‘slippage’, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘noise’.1 Paradoxically, as efforts to fix meanings and interpretations intensified, the clarity that was sought retreated into the shadows. During the 1940s and 1950s, thinkers in multiple fields (but particularly in mathematics and technology) found themselves wrapped up in problems of misunderstanding and mistranslation – with economists worrying about perfect information exchange for the operation of efficient markets and linguists worrying about the impossibility of translation across diverse languages. Meanwhile, from wartime cryptography came the nascent telecommunication sciences, which grappled with how to parse signal from noise in messages being wired from machine to machine. The scholarship on communication which emerged during this period took two broad routes: in the mathematico-physical sciences, there was an increasingly technical and rigorous concern with transferring data with the minimum of distortion, abetted by a total indifference to the content and meaning of those messages. Meanwhile, in the humanities, a productive but deeply introspective set of principally hermeneutic and epistemological concerns arose around the validity of interpretation, leading ultimately toward a pessimism about the possibility of extracting any stable and shared meanings from texts and culminating in the semantic pluralism of deconstruction. Such hermeneutic problems undermined straightforward dissemination even in the face of runaway technological successes. A marvel such as satellite communication could deliver a message across vast distances at astonishing speeds, only for it to be misunderstood by the human minds which were its ultimate recipients. And our own tendency to garble our intentions was no less deleterious. By 1969, we could transmit live audio back from the moon – but even Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for [a] man … ’ embedded a crucial ambiguity: that dropped article undid the sense of the sentence, plunging the intended meaning into confusion. Expertise was for naught if what the experts said could not be properly understood. So the problem of dissemination sits on these axes, two gradients: between the expert diktat and democratic choice; and across that, between signal and noise. Expertise struggles for legitimacy in the face of democratic decision-making, even as the very idea of a clear message becomes problematic. The history of dissemination is bound up with the history of dissemination’s enabling technologies – from the invention of writing to the relatively slow development of moveable type, through to the mass production of printed matter, and then, with remarkable rapidity, the concatenation of broadcast radio, digital encoding, television, and most recently, the internet, transferring volumes of data that in under a decade have exceeded the sum total of human-produced information in all of history. The volumes of data now surging across the networks surpass all benchmarks for excess. The dataglut threatens to overwhelm not only our ability to understand the

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information, but to subsume the channel capacity of the internet itself in what Bret Swanson has called ‘the exaflood’ – a deluge of data measured not in giga-, tera- or even peta-bytes, but exabytes – a quintillion bytes.2 A 2014 report from technology company Cisco claims we are now entering the ‘zettabyte era’.3 To put this into some sort of perspective, researchers at UC Berkeley have estimated the total volume of information humanity produced by the year 2000 – all books, newspapers, videos, audio recordings – at around twelve exabytes.4 Global traffic on the internet as of 2015 is estimated as being in the region of 75 exabytes per month.5 How should we react to the scale of this deluge, and what changes might this reaction bring? In 1908, E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, a science fiction story as prescient as it was generically anomalous, foresaw a world where the creeping mechanization of modernity had come to subsume even our social relations. He envisaged whole populations densely packed in hive-like cells but utterly alone, with video calls replacing face-to-face contact. Here was a future society in which social structure and infrastructure were inextricably enmeshed within a ‘Machine’ through which all human intercourse would be translated into electronic signals. In Forster’s Machine, chronic overpopulation demands a new means of organizing society, while the overwhelming volume of information being exchanged leads to an inversion of the proper relation between the social order and the citizenry. Here was a totalizing filing system that had enfolded its users, an index that now dictated the contents. The complaint would be echoed by a character in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, set amidst the events of the Second World War: ‘Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information the only real medium of exchange?’6 Forster had been inspired to write the story in protest at the ‘technological optimism’ of his contemporary, H. G. Wells. But Wells clearly remained optimistic about managing the approaching dataglut and, between 1936 and 1938, published a series of non-fiction essays on the possibility of designing a system for storing and cross-referencing the world’s knowledge in a single system – a hyper-encyclopaedia which he called the ‘World Brain’. At about the same time, the American engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush had independently conceived of a similar information storage and retrieval system, the ‘Memex’, which would employ the novel technology of microfilm to combine vast capacity with precise modularity, allowing for updates, edits and cross-references when and where required. Moving across both projects was a concern that the problem of disseminating information had shifted from transfer to management. Both Wells’s ‘World Brain’ and Bush’s ‘Memex’ are now widely hailed as conceptual if not practical precursors of the internet, but the real shift – the event that makes the dataglut possible and perhaps inevitable – happened in 1948 when Claude Shannon, a mathematical theorist and former graduate student of Bush, published his ‘Mathematical Theory of Communication’, while working at Bell Labs in the United States. Shannon’s insight was to develop a technical definition of information, measured in bits, which could be described mathematically. Information, in this account, was distinct from knowledge. Knowledge was particular and context specific, while information was fungible and could be traded for a like quantity of itself. Knowledge was (and remains) selfcancelling, disparate, difficult to stack, but you could aggregate information as easily

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as so much sand. The conceptual – as well as the technological – shift involved a conversion from knowledge to information. Warren Weaver, Shannon’s explicator and collaborator, explains this shift as follows: ‘information’ is used here with a special meaning that measures freedom of choice and hence uncertainty as to what choice has been made. It is therefore possible for the word information to have either good or bad connotations. Uncertainty which arises by virtue of freedom of choice on the part of the sender is desirable uncertainty. Uncertainty which arises because of errors or because of the influence of noise is undesirable uncertainty.7

As indicated there, Shannon’s thesis also gives us the now-familiar distinction between signal and noise – noise rising in proportion to the volume of information you are attempting to transmit – and places a limit on the ‘channel capacity’ of a signal: the more information you try to cram in, the more (unintended) noise and the less (intended) meaning you get out. Weaver explains the relationship: ‘information and meaning may prove to be … subject to some joint restriction that condemns a person to the sacrifice of the one as he insists on having much of the other’.8 What literary critics might call ‘slippage’, information scientists cash out in terms of an unworkably high ratio of noise to signal – as an excess of information, an availability of rival interpretations that exceeds a certain threshold for choosing sensibly between them. Part of what makes communication amenable to mathematization is structural. Letter-order in the spelling of words has a statistical character, for instance, with some letters more likely to follow others – q and u, t and h. Structure determines a portion of choice, and Shannon calculated the consequential redundancy at about 50 per cent for English. This meant that it would usually be possible, from the regularity of standardized spelling and from context, to rebuild an English sentence from which roughly half the letters have been deleted, a feature exploited in the early days of telegraphy when communication was paid for by the letter. Crucially, Shannon’s theory brought information into the realm of the physical sciences – it operationalized the term as a measurable quantity like mass or wavelength. In a sense, words turned out to be very much as substantial as sticks and stones. The forfeit on this new ontological status was epistemic: meaning was no longer an essential property of information. The technologies that information theory made possible would be indifferent to the content of the data they transmitted, and they would be capable of transmitting vastly more of it. But abundant information brought with it dangerous levels of corrosive nonsense, of noise, and so while for centuries the problem of dissemination had been a paucity of available information, the problem now would be trying to pare down the volume of information to salvage the signal from the noise. The difficulty still involved gaining access to information, but from the side of surplus rather than deficit. To sharpen this point, we might say that our problem is not so much a simple question of access to information, as it is protection from misinformation. At more or less the same time as Shannon was composing his theory of communication, English mathematician Alan Turing was at Bletchley Park deciphering

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the German Enigma codes. Turing had already laid down the theoretical architecture on which all modern computers run, offering a (then hypothetical) mechanism by which the unlimited flows of data that Shannon’s theories (again, hypothetically) described might be stored and latterly transmitted. But Turing’s wartime code-breaking work is also a reminder that the dissemination of information has a dark twin, a sort of counterfactual, rooted in espionage – dissimulation – the phonetic similarity of which appositely masks a very different etymology, but catalyses a novel way of thinking about the issue of communication. If the problems Shannon discussed constitute a positive position, dissimulation points towards the inverse, the epistemic negative, the issue of how to hide a message within a message. In cryptography, the carrier has a particular relationship to the content. There is, in a rather precise sense, a subtext: a text within the text. The problem of code-breaking usefully sheds light on the positive case, since to hide a meaning you must first know how to deliver a meaning. The perfect code has two requirements: that the uninitiated can never understand it and that the initiated can never misunderstand it. A cracked code that still contains ambiguities or, in Shannon’s terms, noise is every bit as useless as the cipher from which it derives, and because it offers the decoder an illusion of security, it is arguably worse. Shannon and Turing met in America in 1943 while Turing was stationed in Washington. The pair appeared to be working on opposite ends of the same problem. As a code-breaker, Turing’s starting point was a belief that immanent randomness contained sense, and his job was to locate and extricate the meaning, to extract the signal from the noise. But for Shannon, the ubiquity of noise meant all transmitted messages were codes to some extent. Turing saw noise and looked for signal; Shannon saw signal and looked for noise. Both worked on removing the obstacles to clarity. Turing’s obstacles were intentionally introduced, and so his interpretations are predicated on a confidence that a signal exists to be found. Shannon’s concern was in a sense epistemically prior to this and would prefigure Jacques Derrida’s pessimistic view that code-breaking was not a specialist activity, but a background condition underlying the successful (though more commonly partial and incomplete) interpretation of any message. The subtlety of Derrida’s anxiety is performed through his own stylistic opacity. In a particularly ludic moment in Dissemination, he parenthetically whispers: ‘(You are beginning to understand why this text is indecipherable)’.9 Deciphering, cutting past or through the text (which is itself a cipher, which is now a further dissimulation) becomes, for post-war literary theorists, an opportunity for ‘creative misreading’. Literary criticism finds a renewed vigour here: the critic assumes an exulted role as primary conduit to the text’s necessarily concealed meaning or content. The technical practice of cryptography has become the daily bread of the literary analyst, a habit of thought for critical readers – there must be something behind the text, within the text. The text must be decoded to be understood. De-coding, coding, re-encoding: these became motifs not only for literary criticism, but for many of the most significant developments in twentieth-century thought. Once you start to think of information, codes and misunderstandings, a pattern of intellectual activity emerges that cuts across disciplinary borders. In biology, there are the copying errors attendant upon the cyclical process of encoding and decoding that R. A. Fisher proposed in the 1930s as a principle for the transmission of genetic information when

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he aligned the projects of Darwin and Mendel – a mechanism Watson and Crick would later realize in the structure of the DNA/RNA molecules. Much in contemporary economics is animated by a dissemination problem in the exchanges of information about prices and goods – Hayek’s free-marketeers battling with the Keynesians over the best way to make accessible the ‘perfect information’ necessary for the market’s efficient operation. Meanwhile, in 1941, the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, expanding on the work of his mentor Edward Sapir, developed a theory of the fundamental untranslatability of certain concepts between languages, with Whorf advocating a strong position that controversially asserts that there are concepts in other languages for which our own lacks adequate translation. In other words (so to speak), you cannot think like a Hopi Indian without a native familiarity with the Hopi language. It is not a case of adequate rephrasing – the ideas, Whorf claims, are simply unreachable without Hopi. Every translation will only be an approximation; access to the ‘actual’ ideas is possible only via the original language. In parallel, Michael Polyani in 1958 was usefully drawing attention to the problem of transmitting knowledge that resists codification: ‘we know more than we can tell’, he says, marking this distinction between ‘knowing’ and ‘communicating’.10 Where, for Whorf, the untransmissable knowledge was locked up in the speaker’s language, for Polyani, it is locked up in the particular physical body that performs the task. Polyani is thinking especially of physical skills, so-called embodied knowledge, such as how to strike a nail, guide a hand plane or discriminate between vintages of wine. Polyani’s particular concern is with whether this sort of embodied, ‘tacit’ knowledge is fundamentally impossible to codify in writing (in which case, transmission between knowers must always occur in person, between individuals, as with the old system of master and apprentice) or whether it is simply that it remains prohibitively difficult to catalogue with sufficient precision the various steps necessary to teach a physical skill. Thomas Kuhn would avail himself of Whorf ’s untranslatability thesis and Polyani’s sense of the relativity of knowledge to the individual and his or her culture to argue that a similar opacity existed between thinkers on either side of a scientific revolution and that actors before and after such watershed events, what Kuhn called paradigm shifts, effectively lived in different cognitive worlds and would remain fundamentally indecipherable to one another. The otherwise disparate programmes of these thinkers are aligned by their shared focus on the inherent difficulties of communication and dissemination.11 In retrospect, it becomes clear that these particular patterns of mistranslation, garbled signals and mismatches between word and meaning find a peculiar modulation in twentiethcentury intellectual debate. Derrida universalizes this problem: what goes for the dissemination of scientific and expert knowledge goes for any communicative act. It is not that only some types of communication are troublesome, but that all exchanges of information are problematic. Derrida is Shannon redux, and in this light we begin to understand the significance of his indecipherability. But if the lesson is that we cannot even guarantee clear communication in everyday language, what hope is there for the dissemination of expert knowledge? The history of the popularization of science proves instructive in this regard. As fundamental concerns about the inherent

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ambiguity of messages spread out across the culture, there is a simultaneous collapse of confidence in the business of professional dissemination, one that ends in an irresolvable tension between the goals of science popularization and its capacities as a medium of communication. The popular dissemination of scientific knowledge did not get properly underway until the mid-to-late nineteenth century, driven by two simultaneous trends in the production of scientific knowledge. First, the discourse of science became increasingly specialized, rapidly escaping the comprehension of lay readers. Second, there was a marked growth in the influence of both scientific thinking (for example, Darwinian evolution, germ theory, eugenics) and scientific technologies (from gas lamps to telegraphy to radioactivity) on culture in general. Hence, science became an increasing presence in everyday life even as it was unmoored from everyday language. The Victorians exhibited an unblinking confidence in both the value and the possibility of public education. While there is a laudably egalitarian dimension to much of this activity – popularizers touring the Working Societies, Town Halls and Women’s Institutes of the East End and the industrial North with the clear-eyed zeal of Christian missionaries12 – it was very much of a part with the wider colonial project that was simultaneously rolling out franchises of Victorian society over half the globe. As with colonization, the project of public education was buoyed up by a sort of chauvinism: popularizers do not question the truth of what they are sermonizing, nor do they doubt the value for audiences in learning about the newest scientific discoveries. Contrast this with the almost tentative attitude toward dissemination we find today. That distinctively Victorian confidence in the value of public education has latterly dissolved into present-day anxieties over what was previously called ‘public engagement’, which briefly became ‘knowledge transfer’ and is now more commonly termed ‘knowledge exchange’. Its practitioners are concerned with ‘deficit models’, ‘citizen science’ and ‘folk knowledge’, in opposition to ‘scientific truth’, which is often characterized as pseudo-colonial with respect to the various belief systems it seeks (through popularization) to replace.13 All this lexical blossoming records an anxiety about the power dynamics implicit in popularization. Where the Victorians saw the spread of knowledge as liberating and inclusive, in a postcolonial era we are apt to see in it a potential for suppression: not inclusion within the dominant mode of thought, but the imposition of an externally derived and homogenizing world view on a disparate set of indigenous belief and knowledge systems. The other source of anxiety regarding popularization emerges from a tension between the pedagogic structure and the problems it is intended to address. By the mid-twentieth century, many political decisions were increasingly indistinguishable from decisions about science and technology. As scientific progress outstripped scientific education, a laity at once increasingly reliant upon science and technology, yet increasingly ignorant of their workings, suffers an increasingly limited participation in the democratic process. And the wider the chasm between public and expert knowledge becomes, the less opportunity the non-expert public will have to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and the greater the concomitant risk that a society will emerge in which the scientifically literate control the scientifically illiterate, whose ignorance they are then in a position to strategically maintain.

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In the United States, concerns that emerge regarding the sociopolitical centrality of science for the voting public led to the formation of the Science Service, a non-profit agency set up ‘to aid in the dissemination of scientific information’ and explicitly to guide democratic decision-making.14 Science Service’s founder, the publishing magnate E. W. Scripps, states his position bluntly: ‘Damn it! If we have to have a democracy, let’s have an intelligent one.’15 In this way the popularization of science came to play a powerful rhetorical role in maintaining a certain ideological position on what constitutes a healthy democracy, advancing the idea that the future will be fine as long as we can explain science to everyone. But there was a glitch in this reasoning. As the science became increasingly complex, explaining it became increasingly difficult. And if much of the epistemic prestige attached to scientific knowledge stemmed from the sheer difficulty of its acquisition, then how, against the rapid expansion of the sciences, were experts supposed to keep the citizenry ‘well informed’? Insofar as translation of specialized to generally accessible knowledge is required, popularization necessarily carries information down from those who are expert to those who are not. One consequence of this structure is that it does not leave much room for scepticism. The audience for popularizations is necessarily credulous, and this credulity is a problem if the popularization is intended to be doing work as a means of distributing information on which to base political decisions. So, in addition to the cognitive problems of comprehension, there is also the social problem of reconciling the political ideals of democracy with the epistemic ideals of expertise. Expertise is inimical to democracy inasmuch as non-experts cannot cogently challenge expert knowledge. The activities and practices whose performance and comprehension requires (or is definitive of) expertise – such as genetic engineering or nuclear physics – are, as philosopher Stephen Turner puts it, ‘out of the reach of democratic control’ because, in Turner’s words, ‘it is the character of expertise that only other experts may be persuaded by argument of the truth of the claims of the expert; the rest of us must accept them as true on different grounds than other experts do’.16 Even if the public is offered choices, insofar as meaningful engagement requires expert knowledge, these choices remain beyond the competence of those asked to make them. Ultimately, expertise is inimical to democracy because experts are always a minority, and expert decisions will always be privileged over and supervene upon the decisions of the masses. The consequences are striking: democracy looks undesirable if it has the potential to trump expert knowledge, while expert knowledge looks undesirable if it operates outside the realm of democracy. It seems that despite both being desirable individually, they struggle to coexist in practice. The conflict yields a stark choice, as Turner contends: ‘[W]e are faced with the dilemma of capitulation to “rule by experts” or democratic rule which is “populist” – that is to say, that valorizes the wisdom of the people even when the “people” are ignorant and operate on the basis of fear and rumour.’17 So we are returned to Scripps’s concerns about the liability of inexpert participation – the ‘unsafe’ democracy. The initial hope was that popularization would remedy this potentially dangerous ignorance. But unfortunately, the demand that popularization involve maximal comprehensibility means that it cannot also be comprehensive.

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Although presented as a means for enabling informed decision-making among a nonexpert citizenry, popularization lacked the intellectual bandwidth necessary to convey sufficient information to validate the choices that the electorate in a liberal democracy are required to make. Consequently, the dissemination of scientific knowledge – if it was to do anything useful at all – would not be offering the electorate real choices. Instead, popularization would exist to constrain choice and offer in its place only the illusion of decision. Such popularization would not be a site where the authority of experts would be challenged, but where the authority of experts would be compounded. Expertise is beyond the reach of democracy simply because expert knowledge is knowledge that non-experts cannot assess. This is no mere inconvenience, but the very mark of ‘expertise’, which can be defined as precisely the sort of knowledge that is not commonly possessed. It is by definition elitist, for ‘expert’ is a relational category, not an absolute degree of competence calibrated on an external scale. Popularization, in other words, is a corollary of elitism: it valorizes expertise. It is precisely this power structure that terminology such as ‘knowledge exchange’ rather feebly aims to mitigate with its hopeful suggestion of a two-way conversation between expert and public. But recent decades have witnessed more substantive moves towards the democratization of knowledge, through such means as Wikipedia, which, in the absence of expert superintendence, seemingly produces a functionally adequate equivalent to expert knowledge. It is a process endorsed by popular books such as James Suroweicki’s The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) and, to some extent, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005).18 In contrast to the humbling demand that we assent to expert knowledge, Wikipedia allows people to feel that their contributions count. The generalized shift that the success of Wikipedia points, and that Gladwell and Suroweicki emphasize, is one which (at least nominally) centralizes the individual’s contribution in defiance of the tyranny of expertise. Expertise, the Web 2.0 ‘user-generation’ suggests, might be seen as a distributed network, possessed across a population, rather than embodied in specialist individuals. Against the expanding application of ‘user-generated content’, the expert is increasingly seen as dispensable at best, and at worse, as an obstacle to the democratization of knowledge that Wikipedia seeks. To some extent, the attempt to democratize knowledge has proved a success: both Wikipedia and the wise-crowd models really do allow non-experts to meaningfully challenge expertise. But they do so on a peculiar (and distinctly democratic) condition: the individual can have his or her say just so long as he or she agrees not to be individuated. Because the conflict here is not – as the user generation appears to cast it – between experts and individuals, it is between experts and the aggregation of a sufficient number of inexpert contributors. In other words, the individual is free to challenge the expert, but only on condition that the individual cedes his or her individuality.

Conclusion It is not so much that dissemination ‘fails’ under the challenges posed by the information age, but rather that the new information – both the dataglut and the redefined terms that made it possible – profoundly transforms the relationship between audience

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and expert. The problem of access to information shifts from what had always been a targeted excavation to something more like filtering and sieving – from never having enough information, to always having too much. It is no accident that the search engine is far and away the internet’s most successful tool. The mass availability of information has caused momentous shifts in the contract between experts and citizens and, to a large extent, has rendered many of the old academic skills (locating and memorizing arcane facts, for example) largely redundant. But if the internet, in realizing Wells’s World Brain or Bush’s Memex, promises universalized access to information, it has not immediately dispensed with the need for expertise. Accordingly, even if knowledge is power, mere information, surely, is not. Nonetheless, beginning in the mid-1960s, the phrase ‘information is power’ has been used in parallel, and sometimes interchangeably, with the older formulation of ‘knowledge is power’. This suggests how Shannon-Information has come to contaminate the discourse around knowledge. In one respect, the current conversation about ‘free access’ to data – and the normative language that has sprung up around it suggesting that ‘information should be free’ – is also a consequence of this vacillation between the old sense and the new. Once information becomes a physical property, it is no more legitimate to ‘own’ knowledge or deny it to others, than it was to ‘own’ air or water. ‘Intellectual property’ becomes a contradiction in terms. Private – which is to say, excludable – access to information was once a natural consequence of the technologies through which information was stored and retrieved. Books, for example, were expensive and slow to reproduce and largely confined to collections in libraries. Even if those in possession of the information had wanted to make access to it free, there were always practical barriers to accomplishing this. Within the space of a single generation, the internet has transformed the means and extent of access to information. But in the centuries between Gutenberg and Google, a vast and intricate legal-commercial structure has developed around the control and dispensing of information – copyright, patents, image libraries. The obstacles to making this information ‘free’ were as much legislative as ideological.19 Nonetheless, for the generations growing up with the internet, Shannon-Information has fused with the old, vernacular sense of information, and Stewart Brand’s claim that ‘information wants to be free’ has come to mean that information – all information – is something to which the people are entitled. The consequences are still being played out, but one striking case where this new sense of information overlaps with and bleeds into the old can be found in the moral politics of the so-called Hacktivists and the mass leaking of classified government documents by Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Any position on the legitimacy of their actions will to a significant extent depend upon which understanding of information is adopted. The erosion of expertise that occurred alongside and was driven by the mass availability of information also opened the gates for novel forms of populism, both epistemic and political. All manner of ‘alternative’ positions would now have ample evidence with which to vie with the orthodoxy, as anti-vaccination campaigners, climate change sceptics, sundry conspiracy theorists and even flat-earth advocates freely select their own canons of data from the information glut. Meanwhile the

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growing influence of social media platforms, which acted as a means of bypassing the censorial function of editorial discretion, was crucial in the rise of populist movements that saw Britain leave the European Union and a reality TV host enter the White House, nominally ‘empowering’ previously marginalized voices even as far-right politics once again began to take hold across Europe. The information that drove the Information Age was Shannon-Information, and its dissemination was a purely technical matter, indifferent to meaning or content. Keats’s nineteenth-century Romantic equivalence between truth and beauty returns to us with a peculiar twist: not now the elevation of beauty to the status of truth, but the degrading of truth to a matter of personal taste. ‘Knowledge enormous makes a god of me’,20 Keats wrote elsewhere. Information enormous would do the job for now.

Notes 1

From, respectively, Empson in poetics, Gödel in mathematics, Derrida in semiotics, Heisenberg in physics, and Shannon in telecommunications. 2 See Bret Swanson, ‘The Coming Exaflood’, Wall Street Journal, 20 January 2007; also, Bret Swanson and George Gilder, ‘Unleashing the “Exaflood”’, Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2008. 3 See the Cisco Systems white paper, ‘The Zettabyte Era: Trends and Analysis’, published as part of Cisco’s Visual Networking Index. Projecting from current trends, the report predicts: ‘Annual global IP traffic will pass the zettabyte (1000 exabytes) threshold by the end of 2016, and will reach1.6 zettabytes per year by 2018. In 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.1 zettabytes per year or 91.3 exabytes (one billion gigabytes) per month, and by 2018, global IP traffic will reach 1.6 zettabytes per year or 131.9 exabytes per month.’ 4 See P. Lyman et al., ‘How Much Information?’ (2000), UC Berkeley, accessed on 1 August 2018, http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info; Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, ‘The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information’, Science 332 (2011): 60 (60–5). 5 It’s important to note that this figure is hugely bloated by HD video; books are much more efficient: the printed collection of the US Library of Congress is a mere 10 terabytes. For predictions, see Cisco Systems, ‘The Zettabyte Era: Trends and Analysis’, esp. Figure 1. Cisco VNI Forecasts 132 Exabytes per Month of IP Traffic by 2018; Swanson, ‘The Coming Exaflood’; Swanson and Gilder, ‘Unleashing the “Exaflood”’. 6 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 258. 7 C. E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 19. 8 Ibid., 28. 9 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2004), 329. 10 Michael Polyani, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2005), 92. 11 Yet it is also the case that we might not have thought to line these programs up in this manner (or indeed, at all) if we did not have at our disposal a manner of

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14 15 16 17 18

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Future Theory speaking about information that was content-neutral, that allowed for the essential fungibility of information. Shannon’s formal definition of information helps us to see past the various disciplinary identities and subject matters that might otherwise have distracted us. Approached in informational terms, new patterns of similarity are disclosed. For an overview of Victorian popular lectures, see Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy, eds., The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries: Tyndall and His Contemporaries (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). The major policy shift from a so-called Public Understanding of Science to the new, nominally reciprocal, ‘Public Engagement with Science’ can be traced to a House of Lords report from 2000, especially chapter 5, ‘Engaging the Public’ (House of Lords, Science and Technology – Third Report, 23 February 2000). Edwin E. Slosson, ‘A New Agency for the Popularisation of Science’, Science 53.1371 (1921): 321 (321–3). Ralph Coghlan, ‘The Need for Science Writing in the Press’, The Scientific Monthly 62.6 (1946): 539 (538–40). Stephen Turner, ‘What Is the Problem with Experts?’ Social Studies of Science 31.1 (2001): 129 (123–49). Ibid., 124. Suroweicki argues that for particular types of problem, a collective average of estimates from non-experts rivals or exceeds expert assessments as accuracy emerges as a function of the law of averages. Similarly, Gladwell reports on the surprising success of ‘thin-slicing’ – making snap decisions based on very limited information. In both cases, the value of informed expertise is challenged by unconscious processes. James Suroweicki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few (New York: Doubleday, 2004); Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (London: Penguin, 2005). See Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). John Keats, ‘Hyperion’, in The Complete Poems of John Keats, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1988), 270.

20

Institution Simon Critchley

Academic institutions are unavoidable. Institutions are unavoidable. My discipline, philosophy, has always been a school discipline, beginning with Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, but also the hugely important example of Epicurus’s Garden. Such schools are institutions of an informal kind, usually organized around a charismatic master and devoted to the transmission of the master’s teaching to the pupils. The model is discipleship and the purpose of the institution is the production of disciples. This model, which Jacques Lacan calls ‘the master’s discourse’, is easy to criticize, but what is interesting about these philosophical schools is their small-scale, autonomous nature and their commitment to teaching. Plato’s dialogues were not written as research projects, but as ways of extending the audience for a teaching. What the humanities can offer in this light is an experience of teaching, where teaching becomes the laboratory for research, a point to which I return below. As a philosopher, I am concerned with thinking, with thinking about all sorts of things, with thinking as creatively, clearly and rigorously as possible. Nothing should be alien to a philosopher. The question is: what is the form of thinking? At an obvious level, it is what appears to take place in your head, in the articulation of concepts. But what is the collaborative form for thinking or the institutional form for thinking? That is the question to be addressed here. My worry is that I do not think that the university, particularly the state university, is the right form for collaborative thinking. The university in its modern form is a largely German, Humboldtian, nineteenth-century invention, with its pyramidical hierarchy and its division into disciplines, with professors in chairs, and varieties of submissive assistants kissing the hems of their academic gowns. It is beautifully and properly Prussian in this respect. Its philosophical expression is Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which is the philosophical apologia for the state where Plato’s philosopher king becomes the state bureaucrat. This is what Husserl had in mind when he described the philosopher as the civil servant or functionary of humanity and what Heidegger had in mind when he ominously described philosophers as the police force in the procession of the sciences. Let us just say at this point that I do not see philosophy, or indeed the humanities, as a branch of the state bureaucracy or a police academy. The linking of the university to the state, whether in the form of the classical nation state or the European superstate, generally has a deadening effect on thought. Tying

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the university to the state might have been justified and productive at certain points in history, but at the present time it risks turning academia into an increasingly uniform and pleasureless machine, a kind of knowledge factory at the service of the abstractions of the state and capital. I think we need to think and think again about what might be a better collaborative form of thinking, about what institutional forms might better serve the students we teach. There are, of course, exceptions to what I am saying about the university, bureaucracy and the state. There must certainly be counterexamples in context and, to be clear, I am not arguing for private universities. It was otherwise, for example, in England in the 1960s. In 1959, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture in Cambridge, ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’,1 in which he identified two broad cultures dominant in English academic and social life: the cultures of science and of literature. Furthermore, he argued that there was a crisis in English society because these two cultures could no longer talk to each other: they shared neither a common vocabulary nor did they really have any interest in what the other was doing. The great project of university reform in the 1960s responded directly to Snow’s challenge. In the UK, for example, experimental universities like Sussex, Essex, Kent, Warwick, York and Keele were founded. It was a fantastic experiment, but at the core of universities like Sussex and Essex was the idea that students from the humanities were required to take courses in the sciences and vice versa. Students were not in departments, but in large and diverse schools that effectively had complete autonomy over their curricula, like the Schools of American or European Studies at Sussex or the School for Comparative Studies at Essex. I was a student in the School of Comparative Studies at Essex in the early 1980s, and it was originally decided not to have a philosophy department, but to have one philosopher in each department. For example, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre was professor of sociology for some years at Essex. There was a tripartite structure to these institutions: departments, schools and universities. The schools were like soviets (‘all power to the soviets’, as Lenin said), departments were comparatively weak; interdisciplinarity was extremely strong, with academics running their own curricula through various democratic forums with heavy student input; and the administration was tolerated but held at a polite distance. In fact, as a consequence of extended student protests and occupations from 1968 until the miners’ strike in 1984–5, it is fair to say that the administration was frightened of the students and many of the faculty. To be clear, this was not paradise, but it meant that even students who wanted to keep to their specialization (many are habitually conservative with respect to their own disciplinarity and therefore have to be educated into the virtues of working across several disciplines) were obliged to receive a broad humanistic education that included the natural and social sciences. What happened to these universities? In short, the tripartite structure has since been inverted: schools are now weak, effectively non-existent; administration is now called ‘central management’ and they rule with an arrogance and philistine brutality that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago; and departments are increasingly isolated from each other, competing for students and scarce financial resources in a kind of Hobbesian state of nature. The informal bonds of civility that tie a university community together are being stretched

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to breaking point and, in many cases, being broken. Departments exist simply to please the management, and the management exists simply to carry out the endless shower of increasingly meaningless university reforms and make money pulling in research grants. What began under Margaret Thatcher as an ideological attack on the liberal intelligentsia in universities, particularly left-wing experimental universities like Essex, was perfected in the Blairite bureaucratization of universities obsessed with three concepts: transparency, accountability and quality. Here it is worth emphasizing that what happens in teaching, in actually working with students in the real experience of education, is very often not transparent. It is sometimes obscure and difficult to grasp at the time and perhaps only really understood retrospectively, sometimes months or years later. Education is not accountable in accordance with any calculative way of thinking. Finally, quality is something that cannot be measured like coffee beans; it is something very difficult to define, like an ethos (I will come back to this word), an atmosphere that enables students to become something, to become more than they would ever have imagined. Education emancipates in ways that are often difficult to define and impossible to measure. There has been a middle-management takeover of higher education in Britain, and people with no competence or capacity for intellectual judgement force academics to conform, to operate within some sort of state-administered educational straightjacket. Another vapid buzzword of higher education is ‘excellence’. The issue facing universities is very simple: excellence at all costs. But what on earth does that word mean? Nothing, I fear. For a philosopher, excellence recalls the Greek idea of arête, virtue, and there is a long and fascinating debate in ancient and modern philosophy as to what excellence might mean and how and whether virtue can be taught. It is not at all clear that it can be taught, and in this context it is important to note that excellence is dependent upon an ethos that is fragile, at times obscure, and that cannot be reduced to bean-counting methods of measuring research quality. In Britain the situation is completely hypocritical, with increasingly separate and professionally competent disciplines drifting apart and spinning centripetally into smaller and smaller orbits, fighting tooth and nail for resources, let alone some recognition that they are good at what they do and are valued. Above those disciplines in their Hobbesian state of nature, there floats an ideological patina of interdisciplinarity that claims it can somehow be measured by quality assurance agencies, by the new police force. The true mechanism of doom in Britain, however, was the RAE, the Research Assessment Exercise (now termed the Research Excellence Framework or REF), which made cross-disciplinary collaboration much harder to justify, and that completely downgraded the importance of teaching, bestowing certain academics with overpaid jobs without much teaching in order to improve departmental research scores as part of some bizarre quest for increased income streams. What counts is research at all costs and research is always conceived on the model of the natural sciences. What can one say? At some point in the late 1980s, an ideological mist descended, resulting in academics becoming fixated with research, cutting the fragile bonds of solidarity with their colleagues – a collegiality that is as vital to academia as it is fragile – and introducing an obsession with metrics and the ranking of institutions. Academics have almost entirely conspired in this process and are completely culpable.

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We have shifted from a model of oppositional politics in the Marxist sense, where there was a sort of war or class struggle between academics and the state that required strong unions, to a Foucauldian model, where university academics learn to discipline themselves and govern themselves through structures and criteria handed down to them by university management and state departments of education. I watched this disaster unfold at Essex and other British universities and witnessed it up close when I was head of department for a few years and obliged to do management training courses and the like. It was soul-destroying to watch the institution that had taught me to think and to which I was fantastically loyal turn into something so different. So I left. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to leave. Since leaving, on my trips back I see the effects that the EU and the Bologna Accords are having on higher education. I am sure there are benefits, but I can only see universities across Europe in a state of confusion, particularly with the pressure to publish in English in non-English-speaking countries. Universities have become competitive entities, not unlike professional football teams, each trying to attract faculty that excel at drawing recognition and winning research grants. Are there other ways of thinking about institutions? For deep sociological reasons having to do with feelings of disenfranchisement, disempowerment and disconnection, we are living through a time where there is a massive lack of creative thinking about academic institutions. We are living through a long anti-1960s reaction, governed by an overwhelming sense of psychical impotence and by a fear of not being seen to follow the law, to submit to what the state demands. Overwhelmingly, academics want to be left alone to do their ‘research’. Academics feel a growing sense of anomie and increasingly have instrumental, functional relations to their universities. Yet what might be a better, collaborative, institutional form for thinking, one that is not simply at the service of abstract knowledge, but based on an experience of enjoyment that is at the service of truth? Could we imagine the humanities based on enjoyment: a collaborative, institutional form of existence based on the cultivation of joy in what we do? This feels like a dirty, obscene and slightly shocking question in the context of a culture of increasingly purposeless and endless work, but I would like to pose it nonetheless. Universities, particularly as envisioned by the humanities, are defined by a mood of melancholy. This reflects the fact that people feel powerless, and powerlessness induces melancholia. What I see in many British universities – and this certainly has not been refuted by my time in other corners of northern Europe – is a culture of depression. It is a depression that people seek to embrace, recalling Dostoevsky’s remark that corporal punishment is better than nothing; at least it livens you up. In my final years at Essex, I saw colleagues whose entire existence was sustained by the depression that the university was causing in them. It seemed to be the only thing that gave their professional lives meaning and shape. They would wander around the corridors and cafés on campus desperately trying to find someone to complain to about the latest initiative that was being produced from the university central management at the behest of central government. The problem here is autonomy. The goal of academic institutions is autonomy, both their own autonomy and the autonomy they induce in their students. What we are

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witnessing at present is a serious undermining of autonomy at two interconnected levels. First, the autonomy of teachers, departments, schools and universities is being undermined by an obsession with regulation, quality assessment, transparency and all the other elements of the middle-management takeover of higher education. What I saw at Essex and other UK institutions was, in Habermasian terms, the colonization of the academic life world by systems of administration and a cadre of administrators who seemed suspicious and sometimes even contemptuous of the work of academics and who implemented new government initiatives with sadistic delight. It is a particularly striking sadism because no one is responsible. ‘Listen’, they will say, ‘you have to be punished because you cannot do things in the way you previously did. You have been bad academics and need to be punished. But look, I am not the person to blame. I am just the messenger. I am simply carrying out the instructions of the university central management at the behest of the national government in order to fall in line with new EU regulations’. We live in academic institutions where there is a palpable absence of autonomy; no one is to blame, no one is responsible, and no one can do anything. It all adds up to a crushing sense of psychical impotence, and it is really worrying, all the more so when academics conspire willingly with their own powerlessness and positively enjoy their depression and misery. So the heteronomy is double: it is both imposed from outside and cultivated from within. People are utterly dependent on their feelings of psychical impotence, and for as long as this situation continues and we fail to analyse the kinds of psychosocial economies of power that are at stake, conferences on questions such as what counts as theory, or the future of the humanities, or the nature of the university will achieve precisely nothing. Teachers and students will have a relation of heteronomy and quiet resentment towards their institutions and their teaching and dream of the moment they can get back to the library and continue their research on some obscure region of their discipline. What, then, is the institutional form of thinking in the humanities? It is simple. It is teaching. It is teaching people to have an orientation towards truth. This is perhaps where philosophy provides an exemplary and compelling model. As everyone knows, philosophy begins in the Socratic dialogues by opposing itself to sophistry, the promise of knowledge obtained with a fee. What does philosophy offer by way of contrast? It offers a critique of sophistry and its spurious claims to knowledge. It offers a critical undermining of conventional views on justice, beauty, love and so on. But it does not offer knowledge in the form of information. It does not even provide wisdom. It simply offers a disposition towards wisdom, what we might think of as an orientation of the soul towards the true. This is what Socrates calls ‘philosophy’, the ‘love of wisdom’. We might even say that philosophy challenges the discourse on knowledge and offers in its place a non-knowledge where the object of philosophical investigation is not conceptualized, compartmentalized or neatly defined, but where we might be inclined towards that matter in a certain, definite interpersonal experience. Philosophy begins in dialogue, in a drama that is a competitor discourse to that of the tragic poets whom Socrates excludes in Plato’s Republic. Philosophy offers a scene of instruction, of encounter; in a psychoanalytic sense it is a transferential experience, a teaching that is not the passing of information from teacher to student, but something much more

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subtle and profound: a contact, a communication, a pedagogical erotics that has to be handled with tact and prudence and that requires discipline on both sides. These are my watchwords: teaching, an orientation towards the true, contact and communication through the spoken word, enjoyment, tact, touch, prudence and discipline. I am far from opposed to research in the humanities, but I think it is a mistake to formulate an agenda for research in the humanities in a way that simply accepts established criteria for what counts as research. What our future research needs to investigate is the careful distinguishing of what it is we do in the humanities: the delicate tact of teaching, being involved in the formation of human beings, leading them out into something new, rich and exciting. This is what the Greeks meant by paideia. Without it, a culture dies. My question becomes, what might be the institutional, collaborative form of such a paideia? I find Lacan instructive here. He never described what he did as a theory or a psychoanalytic research program, but as a teaching, un enseignement, which required a persistent experimentation with institutional forms, largely due to the fact that he was repeatedly expelled from the institutions of the psychoanalytic establishment because of the radicality of his teaching and practice. Lacan makes a brilliant distinction between four orders of discourse: master, university, analyst and hysteric. The master’s discourse is essentially that of classical philosophy, which is concerned with the production of disciples and the irony of drawing unknown knowledge from the mouth of the slave, as in Plato’s Meno. Implicit in Lacan’s approach is the idea that there has been a collapse of the discourse of the master. This is paralleled with an ethical collapse. The idea that the highest good or happiness is the bios theoretikos, the dialogue of the soul with itself in contemplation, has been replaced by the idea of happiness, as the happiness of the greatest number, and morality as something quantitative and utilitarian. Morality becomes what Lacan calls ‘the service of goods’.2 This is paralleled in the discourse of the university, which is also the discourse of capital. Both the university and capital are obsessed with accumulation. Universities become factories for the production of knowledge in the form of degrees, PhD theses and research. Universities are phallic knowledge machines designed to accumulate at all costs. Capital and the university collide in the model of the rich American private university, where the value of the institution lies in the size of its endowment, the aggregation of private capital; and in this system, everyone wants to be well endowed. Lacan works with an ad hoc distinction between knowledge and truth, where truth is what bores a hole in the self-certainty of knowledge. In this sense, truth is something new, something unpredictable and surprising, something with a relation to enjoyment, something that perhaps even idles in the relentless activity of knowledge and capital accumulation, something on the order of an event. We should be trying to cultivate the conditions under which such an event might happen, in our teaching, our listening to students, and our collaborative being-with others. Are there forms other than the traditional Humboldtian university or the contemporary bureaucratic university machine that might be more amenable to thinking, to collaborative thinking? Might there be collaborative forms where we might actually enjoy ourselves? Let me sketch seven models for thinking about institutions, each of which is an open question.

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(1) The anarchist tradition offers rich resources for thinking about new institutional and collaborative forms. Contrary to popular misconception, anarchy is in fact deeply concerned with order and organization, which is enshrined in directly democratic procedures like affinity groups (which cohere around shared interests outside of hierarchical structures). Anarchists are rightly convinced that institutions should not be organized hierarchically around a relation to the state or to God. Institutions should not have to be legitimated by the state, and academics should not be the civil servants of humanity or the police force at the procession of the sciences. Institutions should be horizontally selflegislating and self-organizing, like small republics, entirely accountable to their students. Perhaps the path to some sort of institutional autonomy is by keeping institutions as small as possible. (2) The problem that has to be confronted is the relation between such institutions and capital. For example, on a summer evening in central London, while witnessing someone like the gallery curator Hans Ulrich Obrist engage in two different conversations while calling someone else, do we not encounter in the contemporary art institution a compelling form of collaborative thinking? If it is undeniable that the art world is an expression on one hand of cultural hegemony, on the other it sometimes provides a space where thinking can take place. Yet there can be no question that the art world, for all its nuances and promises, remains a form of cultural life framed by its relation to money, so that while many gallerist are generating spaces where thinking can take place, they often remain enthralled to capital. (3) Another model for collaborative thinking is the American private liberal arts college. We have one at the New School in New York called Lang College for the Liberal Arts that is perfectly utopian, where students have a freedom unimaginable in the UK and an ambition and honesty about what they want from their education. Life in the United State is an often dubious and complex pleasure, but the importance placed on education, particularly humanities education, can be truly breathtaking. Small liberal arts colleges are often collectively governed and extremely radical. But, again, this collaborative space comes at a high price: about $40,000 per year. (4) We might also think about examples of new corporate forms that are more rhizomatic and horizontal than classically hierarchical in the way that academics might associate with business structures. Having given a talk at the Google offices in New York and toured the site, I found it a wonderfully fluid, soft environment full of seemingly very happy creative people. But that should not blind us to the hard business reality just beneath the surface. (5) The one place in academia where the question of the university is still being vigorously posed and debated is in many Catholic universities. Think here of the work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre. Obviously, the question is posed in relation to questions of faith versus reason and the nature of church hierarchy and church teaching in relation to a secular state. But at least this context allows questions regarding the nature of the university to continue being addressed.

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(6) As mentioned above, psychoanalysis is interesting to think about in relation to institutions, and the history of psychoanalysis is in large part the history of battles over institutions. Lacan, for example, had a highly fraught relation to institutions, but to his credit he constantly struggled with the psychoanalytic establishment around the issue of autonomy. This struggle turns on the question of who can be a psychoanalyst, which has to be a question that is both selflegislating (‘I am an analyst; I take responsibility’) and that requires some other form of external legislation (‘This institution legitimates your claim to being a psychoanalyst’). (7) A final example that comes to mind in this connection emerges from the life and work of Georges Bataille. Throughout his life, but particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, Bataille experimented with different types of informal institutions, from Contre-Attaque, the Collège de Sociologie and the Collège Socratique, through to the more mysterious Acéphale – both a publication and occult group founded by Bataille which once, famously, discussed the possibility human sacrifice, a discussion which fortunately was never translated into practice. I find Bataille an interesting interlocutor in terms of experimenting with institutional form. I conclude by returning to my own experience and to the importance of ethos, in the sense both of atmosphere, climate and place, and in the sense of a disposition for thinking and thoughtfulness. I used to be the director of something called the Centre for Theoretical Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (CTS). This was an initiative of Ernesto Laclau, constituted in 1990 to bring together theoretical work in a number of disciplines at the University of Essex and provide a context where we could talk to each other. I took over in 1995 and managed the centre for seven years. It was a success because it simply formalized an existing informal culture of discussion and disagreement among a range of colleagues. We were people with common interests in philosophy and politics, and we created a space where faculty and students from law, art history, sociology, literature, history and various natural sciences could take part. It was a genuinely interdisciplinary space that produced a huge amount of research that went on to be published. This was not due to any policy on interdisciplinarity but was because of an existing interdisciplinary culture that could be ‘hegemonized’, as we used to say in Essex, and organized organically. The point of the tale is two-fold. On the one hand, the research flowed from oral presentations and collective discussions in an atmosphere – and this is crucial – of familiarity and trust. People took risks with their work because they knew they would find a sympathetic ear, although debate was often highly critical and contentious. On the other hand, at any point in the history of the CTS, probably only about five people were really active in planning and creating ideas. The core personnel changed, but the number was always small, and I think this was a virtue. What I want to emphasize is the fragility of such an ethos and any other intellectual ethos; it is the easiest thing in the world to destroy. At the time of writing this piece, the fate of the CTS is in grave doubt. There has been a top-down reorganization of the faculties at Essex, with a new management structure, and it looks as though the CTS will fall through the cracks and probably disappear. It is a huge pity but in no way surprising.

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I moved to the New School for Social Research (NSSR) in 2004 and found myself in a very different academic culture, but with some surprising similarities. I will not here detail the long and heroic history of the New School and its origins in its emergence in opposition to US policy on the First World War and the period of the University in Exile in the 1930s and 1940s, when the New School was home to many exiled German Jewish professors and later their French colleagues. The aim of the NSSR is to offer a programme of critical social research on the model imagined by John Dewey, who was involved in the foundation of the institution. NSSR does not teach or research in the traditional humanities as such but instead has a grouping of humanistic social science departments along with departments of philosophy and history. Although many people at the NSSR are perhaps inclined to exaggerate its importance in American academic life – I confess that I am one of them – it is a unique place with a strong intellectual culture and a living institutional memory. This is combined with a secular Jewish leftist Weltanschauung and a healthy competitiveness among colleagues. Every year, there are threats to this culture, this ethos, but we keep it alive through conversation, playful, joking relationships, and a strong sense of solidarity, that make manifest what it means to refer to ourselves as a collegium, as a collegial institution. What is surprising about the NSSR to someone coming from the UK is the importance placed on teaching. We all undertake a similar amount of teaching, and it is simply assumed that faculty members are doing research. What counts is the quality of your teaching, your engagement with students and your presence in the institution. One’s kudos among colleagues comes from the buzz around your teaching, and since most of my colleagues are better teachers than I, I am constantly seeking to improve my pedagogical technique. Teachers have a level of autonomy over curriculum, assessment and administration that would be unimaginable in the UK. Yet this does not lead to autocratic teaching, but, on the contrary, to classes of the most democratic kind that I have seen, and students expect and like to take initiative. Indeed, in considering how we might allow for the emergence of new forms of institutional thinking, it is perhaps important first to turn to the next generation of thinkers – our students – and to ask them how they envisage curriculum, assessment and the future of institutions. Perhaps this would allow for the emergence of some radically autonomous institution of thinking by establishing its conditions, sketching a framework and then stepping back to let the institution live a life of its own.

Notes 1 2

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, 14th printing (1959; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Potter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Routledge, 1992), 303.

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Section Five

Horizons and Trajectories

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Climate Ecocriticism, global warming and the zombification of the human Timothy Clark

‘Climate’ names a pervasive set of longer-term natural/material conditions, usually taken for granted as these also provide norms for human life and activities such as the times for sowing and harvesting, the basic requirements for building shelters, needing clothing and so on. Climate also provides a ubiquitous source of images or metaphors in the world’s religions and cultures: drought as an image of emotional want, Spring as hope, flowering as a sign of favour. As a horizon of physical norms, the climate, as opposed to mere weather, also tends to be discussed only at times when these norms seem to have been breached or are less reliable. Now, as almost everyone ‘knows’ (the reason for the scare quotes will become apparent), the climate is destined for serious and unpredictable shifts as a side effect of human activities interacting in still only partly understood ways with the planet’s basic ecological systems. These may continue to alter at their current rate, or they may be subject to abrupt change. For some scientists and environmental thinkers, taking a perspective of centuries or millennia, such increasingly probable futures have already become a daily context. In these probable futures, major cities are already under metres of water, and disease, drought, resource wars and the threat of nuclear confrontation dominate most of human life. As such scenarios become more probable, literary criticism, however trivial by comparison, becomes touched by the hope that its own work might somehow engage or even help mitigate these disasters. For although there is still a margin of doubt as to the reality of these scenarios, their mere possibility must surely be a sufficient motive for action. When taking up literary or other texts, or received ways of thinking, those working in the field of ‘ecocriticism’ find themselves increasingly considering how their work may contribute to the disaster or help avert it. This behaviour, initially an involuntary train of thought, is being formalized as a self-conscious method, as ‘back-casting’ or ‘catachronism’1 which involves finding new revisionist and proleptic readings of texts in terms of the futures likely to follow them, either as speculative fictions or thought experiments or as interventions in the world. There is also a

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further reorientation of the sense of time and of periodization as modes of human categorization and conception. What does it mean, for example, that Shakespeare’s sonnets, or the poetry of John Clare, may now be read, newly estranged, as products of the late Holocene, with its lost assumptions regarding the regular periodicity of the seasons providing a sense of background order and unregarded reliability for human affairs? Much inherited literature, with its background assumptions about the natural world, nonhuman life and seasons, seems set in future centuries to become the object of new forms of intense nostalgia. The sense is of things changing faster than they can clearly be determined, and of their ramifications altering intellectual boundaries in ways that often sidestep inherited patterns of expertise. Although the term ‘Anthropocene’ is yet to be officially adopted by the ‘International Union of Geological Sciences’ to name that geological era in which humans have come to play a decisive role in long-term earth systems, the inevitable shifts in inherited conceptions of the human entailed in the adoption of this new periodization are still only now becoming available to full or even partial comprehension. The issue is not that humanity has suddenly realized that it has a damaging impact upon the natural world. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that this ‘Anthropocene’ consciousness, loosely speaking, is nothing new. Accounts of the contemporary context as a sudden ‘awakening’ evade the fact that, for centuries, ‘our ancestors destabilized the Earth and its ecosystem, despite knowing what they were doing’.2 The issue is less one of knowledge than of a majority indifference to the implications of that knowledge. The Anthropocene is an emergent ‘scale effect’: at a certain, indeterminate threshold, numerous human actions, insignificant in themselves (heating a house, clearing trees, flying between the continents, forest management, having children), come together to form a new, imponderable physical event that interferes with the basic ecological cycles of the planet. The world becomes a realm of new and even surreal interconnections which seem initially as bizarre, though hardly as supposedly ‘beautiful’, as Lautréaumont’s famous tableau of a ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’,3 a favourite of the French surrealists. Any one action (say, an increase in the social status of eating meat) may also be already implicated, however minutely, in seemingly unrelated phenomena on the other side of the world (such as changing sea temperatures, disruption of sand eel populations or the collapse of sea-bird colonies). Events that seem merely cultural (as distinct from the natural) – publishing an opinion in a book, broadcasting on the internet, choosing a holiday destination, customary foods and so forth – are now also to be recognized as a physical/material, implicated in patterns of energy consumption and waste production for which they previously had no regard. The relatively novel issue implicit here is less the supposed emergence of the human species as a new political subject, than of future generations, human and nonhuman, as a new category of victim – a source of ethical demands that must concern more and more elements of human life and thought. Concern with climate is often, at one remove, a response to this felt demand. The Anthropocene requires modes of thinking which exceed the framework of an ethics of respect for the particularities of living

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individuals, whether human or nonhuman. It entails a meta-ethics that embraces the future beyond the individual lifetime, for one cannot have a singular relation to a person or creature that does not yet exist. Furthermore, the challenge, as we have seen, of managing or responding to irreversible and often unpredictable climatic shifts already underway adds an additional element of caprice and uncertainty to all human plans. The old literary-critical concern with singularity, with recognizing the other, perfecting our ‘democracy’ to embrace the stranger begins to seem like a worthy but increasingly circumscribed agenda, because it neglects modes of affect and influence that are not a matter of any ethics of interpersonal recognition, but simply of what is being done to the shared atmosphere. The physical earth itself becomes a medium for the partly accidental transmission of deep wrongs from one generation to the next, and environmental politics becomes a politics of damage limitation. With all their calls to ‘protect’, to ‘save’, to ‘regulate’, to ‘ward off ’ mounting pressures of commercial exploitation, population growth, ocean acidification and so on, environmental activists and ecocritics find themselves in a strange and amorphous political and intellectual space: we advocate new measures of regulation, protection and prohibition which must depend on or even enhance the authority of some central government, even as we call for political change or a revolution in values so drastic and radical as to effectively delegitimate current structures of power. As more and more invasive species alter and sometimes damage ecosystems across the world, human action to curb or control them becomes increasingly built into the continuing health or functioning of indigenous life, again intensifying a tendency towards more authoritarian forms of government or, at least, escalating forms of surveillance and intervention. What was once the wild becomes increasingly damaged or artificially maintained. The Australian outback, for instance, maintains some semblance of its old biodiversity in part because of large, expensive programmes to shoot camels or feral cats, while the California condor is said to be ‘on the road to recovery’ only as a result of complex and costly monitoring and breeding programmes that will need to be maintained. ‘Nature’ becomes an artfully maintained simulacrum, liable to further rapid degradation or collapse should human interventions cease.

The end of ‘continuism’ ‘Climate change criticism’ as a field emerged at the end of the first decade of the century, initially as a subset of ecocriticism, then achieving broader recognition as a distinct school of work, and now largely subsumed in the work that is making broad and variously careful use of the term ‘Anthropocene’. Within the field of literary and cultural theory, a number of journal special issues appeared early – these include the ‘Climate Change Criticism’ issue of Diacritics (43.1, 2013), the ‘Critical Climate’ issues of Syncope (21, 2013), two special issues of the Oxford Literary Review (32.1, 2010; 34.1, 2012) – as well as the open access book series, Critical Climate Change and Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibilities, published by Open Humanities Press.4 Adam Trexler, engaging the overwhelmingly dominant but at times simplistic, neoMarxist explanations of climate change in relation to the hegemony of Capital,5 argues

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‘that climate change is not a sub-discourse of environmentalism, but rather indicates a newly emerging episteme in its own right’.6 It affects, that is, the deeply structuring and often unthought modes of thinking that underlie seemingly separate disciplines: Climate change is … forcing biosciences to develop models to account for species in the future, economics to account for geological processes and to discount futures far beyond traditional investment horizons, philosophy to account for new kinds of ethical and definitional questions, and criticism to re-evaluate literary aesthetics, not to mention dozens of other disciplines that have been reorganized to address the phenomenon.7

For Trexler, these shifts entail ‘differences impossible to hold in a single analysis’.8 What seems consistently at stake is the deep presupposition in post-Enlightenment thought that reality is ‘continuous’, that being can admit of synthesis in some overarching conceptual unity. One common name for such an underlying principle of continuity has, of course, been ‘nature’, in the sense of an ultimate law-governed and homogeneous ground of all things. In an essay on surrealism, Maurice Blanchot writes of this ideology of the continuous from which we are just beginning to disengage ourselves, and for which surrealism … is less responsible than it is its victim, as was Freud and as were so many scientific, political, and sociological conceptions. An ideology easy to summarize inasmuch as it consists of two propositions: the world – the real – is continuous; the discontinuous is the continuous such as it comes to man, who has insufficient means to know it and formulate its expression.9

Blanchot’s concern is not with the planetary environment but rather with the deeply structuring presuppositions and principles in Western thought, what one might term ‘continuism’. Against this, it becomes important to affirm singularity, opacity, the incalculable and discontinuous – change that defies any calculus – not just as a matter of the accidental limits of human perspective, but as fundamental to the ultimate nature of things. For Blanchot, as in the essay on surrealist experiments with chance, the interest is in modes of being, encounters or experiences that are incompatible with continuism, and in ways of articulating a thought and language adequate to such an ‘otherness (beyond presence, identity, or sense) … no longer authorised by morality or truth, and thus no longer subject to a logic of identity or a dialectic of completion’.10 In relation to the Anthropocene as an ontological and epistemic threshold event, continuism becomes daily and visibly confounded in multiple areas of life. Environmental issues, as they become more and more an element or context in all fields of life, seem inherently transgressive of any unitary framing. They reveal, for instance, the historical constructedness of various human societies’ understanding and experience of time and ‘nature’, making us all too aware of being embedded in time scales that dwarf any human sense of lasting significance or power. To date, climate change has been most discussed in terms of its challenge to adequate literary representation, and particularly in relation to two central issues, scale and complexity.11 Addressing the former first, the spatial and temporal scale of

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normal, individual human life, as projected by human physiology and normal human life span, is not well suited to engaging with global environmental questions that may hinge on events on the other side of the world, or in unseen deep ocean depths, or with future generations. Since such a day-to-day scale is the norm in the novel’s conventions of realism, for example, some inherited modes of writing now face the threat, in this context, of seeming anachronistic. ‘Realism’s naturalization of a stable singular objective reality is wholly inadequate to convey the manifestation of climate change across dynamic spatio-temporal scales and effects’, according to Emily Potter, ‘while its privileging of individual experience runs counter to the political models of response required by climate change’.12 Some critics, accordingly, follow Trexler in advocating a reappraisal of the distinction between ‘serious’ literary fiction and modes of (mere) genre fiction, with science fiction in particular seemingly better suited to the task of representing realities on far larger scales of space or time.13 Other critics celebrate the resources of modernist or contemporary poetry, and the use of fragmental and nonlinear poetic forms that can work on various scales at the same time: the paratactic juxtaposition of various images and episodes can help resist some of the simplifications of more linear prose narrative. Such open-form techniques can avoid giving too linear or simplistic a sense of cause and effect in relation to the interaction of multiple human actions, histories and attitudes as they interact with climate and material contexts. Matthew Griffiths’s rereading of Eliot’s The Waste Land is a strong example of such work, recognizing that the poem destabilizes easy distinctions between culture and waste: ‘Eliot’s … deployment of and reinterpretation of myth creates a fictive context in which we are able to trace the human and natural, the past and its consequences, as they collaborate uneasily and unintentionally in the creation of the world.’14 The limits of the realist literary fiction that devotes itself to possible future engagements with climate change have a chastening implication beyond that of the limits of a literary convention. Despite their ambitions, such novels surely read as tracing the limits of the plausibility of genuine future engagement in the real world. George Marshall’s The Earth Party: Love and Revolution at a Time of Climate Change (2009)15 and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Washington Trilogy16 take up the challenge of engaging with the world as it currently is, including its economic and political systems along with current vectors of resource use, its population growth and the like; both also work to project in detail a credible future in which the challenges of environmental degradation are both overcome and reversed. Both writers are working with respect for the kind of probability and knowledge of human behaviour that characterize the realist or naturalist novel. Marshall’s The Earth Party genuinely strives to conceive and depict a plausible future scenario in which governments and other formal bodies, responding to environmental activism, come together, effectively confront and successfully mitigate climate change. Yet Adam Trexler’s analysis of the plausibility of the narrative is striking: ‘Marshall’s novel is something of a test case, because of the extraordinary transformations it must make to the Earth Party’s political organization and environmental aims in order to make it a viable power.’17 The apparent implausibility of this scale of transformation has implications beyond the objection that Marshall’s plot is rather creaky. A similar

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conclusion follows from a close reading of Robinson’s trilogy, arguably the best known and most thorough of such exercises in future realism, which hinges on the pervasive sense of emergency inducing a set of transformations in the workings of US politics. However, given the social, material and political complexity of the Anthropocene – its inter-implication of far-flung nonhuman and human agencies, some barely understood – it is hardly surprising that Robinson’s work also becomes easy to criticize as a simplification of the issues and probabilities involved. It evades, for instance, the likely fractiousness of US politics and moreover fails to address the exclusions that underpin Robinson’s very dubious US-centric vision in the first place (glossed over by the device of a last-minute deal with China’s leaders). There is also the problem of Robinson’s arguably necessary accommodation with continuism that manifests through her relative disregard of how nonhuman, geological and meteorological forces may entail elements of caprice and the incalculable that can sidelong human negotiations, agreements and policies altogether. Here, as with the comparable case of Marshall’s hypothetical Earth Party government, even the relative failure of a novel can offer insight – namely, that the constraints of psychological and social realism seem incompatible with the narrative in which humanity achieves a responsible, consensual and effective engagement with climate change. One real implication of such novels may be that no plausible or credible near future can currently be conceived that seems adequate to the task of confronting and genuinely mitigating the complexity and dangers of climate change. What of the role of the critic in reading and evaluating past literature more generally? For Srinivas Aravamudan, the disconcerting ‘re-enchantment’ of the material world as the arena of unknown and capricious agents undermines the Enlightenment faith in ‘the secular basis of human history as one that wrests freedom from necessity’.18 This ‘creeping catastrophism’ enforces a revisionist interpretation of its direct or indirect causes in past and current thought and assumptions, and this ‘inexorably begins to reverse the Enlightenment’, for it alters ‘the anthropological function of critique, whose rhetorical appeal depends on the prediction of an open rather than determined future’.19 The challenge emerges less from the fact that climate change is a new, interesting, fruitful and insightful topic for both literature and criticism, than from the fact that a sense of the Anthropocene threatens to undermine what literature and criticism are for – their moral, social or political defence/justification. Will that almost paralysing sense of despair felt by many environmental activists spread into more and more elements of life? The challenge for environmental activism seems to be to accept and negotiate complexity and moral contamination without succumbing to a sense of paralysis or fatalism. In such a context, various kinds of moral simplification are an especial temptation. A particular challenge for environmental politics is posed by the ways in which the consequences of overpopulation and climate change often resemble one another, together forming an elusive and intellectually multiple issue which does not fit comfortably into the mould of would-be progressive or liberatory forms of cultural politics. For the emergence of humanity as a dangerous climatic force has numerous implications that draw us beyond the obvious depredation effected by capitalism, requiring us to address the complexities introduced by increased longevity, greater

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material prosperity (for some) and the trivia of daily energy use and infrastructure design all of which now become politicized in novel and imponderable ways. Alvin K. Wong identifies a syndrome ‘Anthropocentric futurism’, moving through many environmental arguments: Recent Chinese documentary films about the city of Beijing raise significant public awareness of ecological crisis on the one hand, while the very form and language of ecological realism and human-centered necropolitics paradoxically recenter the Anthropocentrism that these films seek to challenge in the first place [i.e. the ascription of all value in life to the figure of the human being].20

Wong’s principal example here is Chai Jing’s documentary film, Under the Dome, which examines the extent and seriousness of air pollution in China, calculated to be behind the premature deaths of about half a million people a year.21 Yet, as Wong argues, Jing’s powerful piece of visual activism also works to consolidate a reductive Anthropocentrism: the film caricatures the challenges it delineates by simplifying an ecological crisis into something with both entirely human causes, human vectors and human solutions, excluding the more capricious and incalculable factor of nonhuman agency in air pollution. ‘Cultural representations about pollution habitually turn to stress the need for a human rescue mission even while the critical reckoning with the Anthropocene suggests that the human is only one, among many, vital forces in a multispecies world.’22 Wong’s point, arguably only valid for problems of air pollution largely ascribed to emissions from urban vehicles and industry, becomes incontestable if one takes the topic to be the atmosphere in general, or, in other words, the global warming arising from an obscure assemblage of human and nonhuman factors. Wong’s argument could be generalized further in relation to a common cultural syndrome: the idea that arguments, actions and critiques directed by activists or critics towards human violence against the environment can often work, simultaneously, as implicit celebrations of the activist or critic as the representative of a simplistic counterimage of the human as redemptive, or heroic.23 In particular, Wong homes in on the latent human narcissism implicit in the image, ubiquitous in environmental discourse, of the future child or grandchild. Addressing Jing’s reflex in Under the Dome to the familiar trope of conceptualizing the future in terms of care for her child, Wong asks, ‘Is not the habitual investment in the symbolic Child as the one and only reason for restoring a “natural” planet symptomatic of how much damage we, as human animals, have already done to the planet, ourselves, and our diverse species?’24 The image of the future child, threatened and innocent, becomes the focus of an even slightly sentimental humanism. It is also an image of faith in an essential human innocence, a kind of species narcissism that needs to be questioned as much as reaffirmed. Are there alternative ethics and ways of seeing that do not immediately reinstall the humancentric optic of Anthropocentric futurism?25 By contrast, Wong highlights a second documentary on much the same topic, but here the illusion of it being graspable solely in a human-to-human focus is sidestepped. Jiuliang Wang’s Beijing’s Besieged by Waste traces the lines of association between

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disparate things such as human waste, pigs, urban kitchens, landfill sites with their human scavengers and sheep; it follows them all in their linked spaces, without being too anxious to ascribe an overall ‘social explanation’ to phenomena, but instead simply tracing how all the agents or factors in a scenario, human and nonhuman, affect each other in an ‘uneven ecological assemblage’.26 Aiming to ‘contribute to the scholarly debate on why gender and sexuality should matter in our thinking and worrying about the Anthropocene’,27 Wong is troubled by the way the icon of the future child can reinforce current norms of the heteronormative family. Yet this point, however valid, would surely not escape a version of the syndrome Wong describes, for this must highlight the seductions and evasions of human narcissism in general, irrespective of specific reproductive or gender norms. While acknowledging the syndrome of ‘Anthropocene futurism’, there are nonetheless dangers in rejecting too anthropocentric a reading of the climate crisis and the dilemmas it poses as to what we, or anyone, can do about it. At worst, a justified scepticism about the limits of human agency can also lead to debilitating sorts of fatalism and a weakening of the sense of urgency in delegitimating and opposing the depredations of international capitalism or working for environmental justice in many parts of the world. Lawrence Buell sums up the difficulty here as ‘the risk of taking principled critique of autonomous human agency to the point of disenabling gridlock’.28

Zombification At present, one effect of reading culture ‘catachronically’ or through ‘back-casting’ is a pervasive, estranging sense of the incongruity and inadequacy of given modes of thought and politics. Ingolfur Blühdorn’s analysis of the condition of contemporary politics on environmental issues as a ‘symbolic’ politics mutating into a new notion of ‘simulative politics’ is illustrative in this regard. His focus is on political will, or rather the lack of it, in relation to environmental questions. ‘Symbolic politics’ in the sphere of government legislation and action means legislative gestures serving to mask the deeper fact that ‘late-modern societies have neither the will nor the ability to get serious’29 about the major environmental issues implicated in their basic practices. In this way the environmental challenges are met largely with what Blühdorn calls their ‘performance of seriousness’ or ‘the politics of simulation’.30 The phrase ‘performance of seriousness’ does not just describe symbolic legislation; it incorporates kinds of individual behaviour and societal self-description that can include even a keen awareness of ‘sustainability’ and its ramifications: These societal self-descriptions provide reassurance that the problem is taken seriously, that it is being researched and addressed with all available expertise, and that appropriate counter-strategies are being pursued with undivided determination. They create discursive spaces in which individuals, collective actors and society at large can present and experience themselves as ecologically virtuous and committed without compromising the post-ecologist value preferences which condition their thinking and behaviour otherwise.31

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Jens Newig lists the scenarios likely to result in a merely symbolic politics: (i) those in which the issues are at a long remove in space and time from the immediate experience of the decision makers; (ii) when the various parties cannot reach a consensus, leading to ‘soft watered-down policy approaches which, whilst fulfilling the demand that action ought to be taken immediately, make only a marginal contribution to resolving the problem that was supposed to be addressed’; or, finally, (iii) a merely symbolic politics may arise ‘where the management of these issues by far outstretches anyone’s intellectual and moral capabilities’,32 so that symbolic action appeases by taking the form of a gesture of at least doing something rather than nothing, a feeling probably experienced at some time by anyone engaged in literary environmental criticism. As Blühdorn and others have argued,33 however, the prevalence of a merely symbolic politics in ‘tackling climate change’ is often a ‘deception’ in which most of the public are both trapped and in which they happily collude. Blühdorn’s focus is again on questions of will and commitment, but the dominance of simulative politics relates to the way in which the global nature and complexity of the situation render any conceivable politics only a simulacrum of what an effective politics might actually be. This is not, then, a matter of individual or even group hypocrisy (though this is surely present), but of hypocrisy that is structural, so to speak, rather than psychological. Intellectually, one effect of this situation for an observer is of a perceived stark ‘anthropologization’ of human politics and behaviour more generally. Consider all the national and international political conferences on climate change, ocean acidification and so on. To an observer fully alive to the meanings and implications of the Anthropocene, these affairs come less and less to resemble any ideal of serious debate. Instead, climate negotiations take the appearance of comical performances, with negotiators as caricatures of a repertoire of inherited species gestures, behaviours and discourses that, against this new stark backdrop, appear redundant and neither helpful nor adaptive. On this stage, no sooner are the competing interests of national groups accounted for or covered over by their embeddedness in a particular set of agreements than subgroups within them compete to shift the costs to others, making claims for the supposed carbon-absorbing powers of their national forests or population policy, for example, or making solemn appeals to their ‘national sovereignty’. Dated forms of humanism also return anew in this altered context. For instance, any critic praising a new (or old) novel for its insight into the subtleties of individual human psychology and intentions, or extolling a film for ‘making us feel what it is to be human’, is now writing in an emergent context where any such gauging of correspondence to the ‘human’ has to be seen as newly and merely partial – encompassed and qualified by the broader context of a world increasingly constituted by the human-as-zombie. Indeed, an increasingly prevalent feature of the environmental crisis must be the proliferation of individual identity crises. The mismatch of individual lives and geoecological realities mocks the implicit need to return to some lost norm, the ‘more genuinely human’, some lost measure for the species, and any green thinker appealing for a ‘more truly human’ relation to the natural world is confronted with a sense of how empty such uses of the word ‘human’ have become. A sense and spectacle of the general zombification of humanity are a phenomenon that seems set to define the ‘Anthropocene’.34

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If an all-too-familiar response to the condition of the Anthropocene has become the convening of international political conferences on climate change – events which often become caricatures of familiar political posturing rather than authentic means of engagement – a sense of the Anthropocene can also effect a certain ‘anthropologization’ of mainstream ecocritical arguments. The anthropological trait that shows up in this case is that human beings are famously creatures of ‘culture’ – culture-producing and culture-reproducing animals whose lives are always mediated by the cultural significance attached to material entities or other products or patterns of human behaviour: It’s the nature of the human condition to live within structures of symbol, belief, and power of our own fashioning: religion, art, gender, war, ecosystems, race relations, embodiment, kinship, science, colonialism, language, nations and states, play, subsistence strategies, mass media, illness, pain, and pleasure. In a word, culture.35

Ecocriticism, when at its weakest, exemplifies how the dominance of the cultural in human life may drift with insidious ease into a dominance of the merely symbolic or simulative as a supposed field of engagement – like the pop band announcing an extensive concert tour in order to ‘help fight climate change’. In ecocriticism, there are ubiquitous exaggerated and self-justifying claims that ‘narratives and discourses have the power to change, re-enchant, and create the world’.36 It is equally common to find the environmental crisis to be ‘a crisis of imagination’,37 implying that a revised reading of cultural artefacts can help to alter the so-called ‘social’ or ‘cultural imaginary’ in a decisive way. An important, partial truth – that of the power of cultural representations in human affairs – is being affirmed with a vehemence that can come to seem implicitly evasive. So it is an oddity of ecocriticism that – even while making its case for the material imbrication of human life in the earth’s processes – when it comes to accounts of its own importance, it still effectively endorses the kind of ‘culturalism’ whereby, for example, ‘social sciences asserted themselves as science through the elimination of natural causes and constraints in the explanation of the “social”, the “cultural” and the “political”’.38

Critical practice What may be at issue is a drastic re-evaluation not just of modes of criticism but of the various inherited constructions and canonizations of the literary. Some twenty years ago, an article by Dominic Head found ecocriticism parochial because it was seemingly ill-equipped to deal with the vast body of non-environmentally oriented literature, such as the realist novel, with its habitually anthropocentric scope of interest that works around an individual-and-society axis, and with the environment being conceived mainly as ‘setting’.39 Yet must not a future of capricious and often destructive climate change tend precisely to invert the terms of Head’s argument? The transformation in thinking that is now being demanded of critics must be acknowledged as entailing a

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drastic revaluation and even devaluation of much of what is thought of as the literary heritage, perhaps involving a more complete overhaul even than the profound shift in how we now engage with almost all inherited literatures in the wake of successive waves of feminist theory, criticism and activism. After all, if departments of literary study still exist in fifty or a hundred years’ time, what sort of writing will seem ‘canonical’ in the probable context of a deeply damaged world of resource wars and mass extinctions? Might most currently canonical literature also come to seem ‘anthropologized’, and steeped, in retrospect, in unwittingly destructive or inadequate values and an anthropocentric narrowness of outlook? In this way, perhaps the Anthropocene would then finally form, albeit too late, a profound cultural and intellectual and aesthetic threshold, as well as an environmental one. For ecocritics and others already conscious of this threshold, many received modes of interpretation in critical practice obviously become more questionable. Tom Cohen’s account of old procedures continuing in various ‘zombie’ forms may sound aggressive,40 but it captures well a situation in which old methods in criticism – reconstructing a specific historical/cultural context, focusing on issues of national culture and identity, or working out the dynamics of power in such contexts in terms of (anthropocentric) logics of social inclusion and exclusion – all continue to have a certain validity, but in an increasingly formulaic way that highlights their insufficiency in relation to the emergent but encompassing effects, and the fuller more daunting context, of what is termed the Anthropocene. This sense of inadequacy can also affect ecocriticism, even as it directly engages some extremely frightening future scenarios. Given the threat of social breakdown entailed in such scenarios, lovino’s and Oppermann’s ambition for ecocriticism – that it be a ‘promise and hope of change in literary and cultural studies’41 – seems incongruously tame as a means for engaging future contexts in which ‘literary and cultural studies’ are likely to struggle to survive at all. Such ambitions, however supportable in themselves, fall short of meeting a future in which institutions such as universities are set to become more fragile. The strikingly limited nature of what Iovino and Oppermann hope ecocriticism might achieve is implicitly an acknowledgement of the fact that a specific work of environmental criticism can only ever have a derivative impact, as a function, that is, of the social status and force already granted to literature, criticism and the realm of cultural representations more generally. The ethical call of future generations may perhaps make it more difficult to evade what must be the most obvious implication of a disruptively shifting climate for the institution of literary criticism. Such a call may exacerbate its relative cultural insignificance, debunking any fantasies of self-importance that inhabit the self-image of critics as activists of some sort. In another context, Christopher Nealon describes how the age of literary theory was one ‘which tried to mediate between criticism and activism by imagining the relation between the two as necessary, or as definitional (not least in compressed code that went): writing-is-reading/reading-is-literacy/ literacy-is-empowerment/empowerment-is-activist.’42 What is at stake is not the enormous volume of close analytical work offered by ecocritics, but the underlying project of how these readings might change things, of what this work is ultimately for. At issue is the increasingly fragile faith that an increase in consciousness and human

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self-understanding must lead to significantly altered modes of life. As Clive Hamilton asks, ‘Is not the essential lesson of the climate crisis that reflexive modernisation has failed? The most striking fact about the human response to climate change is the determination not to reflect, to carry on blindly as if nothing is happening.’43 Outside ecocriticism itself, for a great many literary critics it is still business as usual: reconstructions of the cultural politics of a specific writer’s context, work on some ‘important new edition’ and so forth. At what point does working in a disconcertingly altered context shift activities that were once simply normal into being unwittingly complicit with modes of denial? The probable, if alarming, scenario is that critics and ecocritics will not be offering ever more inventive re-readings of literature in order to support environmental awareness. Rather, critics and former critics will increasingly be engaged directly with political action to defend the study of literature itself in increasingly ruined and oppressive contexts, and that they will be fighting simply to hold on to the civic and democratic values with which literary study is currently associated.

Conclusion As a threshold, the ‘Anthropocene’ is increasingly set to be an encounter with the ‘impossible’ in Maurice Blanchot’s specific sense of ‘impossibility’: not what does not or cannot exist, but what exists independently of human power or decision (the realm of ‘possibility’), and which cannot be fully conceptualized. ‘Impossibility’, writes Blanchot, is ‘a relation escaping power’.44 One way of describing the world of likely environmental collapse is that more and more of human and nonhuman processes need to be recognized as ‘impossible’ as the Enlightenment project of expanding the realm of human power over more and more of the nonhuman realm comes to reach a point of saturation, self-interference, ‘autoimmunity’, disenchantment and destructiveness. In the sphere of immediate, day-to-day decision and politics, this accelerating dynamic manifests itself as a narrowing space for choice, a contracting room to manoeuvre and a diminishing ability to predict the effects of policies and actions. Henry P. Huntingdon, Eban Goodstein and Eugénie Euskirchen observe that As Earth warms, there will be many political-economic tipping points, at a variety of scales. Their shared feature is that they involve the loss of one or more options for future expenditure and action. For instance, Australia diverts money away from clean energy towards flood relief. If response costs increase more quickly than the size of the economy, the resources available for prevention decrease over time, resulting in fewer available options for society.45

Nevertheless, warning scenarios like this, now widely circulated, are at risk of becoming self-fulfilling insofar as they inculcate a sense of fatalism, blinding people to the inadequate but real progress being made in some areas to address environmental degradation, as in the accelerating rise in the economic viability of solar power for instance. To be both activist and ecocritic, a subtle and perhaps unrealistic balancing

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act now seems called for, one which is able to counter an overwhelmingly bleak context with just enough hope to dispel passivity and to counter institutionalized zombification. Environmentalists may be set to become the self-conscious bearers of a kind of strategically maintained hoped-for hope, since, in Nancy Knowlton’s words, ‘bad news without solutions is not very helpful’.46

Notes Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘The Catachronism of Climate Change’, Diacritics 41.3 (2013): 6–30. 2 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, in The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso: 2016), 291. 3 Comte de Lautréaumont, ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’, in Oeuvres completes, ed. PierreOlivier Walzer (1869; Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 224–5, Canto 6, stanza 3. 4 See http://openhumanitiespress.org/critical-climate-change.html. 5 Adam Trexler, ‘Integrating Agency with Climate Critique’, Syncope 21 (2013): 227–8 (221–37). 6 Ibid., 226. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 229. 9 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 41. 10 Leslie Hill, ‘Affirmation without Precedent’, in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, ed. Leslie Hill, Brain Nelson and Dimitris Voudoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 76 (58–79). 11 For an overview of these challenges to forms of poetry and of the novel, see my The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 12 Emily Potter, ‘Teaching Climate Change at the End of Nature’, in Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, ed. Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall and Stephanie LeMenager (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 252 (250–7). 13 See, for example, Mark McGurl, ‘The Posthuman Comedy’, Critical Inquiry 38.3 (2012): 533–53; Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 14 Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modern Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 51 (42–58). 15 George Marshall, The Earth Party: Love and Revolution at a Time of Climate Change (London: Penn Press, 2009). 16 Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Fifty Degrees below (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Sixty Days and Counting (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 17 Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 121. 18 Aravamudan, ‘The Catachronism of Climate Change’, 12. 19 Ibid., 9. 20 Alvin K. Wong, ‘Beyond Anthropocentric Futurism: Visualizing Air Pollution and Waste in Post-Olympic Beijing’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 43.1 (2017): 123 (119–43). 1

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21 Ibid., 130. 22 Ibid., 132. 23 For example, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014) offers an attractive, but mildly disingenuous, account of the environmental crisis, of powerful and selfish elites stifling a would-be democratic, supposedly enlightened and righteous citizenry, the latter also being the mildly narcissistic implied reader of Klein’s book. 24 Wong, ‘Beyond Anthropocentric Futurism’, 139. 25 Ibid., 132. 26 Ibid., 139. 27 Ibid. 28 Lawrence Buell, ‘Anthropocene Panic: Contemporary Ecocriticism and the Issue of Human Numbers’, Frame 29.2 (2016): 4, https://dash.harvard.edu/ handle/1/32192699. 29 Ingolfur Blühdorn, ‘Sustaining the Unsustainable: Symbolic Politics and the Politics of Simulation’, Environmental Politics 16.2 (2007): 253 (251–75). 30 Ibid. 31 Blühdorn, ‘The Governance of Unsustainability: Ecology and Democracy after the Post-Democratic Turn’, Environmental Politics 22 (2013): 21 (16–36). 32 Jens Newig, ‘Symbolic Environmental Legislation and Societal Self-Deception’, Environmental Politics 16 (2007): 276–96. 33 See K. M. Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 34 Tom Cohen uses the zombie metaphor for much of contemporary life: Zombie politics, zombie deconstruction. See his ‘The Geomorphic Fold: Anapocalyptics, Changing Climes and “Late” Deconstruction’, Oxford Literary Review 32.1 (2010): 71–89. 35 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘What Is Cultural Anthropology?’, accessed on 6 August 2018, http://culturalanthropology.duke.edu/undergraduate/what-is-cultural-anthropology 36 Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, ‘Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych’, Isle 19 (2012): 470–1 (448–75). 37 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formations of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2. 38 Clive Hamilton, Christophe Benneuil and François Gemenne, ‘Thinking the Anthropocene’, in The Anthropocene and the Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in an New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and François Gemenne (New York: Routledge, 2015), 6. If the ethical case for ecocritical writing rests on its possible effect on the ‘cultural imaginary’, the following thoughtexperiment suggests itself as a provocation: what might the effect be if at the next major conference of environmental professors, an agreement is reached that at a set date, a significant number of critics, preferably those who are not motorists themselves, will leave their desks, take up two sizable bricks and, at a coordinated time, hurl them through the windows of the first stationary and empty vehicles they come across, at the same time issuing a text to the media in each country of origin outlining why this is being done. If the moral basis of ecocriticism is its aim of changing the ‘social imaginary’ in the face of a frighteningly destructive future, why is this not a more immediate, effective and even ethically defensible path?

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39 Dominic Head, ‘Ecocriticism and the Novel’, in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (New York: Routledge, 2000), 236 (235–41). 40 Cohen, ‘The Geomorphic Fold’, 75, 86. 41 Iovino and Oppermann, ‘Theorizing Material Ecocriticism’, 471. 42 Nealon, ‘Reading on the Left’, Representations 108 (2009): 43 (22–50). 43 Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and Francois Gemenne, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch (New York and London: Routledge, 2015). 44 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 38. 45 Henry P. Huntingdon, Eban Goodstein and Eugénie Euskirchen, ‘Towards a Tipping Point in Responding to Change: Rising Costs, Fewer Options for Arctic and Global Societies’, Ambio 41.1 (2012): 72 (66–74). 46 Quoted in Julia Brown, ‘Seeing the Glass Half Full’, New Scientist, 14 October 2017, 40 (38–41).

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Decolonization Nelson Maldonado-Torres

In her brief but widespread account of decolonization, M. E. Chamberlain notes that decolonization ‘is commonly understood to mean the process by which the peoples of the Third World gained their independence from their colonial rulers’.1 In contrast to those in the former colonies who worry that decolonization ‘can be taken to imply that the initiatives for decolonization … were taken by the metropolitan powers’ and who prefer the concept of liberation instead, Chamberlain posits that a historian ‘must try to hold the balance’ between the examination of ‘the policies of the colonial powers and the ideas and initiatives which came from the colonized’.2 She also argues that historians should ‘view the problem in a longer perspective’, which means, apparently differently from the non-historian liberationist, tracing the roots of the movements of decolonization that took place between 1947 and 1965.3 Chamberlain’s call for balance and for a longer perspective is apt. However, very obvious limits appear in her study when one considers that (a) European empires remain her principal unit of analysis, (b) most of the book focuses on the British Empire and (c) while the ‘longer perspective’ that she invokes stretches back at least to the expansion of the first maritime empires in the late fifteenth century, the vast Spanish and Portuguese empires are only mentioned briefly and mainly in a chapter entitled ‘The Empires of the Smaller European Powers’. Therefore, the text offers no serious consideration of the ways in which doctrines of ‘discovery’ as well as previous expeditions and conflicts played a role in the transformation of the forms of conquest and colonization that emerged with the shift from the centrality of the Mediterranean to that of the Atlantic Ocean in European history and commerce, and with the formation of a ‘New World’. This ‘longer perspective’ is crucial in understanding colonization and decolonization, especially since colonized and formerly colonized groups tend to experience parts of this history not as some past that exists as a trace, but as a living present. This transformation of time itself – from chronological historical time to what seems like a form of anachronic temporality whereby groups are exposed to logics and conditions that are now considered non-existent – is part of the legacies of colonization and a key target of critique in decolonization efforts. This is how the perspective of the decolonial activist, along with artists, writers and others who aim to interpret and grapple with the thickness and heterogeneity of time, becomes indispensable to any intellectual effort. History as a discipline and intellectual practice does not have the

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monopoly of accounting for temporality. Likewise, the decolonization of views of time (and space for that matter) is part and parcel of the struggle for liberation, which is also why one cannot be satisfied with the relation that Chamberlain poses between liberation and decolonization or between historical enquiry and activism. Taking the lead from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, I here approach decolonization as a concept that is fundamentally aligned with the concept of liberation, at least in the ways that it has been used by movements that oppose colonization. Liberation expresses the desires of the colonized who wish not to reach maturity and become emancipated like Enlightened Europeans who denounce tradition – not that this is the only way to conceive of emancipation – but to organize and obtain their freedom. A typical goal of these efforts has been either political or economic independence. Independence, however, does not necessarily entail decolonization, as there are colonial logics and representations that can continue existing even after the climax of specific liberation movements and the achievement of independence. In this context, the concept of decolonization offers two key reminders: first, it keeps colonization and its various dimensions clear in the horizon of struggle, even after so-called independence; and second, it calls attention to the long durée, richness and heterogeneity of the struggle against colonization, which exceeds the scope of any given liberation movement. This is why the concept of decolonization still plays an important role in various forms of intellectual work, activism and art today. I will here try to address some of these problems and offer a view of decolonization that strongly considers the significance of the condition of colonization and the agency of the colonized. This will involve a serious engagement with the ‘longer perspective’ that Chamberlain invokes, which is one that has been part and parcel of many a liberation struggle, but also an effort to consider it through theoretical lenses produced by thinkers from the former and current colonized world, a number of whom were or are also activists and artists. Theoretical insight contributes to the present argument in two important ways. First, it helps counter the flattening of temporality that is an aspect of doctrines that are still part and parcel of the European sciences: historicism, empiricism and positivism. Historicism, empiricism and positivism tend to approach knowledge as the sum of data that is observed, quantified and analysed. Data has been the predominant way of referring to potential objects of knowledge as they appear in a field of linear temporality, which makes it extremely difficult to explore phenomena that reflect or are found at the intersection of temporalities. From this point of view, colonization and decolonization are the sum of the visible and/or quantifiable events that take place within a certain time period, both of which fundamentally belong at this point to the past. Decolonization – as a living struggle in the midst of competing views and modes of experiencing time, space and other basic coordinates of human subjectivity and sociality – needs a different approach. Decolonial theorizing, as I will approach it here, critically reflects on our common sense and scientific presumptions regarding time, space, knowledge and subjectivity, among other key areas of human experience, and allows us to identify and account for the ways in which colonized subjects experience colonization, while also providing conceptual tools to advance decolonization. This simultaneously critical and constructive engagement is a second fundamental contribution and a key function

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of decolonial thinking and theorizing. More specifically, decolonial thinking and theorizing call for a robust critical engagement with theories of modernity, which also tend to serve as epistemological frames in the European humanities and social sciences. The time/space of decolonization does not take place within Western modernity; rather, it enacts a rupture with modernity. From a modern perspective, however, decolonization is often depicted as the attempt to return to the past or as an effort in receding to pre-modern social and cultural formations. And so, I will start here with an effort in clarifying the relationship between modernity and colonization.

Western modern civilization as modernity/coloniality Western modernity is commonly understood as the epoch of the highest form of civilization in comparison to which other socio-cultural, political and economic arrangements appear as less civilized, not-civilized, savage or primitive. Rejection of the theses of a hierarchy of cultures and of the superiority of Western modernity may be necessary, but is by no means sufficient to challenge the basis of an international order and of institutions that have this kind of colonizing logic and ethos. The reason for this is that the meaning and structure of modern Western institutions, practices and symbolic representations already presuppose concepts of progress, sovereignty, society, subjectivity, gender and reason, among many other key ideas that have been defined with the presupposition of a fundamental distinction between the modern and the savage or primitive, whether hierarchically understood or not. And like this, there are multiple other ways in which the concepts of civilization and modernity have been defined through dichotomies and essentialistic definitions. It is therefore necessary to critically reflect on the entanglement of markers of civilization with ideas that posit other people as primitive or savages, and on the ways in which Western modernity always already presupposes colonial definitions and distinctions of this nature. Typically, the European Enlightenment is considered to be the main, and sometimes the only, relevant historical period for the understanding of the modern Western idea(l) of civilization. This is why analyses of modern colonialism tend to focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century empires and nation-state formations that played a major role in that process, namely, England and France. However, as Brett Bowden demonstrates, the establishment of the ‘the standard of civilization’ that was characteristic of all the modern European empires goes back to the ‘discovery’ of the New World and the conquest of the Americas.4 This ‘discovery’ had multiple profound implications as well as a major impact on the notion of being civilized. As Bowden puts it: ‘Once it was determined that the colonial world lacked civilization and thus lacked sovereignty, it was almost inevitable that international law would create for itself “the grand redeeming project of bringing the marginalized into the realm of sovereignty, civilizing the uncivilized and developing the juridical techniques and institutions necessary for this great mission”.’5 More specifically, ‘[t]he precedents and laws established following contact by Europeans with the peoples of the New World would thereafter inform the nature of subsequent European encounters with indigenous peoples around the globe’.6

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In order to substantiate his thesis, Bowden considers various judgements about the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. One of them is Tzvetan Todorov’s idea that ‘the discovery of America, or of the Americans, is certainly the most astonishing encounter of our [European] history. We do not have the same sense of radical difference in the “discovery” of other continents and of other peoples’.7 English intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themselves attested to the enormous significance of the event. Bowden cites John Locke who stated that ‘in the beginning all the World was America’,8 and one can add Adam Smith who argued that ‘[t]he discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind’.9 The impressions do not attenuate when one moves closer to the moment of ‘discovery’. In 1551, Francisco López de Gómara asserts that ‘[t]he greatest event since the creation of the world, save the Incarnation and death of Him who created it, is the discovery of the Indies that are thus called the New World’.10 Echoes of these views about the significance of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas can be found in the work of Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, who have proposed that ‘[t]he impacts of the meeting of Old and New World human populations … may serve to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene’.11 The Anthropocene refers to the epoch of world history when human beings become the main agents of geological change. A usual date for the start of such a moment is the Industrial Revolution, but Lewis and Maslin reject this assumption because, like other historical moments proposed, it is ‘not derived from a globally synchronous marker’.12 After citing the various implications of ‘[t]he arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492’13 and the massive changes that have occurred since then, they ‘suggest naming the dip in atmospheric CO2 the “Orbis spike” and the suite of changes marking 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene the “Orbis hypothesis,” from the Latin for world, because post-1492 humans on the two hemispheres were connected, trade became global, and some prominent social scientists refer to this time as the beginning of the modern “world-system”’.14 The implications of these theses are clear for the authors. For them, ‘[t]he Orbis spike implies that colonialism, global trade and coal brought about the Anthropocene’.15 These considerations support Jahn Beate’s claim that ‘[a]gainst the deeply held beliefs of (almost all) European scholars’, it is ‘the discovery of the American Indian’ that ‘triggered a revolution in, or perhaps even the emergence of what would later become, the modern social sciences’.16 Jahn identifies three levels in which this revolution took place: the epistemological, the ontological and the ethical.17 These levels resonate with basic dimensions of reality that have been identified by decolonial theorists, artists and activists as major columns of coloniality in the modern/world: knowledge, power and being.18 The collective work of these and other authors leads one to consider that rather than conceiving colonialism as something that happens in modernity along with some other historical periods, it is more accurate to state that modernity itself, as a major revolution entangled with the paradigm of ‘discovery’, became colonial in character. This leads to a shift in the way of referring to Western modernity: from modernity simpliciter, as opposed to the pre-modern or non-modern, to modernity/coloniality as opposed to what lies beyond modernity. It is this ‘beyond modernity’, rather than simply independence, that becomes the main goal of decoloniality.

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Ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality The shift in the study of colonialism and decolonization from a historical approach like Chamberlain’s to a view that considers the entanglement of coloniality and modern civilization (and the views of decolonial activists and creators) requires the exploration and redefinition of multiple ideas as part of an analytics of coloniality and decoloniality. Also needed is a sense of the relationship between these ideas and conceptual frameworks that can serve as reference in the effort to advance decoloniality. Here I submit ten theses that aim to contribute to this work.19

First thesis: Colonialism, decolonization and related concepts provoke anxiety Western empires and modern nation-states have used multiple mechanisms to instil a sense of security and legitimacy in their subjects and institutions. Colonialism, decolonization and related concepts question the sense of legitimacy on which the modern citizen-subject, the modern nation-state and other modern institutions are built, thereby unsettling them. This includes heroic accounts of the origins and purpose of modern institutions. In these accounts, ‘right’ is always on the side of the power that led to their formation. Indigenous territories are presented as ‘discovered’, colonization is depicted as a vehicle of civilization and slavery is interpreted as a means to help the primitive and sub-human to become disciplined. Raising the question about the meaning and significance of colonization challenges the usual meaning of ‘discovery’ and, with it, raises the question of the problematic character of the appropriation of lands and resources and their implications up to this day. It also challenges the legitimacy of state boundaries and the respectability of every normative concept and practice through which modern citizens and institutions justify the modern/colonial order, including the normative sense of race, gender, class and sexuality, among other sociogenically generated markers of difference. In short, raising the question of colonialism disturbs the tranquillity and security of the modern citizen subject and modern institutions. A second reason why colonialism, decolonization and related concepts raise anxiety is because behind the question of the meaning of colonialism or decolonization stands the colonized as a questioner and potential agent. This is remarkably different from their expected position as docile sub-human entities. The order of things in the modern/ colonial world is such that the questions about colonization and decolonization are not supposed to appear other than as merely historical curiosity. The colonized or former colonized is supposed to be both docile and grateful. Specific pathological connotations are given to different bodies and different practices, depending on specifics of gender, sex, race or other markers. As will be made clear in subsequent theses, interrogating the meaning and significance of colonialism indicates a decolonial turn in the subject and the start of a decolonial attitude that raises questions about the modern/colonial world.20 There is nothing more terrifying for modern citizen-subjects than the possibility of this turn. Their imagination fills with images of revenge, and the most basic claims of justice are taken as evidence of reverse discrimination.

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The anxiety raised by the concepts of colonization and decolonization is therefore linked to the phobia towards colonized and enslaved peoples and with the terror that citizen-subjects feel when they conceive the colonized as an agent. Responses to this situation are visceral and aim to relativize the questions of colonialism and decolonization as well as to undermine the position of the colonized as a questioner. ‘This happened in the past and we need to move forward’, ‘but my ancestors were also colonized’, ‘my parents were poor’, ‘I am also othered’, ‘in truth, we are all racists’, ‘my wife (or husband, or best friend) is one of you’, ‘I try to join, but they reject me’ are some samples of the stock responses. Another related response that is very popular today is: ‘All lives matter’ in face of the assertion that ‘Black lives matter’ in a context where Blacks are disproportionally killed by police. Taking a cue from Aimé Césaire, who starts Discourse on Colonialism with an account of civilization and decadence, we can refer to these responses as forms of murderous and genocidal decadence.21 Stuck in a decadent colonial attitude promoted by the also decadent modern Western civilization, most citizen-subjects engage in what Fanon referred to as a ‘cat and mouse’ game, the goal of which is to forever delay the moment when the questions of colonialism and decolonization are taken as truly fundamental and when the colonized appears as a legitimate questioner.22 The reason why the anxiety-producing character of the concepts of colonialism and decolonization as well as of the colonized as an agent/questioner constitutes the first thesis is that it calls attention to what represents a performative a priori in the approximation to the theses taken individually and collectively. The performative a priori is a demonstration of a decadent colonial attitude which tends to be expressed through multiple forms of evasion and bad faith where the standards of reason constantly change in the effort to make the questions about colonialism and decolonization inert and irrelevant. In that sense, this first thesis is the result of a meta-reflection on the very act of pronouncing any thesis regarding colonization or decolonization. It would be normal for most readers to fall into various forms of decadence when they go through each of the theses. A fair engagement with the theses would in fact be an impossible act within the normative order of modernity/coloniality. Decolonial activists, artists and thinkers need to be prepared to handle or decide to not handle this situation. But as long as one wishes to communicate about these matters in the modern/colonial world, the a priori attitude will be one of evasion and bad faith.

Second thesis: Coloniality is different from colonialism and decoloniality is different from decolonization If the first thesis addresses the basic attitude that comes into play in the confrontation with the questions about the meaning and significance of colonization and decolonization, the second one introduces a conceptual clarification that makes it more difficult to engage in over-simplifications. Usual tendencies in the effort to make colonialism and decolonization appear irrelevant include their relativization and their interpretation as matters that only refer to the past. Colonialism and decolonization are sometimes defined so generally that they apply to all forms of empire-making and resistance to it since the beginning of humankind. But when colonized subjects raise the question of the relevance of colonization and decolonization, they tend to

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refer quite particularly to modern forms of colonization. Massive confusion begins to emerge when the interlocutor imagines a trans-historical concept of colonialism that would apply as much to the Roman Empire in ‘antiquity’ as to the non-European empires previous to the ‘discovery’ of the New World. The strategy is simple: make colonialism so general that it loses specificity and any implications for the present. This does not mean that there are not important ties between different forms of colonialism and empire-making as well as between various modes of dehumanization, but the contemporary relevance of colonialism and decolonization is lost if these concepts are only approached in this way. In the effort to obtain clarity about the meaning and significance of colonialism and decolonization, it is useful to distinguish between colonialism, modern colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism can be understood as the historical formation of colonial territories, modern colonialism as the specific ways in which Western empires colonized most of the world since the moments of ‘discovery’, and coloniality as an overarching logic of dehumanization that can exist even in the absence of formal colonies and that has become part and parcel of Western modernity. The ‘discovery’ of the New World and the forms of slavery that immediately followed were some of the key events that served as foundation to coloniality. Another way of referring to coloniality is modernity/coloniality, which is a more complete way of referring to Western modernity as well. In similar fashion, if decolonization refers to the historical moments when colonial subjects rose against former empires and claimed their independence, decoloniality refers to a struggle against the logic of coloniality and its symbolic, epistemic and material effects. Sometimes decolonization is used in the sense of decoloniality. In such cases decolonization is typically conceived, not as a punctual goal or achievement, but as an unfinished project. Colonialism is also sometimes used in the sense of coloniality. One of the outcomes of this thesis is that unlike the standard and purely empirical or historical concept of colonialism, coloniality is a logic that is embedded in modernity, and that decoloniality is a struggle that seeks to bring out, not a different modernity, but something other than modernity. This does not mean that a number of ideas and practices that we usually consider ‘modern’ will not be part of this other world order, just as it does not mean that what we call modernity did away with everything that it conceived as different from it, including ideas from ‘antiquity’. The difference is that while Western modernity achieved an identity by inventing a temporal narrative and a conception of spatiality that made it appear as the privileged space of civilization in opposition to other times and spaces, the search for an-other world order is the struggle for the creation of a world where many worlds can exist and therefore where different conceptions of time, space and subjectivity can coexist and relate to each other productively as well.

Third thesis: Modernity/coloniality is a form of metaphysical catastrophe that naturalizes war, which is at the root of modern/colonial forms of race, gender and sexual difference It is often recognized that ‘[b]y every reckoning, the conquest of the Americas led to one of the biggest, if not the biggest, demographic catastrophes the world has ever seen’.23 Everything indicates that it was the biggest demographic catastrophe at

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least up until that point and that it served as a foundation of sorts for other forms of demographic catastrophe since then. The reason that this ‘discovery’ and conquest has such a massive impact and paradigmatic character is because it represented not only a demographic catastrophe, but also a metaphysical one. By this I mean that the ‘revolution’ that was the ‘discovery’ of the Americas involved a collapse of the edifice of intersubjectivity and alterity, and with a major deviation in the formation of being and reason, as well as a distortion of the meaning of humanity. This metaphysical catastrophe is at the core of the transformation of the ‘epistemological, ontological and ethical’24 levels that is part of the foundation of modernity/coloniality and of the modern European sciences. Quite radical divisions among human beings already existed in the West in the understanding of the difference between Christians and non-Christians, men and women, healthy subjects and lepers, among other such distinctions, but these divisions tended to be limited and contained by the monotheistic idea of one God that created all by a Chain of Being that linked all the parts of creation to each other and to the divine.25 The ‘discovery’ not only puts in question the comprehensive character of Scripture and the Ancients, neither of which appear to say anything about the existence of such lands, but also eroded the understanding of the universe in terms of a Chain of Being with God at its head. The ‘discoverer’ now appeared as a historical agent with the right and duty to name the world, classify it and use it for its own well-being.26 In this process, observation rather than revelation would increasingly be considered the source of knowledge. The disenchantment of the world and its utilitarian conception, along with the reordering of all existing human relations and forms of domination, are part of this shift. A key point of departure for this modernity was therefore the positing of a separation that broke with, or at least started to make irrelevant, the notion of a chain that connected all beings to the divine. But even more devastating than a departure from the theological Chain of Being was the radical collapse of the self-other structure of subjectivity and sociality as well as the introduction of a Master–Slave non-dialectic. The non-dialectical character of the emerging Master–Slave relation meant that, in the New World, a form of slavery emerged that was meant to be permanent. What emerges is what I have called elsewhere sub-ontological difference, or the difference between beings and those below being.27 That is, the main differentiation among subjects in this new world order will be less that of belief, and more that of essence. This is what I mean by metaphysical catastrophe, a catastrophe that is at once ontological, epistemological and ethical. Metaphysical catastrophe and the emergence of sub-ontological difference do not take place in a vacuum. If sub-ontological difference were only a matter of metaphysical separation alone, it would not necessarily lead to the relation of violence that exists between the order of being and the one below being. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the Western Christian world was increasingly engaging in wars supposedly to defend the Holy Land from Muslims and its kingdoms from Muslims and other Christians. This path reaches a climax in the Iberian Peninsula, where Christian kingdoms were in opposition to the Ottoman empire, where Christians adopted a doctrine of ‘limpieza de sangre’ (purity of blood) to help control potential dissent and where the Portuguese had already started travelling to new lands in Africa

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and taking people as slaves.28 All of these practices had to be justified in terms that were reconciled with monotheism and the notion of the Chain of Being. Metaphysical catastrophe made it possible for the same and even worse actions to be inflicted on non-Christian peoples living outside of the European kingdoms without much need for legal justification. This meant that the exceptional actions and modes of behaviour that were exhibited during times of war now became part of the natural way of behaving with respect to the newly ‘discovered’ and enslaved peoples, and towards other peoples on the planet classified using the same paradigm.29 That metaphysical catastrophe is linked to Western civilization and war, and that it leads to the naturalization of war, explains why colonial conditions in modernity resemble perpetual war zones where both extreme violence and constant low-level violence are continually directed to colonized populations and those identified as their descendants.30 It also explains why sub-ontological difference takes the form of a Manichean dualism whereby the colonizer is identified with goodness and the colonized with evil. Manicheism resists dialectical movement, which means that, in coloniality, the modern world is installed in permanent war with colonized people, their habitats, and a vast number of their creations and products; these are all viewed as the most direct targets. Modernity/coloniality is a paradigm of war that positions itself as righteous and that makes the colonial context an always-already violent one, a situation that normalizes violence well beyond the borders of the colonies and former colonies.31 Violence is unleashed in multiple directions, even in the metropolis, while colonized subjects tend to persistently remain at the receiving end of systematic violence. However, to the extent that any violence is recognized in this context, colonized subjects themselves are perceived as the ultimate reason for or source of such violence. In this light, they are also expected to demonstrate that they are not the source of violence by adopting the mores and ways of thinking of the colonizers. This only leads to some of the colonized joining the colonizers in further perpetrating or justifying this violence. The naturalization of war helps to explain not only the Manichean turn of ontological separation and the non-dialectical character of coloniality, but also certain dynamics of gender and sex. War and gender are inextricably linked, and the ways in which gender and sexuality are assigned and expected to be performed in modernity/coloniality have a deep connection with how gender and sexuality are situated in the contexts of war.32 At the same time, the naturalization of war involves a transformation of how sex and gender operate, not only in peaceful contexts, but also in traditional wars. Sex and gender operate in complex ways in modernity/coloniality. At one level, the production of sub-ontological difference locates the colonized below the categories of gender as they are usually applied to human beings. The colonized are conceived either as intrinsically aggressive animals, or as peaceful, though never fully rational, animals who are always in danger of turning violent.33 Since it is the animality rather than the humanity of the colonized that is emphasized by the colonizer, there is unquestionably a dimension of the experience of being colonized in which subjects are stripped of their gender and/or of their sexual difference.34 At the same time, at another level, just as has been typical in Western wars, the bodies of male and female enemies are interpreted differently. Male enemies tend to be perceived as warriors or potential warriors who represent an immediate threat,

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while female enemies, although they may also be seen as immediately threatening, are furthermore associated with the sustained threat of allowing enemies to reproduce themselves, and in some cases carry the tradition and the memory of the enemy into the future. Deviating from these roles makes these subjects much more of a threat. In this scenario it is usual to have enslaved subjects – and those put in a similar ontological position – tortured, mutilated, sexually abused, raped and killed in various ways. Because of the perceived role of females in this context, sexual abuse and rape will be particularly present in the day-to-day life of female slaves. As Angela Davis puts it, ‘Rape, in fact, was an uncamouflaged expression of the slaveholder’s economic mastery and the overseer’s control over Black women as workers.’35 A third level includes the remnants of gender relations and conceptions of sex that existed among the colonized prior to colonization, which, from a decolonial perspective, could be regarded as having both liberating and oppressive dimensions, depending on the case. These relations and conceptions have survived in some contexts more than in others, and tend to be entangled or in tension with the dominant views that were imposed by the colonizers or with the views and practices that emerged in the process of conquest and/or colonization. Finally, a fourth level involves the meanings of sex and gender that emerge as a result of Manicheism and sub-ontological difference: those who appear below the zone of being generate anxiety and fear, but also desire. This dimension builds on a certain ‘porno-tropic tradition’ of European explorers within which ‘women figured as the epitome of sexual aberration and excess. Folklore saw them, even more than the men, as given to a lascivious venery so promiscuous as to border on the bestial’.36 This porno-tropics was present in the very context of ‘discovery’ and colonization of the New World.37 Metaphysical catastrophe takes things in an even more radical direction by turning the slave zone and the zone of coloniality into the zone of animality and bestiality, which explains Fanon’s argument that in modernity/coloniality the black female and the male symbolize the biological.38 As a result, the bodies of the colonized and enslaved can be conceived, at one moment, without gender or with a particular form of gender difference based on the ways of understanding the gender of enemies in war and, simultaneously, supersexed in the still pathological sense that their sexual organs and sexualized body parts define their being with or without gender as such. These are four basic modalities, surely among others, in which gender and sex can be understood with reference to the production of sub-ontological difference, Manicheism and the naturalization of war. Gender and sexuality also take on particular dynamics in the ‘civilized’ part of the world. In the ‘civilized’ world, certain conceptions of masculinity and femininity acquire prominent status as they prove key not only in tolerating but also in perpetuating war on a constant basis. Aggressive masculinity becomes the norm, along with a sense of the feminine that is meant to help support and reproduce such masculinity. The model of femininity is expressed in the figure of the wife who takes care of her husband and who helps raise the next generation of men. Women who deviate from the script lose respectability and can be susceptible to as much or more violence than women who perform their role as wives and reproducers of men/warriors. At the same time, this model of the relation between men and women is imposed on colonized subjects, which adds yet another layer to the ways in which gender and sexuality work in the colonized world. This imposition is systematic and it takes place in explicit and

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forceful, but perhaps most effectively in subtle, ways like the internalization of ideas and ideals of gender normativity through education and the media. The result is that the colonizer’s model of gender and sex is taken by colonized subjects as directing their own performance in their effort to appear as normal in a world that regards them as essentially abnormal, deficient and evil. This leads to aggressive forms of warring masculinity among those considered as perpetual, defeated and sub-human enemies. It also leads colonized men and women to look for various avenues of escape from this condition by seeking to associate with male colonizers or to take their place – a situation that colonizers often use to their advantage. Coloniality refers not only to the imposition of Western gender roles on the colonized, but to the combination of this practice with the multiple forms of ungendering and regendering that are linked to Manicheism, sub-ontological difference, and to still existing non-Western understandings of sex and gender as well. This is part of the process whereby colonized subjects are broken into pieces when they are not already dead; for, similar to war, death is always either present or on the horizon in this context. The violence of ungendering and regendering is part of a larger context of the subjugation and control of bodies that promotes early death. Whatever decolonization means in this context it is clearly not simply the affirmation of indigenous ways of conceiving gender and sex, or the rejection of patriarchy as if patriarchy had not been modified by this coloniality of gender and sex in the colonized world. These are key areas in the study of coloniality and decoloniality, particularly in the analysis of the constituting and constituted character of gender, race and sexuality in the modern/ colonial world.39

Fourth thesis: The immediate effects of modernity/coloniality include the naturalization of extermination, expropriation, domination, exploitation, early death and conditions that are worse than death such as torture and rape Extermination, expropriation, domination, exploitation, early death and conditions that are worse than death such as torture and rape are all predominant in warring conflicts. Some of these are sometimes considered legally legitimate up to a certain point, and others are meant to be at most temporary or are conceived as unintended effects. In modernity/coloniality, all of these actions take place perennially, not as a response to specific conflicts, but as ways to be in accordance with the perceived order of nature and the world. Like colonialism, coloniality involves the expropriation of land and resources, but this happens not only through foreign appropriation, but also by the mechanisms of the market and modern nation-states. This leads to a situation where native subjects of former colonies are still dispossessed. But it is not only land and resources that are taken; it is also minds that are dominated by forms of thinking that promote colonization and self-colonization, and bodies that are exploited for labour in ways that remain in a lower status than the majority of the metropolitan proletariat. Because of this, whatever decolonization is, it needs to include the struggle for the redistribution of land and resources, though it cannot be limited to that. The naturalization of early and often violent death speaks to the genocidal dimension of modernity/coloniality as well as to the condition of normative and systematic torture that seeks to make the colonize wish that they were dead. The material and

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metaphorical process of splitting the enslaved and colonized subject apart is part of the torture and announces the non-natural death of these subjects. The colonized is made to live as a being-towards-an-unnatural death, and, by virtue of the exposure to torture, as a being who should find death more desirable than life. Likewise, the lesser the value of a given precolonial culture and society is considered to be, the more there is a sense that this culture and society (and its people) can die without major repercussions, and that they should not have emerged in the first place.

Fifth thesis: Coloniality involves a radical transformation of knowledge, being and power leading to the coloniality of knowledge, the coloniality of being and the coloniality of power Worldviews cannot be sustained by virtue of power alone, but require various forms of agreement and consent. Basic ideas about the meaning of basic concepts and the quality of lived experience (being), about what constitutes valid knowledge or points of view (knowledge) and about what represents political and economic order (power) are fundamental areas that help define how things are conceived and accepted in any given worldview. Human identity and activity (subjectivity) also produce and unfold within contexts that have precise workings of power, notions of being and conceptions of knowledge. The coloniality of knowledge, being and power is informed, if not constituted, by metaphysical catastrophe, the naturalization of war and the various modalities of human difference that become part of the modern/colonial experience, while at the same time they help to differentiate modernity from other civilization projects and account for the ways in which coloniality organizes multiple layers of dehumanization within modernity/coloniality. As I have already noted, the ‘revolution’ of the ‘discovery’ did not consist only in particular actions, such as an unprecedented dispossession and elimination of human life, but also in metaphysical catastrophe and the emergence of a paradigm (of war) with particular forms of knowledge, being, power and subjectivity at its centre. It is only by virtue of the linkage of forms of being, power and knowledge that modernity/ coloniality could systematically produce colonial logics, practices and ways of being that appeared not only as natural, but as a legitimate part of the goals of modern Western civilization. Coloniality therefore includes the coloniality of knowledge, the coloniality of power and the coloniality of being as three fundamental components of modernity/coloniality. Each of these major dimensions of what constitutes a worldview has at least three basic components and each of them includes reference to the embodied subject: Knowledge: Subject, Object, Method Being: Time, Space, Subjectivity Power: Structure, Culture, Subject

Common to the three dimensions is subjectivity: whatever a subject is, it is constituted and sustained by its location in time and space, its position in the structure of power and in culture, and the ways in which it positions itself with regard to knowledge production.

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Fanon pointed to this kind of relation between the subjective and the objective in his account of sociogeny.40 He also saw the subject as both the product and a generator of the social structure, culture and the entire worldview of a time. Another way of enunciating this is by identifying the subject not only as a key element in the constitution of being, power and knowledge, but also as the one element that most obviously connects those major dimensions of what we take as real. The subject, therefore, is a field of struggle and a site that must be controlled and dominated for the coherence of a given worldview and order to continue undisturbed. By bringing the basic dimensions of a worldview (being, power, knowledge) – which have also been identified as key broad and general areas of analysis in the theory of coloniality and decoloniality – into a connection with Fanonian sociogeny, and by further identifying some of the most basic elements of knowledge, power and being, one arrives at the following diagram:

The coloniality of being involves the introduction of a colonial logic in the conceptions and experience of time and space as well as in subjectivity. The coloniality of being includes the coloniality of vision and the rest of the senses, which are modes by virtue of which subjects have a sense of themselves and their world. An exploration of the coloniality of being therefore needs an examination of the coloniality of time and space, as well as subjectivity, including the coloniality of seeing, sensing and experiencing. The coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of power involve the same operation with regards to the elements that constitute them. The most obvious and direct unifying thread is the colonized subject, which I propose we conceive, following Fanon, as the damné or damned. The damnés are the subjects that are located outside of human space and time, which means, among other things, that they are ‘discovered’ along with their land, deprived of the potential to discover anything, and that they do not even represent an impediment to the take-over of their territory. The damnés cannot assume the position of producers

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of knowledge and are said to lack any objectivity. Likewise, they are represented in ways that make them reject themselves and, while kept below the usual dynamics of accumulation and exploitation, can only aspire to rise in the power structure by forms of assimilation that are never entirely successful. The coloniality of power, being and knowledge aims to keep the damnés in their place, fixable, as if they were in hell. This is the hell in relation to which the heaven and salvation of the civilized are conceived and on which it is mounted.

Sixth thesis: Decoloniality is rooted in a decolonial turn or turns away from modernity/coloniality The most basic expression of the decolonial turn is at the level of attitude, leading to the formation of a decolonial attitude. The damné, as the entity that is created at the crux of the coloniality of knowledge, power and being, has the potential to shift away from the imperatives and norms that are imposed on it and keep it divided against itself. It is the self ’s desire ‘to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other’ against the devastating effects of metaphysical catastrophe that makes the impossibility of the formation of this attitude (within the logic of modernity/coloniality) possible.41 Explaining the formation of the decolonial attitude requires a phenomenology that I am elaborating elsewhere in conversation with Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, but which appears here in part in the remaining theses. The theme of attitude is crucial to Fanon’s Black Skin. Suffice it to consider that one of the main objectives of the book is to study the ‘various mental attitudes’ that black people adopt ‘in the face of white civilization’.42 Attitude is both the object of analysis and a key element in the conception of knowledge advanced in the book. It is not accidental that Fanon refers to attitudes immediately after making his often-cited statement about method: ‘We leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians. There is a point where methods are resorbed.’43 Fanon can ‘leave methods to the botanists and mathematicians’,44 but he cannot equally leave attitude behind, for attention to Black subjects as non-pathological subjects requires a break with the modern/colonial attitude that is predominant in European sciences and elsewhere. It is with this in mind that Black Skin offers a double analytical route through which the author reflects on attitudes while also describing the drama of the process through which he breaks with the modern, anti-black attitude of coloniality and emerges as a thinker and writer. Black Skin is less a book about Black individuals taken as the discreet object of analysis than a catalysing narrative with poetic, analytic and performative dimensions – a narrative that seeks to illustrate the depth of coloniality as a global problem faced primarily by Black and colonized subjects and to animate the formation of a decolonial attitude in order to generate the idea of decoloniality as a project. Understanding the painful drama in search of the right attitude takes the place of an obsession about method. Attitude is, indeed, from this Fanonian perspective, more basic than method.45 Steve Biko also understood the fundamental character of attitude as he defined Black consciousness as ‘an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the Black world for a long time’.46 While method defines the relationship between a subject and an object, attitude refers to the orientation of the subject with

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respect to knowledge, power and being. A shift in attitude is therefore crucial to critically engage the coloniality of power, knowledge and being, and to pose decoloniality as a project. The decolonial attitude is thus crucial for the decolonial project and vice versa. Unlike the Habermasian conception of modernity as an unfinished project, and the Foucauldian proposal of modernity as a historico-critical attitude, decoloniality is both attitude and unfinished project that seeks to ‘build the world of the you’.47 Building the world of the you entails an opposition to metaphysical catastrophe, the paradigm of war and ontological separation. This struggle is pursued with love, as the positive attitude of the damné, and rage as a form of negation that is inspired and oriented by the positive attitude of love. Love and rage are expressions of the ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ that Fanon identifies as the primary expressions of decolonial agency and the decolonial attitude.48 Decolonial love and rage are therefore counter-catastrophic actions. As an unfinished project, the decolonial turn requires a genealogy showing various moments through history where this turn has manifested as well as a phenomenology. Both are part of the analytics of the decolonial turn. Another aspect of this analytics consists in the identification of the decolonial turn at levels of knowledge, power and being. The remaining theses capture different expressions of the decolonial attitude and the decolonial turn at each of these levels. With love and rage, the damné emerges as a thinker, a creator/artist and an activist. I do not mean to reduce knowledge to thinking, being to art and power to activism, but I think that the usual predominance of these major areas in the struggle against colonization can be partly explained by their close relationship with each of the basic dimensions of coloniality: knowledge, power and being. Decoloniality therefore has to do with the emergence of the damné as thinker, creator and activist and with the formation of communities that join the struggle for decolonization as an unfinished project.

Seventh thesis: Decoloniality involves a decolonial epistemic turn whereby the damné emerges as a questioner, thinker, theorist and writer/communicator In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon decides not only to study modern/colonial antiblack attitudes as found in Black subjects themselves, but also to show a path that includes the emergence of the decolonial attitude and with it the possibility of the damné writing and committing to decoloniality as a project. This is the crux of what I have called elsewhere Fanonian meditations,49 where the embodied damné, and neither the ego cogito nor the transcendental ego, appear at the centre of the analysis, not simply to better know, but also to more radically change the world. The transition from the solitude of damnation to the possibility of communication passes through the formulation of critical questions. This is why the formation of questions is so key in the works of agents of decolonization such as Aimé Césaire, who early on in his Discourse on Colonialism posed the question, ‘what, fundamentally, is colonization?’ as ‘the innocent first question’ that must be seen and answered ‘clearly’, by which he also meant ‘dangerously’.50 Fanon also considered the moment of questioning key, as the narrator and analyst in his Black Skin, White Masks concludes the text with a prayer to make of him always someone who questions.51 Since the mind of the colonized is already taken over by stories and ideas that make them confirm

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the coloniality of knowledge, power and being, Fanon prays to his body to make him someone who always questions. Fanon conceives the body as the ‘open door of every consciousness’ and therefore his prayer is for the body to remain opened and counter any sociogenically generated imperative to close. This is quite a different conception of subjectivity and the formation of questions than one finds in René Descartes’s conception (which proves paradigmatic for modernity/coloniality). For Fanon, critical questioning emerges not by virtue of hyperbolic doubt, but, at least partly, as an effect of hyperbolic suffering. Rather than becoming an agent in its own suffering, Fanon prays to his body to remain open and to turn critically from anything that promotes isolation, closure and systematic suffering. Decoloniality requires a commitment to the body as open, as a zone of contact, as a bridge and border zone, to follow Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, among a large number of women of colour who advance various forms of what could be regarded as decolonial feminisms.52 This is part of what Walter Mignolo has referred to as the bodypolitics of knowledge, in addition to the geo-politics of knowledge, and in opposition to the theo- and ego-politics of knowledge, and what he and Madina Tlostanova conceive as a form of ‘theorizing from the borders’.53 Decolonial critique finds its anchor in the open body. When the damné communicates the critical questions that are grounded on the lived experience of the open body, we have the emergence of an-other speech and an-other way of thinking. This is why writing for many an intellectual of colour constitutes such a major event. Writing is a form of reconstituting oneself and a way to counter the effects of ontological separation and metaphysical catastrophe. That is why Fanon wrote Black Skin even though ‘nobody asked [him] to’, why Anzaldúa considered writing ‘a way of life’, and part of the reason why it was so revolutionary for Biko’s writings to circulate with the title I Write What I Like.54

Eight thesis: Decoloniality involves an aesthetic (and often a spiritual) decolonial turn whereby the damné emerges as creator55 Living in ways that affirm the openness of the body is part of the decolonial attitude that allows not only for the possibility of critical questioning, but also for the emergence of views of the self, others and the world that defy the conceptions of modernity/ coloniality. The open body is a questioning as well as a creative body. Artistic creations are means of critique, self-reflection and of proposing different modes of conceiving and living time, space, subjectivity and community, among other things. Decoloniality requires the emergence not only of a critical mind, but also of reawakened senses that aim to affirm connection in a world defined by separation. Decolonial artistic creation aims to keep the body and the mind open as well as to keep the senses sharpened in ways that can best respond critically to anything that aims to produce ontological separation. In that sense, decolonial artistic creation can be understood as a form of extending the prayer that Fanon makes to his body.56 Decolonial aesthetic performance is, among other things, a ritual that seeks to keep the body open as a continued source of questions and as a body prepared to act. The decolonial aesthetic turn is a shift away from the coloniality of vision and of sensing.57 It is a key aspect of the decolonization of being, including the decolonization

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of time, space and subjectivity. It is also connected to the decolonization of spirituality, a point which is well expressed by Anzaldúa when she writes that ‘[i]n the ethnopoetics and performance of the shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. The religious, social and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined’.58 Spirituality is in large part connected with the decolonization of being, but also with the embrace of the unity of knowledge, power and being. Decolonial aesthetics also has this character: weaving and interweaving, connecting and reconnecting the self with itself, knowledge with ideas, ideas with questions, questions with modes of being; all are part of the writing, visual art, music, dance and performance that advance decoloniality.

Ninth thesis: Decoloniality involves an activist decolonial turn whereby the damné emerges as an agent of social change Thinking and creating cannot by themselves change the world. One might add other activities, such as spirituality, but still, by themselves, they cannot change the world. The damné needs to try to take hold of multiple such activities, thinking, creating and so forth, and to make them part of strategies and efforts to effectively decolonize power, knowledge and being. This requires the emergence of the damné as an agent of change. This is someone who avoids the temptation of making the activities of thinking and creating zones of refuge from coloniality. In those positions, the scholar, the theoretician and the artist can easily be co-opted as they seek recognition from specific arenas, such as the scholarly or the artistic world. The decolonial turn requires a suspension of the logic of recognition and a resignation from the institutions and practices that sustain modernity/coloniality. The decolonial path of perhaps too many critical and creative subjects ends here and they become, on occasion or more than on occasion, agents of coloniality. Traditional activism can also fall into such forms of co-option and decadence. This happens when activists consider themselves more radical than the theorists or the artists, for example, as if true activism did not seek to join these areas and mobilize them against the walls of separation created by modernity/coloniality. Activism is therefore not something that exists outside of thinking or creating. Activism happens through these practices as much as in the discussion of strategies to change particular institutions in society. But neither of these areas of activities can exist in isolation if the decolonial turn is to become a project. The agency of the damné is defined by thinking, creating and acting in a way that seeks to bring together the various expressions of the damné in order to change the world.

Tenth thesis: Decoloniality is a collective project The emergence of the damné as a questioning, speaking, writing and creative subject is an impossible event within the logic and terms of the modern/colonial world. The impossible occurs every time that the damné appears in these ways. The response is predictable: the modern/colonial order seeks to discard the anomaly by either rejecting, minimizing, humiliating, killing, exoticizing and/or tokenizing the damné.

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The decolonial attitude involves resignation from the systems of value that allow this response to work or to have the final word. But a damné, alone, can only go so far. Decoloniality, however, is not a project of individual salvation but one that aspires to ‘build the world of the you’. Thinking, creating and acting are all done, not by looking for recognition by the masters, but while reaching out to other damnés. And it is the damnés and others who also resign from modernity/coloniality who – thinking, creating and acting together in various forms of community – can seek to disrupt the coloniality of knowledge, power and being in order to change the world. Decolonization is therefore not a past event, but a project in the making. A final diagram serves to consolidate the major aspects of this project discussed above.

Notes M. E. Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1985), 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 5 Ibid., 128. 6 Ibid., 131. 7 Cited in ibid., 48; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 4. 8 Bowden, Empire of Civilization, 48; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690; New York: New American Library, 1965), 343, Book 2. 9 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; Hazleton, Penn: The Electronic Classics Series of Pennsylvania State University, 2005), 508. 10 Francisco López de Gómara, Historia general de las indias y vida de Hernán Cortés (Caracas,: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 7, translation mine. 1

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11 Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature 519 (2015): 175 (171–80). 12 Ibid., 177. 13 Ibid., 174. 14 Ibid., 175. 15 Ibid., 177. 16 Beate Jahn, The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 95. 17 Jahn, Cultural Construction, 95. 18 See, for example, Edgardo Lander, ed., La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales: perspectivas latinoamericanas (Caracas: Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales [FACES-UCV]; Instituto Internacional de la UNESCO para la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe [IESALC], 2000); Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept’, Cultural Studies 21.2–3 (2007): 240–70; Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Aníbal Quijano, ‘Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad’, Perú indígena 29 (1991): 11–20; Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 533–80; Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337. 19 A more developed version of these theses appears in Maldonado-Torres, ‘Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality’, Frantz Fanon Foundation, accessed on August 2016, http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360. html. 20 See Maldonado-Torres, ‘El pensamiento filosófico del “giro descolonizador”’, in El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe, y ‘Latino’ (1300–2000), ed. Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta and Carmen Bohórquez (Mexico DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2011), 683–97; ‘Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Postcontinental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique – An Introduction’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1.2 (2011): 1–15; ‘Transdisciplinariedad y decolonialidad’, Quaderna 3, accessed on 3 April 2015, http://quaderna.org/transdisciplinariedad-y-decolonialidad/; ‘Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn’, in Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, ed. Nada Elia et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 435–62; ‘Outline of Ten Theses’; ‘The Decolonial Turn’, in Twenty-five Years of Turns in Latin American Studies: Culture, Power, and Politics, ed. Juan Poblete (London: Routledge, 2017), 111–27; ‘Frantz Fanon and the Decolonial Turn in Psychology: From Modern/Colonial Methods to the Decolonial Attitude’, South African Journal of Psychology 47.4 (2017): 432–41. 21 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 29. 22 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Kindle edn, trans. Richard Wilcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 99. 23 Jahn, Cultural Construction, 73. 24 Ibid., 95. 25 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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26 See Todorov, The Conquest of America; Sylvia Wynter, ‘Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos’, Annals of Scholarship 8.2 (1991): 251–86; and Sylvia Wynter, ‘1492: A New World View’, in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57. 27 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 28 Wynter, ‘1492’; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82.3 (2014): 636–65. 29 Maldonado-Torres, Against War, 2008. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 See Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being’; Simona Sharoni et al., Handbook on Gender and War (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2016). 33 For an exploration of connections between the colonial/modern gender system and animality, see María Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’, Hypatia 22.1 (2007): 186–209. 34 See, for instance, Drucilla Cornell, ‘Afterword’, in What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought, ed. Lewis Gordon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1983); Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial’. 35 Davis, Women, Race, 7. 36 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22. 37 Ibid., 21–2. 38 Fanon, Black Skin, 144. 39 See particularly Miñoso Espinosa et al., Tejiendo de otro modo: feminismo, epistemología y apuestas decoloniales en Abya Yala (Popayán, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2014). 40 Fanon, Black Skin, xv. 41 Ibid., 206. 42 Ibid., xvi. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., xv. 45 Maldonado-Torres, ‘Frantz Fanon and the Decolonial Turn’. 46 Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings (1978; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 91. 47 Maldonado-Torres, ‘Transdisciplinariedad’. 48 The three-point platform of the Campamento Contra la Junta (Campament against the board), set up by Puerto Rican youth to oppose the implementation of a seven member control board created by the US government to oversee and potentially supersede economic decisions by the Puerto Rican government, offers a clear example of politically driven formulations of the ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’: ‘The principles adopted: No to the federal oversight board, no to the debt, and yes to decolonization’.

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Jhoni Jackson, ‘Young Boricuas Have Been Camped Out for a Month Protesting PROMESA. Meet the Faces behind the Movement’, accesed on 27 July 2016, http:// remezcla.com/features/culture/campamento-contra-la-junta-puerto-rico/. 49 See, among others, Juan Blanco and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘La descolonización como filosofía primera. “Giro decolonial,” universidad, y “meditaciones fanonianas”’, Cultura de Guatemala 37.2 (2016): 147–64. 50 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 32. 51 Fanon, Black Skin, 206. 52 See, for example, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002). 53 Walter Mignolo, ‘De-linking: Don Quixote, Globalization and the Colonies’, Macalester International 17 (2006): 3–35; Walter Mignolo, Desobediencia Epistémica: Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad, y gramática de la descolonialidad (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2010); and Walter Mignolo and Madina V. Tlostanova, ‘Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge’, European Journal of Social Theory 9.2 (2006): 205–21. 54 Biko, I Write What I Like. 55 A more developed version of this section/thesis appears under the title: ‘Decoloniality Involves an Aesthetic, Erotic, and Spiritual Decolonial Turn Whereby the Damné Emerges as Creator’. See Maldonado-Torres, ‘Outline of Ten Theses’, 26. 56 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On Metaphysical Catastrophe, Post-continental Thought, and the Decolonial Turn’, in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, ed. Tatiana Flores and Michelle A. Stephens (Los Angeles: Museum of Latin American Art, 2017), 247–59. 57 Alanna Lockward et al., ‘Manifesto for a Decolonial Aesthetics’, Transnational Decolonial Institute, last accessed on 1 August 2018, https:// transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/; Rolando Vázquez and Walter Mignolo, ‘Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings’, in Social Text Online, accessed on 15 July 2013, https://socialtextjournal. org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/ 58 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza=La frontera, 3rd edn (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 88.

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Resilience Sarah Atkinson

A chapter on resilience in a book on critical transitions is something of an anomaly; resilience is the playing out of latent capacities that prevent a critical transition that might otherwise have come about and as such, in relation to critical transition, is an absence, an anticipatory event not just anticipated but successfully avoided. Nonetheless, despite the conservative nature of an engineering metaphor of resilience as an ability to return to the prior state, most uses of resilience understand the ‘bounce-back’ effect in terms of mitigation or adaptation rather than strictly as the maintenance of an existing and stable set of relationships. This understanding of resilience as associated with change in terms of subtle shifts – as opposed to the radical change of a critical transition – depends on a set of capacities that are already in place. As such, resilience is latent and therefore both invisible and unspecifiable until need prompts its agency. What can be said about resilience as a latent set of capacities is that those capacities must be such that they enable a flexible responsiveness to unforeseen events and circumstances. Resilience is one of those concepts, along with others including well-being or sustainability, that carry an inalienable sense of the desirable good, in this case, a desirable good to help us through unforeseen and uncertain change. And, similar to these other concepts, the term exhibits a certain conceptual vagueness which allows it to function as a boundary object, discursively to open policy dialogue across a wide range of settings, scales and practices.1 Thus, resilience is mobilized as a term across different sectors of government, across scales of practice from that of global security to that of individual daily lives, and across the ideological range of the political spectrum.2 By the second decade of the millennium, the term resilience had been picked up in key influential policy materials, for example, in the United Nations’ Panel on Global Sustainability, ‘Resilient people, resilient planet’.3 In 2013, Time magazine claimed that ‘resilience’ was the buzzword of the year,4 and the pervasive presence of resilience in a wide range of political arenas, everyday spaces and our personal lives suggests that we may have entered an ‘age of resilience’. However, such widespread enthusiasm for the concept indicates that resilience is not only slightly vague in terms of the processes that it describes but, perhaps more importantly, sufficiently malleable in meaning so as to be amenable to being interpreted and operationalized in different ways by different constituencies.5 In the domain of security, policy focused on prevention of security events such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters is gradually being replaced by policy

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focused on preparedness and resilience to the effects of such events,6 particularly evident in relation to natural disasters such as flooding.7 This shift in focus may reflect some overdue humility in relation to our human and institutional capacities to fully predict and control the world around us, but may also reflect a shift in the focus of our predictive technologies away from or beyond the event, and forward and onto its consequences. In the domain of environmental management, exploration of the dynamics of ecosystems and their response to rapid change has popularized ideas of interdependency, contingency and resilience so as to emphasize the complexities inherent to a dynamic system in terms of multiple interdependencies, multiple scales of influence and multiple expressions of time. These two examples of common engagements with the notion of resilience across the domains of security and of ecology share an attention to resilience in relation to systems, albeit systems of different sizes and across different temporal scales. By contrast, this chapter will attend to a rather different mobilization of the term, that of resilience at an experiential scale and within a single lifetime. At the scale of personal experience, resilience has been used to address why it is that some people function better than others when they are all living through similarly demanding and difficult circumstances, and to explore what modes of intervention might support such resilience. This demands two different but commonly aired positions in relation to resilience: that of the ecological and that of the constructionist; or, to put it another way, resilience as found and resilience as made.8 The possibilities for building resilience indicate a feature shared across almost all engagements with resilience; that it is not just a predisposition of preparedness, but, ‘a systematic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective and material arrangements so as to be better able to anticipate and tolerate disturbances in complex worlds without collapse, to withstand shocks, and to rebuild as necessary’.9 An individualized notion of resilience shares much with the related concept of wellbeing, and either may be seen as contributory or complementary to the other. In order to use either of these concepts to determine, intervention demands consideration of how we understand the meanings and influences of ‘doing and being well’. However, addressing ‘doing well’ and ‘being well’ as desirable outcomes directly engages a politics of what makes a good citizen; as such, the way in which resilience is mobilized and practised in academic thinking and in policy interventions constitutes a significant intervention into this broader politics. The modalities of our interventions into this broader politics through the uses we make of the notion of personal resilience have changed over the last thirty years – a change that has accompanied a shift of focus and approach in the relevant strands of the discipline of psychology: a shift that can be seen as a critical transition in the ways resilience and related terms are mobilized and enacted.

Complexity and contingency in personal resilience Resilience as a feature of living with adversity on a personal level began to attract research attention in the 1970s, accompanying a wider trend in health, medicine and social care of addressing health not only from the perspective of preventing or

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treating deficit and disease, but also in terms of enabling strengths, adaptations and well-being.10 Given the importance of the early years in informing later adult life experiences, much of the research focused on identifying the pathways to resilience built during childhood. In particular, the observations that some children show positive development despite significant adversity, and that some people cope better than others with major trauma or upheaval, indicate possible protective factors, coping processes and modes of positive adaptation that research aims to identify and that intervention aims to strengthen. As such, resilience must be thought of as a twodimensional construct.11 On the one hand, resilience is effected in relation to a stressor of some kind. Given that resilience marks the absence of a significant and detrimental response to such stressors, to assert the action of resilience requires a judgement that there has indeed been exposure to a significant form of adversity, whether through a short-term event or through a longer-term set of life circumstances. On the other hand, again in the absence of evident deterioration or significant lack of childhood development, the assertion of resilience requires that a judgement be made both on the probable effects of the adverse circumstances and on the evidence of a successful adaptation that has maintained or recovered functioning. As such, resilience becomes ‘a dynamic process wherein individuals display positive adaptation despite experiences of significant adversity or trauma’.12 This is where the politics of citizenship begins to enter the discussion. First, the political import of intervention derives from how evidence of good and proper functioning is defined. Secondly, the political import of both research and intervention derives from how resilience is understood to be built and enabled, and specifically whether the influences are positioned as external or internal to the individual. Thirdly, depending in part on where such influences are thought to lie, the final political import derives from whether and to what extent personal resilience is considered to be amenable to change. A first strand of psychological research on resilience, which emerged in the 1970s and continues to the present day, has emphasized the embedded and complex interrelationships from which resilience as a response may emerge. Research has compared resilient with non-resilient individuals, the multiple variables that may be associated with differential responses of groups in similar circumstances and lifecourse narratives. Research data have been used to model pathways to resilience and to establish risk gradients to identify those ‘off-gradient’ as displaying resilience.13 Debate around the temporality of responsiveness has led some researchers to distinguish resilience (in which a return to normal functioning takes place in a relatively short period) from recovery (in which return is a longer-term or prolonged process).14 The factors explaining resilience cover a full range of influences from individual personality (human capital), parenting, other supportive relationships (social capital) and multiple contextual factors such as socio-economic advantage and the complex interrelationships between all these factors. The complex nature of resilience is further demonstrated in that some high-risk children may exhibit resilience by functioning well in some areas of their lives, whilst not doing so in others, or at some points in their childhood, but not at others.15 The importance of a longer-term perspective on development and normal functioning is also evident in findings of some children as ‘late bloomers’, moving across categories from ‘maladaptive’ to ‘resilient’ in late

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adolescence.16 More recent work aims at an even fuller integration of life factors, including aspects of brain function, genes, complex systems, culture and context. This body of research on childhood development, competence and resilience emphasizes the socio-economic nature of risk and adversity and locates the influences on resilience as deriving from a wide range of life experiences and relations. Whilst individual traits of personality, genes and so forth are part of this set, they are imbricated in a mesh of complex and multiple interactions across time. Intervention can variously aim to offer cumulative protections to disrupt negative cascade effects or to promote positive cascade effects and to be sensitive of the complex temporalities of resilience and the little-understood roles of culture and context.17 The approach is well summarized by Ingrid Schoon writing in 2006: ‘Individual development is continually produced, sustained and changed by the socio-historical context experienced.’18

Governance and responsibility in personal resilience A second strand of psychological research on resilience has emerged over the last two decades as part of the work of the positive psychology movement. The positive psychology movement shares with the first strand of research a redirected focus to include within psychology’s remit not only dysfunction, but also what William James referred to in 1902 as ‘healthy mindedness’.19 However, despite the similarity with the first strand’s emphasis on strengths (such as resilience) and the development of such capacity, there are several important distinctions. First, the work on childhood resilience, despite its emphasis on positive human development, remains grounded in a concern with dysfunction; resilience is framed as countering processes leading to lack of competence, interrupted normal development, and as facilitating the prevention of dysfunction. The work on resilience combines a focus on both deficit, in terms of risks and specific adverse events, and on assets, in terms of capacities and competencies. By contrast, the positive psychology movement has as its primary focus not just an adequacy, but an optimization of human functioning. As such, it focuses almost entirely on assets in the work of building strengths and resilience. In this respect, the two waves of research on resilience are distinguished not so much in categorical terms, but are rather located at different points on a continuum.20 A second area of difference in the two bodies of research does, however, mark them as more categorically distinct. The mainstream outputs coming from the positive psychology movement are much more dominantly centred on the characteristics and behaviour of an individual, particularly on personality, emotions and attitudes. The external stressor or the embedding environment is given a place in analysis merely as that to which resilience is demanded, and intervention in building capacity is fully targeted at the capacities required for individual management. For example, Barbara Fredrickson’s extensive research (through a positive psychology lens) informs her broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions,21 which specifies different roles for positive and negative emotions. So, for her, negative emotions are associated with a narrow range of pre-defined, specific behavioural responses, such as the fright and flight response. By contrast, positive emotions are associated with a broader range of

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possible behavioural responses which, in turn, enable the capacity building of further personal resources, whether physical, mental or social. Fredrickson has applied and validated her theory across responses in a range of situations, from the extreme event of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001,22 through to situations of experimentally induced anxiety23 and self-reporting coping styles.24 The implications for intervention are that individuals are to be encouraged and enabled through training modules to broaden their cognitive capacities, or mindset, in terms of their attention, thinking and behavioural repertoires.25 The connection of such cognitive broadening to resilience is established through the definition of personal resilience as a ‘flexibility in response to changing situational demands, and the ability to bounce back from negative emotional experiences’.26 The positive psychology movement became well established in the late 1990s, but this reflected less the creation of a new attention within psychology on positive functioning than the bringing together and affirmation of the direction of disparate and fragmented pockets of research.27 Nonetheless, the field has shown a meteoric growth in its outputs in the last twenty years: in the academic and policy uptake of its research messages, and in the popularization of publications to a wide audience. As such, it can itself be seen as constituting a critical transition within the intellectual history of psychology. The rise of positive psychology exhibits several features that resonate with Malcolm Gladwell’s elaboration of rapid change in his popular book The Tipping Point, a concept which he defines as ‘the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point’.28 In particular, the field can be seen as characterized by variants of Gladwell’s three agents of change: the importance of a few key persons; the importance of the ‘stickiness’ of the message; and the importance of context in terms of time and place. As already mentioned, various but disparate research endeavours were already tackling the underrepresentation of positive functioning within the discipline; what facilitated the integration of these activities was the emergence of a key figure in Martin Seligman, who in 1998, as president of the American Psychological Association, used his presidential address to effectively launch the movement by arguing that psychology was neglecting two of its core missions: that of helping people to lead more productive and fulfilling lives, and that of identifying and nurturing talent.29 In addition to creating a legitimated intellectual space for disparate strands of research to come together under a single label, Seligman was successful in promoting his ideas to a wide audience, being a prolific writer of popular best sellers and a powerful advocate of the field’s approaches to policy communities. The movement also came at the right time and place, not only in terms of harnessing a wave of ongoing work under a single umbrella, but also in terms of the closeness of fit between the movement’s approach to personhood and the dominant political ideology of neoliberalism in the United States. The intellectual position of the positive psychology movement is that certain psychological traits and processes are inherently beneficial for fostering resilience and well-being. Whilst these traits and processes are part of a personality, attitude and mindset, they are not immutable and can be learned or developed through training. In this, the positive psychology movement aligns with the tenets of individualization and self-actualization which are argued to be central to modern forms of governmentality in late capitalist societies.30 Positive psychology

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presents the desirable outcomes for resilience and well-being not only as uncontested, but also as influences on achieving equally uncontested markers of success in society such as income, social status and health. But perhaps most importantly, achieving such outcomes becomes less a concern of social welfare and more a matter of personal responsibility and management. The success of this alignment between positive psychology and political ideology can be seen in the extent to which an understanding of resilience and well-being as every individual’s personal responsibility has permeated popular understanding of the concepts that underpin a growing self-help industry. In the United States, Barbara Ehrenreich has documented the expense incurred by attending courses on self-management for resilience and well-being for those seeking to improve their life chances.31 In the UK, Lynne Friedli highlights how those unemployed may be sent on courses for ‘attitude’ training. Friedli describes this as a shift from welfare to wellbeing and a politics of personality, which, in turn, reflects a move to privilege response over risk in a political age of resilience.32 Ehrenreich and others have also challenged the claim that positive thinking mediates other outcomes, especially the outcome of serious ill-health episodes such as cancer.33 The movement has been further challenged on its claim that particular psychological traits and processes always facilitate resilience and well-being. Some of the aspects of mindset in close relationships such as marriage that are claimed to be beneficial include forgiveness, optimistic expectations, positive thinking and kindness. However, others claim that these benefits and attitudes depend on a range of contextual factors, such as whether a marriage is healthy or troubled. This finding regarding the significance of contexts in determining whether or not features of a positive mindset have a beneficial or harmful outcome undermines the positioning of certain traits as always intrinsically positive.34 Thus, a major criticism of the positive psychology movement’s engagement with resilience (and well-being) is its lack of attention to issues beyond the internal mindset: ‘Decontextualized, this understanding of resilience stresses individual responsibility for success and negates the role of social, political, economic, and cultural forces that promote or inhibit access to the social determinants of health.’35 This is not to say that the approaches of the positive psychology movement have no traction; they clearly do. The particular strength of the approach lies in its attention to the here and now. The focus on positive thinking as a strategy for functioning within the world as it is, including within the values of a given society, offers a therapeutic alternative which many prefer to the backward-looking psychoanalytic techniques of reworking a personal history. However, this attention to the here and now is simultaneously its weakness, in that personal circumstance, socio-economic status and political context are all disregarded in an approach that locates all problems and solutions as internal to the individual. The movement has some notable success stories. Seligman and his colleagues36 have pioneered training programmes in resilience for those in active army service aimed at mediating the effects of trauma and stress, under the strap-line, ‘Building Resilience, Enhancing Performance’.37 Their claim is that what they have learned in this context may be transferable to other settings. Others, however, feel that those engaged in war are exposed to very exceptional aspects of

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life (and are certainly in need of techniques for management and resilience), but that the circumstances of the common daily lives of civilians should not demand similar training in resilience technologies. Somewhat ironically, given the claim for a focus on optimal functioning, the approaches emerging from the positive psychology movement continue to have greatest impact in exceptional, therapeutic situations rather than in the everyday.

Resilience in context The approach of those working within the positive psychology movement is, then, at some distance from those in the first strand of resilience research in psychology, despite some overlap of concepts, attention to positive functioning and a commitment to intervention. The major difference emerges through the different attention that is accorded to context. While no one would deny the value of personal development and techniques to manage undesirable circumstances, the approach of the first strand gives attention to the circumstances themselves through the primary focus on those living with adversity. The first strand also retains an important emphasis on diversity, as opposed to the positive psychology movement in which negative emotions and pessimism are explicitly framed as problematic and as barriers to material success and status.38 Although placing responsibility for failure with the individual has a powerful agency as a theory in contemporary capitalist societies, and despite the motivational you-can-do-it rhetoric, the majority of people are, by definition, not the highly successful few. Moreover, quite a number do not even seek success in these conventional terms. For those who do strive but fail, the rhetoric of positive psychology offers no consolation, since it stresses that the fault must lie within themselves, their inadequate mindset and their inability to change. The argument is, of course, both circular and unprovable: your mindset is faulty; you attend a course to gain new techniques; you still do not achieve your goals; the fault is not with the techniques but with your failure to adopt them properly. This line of reasoning marks the logical flow from an argument for a meritocracy, the moment when failure is positioned at the door of the individual and sympathy for the plight of others is eroded. The rhetoric of modern society increasingly makes it difficult to countenance the possibility of someone who is essentially good, conscientious, focused and not doing well; we are more likely to reappraise our prior suppositions about that person to identify some personal failing. In contrast, the first strand of psychological research on resilience never made invisible or irrelevant the realities of an unequal and unfair distribution of advantage and disadvantage within which success and failure are judged. Societies have not always adopted this rhetoric of what might be called an ‘extreme meritocracy’. The ancient Greek exploration of tragedy specifically demands our engagement with how it is that someone essentially good may fail, how easily a minor error leads to calamity and how vulnerable we all are to finding our lives out of control.39 Aristotle saw the power of tragedy as a balance to any meritocratic inclinations amongst the privileged and advanced the idea that people should see tragedies regularly. As summarised in The Book of Life, ‘tragedy is meant to be a corrective to easy judgement,

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it exists to counter our natural instincts to admire only the successful, to spurn all those who fail, and to dismiss unfortunates as losers’.40 The pressure to succeed, understood as part of good citizenship, existential competence or metaphysical security, inevitably brings its own negative impacts. Suniya Luthar and her colleagues – key figures in the first strand of psychological research on resilience – have demonstrated unexpectedly elevated levels of problem behaviour amongst affluent, upper-class youth.41 Characteristically, they connect these problems to multiple factors which include the context of their status as ‘privileged and pressured’: ‘All of these pathways are considered within the context of broad, exosystemic mores: the pervasive emphasis, in contemporary American culture, on maximizing personal status, and how this can threaten the well-being of individuals and of communities.’42 These researchers begin to bring considerations of resilience as personal attributes into dialogue with ecological and political considerations of resilience as system attributes. Luthar’s summary above foregrounds how uncertainties in the social, economic and political spheres are re-categorized as personal challenges, and how failure to negotiate such uncertainties and perform effectively within the economies of late capitalism constitutes a failure of good citizenship.43 The risk that the next generation may fail to thrive under this model of citizenship, or, worse, may fail to collude with its values may be seen as the driver for calls to invest in an extensive rollout of modules for resilience-training in schools in the UK, based on the Penn Resilience Programme of Karen Reivich and Martin Seligman. The impact in British schools to date has been both minimal and unsustained, although inputs were of short duration.44 This institutionalization of ‘resilience thinking’ in and across domains from the global concerns of climate change and security, to personal concerns of wellbeing, points to the importance of examining the different ways in which resilience is mobilized, the underlying assumptions and the fractures or interstices offering an entry point for critical reflection.

Context, complexity and a critical resilience Ecological models of resilience have also been subject to various criticisms. An important criticism – shared with the positive psychology movement – is that these models lack recognition of the social contingency of both people and systems. Social scientists have bemoaned the simplistic assumption that ecological and social systems have essentially similar dynamics, and that this assumption – in the absence of any engagement with a more critical social science – has informed a growing field of research on resilience within ecology.45 Both ecological and positive psychological models of resilience demonstrate a lack of engagement with the critical and spatial social sciences, resulting in a limited, functionalist understanding of social science.46 Similarly, both approaches use resilience in a largely conservative sense, one that seeks to maintain or enable the persistence of a given system, whether of ecological interactions or of political economy and values. Indeed, both accounts eschew any discussion of politics or relations of power in their understanding or application of resilience: the avowed products of resilience are presented as uncontested, desirable goals and the processes

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through which resilience is achieved or exerts its effects are presented as unaffected by conflicts over resources, power asymmetries or inequalities.47 In ecological models, however, complex relations and interconnections are strongly emphasized, whereas the positive psychology approach tends to simplify and draw out key processes. Relatedly, the ecological models tend to focus on the disruptive effect of and resilience to external forces or events, whereas a positive psychology approach locates the challenges to resilience and success as solely and fully internal to the mindset. A growing body of research draws on Foucauldian modes of analysis to engage more critically with resilience as something that can be produced, constructed, made and fashioned, and which, as such, constitutes not an attribute or something we have, but rather a practice or something we do.48 The production of resilience as a necessary personal attribute in contemporary, high-income societies has been explored in a number of contextual settings. For example, legal professionals show high levels of mental ill-health, and so modern legal education endeavours to engage the pressures of the workplace by fostering resilience. An analysis of the discourses and presentations of the self in three prescriptive documents draws out five modes of fashioning resilience. First, checklists of symptoms, tools, strategies and so forth effectively position the law students as subjects of a psychological discourse which, as already seen, carries considerable authority. Alongside the self-help, psychological management discourse is a small, but growing, discourse of the neurochemical self for whom diet, supplements and medications can manage moods. Together, these two discourses indicate the importance of self-discipline in the self-management of stress through time-management, health-related practices, relaxation techniques and selfdiagnosis. The fourth discourse takes a different and rather interesting angle. Here, the importance of context is acknowledged in the stresses of competition, the adversarial environment of legal practice and the long hours demanded of professionals. A workrelated discourse frames personal responsibility in terms of resisting and renegotiating workplace relations. The virtuous person is, despite all pressures to the contrary, an ethical practitioner, a collegial employee and a committed family member. Again, the solution to the problem is presented not in changing the workplace culture, but in how the individual manages his or her own ethical practice in a challenging context. Finally, alongside all the self-management techniques required, the young professional entering the market must understand his or her own bargaining position as a desirable commodity and, again, through his or her own ‘entrepreneurial’ subjectivity, control the workplace demands.49 These five modes of continual fashioning of the resilient persona combine internal and contextual factors in the challenges to be faced and, as such, go beyond the simplicity of the positive psychology approach. However, the pathways to the resilient persona are, nonetheless, all located as internal to subjective self-management. This mode of analysis has been taken further to explore not only how resilience is fashioned, reflecting the submission of bodies to the discourses of subjective resilience, but also how the normative values typically underpinning discourses of resilience are negotiated, subverted, resisted and opposed.50 Indeed, in some contexts, it is the very processes of resistance of normative values, labels and prescriptive behaviours that generate modes of agency, well-being and resilience.51 The body of research produced

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by Michael Ungar and colleagues has documented great diversity in how resilience is expressed and produced across an international range of different social, economic and cultural settings. Their work specifically attends to the situated and diverse processes involved and stresses the multiple interactional processes that function at the meso-, macro- and exosystem levels,52 and the importance of cultural and contextual relevance in modes of constructing resilience and well-being.53 Resilience, in this work, is not understood as dependent upon an individual’s characteristics, but as firmly embedded within other social structures such as family, community, schools and cultures through which resources may be available to foster resilience.54 The constructionist accounts of Ungar and colleagues emphasize difference and repoliticise the notion of resilience. They do, however, maintain a distinct binary between the inner world of the self and the outer world of the social. A complement and an expansion to their approach come from a fuller account of the subject, drawing on feminist post-structuralist and psychosocial understandings. Such theorizations reconceive the self from the subject whose external expressions reflect an internal essence, to one produced relationally and discursively – a self who emerges performatively through daily embodied and intersubjective practices.55 In this account of the self, identity, subjectivity, resilience and well-being are in a continual process of becoming, and as such, are necessarily and always unfinished. This proposition of resilience as part of constant ontological becoming is in radical opposition to those psychological accounts that identify resilience through a chronologically defined process of development. Instead, such an account advances the theorization of the observations made by Ungar and other researchers on diversity in modes of resilience, the situated specificities and the importance, particularly in contexts of disadvantage and inequality, of resistance and negotiation as processes themselves geared towards resilience.56

Concluding thoughts The importance of considering agency in relation to the emergence of the concept of resilience within contemporary political practice is evident across a range of spheres. In focusing on the experiential scale, this chapter has drawn out several different modes of engagement with the concept and contrasted the underlying assumptions or constructions that relate to the self. These concern the relationships between an inner and outer self, the subjective individual and the embedding environment, the relevance of contextual variability, the universality of personality traits for resilience, the governance of the modern subject and the political import of the various mobilizations of the term. This chapter has also examined the dominant ways in which the term resilience has been employed to demonstrate a clear political agency in positioning the modern subject as responsible for self-management, resilience, well-being and an associated range of measures of life-course success. By contrast, other researchers emphasize complex interrelationships within a range of contextual social, economic and political factors. Engagements that understand resilience as constructed or made, or emergent and always becoming, have demonstrated the immense variability in modes of resilience and its production. This dynamic mobilization of resilience brings

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us full circle to the start of this chapter in which the anomaly of resilience in a volume on critical transitions was noted. In this respect, the constant negotiations, subversions or resistances in relation to normative values and processes offer, if not a moment of dramatic critical transition, at least a continuum of negotiated relations which inform both gradual and critical transitions. The production of the discourses of a knowledge industry – and the rapid emergence and rise to a position of dominance of an approach to resilience informed by the positive psychology movement – may be similarly resisted and renegotiated by alternative modes of analysis that allow for context, relations, diversity and emergence.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

F. Brand and K. Jax, ‘Focusing on the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object’, Ecology and Society 12 (2007): 23; M. Welsh, ‘Resilience and Responsibility: Governing Uncertainty in a Complex World’, The Geographical Journal 180 (2014): 15–26. M. J. Ball, ‘Self-Government and the Fashioning of Resilient Personae: Legal Education, Criminal Justice, and the Government of Mental Health’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice 23.1 (2011): 97–111; J. Walker and M. Cooper, ‘Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation’, Security Dialogue 42 (2011): 143–60. For other examples, see K. Brown, ‘Global Environmental Change I: A Social Turn for Resilience?’ Progress in Human Geography 38 (2014): 107–17. B. Walsh, ‘Adapt or Die: Why the Environmental Buzzword of 2013 Will Be Resilience’, accessed on 12 August 2015, http://science.time.com/2013/01/08/adaptor-die-why-the-environmental-buzzword-of-2013-will-be-resilience/ M. D. Turner, ‘Political Ecology I: An Alliance with Resilience’, Progress in Human Geography 38 (2014): 616–23. M. Neocleous, ‘Resisting Resilience’, Radical Philosophy 178 (2013): 2–7. D. Bulley, ‘Producing and Governing Community (through) Resilience’, Politics 33 (2013): 265–75. M. Ungar, ‘A Constructionist Discourse on Resilience: Multiple Contexts, Multiple Realities among at Risk Children and Youth’, Youth and Society 35 (2004): 341–65; M. Ungar, ‘What Is Resilience across Cultures and Contexts? Advances to the Theory of Positive Development among Individuals and Families under Stress’, Journal of Family Psychotherapy 21 (2010): 1–16. F. Lentzos and N. Rose, ‘Governing Insecurity: Contingency Planning, Protection, Resilience’, Economy and Society 38 (2009): 243 (230–54). A. Masten, ‘Resilience in Children Threatened by Extreme Adversity: Frameworks for Research, Practice, and Translational Synergy’, Development and Psychopathology 23 (2011): 493–506. S. S. Luthar, D. Cicchetti and B. Becker, ‘The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work’, Child Development 71 (2000): 543–62. S. S. Luthar and D. Cicchetti, ‘The Construct of Resilience: Implications for Interventions and Social Policy’, Development and Psychopathology 12 (2000): 858 (857–85). Masten, ‘Resilience in Children’.

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14 G. A. Bonanno, ‘Loss, Trauma and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive after Extremely Aversive Events?’ American Psychologist 59 (2004): 20–8. 15 Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becket, ‘Critical Evaluation’. 16 Masten, ‘Resilience in Children’. 17 Ibid. 18 I. Schoon, Risk and Resilience: Adaptation in Changing Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 16. 19 W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, 1902). 20 P. A. Linley et al., ‘Positive Psychology: Past, Present, and (Possible) Future’, The Journal of Positive Psychology 1 (2006): 3–16. 21 B. L. Fredrickson, ‘The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions’, American Psychologist 56 (2001): 218–26. 22 B. L. Fredrickson et al., ‘What Good Are Positive Emotions in Crises? A Prospective Study of Resilience and Emotions Following the Terrorist Attacks on the United States on September 11th 2001’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (2003): 365–76. 23 M. M. Tugade and B. L. Fredrickson, ‘Resilient Individuals Use Positive Emotions to Bounce Back from Negative Emotional Experiences’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86 (2004): 320–33. 24 M. M. Tugade, B. L. Fredrickson and L. F. Barrett, ‘Psychological Resilience and Positive Emotional Granularity: Examining the Benefits of Positive Emotions on Coping and Health’, Journal of Personality 72 (2004): 1161–90. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 5. 27 Linley et al., ‘Positive Psychology’. 28 Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (London: Abacus, 2000), 12. 29 M. E. P. Seligman, ‘The President’s Address’, American Psychologist 54 (1999): 559–62. 30 N. Rose and P. Miller, Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 31 B. Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (New York: Granta, 2009). 32 L. Friedli and R. Stearn, ‘Positive Affect as Coercive Strategy: Conditionality, Activation and the Role of Psychology in UK Government Workfare Programmes’, Medical Humanities 41 (2015): 40–7. 33 J. C. Coyne and H. Tennen, ‘Positive Psychology in Cancer Care: Bad Science, Exaggerated Claims and Unproven Medicine’, Anns of Behavioral Medicine 31.1 (2010): 16–26; Ehrenreich, Smile or Die. 34 J. K. McNulty and F. D. Fincham, ‘Beyond Positive Psychology? Toward a Contextual View of Psychological Processes and Well-being’, American Psychologist 67 (2012): 101–10. 35 R. M. C. Libório and M. Ungar, ‘Resilience as Protagonism: Interpersonal Relationships, Cultural Practices, and Personal Agency among Working Adolescents in Brazil’, Journal of Youth Studies 17 (2014): 683 (682–96). 36 M. E. P. Seligman, ‘Building Resilience’, Harvard Business Review 89 (2011): 101–6. 37 Neocleous, ‘Resisting Resilience’.

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38 Seligman, ‘Building Resistance’; 2011; Tugade and Fredrickson, ‘Resilient Individuals’. 39 M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 40 The Book of Life. The Book of Life is an off-shoot of The School of Life. This is a centre for enabling ideas to impact on how we live which was set up in 2008 by Alain de Botton together with various colleagues. For Botton, the School has a passionate belief in making learning relevant – and so runs courses in the important questions of everyday life. Whereas most colleges and universities chop up learning into abstract categories (‘agrarian history’ ‘the 18th century English novel’). 41 S. S. Luthar and S. H. Barkin, ‘Are Affluent Youth Truly “at risk”? Vulnerability and Resilience across Three Diverse Samples’, Development and Psychopathology 24 (2012): 429–49. 42 S. S. Luthar, S. H. Barkin and E. Crossman, ‘“I can, therefore I must”: Fragility in the Upper-Middle Classes’, Development and Psychopathology 25 (2013): 1529 (1529–49). 43 Neocleous, ‘Resisting Resilience’. 44 See J. Evans, ‘Once More, with Feeling: The Latest Attempt to Teach Flourishing in Schools’, accessed on 1 August 2018, http://www.philosophyforlife.org/teachingflourishing-in-schools-and-this-time-we-mean-it/ 45 M. Cote and A. J. Nightingale, ‘Resilience Thinking Meets Social Theory: Situating Social Change in Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) Research’, Progress in Human Geography 36 (2012): 475–89; D. MacKinnon and K. D. Derickson, ‘From Resilience to Resourcefulness: A Critique of Resilience Policy and Activism’, Progress in Human Geography 37 (2012): 253–70. 46 K. Hatt, ‘Social Attractors: A Proposal to Enhance “Resilience Thinking” about the Social’, Society and Natural Resources 26 (2013): 30–43. 47 K. Brown, ‘Global Environmental Change I: A Social Turn for Resilience?’ Progress in Human Geography 38 (2014): 107–17. 48 K. Aranda et al., ‘The Resilient Subject: Exploring Subjectivity, Identity and the Body in Narratives of Resilience’, Health 16 (2012): 548–63. 49 M. J. Ball, ‘Self-government and the Fashioning of Resilient Personae: Legal Education, Criminal Justice and the Government of Mental Health’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice 23.1 (2011): 97–111. 50 D. Chandler and J. Reid, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 51 D. Bottrell, ‘Understanding “Marginal” Perspectives: Towards a Social Theory of Resilience’, Qualitative Social Work 8 (2009): 321–39. 52 M. Ungar, ‘The Social Ecology of Resilience: Addressing Contextual and Cultural Ambiguity of a Nascent Construct’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81 (2011): 1–17. 53 Libório and Ungar, ‘Resilience as Protagonism’. 54 Ungar, ‘Social Ecology’. 55 Aranda et al., ‘Resilient Subject’. 56 Ibid.

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Hospitality Derek Attridge

When Odysseus emerges naked from the bushes on the shore of the Phaeacian island, the princess Nausicaa does not run away like the other girls but instead offers him clothing and, as she says, ‘anything else a hard-pressed suppliant deserves from those he meets’. The guest’s story of his wanderings after the fall of Troy, however, includes an episode that reveals a very different way of responding to an unexpected visit: Polyphemus the Cyclops, having discovered Odysseus and some of his men in his cave, promptly eats two of them for his supper and has another two for breakfast. As these contrasting accounts in the Odyssey suggest, hospitality has been a significant issue in considerations of interpersonal and intercultural ethics from the beginnings of Western civilization.1 Derrida speaks of ‘the questions at once timeless, archaic, modern, current, and future that the single word “hospitality” magnetizes – the historical, ethical, juridical, political, and economic questions of hospitality’.2 How, then, has this ancient notion of hospitality come to be an important concept today in thinking about transformation and futurity? How is it that what John Caputo calls a ‘mom-and-apple-pie word’3 has become a significant node in considerations of both ethical behaviour and even wider domains of human and social action? Our starting point is Emmanuel Levinas, whose philosophy has been so influential on contemporary ethical thought within the continental tradition. Ethics, for Levinas, arises from the encounter between a subject and another being – for Levinas, always a human being. In the paradigmatic ethical event, the other being (or just the Other, usually with a capital letter) demands my attention and care through the sheer fact of his or her presence before me, and my readiness to attend to the Other’s needs, at whatever cost to myself, is, for Levinas, the truly ethical response. This demand of the Other, stemming not from any exercise of power but, on the contrary, from its powerlessness and nakedness, is summed up in Levinas’s term face – not to be understood as the empirical bodily feature but as the felt force of another’s singular presence. Hospitality is one possible name for this response to the Other: I open my door to her, no matter

This material was originally published in The Work of Literature (2015), by Derek Attridge, pp. 280– 305, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to reuse this material, please visit http://global.oup.com/academic/rights.

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how foreign or threatening she seems, I tend to her wants, I take responsibility for her well-being. (It would actually be more accurate to use ‘it’ rather than a personal pronoun, since to categorize the Other as one or other gender is already to constrain my responsiveness.) Nausicaa, faced with a naked, salt-streaked man emerging suddenly from the bushes, is exemplary in offering him succour instead of decamping. Homer tells us that it was Athene who drove fear from her body, and indeed there seems to be something divine in this demonstration of instinctive hospitality towards the alarming stranger. My choice of an epic poem for an illustration of hospitality is somewhat misleading, however: for Levinas, ethical encounters occur constantly, not just in extreme situations. Letting someone go through a doorway before you may be an ethical act. Levinas does not, in fact, use the term hospitality very often. In his two most important books, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974), the word comes up only occasionally. Nevertheless, when Jacques Derrida, the thinker to whom, above all, we owe the current centrality of this term in discussions of change, calls Totality and Infinity ‘an immense treatise on hospitality’,4 it is hard to disagree. Derrida points out that although the word hospitality itself is rare in Levinas, the word welcome (l’acceuil) is everywhere; and Derrida entitles the lecture given a year after Levinas’s death in 1995, and from which I have just quoted, ‘A Word of Welcome’ – or, rather, ‘Le mot d’accueil’ which is also ‘the word welcome’. In the lecture Derrida cites from Totality and Infinity one of the uncommon instances of Levinas’s use of ‘hospitality’, occurring in one of the latter’s many accounts of the relation of self to Other. Quoting Levinas’s comment, ‘It is attention to speech or welcome of the face, hospitality and not thematization’, Derrida states: ‘The word “hospitality” here translates, brings to the fore, re-produces the two words preceding it, “attention” and “welcome”. … [A]ttention to speech, welcome of the face, hospitality – all these are the same, but the same as the welcoming of the other, there where the other withdraws from the theme.’5 We’ll come back to the importance for Derrida of the opposition between hospitality and thematization; for the moment, I merely want to note this very basic understanding of hospitality as the welcoming of the singular other as an ethical act, an understanding shared by Levinas and Derrida. Derrida absorbed a great deal of Levinas’s thinking, though he was also one of Levinas’s most acute critics.6 But his admiration for Levinas seems to have grown significantly as the years passed, and by the time of ‘A Word of Welcome’, in the aftermath of the older man’s death, the differences between them emerge not so much in outright critique as in a subtle reworking of Levinas’s arguments.7 Thus Derrida can say, having noted that his language is no longer quite that of Levinas, ‘Hospitality is infinite or it is not at all; it is granted upon the welcoming of the idea of infinity, and thus of the unconditional, and it is on the basis of its opening that one can say, as Levinas will a bit further on, that “ethics is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy”.’8 I do not think Levinas would have disagreed with this, but its emphasis is on those aspects of hospitality that are particularly important for Derrida. Hospitality is an opening to the infinite, the unconditional, and this is what makes it prior to any philosophical considerations. Although Derrida at this point in his thinking has embraced the word ‘ethics’, having at an earlier period of his career been suspicious

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of it, he is pushing ethics away from the arena of personal responsibility to a more far-reaching consideration of the very foundation of ethics, what he elsewhere calls ‘the non-ethical opening of ethics’. And the word hospitality occurs frequently in his writing from the mid-1990s to his death in 2004. If Levinas’s description of the ethical event of hospitality is difficult to equate with actual daily meetings with other people, Derrida’s is even more so. If a stranger knocks at my door and, seeing that he is tired, I let him come in and sit down, am I participating in the infinite? Could my hospitality be called unconditional? What if he makes his way to my kitchen and starts helping himself to food in the fridge – am I not likely to impose some conditions at this point? How does Derrida’s idea of an infinite hospitality without conditions relate to our dealings with one another in the real world? Derrida’s answer is to split the concept of hospitality – which is therefore not, strictly speaking, a concept – into two varieties, one of which he terms ‘unconditional hospitality’ and the other ‘conditional hospitality’. Alternatively, he refers to ‘the law of hospitality’ and ‘the laws of hospitality’. The first item in these pairs denotes an idea of hospitality that has no limits: as I open my door to the stranger I am prepared to have my privacy violated, my house trashed, my well-being destroyed. In being hospitable in this sense, I am not even conscious that I am hospitable. I do not tell myself that it would be morally correct to be hospitable – or, in Levinas’s terms, no thematization takes place. There is in fact a reversal of power: the host who extends unconditional hospitality to the guest becomes the subservient one.9 As Derrida puts it, ‘[T]he one inviting becomes almost the hostage of the one invited.’10 Going beyond literal instances of hospitality to the wider sphere of human relations, I recognize an infinite responsibility for every Other I encounter (and perhaps all those I have not encountered as well). This is, of course, an impossible responsibility, beyond the capacity of any human individual. For Derrida, however, the impossible is not synonymous with the irrelevant or the ineffective. Conditional hospitality, on the other hand, is the type of hospitality that is possible in the real world. You may come into my house, but please wash your hands before you touch anything. We set limits to our national hospitality as we do to our individual hospitality: we welcome some immigrants and turn away others, we lay down a series of conditions on those who wish to stay. Extending the term to the more general Levinasian situation of responding to any Other, we make practical choices about who we are able to help most effectively, and what sort of help will be most valued. The citizens of a state such as the UK can, and of course often do, protest about the conditions imposed on those who are seeking welcome, particularly in the field of immigration and asylum-seeking, but there are few calls for a complete free-for-all.11 Now, the difficult question, the question that Derrida raises in many places, is: what is the relation between these two versions of hospitality? And what, in particular, is the status of unconditional hospitality – which Derrida also calls ‘pure’ and ‘absolute’ and ‘hyperbolical’ hospitality, and of which he says at one point, ‘if such a thing is thinkable’?12 It would be easy to assume that its role is that of an idea or an ideal towards which all hospitality should strive, while accepting that it will always fall short in actual cases. Kant’s notion of ‘regulative ideas’ is one version of this view. But

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Derrida is insistent that this is not how unconditional hospitality enters into the actual hospitality of rules and conditions. Just how it does enter, however, is not easy to say, and he tries a number of different formulations in different texts. Three of Derrida’s seminars in the series given in 1995–7 and devoted to questions of hospitality have been published, two in the volume Of Hospitality and one in the edited collection Acts of Religion. In the first of these, given the title ‘Question d’étranger’ (Question of the foreigner or stranger), Derrida associates the pair unconditional hospitality/conditional hospitality with another pair of terms that had become important to him: justice, on the one hand, and law or right, on the other.13 Justice, too, is unconditional, illimitable – and impossible; law is the limited operation whereby justice may, to some extent, be achieved.14 Thus Derrida asserts: Just hospitality [i.e., unconditional hospitality] breaks with hospitality by right [i.e., conditional hospitality]; not that it condemns or is opposed to it, and it can on the contrary set and maintain it in a perpetual progressive movement; but it is as strangely heterogeneous to it as justice is heterogeneous to the law to which it is yet so close, from which in truth it is indissociable.15

The paradox is set clearly before us: the two types of hospitality are indissociable, yet heterogeneous; unconditional hospitality breaks with its conditional twin, yet is able to set it in motion and keep it going. The relation is expressed in different words in the next seminar, ‘Pas d’hospitalité’ (‘No hospitality’ or ‘Step of hospitality’): ‘Conditional laws would cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even, by the law of unconditional hospitality.’16 Derrida gives us four alternative verbs here to designate the relation between the law of hospitality – he sometimes gives it an upper-case L – and the laws (plural) that govern hospitality on the ground, the fourth of which suggests something new in the picture we are getting: that unconditional hospitality requires conditional hospitality. As Derrida explains: It wouldn’t be effectively unconditional, the law, if it didn’t have to become effective, concrete, determined. … It would risk being abstract, utopian, illusory, and so turning over into its opposite. In order to be what it is, the law thus needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or even pervert it. And must always be able to do this.17

Conditional hospitality, then, is both necessary to unconditional hospitality and a perversion of it; or, in a logic that Derrida found in many other places as well, conditional hospitality renders unconditional hospitality both possible and impossible. In the third published seminar, called ‘Hostipitality’ (a portmanteau that fuses hospitality with hostility), Derrida sets out another impossible scene of hospitality: One must not only not be ready nor prepared to welcome, nor well disposed to welcome – for if the welcome is the simple manifestation of a natural or acquired disposition, of a generous character or of a hospitable habitus, there is no merit

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in it, no welcome of the other as other. But – supplementary aporia – it is also true that if I welcome the other out of mere duty, unwillingly, against my natural inclination, and therefore without smiling, I am not welcoming him either: one must therefore welcome without ‘one must’: neither naturally nor unnaturally.18

Derrida is here invoking the terms of the eighteenth-century debates about true morality: the Kantian argument that only in acting out of duty is one acting morally is set against the belief – propounded, for instance, by the Earl of Shaftesbury – in an innate moral sense, exemplified most endearingly by the character of Fielding’s Tom Jones.19 But neither of these satisfies Derrida’s conception of absolute hospitality: it is an obligation which is not felt as an obligation. In this seminar, Derrida introduces two new terms for the opposition we are considering, this time seen from the point of view of the host. The first is visitation – the arrival of the Other with no input from myself. As Derrida says: ‘In visitation there is no door.’20 The second is invitation – the welcoming of the Other under pre-ordained conditions: It is as if there is a competition or contradiction between two neighbouring but incompatible values: visitation and invitation, and, more gravely, it is as if there were a hidden contradiction between hospitality [Derrida means unconditional hospitality] and invitation. Or, more precisely between hospitality as it exposes itself to the visit, to the visitation, and the hospitality that adorns and prepares itself in invitation.21

Derrida goes on to note, in another rejection of a possible way of interpreting the paradox, that these are not two faces, or moments, or dialectical phases, of hospitality: ‘Visitor and invited, visitation and invitation, are simultaneously in competition and incompatible.’22 How, then, does an individual act hospitably, in a way that is informed or energized by absolute hospitality? Levinas frequently describes the ethical event in terms of persecution, being taken hostage, a ‘passivity more passive than all passivity’, and Derrida’s language often takes a similar hue – though one feels the syntax and vocabulary straining as he attempts to explain an event that defies rationality: To be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken [surprendre], to be ready to not be ready, if such is possible, to let oneself be overtaken, to not even let oneself be overtaken, to be surprised, in a fashion almost violent, violated and raped [violée], stolen [volée], … precisely where one is not ready to receive – and not only not yet ready but not ready, unprepared in a mode that is not even that of the ‘not yet’.23

The year 1997 also saw the publication of a short book by Derrida entitled Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!, translated into English as ‘On Cosmopolitanism’. Here Derrida develops the idea of ‘cities of refuge’ that would welcome refugees, or ‘asylum seekers’ as we like to call them these days, in contrast to the currently prevailing hostility to immigration practised by most economically advanced states in

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the world, and hospitality is, of course, at the centre of his discussion. In fact, he goes so far as to say that ‘ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality’ that one can say ‘ethics is hospitality’.24 And again we hear of the relationship between unconditional and conditional hospitality; admitting that the practical issues that arise are ‘obscure and difficult’, he states: It is a question of knowing how to transform and improve the law [droit], and of knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes place between The Law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment.25

Here we have a further development of the idea that it is not only a matter of the necessarily constrained and regulated acts of hospitality being informed by an impulse derived from the pure unconditional variety; the latter also needs the former in order to have any purchase on reality and to avoid being ‘perverted’. This form of perversion is different from the form we encountered earlier; there, the conditional laws constituted the potential perversion, here they guard against it – presumably because they reduce the risk that the guest will turn out to be dangerous and destructive. Derrida continued to worry away at the question of this relationship. In the early 2000s, in an interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco, he moved to this issue from a consideration of the ‘sans-papiers’, the undocumented immigrants in Paris whose rights he supported during the crisis of 1996:26 Pure hospitality consists in leaving one’s house open to the unforeseeable arrival, which can be an intrusion, even a dangerous intrusion, liable eventually to cause harm. This pure or unconditional hospitality is not a political or juridical concept. Indeed, … for a family or for a nation concerned with controlling its practices of hospitality, it is indeed necessary to limit and to condition hospitality. This can be done with the best intentions in the world, since unconditional hospitality can also have perverse effects.27

Once again, absolute hospitality can give rise to disastrous consequences. As part of an untranslated seminar published in 1999 as Manifeste pour l’hospitalité Derrida advances a somewhat different model of the relationship: in a talk entitled ‘Hospitality and Responsibility’ he speaks of a necessary compromise between the two poles: As a French citizen, I have to find a link between, on the one hand, this system of norms constituted by the language, the French constitution, laws and customs, French culture, and, on the other hand, the welcome of the stranger with his or her language, culture, habitus, etc. I have to find a meeting-place, and responsibility consists in inventing this meeting-place as a unique event.28

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We are still given very little to help us understand how one might find such a link, though it is interesting to note that doing so involves the uniqueness of the event – a point we need to come back to. Though there are difficulties in describing how unconditional hospitality enters into an act of hospitality, the Manifeste gives at least a clear negative instance: ‘If I am sure that the new arrival that I am receiving is perfectly inoffensive and innocent, and will be beneficial to me … this is not hospitality.’ To the degree that I am taking a chance in welcoming the other, my action is informed by unconditional hospitality. *** The logic – or challenge to logic – that hospitality presents in Derrida’s understanding of it is also present in his accounts of many other terms in his favoured lexicon. This problematic relation between an absolute, pure unconditioned and unconditional – what can one call it? – concept? category? impulse? event? – none of these is quite right – and a conditioned and conditional version of the same thing occurs again and again in Derrida’s work, increasingly so in the latter part of his career, and several terms with an ethical import are shown to possess an identical duality. Perhaps the earliest of these terms to appear in Derrida’s thinking was the gift. There is a pure giving, argues Derrida, which occurs without intention to give or acknowledgement by the receiver that giving has occurred, with no gratitude, no reciprocity, no debt, no thanks, no recognition or memory by either party of the gift. If the gift appears as a gift, no giving has taken place. As soon as there is an intention to give, the pure gift is annulled – yet Derrida acknowledges that any actual gift must imply an intention. ‘There must be chance’, he tells us, ‘encounter, the involuntary, even unconsciousness or disorder, and there must be intentional freedom, and these two conditions must – miraculously, graciously – agree with each other’.29 He is explicit about the connection between the gift and hospitality: In the same way that I have tried to show that the gift supposes a break with reciprocity, exchange, economy and circular movement, I have also tried to demonstrate that hospitality implies such a break; that is, if I inscribe the gesture of hospitality within a circle in which the guest should give back to the host, then it is not hospitality but conditional hospitality.30

Derrida is also explicit about the connection between hospitality and forgiveness: ‘Forgiveness granted to the other is the supreme gift and therefore hospitality par excellence.’31 He finds a ‘scene of forgiveness at the heart of hospitality’: ‘Whoever asks for hospitality asks, in a way, for forgiveness’, but ‘the welcoming one must ask for forgiveness from the welcomed one even prior to the former’s own having to forgive’.32 And as with hospitality, forgiveness is manifested in two ways: It is important to analyse at its base the tension at the heart of the heritage between, on the one side, the idea which is also a demand for the unconditional, gracious, infinite, uneconomic forgiveness granted to the guilty as guilty, without counterpart,

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even to those who do not repent or ask forgiveness, and on the other side, as a great number of texts testify through many semantic refinements and difficulties, a conditional forgiveness proportionate to the recognition of the fault, to repentance, to the transformation of the sinner who then explicitly asks forgiveness.33

Here is exactly the same duality, the same relation without relation – Derrida will later speak of the ‘abyss’ between the two instances of forgiveness. A similar relation without relation – Derrida also calls it a ‘double-bind’ – between the unconditional and the conditional is observable in a number of Derrida’s other preoccupations in his later work.34 Justice, as we have seen, is set against droit or the operation of laws; democracy is understood as always to come, actually existing democracies being all too limited; and there are enough mentions of love (as in the interview with Roudinesco I cited earlier) to suggest that it exhibits the same features, although Derrida never, to my knowledge, wrote at length directly on this topic.35 In every case, the absolute or pure instance is ‘impossible’: Derrida often inserts the phrase ‘if there is such a thing’ after a term like ‘unconditional hospitality’ or ‘forgiveness’ to signal that its occurrence is not something we could ever observe or be sure of. But, as I’ve already said, impossibility for Derrida is not ineffectualness; on the contrary, without the impossible nothing would happen. Every description of the unconditional implies impossibility: impossible hospitality, impossible forgiveness, impossible justice, impossible giving. Hospitality, then, is one of a number of terms for the ethical movement from the self, or the other in the self, to the other; or, perhaps more precisely, it is an overarching name for the various manifestations of that movement. ‘For hospitality is not some region of ethics,’ says Derrida, ‘it is ethicity itself, the whole and the principle of ethics.’36 So far, I have been considering hospitality as an ethical attribute or injunction. Derrida, as we have seen, went so far as to say that hospitality is ethics. If ethics is fundamentally a matter of the relation of one person to singular others, as Levinas certainly believed, hospitality is one possible name for that relation, whether conceived as a moral duty or as generosity of spirit (to return to the opposition between Kant and Shaftesbury). The gift, forgiveness, democracy, justice, love: they, too, all have ethical overtones. But the role of hospitality is not confined to the domain of the ethical, an expansion that is suggested by the codicil to the following restatement in a late essay of the paradoxical relation we are now familiar with: ‘Only an unconditional hospitality can give meaning and practical rationality to a concept of hospitality. Unconditional hospitality exceeds juridical, political, or economic calculation. But nothing and no one happens or arrives without it.’37 This last sentence implies a scope of action well beyond that of hospitality as an ethical good, or even beyond ethics tout court. The word awkwardly translated by ‘happens or arrives’ in this sentence is arrive, a word that combines both these meanings and can also mean ‘come’. In his discussions of hospitality, Derrida often uses the related noun arrivant, a term equally resistant to translation; it appears in one quotation above as ‘newcomer’ and in another as ‘arrival’. Its usefulness is manifold. By combining ‘arrival’ with ‘occurrence’, personal reference with impersonality, it generalizes the moment of hospitality: not just the person coming to your door, but the event that unexpectedly takes place. It also reminds us that hospitality to the other is also hospitality to the future: it is an openness to whatever will come.38

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Here is Derrida in Aporias in a passage that sums up much of what I have already said: The new arrivant, this word can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be where he or she was not expected, where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her, without expecting it [s’y attendre], without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for – and such is hospitality itself, hospitality toward the event.39

In including the possibility that the arrivant is not human – ‘that which arrives’ – Derrida goes well beyond Levinas: the other to which one is responsible may be an animal, a vegetable, a culture, a language.40 And the passage introduces another crucial term: the event. For Derrida, the event properly so-called is the unexpected event, the event that is not part of a predictably unfolding series. Hospitality towards the event is, therefore, another way of stating openness to the future. And the term event is connected by Derrida to the term invent (as well as advent, coming). An invention is an event that, in an unprecedented and unforeseeable way, opens up new ground for thought, feeling and action. (Invention is, it hardly needs saying, impossible. To remain within the realm of possibility is not to invent, simply to realize what is already implicit in things as they are.) In 2003 Derrida published Voyous (translated as Rogues in the posthumous 2005 English translation), in which he revisited a number of these questions. He gives a powerful, though still far from transparent, description of the role of the impossible – or, as he names it here, the ‘im-possible’ – in which he makes clear his resistance to any understanding of the unconditional, including unconditional hospitality, as a merely abstract idea. On the contrary, it is felt, and felt as violence: It is not the inaccessible, and it is not what I can indefinitely defer: it announces itself; it precedes me, swoops down upon and seizes me here and now in a nonvirtualizable way, in actuality and not potentiality. It comes upon me from on high, in the form of an injunction that does not simply wait on the horizon, that I do not see coming, that never leaves me in peace and never lets me put it off until later. Such an urgency cannot be idealized any more than the other as other can. This im-possible is thus not a (regulative) idea or ideal.41

But, violent though this movement is, Derrida also associates it with grace, a very different conception of an unsolicited gift from elsewhere. Two of my earlier quotations have used the word ‘gracious’: if the involuntary and the voluntary gift agree, they do so ‘miraculously, graciously’, and unconditional forgiveness is described as ‘gracious’. Derrida doesn’t develop this implicit connection between the Christian concept of an unmerited and freely given boon, and the unconditional gift of forgiveness or hospitality, but it does provide a counter-image to that of a ravishing power, though both involve being taken by surprise. To be hospitable, then, is to be inventive in one’s relation to the Other. Or, to be more precise, to the singular Other, to the Other’s singularity, ‘the singularity of who

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arrives’, as we have just heard Derrida saying. Hospitality does not simply require an open door; it requires that the other’s specific needs be taken care of. The event is always singular, which is to say that it exceeds all possible norms and rules and programmable expectations. To make a just decision – something implicit in the event of hospitality – is, Derrida says in his account of justice, to act not in defiance of the accumulated laws and precedents that are relevant in a particular case, but, as it were, to reinvent all those laws and precedents in order to do justice to the singularity of this case. To quote Of Hospitality again: ‘If I practice hospitality “out of duty” …, this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality, it is no longer graciously offered beyond debt and economy [note the idea of grace again], offered to the other, a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected visitor.’42 Many strands come together in this sentence: a rejection of Kant’s view of ethics as duty, an association of hospitality with the gift (‘offered beyond debt and economy’), the notion of invention, the arrivant (translated here as ‘new arrival’), visitation as opposed to invitation and the importance of the singularity of the other. Derrida stresses the importance of invention in the gesture of hospitality to the other in Manifeste pour l’hospitalité, and, surprisingly perhaps, associates it with poetic creation: The decision in favour of hospitality requires that I invent my own rule. In this sense, the language of hospitality must be poetic: it’s necessary that I speak or that I hear the other in a place where, in a certain sense, language reinvents itself. … It’s necessary that each time I say to the other, ‘Come, enter, make yourself at home’, my act of welcome should occur as if it were the first time in history; it should be absolutely singular.43

This absolute singularity is not just a characterization of the individual stranger; it is what constitutes the arrivant, and the event of its arrival, more generally. There is another important dimension to hospitality to the other we haven’t touched on yet: as Derrida says, ‘Hospitality implies, for the host receiving and the guest received, being first of all hospitable to the other in oneself’,44 and elsewhere he asks, ‘Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?’, continuing that ‘one will not understand anything about hospitality if one does not understand what “interrupting oneself ” might mean, the interruption of the self by the self as other’.45 In other words, hospitality doesn’t issue from a sovereign, self-assured subject, but from a subject already divided; and it is this self-division that makes hospitality possible. Derrida is fond of saying that any decision worthy of the name is taken by ‘the other in me’, and we see a similar insistence here. Judith Butler’s argument in Giving an Account of Oneself, that ethics and responsibility presuppose a subject ‘opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself ’, runs along similar lines.46 Derrida, in effect, proposes two versions of human existence. One is a mechanical succession of occurrences, including the welcoming of strangers, the giving of gifts, the forgiving of criminals, the judging of cases and the creation of art, in which everything happens according to the rules of rational calculation, everything is predictable, everything travels along the smooth rails of convention and convenience. The other is

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a series of unpredictable events, a constant changing of course, a repeated risk-taking that sometimes turns out well, sometimes badly. In this second version, there is also welcoming, giving, forgiving, judging and creating, but they look very different. In fact, from the perspective of the second version, these activities as they would take place in the context of the first are not worthy of the names they are given: there, ‘hospitality’ is the authoritarian subjection of any arrival to strict rules, ‘giving’ is merely an economic exchange, ‘forgiving’ is only granted to the forgivable, ‘judging’ is the application of laws that could be carried out by a computer and the ‘literature’ produced is merely pastiche and cliché. What all these lack is openness to the future, inventiveness, an affirmative response to the absolute singularity of the other, the acceptance that any opening to the good is also potentially an opening to the bad. The field of activities to which this opposition applies is potentially infinite: any situation in which a decision is required admits of two possibilities – a calculation that points unmistakeably in one direction, or a leap into the unknown because the choice is wholly undecidable. For Derrida, only the latter deserves the name of decision, and every decision, although it undertakes the fullest possible exercise of reason and calculation, finally moves beyond the rational and the calculable, and affirms the other. As we have seen, however, the opposition is not actually so stark: life requires a transaction, a negotiation between the unconditional and the conditional. (We have noted that Derrida on one occasion uses the word ‘compromise’, but I am not sure this is a helpful term, suggesting as it does a mid-way position; certainly, his other accounts of the relation are less comforting.) Much of existence is inevitably of the first kind, but in order for life to be life and not a mechanical procession, the activities mentioned have to be injected with, or inspired by, or subjected to, the spirit of the unconditional, inventive, risky, open, unpredictable, uncontrollable alternative, foreign to the order of knowledge and calculation, and always open to perversion. But in order for pure hospitality, absolute justice, genuine inventiveness to occur, if they ever do occur, it is necessary for the subject to have explored and exploited to the full the resources available within the domain of reason and knowledge. One name for this constant negotiation between the unconditional and the conditional, the unconditioned and the conditioned, is ‘deconstruction’. Another way of approaching this knot is to consider the ethical imperatives that have governed Western traditions of thought and behaviour since Ancient Greece (I cannot speak of other civilizations). They would include hospitality, justice, responsibility, forgiveness and the giving of gifts. In each case, it is as if Derrida has asked, ‘What is the most absolute form of these imperatives; what would happen if we followed through these enduring values to their purest or most logically complete or fullest imaginable manifestation?’ The result is not a series of ideals to be striven for, but rather a much more ambiguous set of demands, which are as liable to be destructive as productive, which are all, from the beginning, subject to perversion and betrayal. Were they not so liable, they would not be what they are. Hence the need to introduce conditions, laws, limits; and hence the never-ending interaction and negotiation between the unconditional and the conditional.

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Notes 1

See Michael Naas’s discussion of these episodes in a lucid chapter on hospitality in Derrida’s work Taking on the Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 155–9. See also chapter 1 of Naas’s Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki 5.3 (2000): 3 (3–18); hereafter ‘Hostipitality’ 2000. There are two published lectures by Derrida called ‘Hostipitality’. The given reference is to a lecture he gave in Istanbul in 1997. The second occurs in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 358–420. 3 John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 109. 4 Jacques Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 21. 5 Ibid., 22–3. 6 One of the earliest essays he published, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–102), is a lengthy study of Levinas that expressed both strong admiration and sharp disagreement; and in a 1980 essay, ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’ (Jacques Derrida, Psyche, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 143–90), Derrida took issue with Levinas’s mode of argumentation and his privileging of the masculine. 7 I discuss Derrida’s reworking of Levinas’s arguments in ‘Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas and the Third’, chapter 7 of Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 8 Derrida, Adieu, 48. 9 The fact that the French word ‘hôte’, like the Latin ‘hostis’ from which it is derived, can mean both ‘host’ and ‘guest’, handily captures this ambiguity – though it can make for difficulties in exposition of theories of hospitality. 10 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, 9. 11 As an example of conditional hospitality, Derrida discusses Kant’s ‘Third Article’ in his Perpetual Peace, in which Kant proposes a universal right of hospitality, but with strict limits. See ‘Hostipitality’, 2000, 3–6. 12 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 83, 135. 13 The French word droit refers both to right and to the body of the law. 14 For a thorough study of Derrida’s understanding of justice and law, and their relation to hospitality, see Jacques de Ville, Law as Absolute Hospitality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 15 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 25–7. 16 Ibid., 79. 17 Ibid. 18 Derrida, Acts of Religion, 361. 19 For a lively discussion of Tom Jones in these terms, see Bernard Harrison, Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975). 20 Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, 14. 21 Derrida, Acts of Religion, 362.

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22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 361. 24 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, ed. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 17. 25 Derrida, Cosmopolitanism, 22–3, translation slightly modified. 26 Derrida gave a powerful unscripted speech condemning the French government’s policy on immigration at a demonstration in Paris in 1996; a transcription appears in Jacques Derrida, Marc Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Vincent, Marx en jeu (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1997). 27 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … : A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59. 28 Jacques Derrida, Manifeste pour l’hospitalité, ed. Mohammed Seffahi (Grigny: Éditions Paroles d’Aube, 1999), 114. 29 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 123. 30 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 69 (65–83). 31 Both the English term forgive and the French term pardon contain within themselves a suggestion of their relation with the gift/don. 32 Derrida, Acts of Religion, 380. 33 Derrida, Cosmopolitanism, 34–5. For a longer text by Derrida on the question of forgiveness, see ‘To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible’, in Questioning God, ed. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 21–51. 34 In addition to the preoccupations I’ve considered here, Derrida includes promise and testimony among ‘a whole chain’ of topics associated with hospitality; Jacques Derrida, ‘As If It Were Possible: “Within Such Limits” … ’, in Negotiations, ed. and trans. Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 357 (343–70). Alex Thomson traces the similarities between hospitality and friendship in Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (London: Continuum, 2005), 92. Another term in the list would be responsibility. We might remember, too, that Derrida describes the fullest possible realization of the university as ‘the university without condition’. See the essay of that name in Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202–37. 35 In the film Derrida, asked to say whatever he wished about love, he states, ‘I have nothing to say about love’, but goes on to offer a short speech on the subject. See Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 79, 81. And the question of love, in many forms, permeates his writing, notably in ‘Envois’. See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–256, and The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), but in many other places as well. See also Peggy Kamuf, ‘Deconstruction and Love’, in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle (London: Palgrave, 2000), 151–70. 36 Derrida, Adieu, 50. 37 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 149 (my emphasis). 38 See Derrida’s discussion of hospitality and the future in ‘Hostipitality’ 2000, 11.

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39 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 33. 40 See, for example, ‘Hostipitality’ 2000, 4: ‘What can be said of, indeed can one speak of, hospitality toward the non-human, the divine, for example, or the animal or vegetable?’ See also Derrida’s discussion of Lawrence’s ‘The Snake’, in The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 236–49. 41 Derrida, Rogues, 84. 42 Ibid., 83. 43 Derrida, Manifeste, 113; my emphasis 44 Ibid., 139. 45 Derrida, Adieu, 51, 42. 46 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 19.

25

Risk Marc Botha

Uncertain futures: The problem of defining risk Defined at its simplest, risk describes our uncertain relation to the future. That this relation is ‘complex and ambivalent’,1 manifesting in multiple and varied permutations, follows logically from the fact that at different times and in different places, precisely what constitutes a risk – that which, in other words, makes our relation to the future perceptibly uncertain – assumes different forms. Risk crosses borders and boundaries, cultures and histories, and as it migrates it takes on new forms, new uncertainties. How we interpret and respond to these uncertainties – for instance, whether they are seen as holding promise or threat, whether they are embraced or avoided – conditions how we approach risk across its numerous and diverse contexts. Indeed, as Ulrich Beck, arguably the preeminent theorist of risk, notes, ‘[I]t is cultural perception and definition that constitute risk.’2 In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that risk proves constitutively resistant to precise definition:3 ‘risks have something unreal about them’ suggests Ulrich Beck. ‘In a fundamental sense they are both real and unreal.’4 Yet despite its elusiveness, there can be little doubt that a continued investigation of risk remains a pressing task in the contemporary world. Indeed, writing from the midst of the coronavirus pandemic – as individuals, communities, societies and governments all struggle to weigh the existential risk posed by the virus itself against the socio-economic risk it has apparently occasioned5 – it becomes apparent not only that risk lies at the heart of our political discourse, but that it also constitutes an ideological battlefield where the value of human life (that is of visceral, embodied

I would like to express my thanks to a number of interlocutors at various events who have helped to shape this piece (which remains, in many respects, a work in progress): to Ann-Marie Einhaus and Sarah Lohmann for invitations to speak; to Rob Cover, Rick de Villiers, Simon During, F.-J. HernándezAdrian, Maebh Long, Fraser Riddell, Marc Schachter, Patricia Waugh, but especially to Rob Halpern for his generosity and permission to quote. Thanks also to Neville Botha for his generous editorial assistance. This chapter is dedicated to V. Khlebnikov, who continues to help me to understand the relationship between risk and the future.

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beings, each with a life) is pitted against the value of the market (an abstract and a self-organizing system, habitually treated as an organic lifeform if not a governing deity).6 That these risks and the scale of their impact are asymmetrically distributed both within and between societies and nations has become increasingly clear. The risks posed by the coronavirus not only fluctuate from place to place depending in large part on financial resources and government policies regarding its containment, but also seem unambiguously tied to a range of variables including age, gender, race, socio-economic precarity, body type and pre-existing medical conditions, many of which intersect with one another in the context of the individual to constitute what we might call a vulnerable subject or a subject at risk.7 The capacity or incapacity of a state to respond adequately to the challenges posed to its structures and processes by the vulnerable subject – its capacity for accommodating and defending, rather than simply excluding or isolating the vulnerable subject – offers a compelling proxy measure of the politics of risk. Although it is tempting to say that the coronavirus pandemic and the profoundly unequal politics of risk it exposes are singular to our contemporary reality, most significant crises of the twenty-first century exhibit a similar tendency towards the abstraction of risk: the legacy of the 9/11 attacks in the ‘War on Terror’ where ongoing risk has been used as the pretext for waging unjust wars; the 2008 economic crash and the ascendency of austerity economics which place an abstraction of economic recovery ahead of the social systems that protect the vulnerable; and the rapid approach of ecological catastrophe, and the displacement of accountability from the so-called centre to the periphery in the form of what Nixon has called the ‘outsourcing of environmental crises’.8 This politics of risk thus proves to be both prevalent and persistent, and has been the subject of numerous studies in the recent past.9 Despite the considerable variation in their precise commitments and aims, what emerges almost universally is a sustained concern with inequalities of wealth and the ways in which these inequalities manifest on a global scale. While the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens remains paradigmatic in this regard, there has also been an increasing recognition that it is impossible to grasp inequalities of wealth without simultaneously addressing asymmetries of power. The contemporary understanding of the latter rests principally on the critical revision of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty and an elaboration of Michel Foucault’s understanding of biopower, culminating in a series of significant works of political philosophy at the turn of the millennium, most notably by Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler. The conception of the vulnerable subject that emerges from Agamben’s and Butler’s work differs starkly from the global subject that underwrites earlier studies of risk. For Agamben, this subject is made manifest in the figure of homo sacer who is excluded from the ordinary application of law and thus reduced to bare life;10 for Butler, it is the precarious subject, who possesses a ‘primary vulnerability’ that emerges from the tension between the visceral character of all human life and the fact that the subject is always also socially constituted.11 In both cases, the subject at risk clarifies what it means to live in the contemporary world, a world suspended between

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two competing yet inextricable paradigms of global (dis)order: a global world of interconnectedness and incorporation on the one hand, and the reassertion of the sovereign state and its capacity for separation and exclusion on the other. It is in this light that the subject at risk – the vulnerable subject – becomes not only the exemplum for rethinking the horizons of the political body, but also, in broader terms, the body politic itself.

Reclaiming value: The body at risk and the radicality of value Opposing the dominant trend towards abstraction in the contemporary governance of risk (i.e. in its identification, calculation and distribution), and countering the ways in which this abstraction is increasingly employed to determine and govern the lives of everyday people, it is necessary not only to pay closer attention to the singularity of the vulnerable body, or the body at risk, but to attempt to effect a shift in the understanding of what it might mean to take risks. While as a concept risk is unavoidably imbricated with questions of loss and gain, the wholesale assumption that such losses or gains should be principally economic is finally a question of ideology rather than necessity. In this light, the question becomes: how might we begin to recover the vulnerable lives that are exploited by abstract models of risk? How, in short, do we reclaim a notion of gain which amounts to more than the accrual of wealth by a capitalist elite, but a gain which transforms the everyday lives of vulnerable subjects? How might risk be redistributed so that the bodies and lives of those most at risk are not the very ones constantly placed at risk for the sake of financial gain? It is only in responding to such questions that it becomes possible to begin to reconceptualize risk as distinct from the processes of abstraction that inform the logic of neoliberal capitalism as it seeks to exploit uncertainty regarding the future for the purpose of gain.12 This reconceptualization must of necessity begin by challenging the question of agency, and what it means or might mean to actively take a risk. In the context of the ascendancy of global capitalism the taking of risk has principally been used to refer to economic loss or gain – a context which habitually involves the displacement of risk from the centre to the periphery, from the wealthy to the poor or from the powerful to the vulnerable.13 In this light, identifying a possible route to risktaking as a generative or recuperative act must start by challenging the assumption that risk can ever be adequately conceptualized in terms of abstraction, and rather insisting on the materiality of the world to which the logic of risk is applied, and in particular emphasizing the irremissibility of the embodied experiences of the vulnerable subjects at its centre. By drawing the viscerality of the subject at risk into focus, it becomes clearer precisely what is at stake in the abstraction of risk for economic gain: an implicit decision regarding which lives are worth saving and which can be sacrificed for the sake of economic growth. The process of recovering risk must, therefore, begin by refusing the disposability of any human life and affirming that the radical vulnerability of all life, and fragility of the systems that produce and sustain it, is the source of incalculable value.14

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Beyond representation: The return of the sublime and the aesthetics of risk Since risk may be regarded as inherent to existence by the sheer fact of the uncertainty of the future, it follows that it is only by challenging the ways in which risk and value are tied together in the present that it becomes possible to reconceptualize risk within the political sphere as a source of potential rather than hazard. In this process it is vital to keep in mind the rift that emerges between the dominant regimes of contemporary risk, the visceral and the abstract: between, on the one hand, vulnerable bodies, fragile ecosystems, precarious labour or those things at risk; and, on the other, risk as something to be actively produced and harnessed by various methods of calculation and redistribution. That the first remains in large part subjugated to the second should also be a major source for concern. This subjugation reflects the ongoing acceleration of late capitalism and its manifestation as neoliberal society where the illusion of freedom is fostered to produce docile subjects who, accepting the truth that risk is pervasive, have lost the capacity to distinguish different regimes of risk from one another. What might it mean in this context to take the right risks? To take the right risks begins with affirming the subject at risk: recognizing that bodily fragility and vulnerability are indeed singular, and yet that it is precisely this shared viscerality that makes singular lives comparable and hence undermines the elevation of some lives as inherently more valuable than others. Since risk is radical not only to every life, but to every formulation of the future (and hence unavoidable), it is only by beginning again with risk, by radically questioning if not actively undermining its connection to economic value, and critically interrogating its grounding in the more fundamental value of all human life, that it becomes possible to imagine what it might mean to take the right risks. Thus to rethink risk in terms of its post-economic potential requires us to begin with the embodied or visceral subject and to place under significant scrutiny any conception of subjectivity that rests on the abstraction of the subject to a regime of calculation. In other words, to rethink risk we need to rethink the ways in which we represent risk, and how these representations are imbricated with embodied subjects. The problem of representing risk is at the heart of Scott Lash’s epochal essay, ‘Risk Cultures’. Taking issue with what he views as the two dominant strands of risk thinking – the realist and the constructivist15– Lash proposes to shift the terms of discussion from risk society to risk culture. Following a broadly Kantian schema, he suggests that while the concept of society hinges on an epistemological or cognitive reflexivity, culture, by contrast, depends on aesthetic reflexivity.16 The latter, Lash claims, is more appropriate to understanding the complex set of cultural events and practices that emerge to reflect on contemporary risk.17 In particular, it is an aesthetic of the sublime that, Lash contends, provides a close cognate for conceptualizing risk. Both, after all, address the figure of an unknowable threat. As Jean-François Lyotard recognizes, ‘The sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening.’18 A sense of great risk, then, that provokes a visceral affect which confirms: ‘What is sublime is the feeling that something will happen, despite everything within this threatening void,

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that something will take “place” and will announce that everything is not over.’19 It is in this sense that the aesthetics inspired by the sublime yearn to recover the future, despite the sublime initially appearing to place it in jeopardy.20 Although the Kantian sublime ultimately elevates our cognitive capacity to subdue a sense of imminent risk, subsequent phenomenologists – Merleau-Ponty perhaps foremost among them – have convincingly demonstrated that cognition, in fact, is always an embodied process. In this light the connection between the sublime and risk emerges not from their shared abstraction, but rather precisely in their viscerality: in aesthetics, the sublime makes itself known as gut feeling. On this significant point, it is worth quoting Lash at some length: Aesthetic judgements of the sublime expose bodies with lack, expose open bodies to the ravages of contingency … Hence we also experience this as confirming our finitude. Risks and threats, thus experienced and subsumed under neither determinate judgement of the understanding nor the judgements and syntheses of the imagination therefore bring us in touch with our finitude. Kant called this the ‘terrible sublime’ in which dangers were actually physical. This is a very important means by which we ascribe meaning not only to risks but also to the sensibilities of risk culture.21

It is on account of this close alliance between the aesthetics of risk and the sublime – the latter which, as Lyotard notes, acts as ‘witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy’22 – that we have occasion to shift focus from the demand of finding an adequate means of representing risk as abstraction to exploring the means of witnessing its visceral manifestation in the subject at risk. Much as in the case of the sublime, such exemplary cases must be both conceptual and visceral, navigating rather than subsuming the latter under the former (as might be the Kantian claim).23 The work of US poet Rob Halpern instantiates this set of tensions in the conception of risk with both clarity and force. Yet to read Halpern’s work in such exemplary terms – as a vehicle for the sublime presentation of contemporary risk, and thus, in particular, for the recovery of risk as a visceral rather than an abstract phenomenon – it is necessary first to recall in greater detail what was merely alluded to above: that risk as a concept never emerges in isolation. Of particular significance in this regard is the argument advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What Is Philosophy?, which remains almost certainly one of the most incisive accounts of the concept as concept. A concept, they claim, must of necessity be understood as a dynamic process, a multiplicity characterized by its capacity for both generating and maintaining a complex set of relations that are at once internal and external to the concept itself: internal, since the concept gathers together heterogeneous elements (or components) that persist in a dynamic relation to one another;24 external, since no concept is defined in isolation, but always emerges in relation to other concepts.25 Concepts resonate – ‘each in itself and every one in relation to all others’26 – and in resonating constitute an intervention: an event27 that inaugurates a novel way of addressing a problem which has been intuited yet which in isolation remains frustratingly inarticulate and vague.28

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It is in this dynamic conceptual sense, in this system of resonances, that Halpern’s poetry – ranging across pressing themes such as vulnerability, crisis, disaster and threat – situates itself against an horizon of risk.29 It is thus difficult to pinpoint the precise subject of Halpern’s work. Addressed as a whole, his poetry might be described as a sustained aesthetic interrogation of the politics of vulnerability: an exposition of the multiple asymmetries that scar the lives of those most at risk. The everyday existence of vulnerable subjects remains in significant ways illegible within the ‘normal’ operation of society, predicated as it is on the capacity of a hegemon to effect various protocols of inclusion or exclusion,30 perpetuating the conditions which allow the structural and often direct violence that makes a politics of exclusion and exception the normal condition of existence for vulnerable individuals and groups. The impossible challenge taken up by Halpern’s poetry, then, is to discover a means of restoring legibility and presence to those who have been erased or rendered illegible. By lyricizing abjection and eroticizing loss, this poetic work constitutes an ethically charged corpus that not only reflects on risk, but itself also takes risks. Incorporating the insights of psychoanalysis, queer studies, political theory, the critique of neoliberal economics and avant-garde poetics, Halpern addresses a constellation of risks that emerge in the aftermath of the 9/11 events of 2001 in two interconnected volumes of poetry (the final instalments of a tetralogy): Music for Porn, which addresses the often fetishized figure of the injured, maimed or dead solider; and Common Place, which interrogates the complex imbrication of, and occluded access to, mourning and desire which become problematically abstracted through the autopsy report of a deceased Guantanamo Bay detainee. Despite obvious differences, the soldier and the detainee become exemplary figures in the poet’s attempt to reclaim a degree of legibility for the vulnerable subject.

Representing risk: Militarized capital and the nation at risk Within the prevailing conditions of post-9/11 risk – a situation where the state cooption of the existential threat posed by global terrorism is used as a pretext for waging illegal wars that consistently place economic interests above human lives – what unites vulnerable subjects is the shared danger of their abstraction to a mere statistic. Under such conditions, bodies, identities, histories and possibilities are transformed by the techniques and technologies of contemporary biopolitics and its alliance with neoliberal capitalism, as the deep complexities of human society and its shifting patterns of conflict and risk are flattened into biopolitical data and human algorithms31 to constitute the new basis of informational capital. Reduced to such terms, oblique and unpredictable kinships between even the most unlikely subjects become increasingly probable on account of their shared vulnerability, offering a faint outline for a politics of possibility recovered from its reduction to probability. Yet if their common ground is found in their shared biopolitical abstraction, it should also be recalled that it is the raw fact of embodiment that underwrites even

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the possibility of such biopolitical abstraction to begin with. What happens, then, if abstraction is elevated and the body ignored or – as in the case of the solider and detainee – actively destroyed so that only the abstraction remains? Can there be a body politic (which is to say a political aggregation we might otherwise term society) if the most overtly political bodies can be reduced to an idea, arbitrarily memorialized or redacted from history at will, or, more terrifying still, destroyed or consumed by a collective appetite for catharsis or revenge? Similar questions animate Sianne Ngai’s perceptive analysis of Music for Porn, which she identifies as an allegorical vehicle for coming to terms with the unresolved contradictions in the Marxist conception of abstract labour. In a contemporary world so thoroughly desensitized by hyper-commodification and an over-exposure to spectacular violence, Halpern’s radical poetic labour struggles to reanimate the abstracted soldier through the poetic encoding of a visceral and habitually culturally disavowed desire: For Halpern, the body of The Soldier is one abstracted at multiple levels: as a national representation … as a corpse removed from public view; as a homosexual icon … and as an allegory of value. At the very same time, this abstract-allegorical body is incongruously presented as the visceral object of the poet’s lust, sexual fantasy, and a range of conflicting emotions: love, hate, disgust, shame.32

Tying together Halpern’s diverse and difficult meditation on the erotics of wartime capital is the figure of a solider: a soldier, importantly, not a marine; a figure remarkable, then, precisely because he is the embodiment of a transfigured ordinariness. The solider, generically, is the good son of the working-class family: a figure notable at once for his heroic resilience, yet equally heroic, as national abstraction, for his expendability. Indeed, the solider embodies all the impossibilities of liberal democracy-becomeempire: a national fetish that the poet believes must become the object of what he terms a ‘devotional kink’33 in order for us to confront the depth of the imperial violence that moves through our world, placing us all so deeply at risk. Sometimes wounded, sometimes maimed, but at others the sacralized corpse of the sacrificed hero, this solider ties together the diverse range of forms Halpern investigates in the volume. He animates longer essayistic reflections that draw together an incisive post-Marxist critique of neoliberalism. He provides a common point of access to fragmentary and often disarmingly delicate prose poems that map the crossing of erotic and martial affect. He grounds the complexity of the ‘patterned objectivist lyrics’,34 both drawing on and participating in a long tradition of experimentation with the line in American poetry – sometimes in its discreteness; sometimes multiple enjambed – that runs from Whitman, through Stein, to Olson and his successors. Exemplary in this regard is the ‘MY OPERATIVES’ sequence in Music for Porn, which reflects, at the level of form, a more profound and traumatic incongruity which the poet must risk in struggling to find an adequate means for representing or making sense of the senseless: the aforementioned entanglement of the martial and the erotic within the neoliberal abstraction of the human subject; the exemplary figure of the solider reduced thus by the abstracting force of capital to mere ‘waste’35 or ‘meat’.36

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Consider the following: Now that we’ve seduced the soldier my own thought Thins to a fevered nought there never having been before The war things were identical whereas now difference Reigns in names for annihilation being mine own peace And stability industry ricochets and ducks the largest Private army a one man truth squad alone dodging total Intelligence solutions chop off surveillance […];37 or the more explicit passage from the same sequence: Lick yr wounds it said as if the words would make Me one with the current traumatic neuroses of peace That’s how we live on waste he said crawling out Under the dead weight a carcass had come rising When he saw me on my knees his dick in my mouth Creaming him crushed beneath the weight of nations.38

That the poetic line simultaneously connects and separates, makes concrete and abstracts, is of considerable significance here. The line becomes itself a model of relation, exposing the vertiginous tensions between, on the one hand, the inextricability of war and capital which become abstractions of risk and, on the other, the poetic sublimation of proscribed sex and desire as visceral figurations of this abstraction. One might say that by tracing through this figure of the solider the ways in which the poetical line both facilitates and interrupts relation, Halpern gives expression to an urgent political vision in Music for Porn. In short, what the poetic line risks in formal terms – in its restructuring of our collective access to the disavowed connections between explicit violence and explicit sex together subsumed under the sign of capital – is mirrored in Halpern’s reflection on the inextricability of borderlines, battle lines, lines of production and, perhaps most saliently, lines of credit – that is to say, the risky apertures of speculation that emerge when we confront the inextricability of the nation-state, the military-industrial complex and the transnational flows of capital that drive and sustain these two. Indeed, Halpern’s solider is able to exemplify the interdependency of state, war and capital so forcefully precisely because he allows for what the poet terms an ‘affective tuning’ – a realignment of the private and public, the intimate and social – to constitute a distinctive and disturbing expression of political emotion. On the one hand, the soldier’s vulnerability evokes pathos because it invokes relation at the scale of the individual and, particularly, the individual within the context of the family: the solider is a son, a husband, a father, a brother. On the other hand, the soldier is understood as the embodiment of a transhistorical trajectory of heroic political subjectivity, the everyday hero of an American poetic mythography. For this reason a further line – a genealogical line that binds nationhood to war in the American literary imagination – assumes preeminence. Tracing this line from Virgil, through Whitman, to the present, Halpern identifies an

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affective tuning of a military figure … only fully realized in our own present … To organize prosodically an experience of war, Whitman links uncoded affects, say a certain unsingable tenderness for a dead soldier’s body … to over-coded attachment love of nation, fervor for democracy … To be that sacrificial body, a soldier’s corpse is drained of its historicity bare life, dead meat, taboo just as the nation’s mourning is hygienically cleaned of partisan militant subjectivity.39

Recognized as the subject of a long genealogy that links eros and political violence, the principal question at the heart of Music for Porn is incisively phrased by the poet himself: ‘How to unbind this eros from martial interests, wrest an openness to penetration away from sovereign ends? How to disentangle my desire from a long genealogy of homoeroetic camaraderie embedded in histories of empire and nation, but without denying these entanglements?’40 Halpern’s fragmented response to this impossible demand emerges through a sustained poetic reimagining of a queer affection that risks transgressing the increasingly militarized line of abstraction. Realigning queer affect from within explicit fragments, exploring the significance of inappropriate cathexis, this is a poetry that takes the right risks: the risk of insisting that it may yet be possible to retrieve a trace of pure value from an economy of pure waste. Another name for this trace is the future.

Against risk’s abstractions: The poetics of viscerality and the insistence on life That the concept of risk has shifted, expanded, intensified and accelerated in the present digital age is clear from the increasing abstraction of everyday life. The embodied subject becomes a digital subject; society itself – which historically has been materially located, with concrete infrastructures connecting these locations – becomes an increasingly virtual concept, transposed into informational networks, both professional and social. Recalling that for Beck, risk is in the first instance a predicate of perception,41 what is perceived as risk under such conditions is significantly reshaped by its technological abstraction, which makes it increasingly invisible and inaccessible not only to the public to which it applies, but also to public scrutiny. Under such conditions, the visceral particularity of the embodied subject at risk is all too easily lost to a generalized abstraction, and the overwhelming sense of always being at risk. It is in recovering not only the particularity but also the localizability and viscerality of risk, that Halpern’s poetry has significant implications for contemporary risk thinking. He examines arguably the most extreme figures through which the abstraction of risk is manifested: the US solider, as both hero and victim, whose body is declared disposable and whose future is made expendable for the sake of an imperialist concept of nation that has been co-opted by war; and the Guantanamo Bay detainee, an anonymized and redacted terror suspect, onto whose body – physically relocated to an extra-judicial territory, with or without supporting evidence – the abstracted form of national mourning, rage and desire for vengeance are projected. Halpern’s strategy

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for reclaiming these spectral yet persistent figures is radical, and within the normative structures of conventional aesthetics, almost unthinkable. The eviscerated subject, the subject become object, is reinvigorated and reformed through the libidinal force of desire – a defiant queer affect, the taboo of a ‘devotional kink’, to recall Halpern’s terms. Probing the relationship between viscerality and abstraction in Halpern’s ouevre proves fertile ground for the political discourse on risk. His work makes explicit the link between our ‘new age of risk’ and the ways in which the politics of viscerality and abstraction are locked into a symmetrical relationship. A turn to the viscerality of the subject seems imperative in this light, interrogating the conceptual imbrication of risk, vulnerability, precariousness and fragility by bringing these into a sustained dialogue with not only the material aspects of viscerality – that is, the immanence of the body – but also its symbolic manifestations in terms of an embodied internality, concealed functions, enclosed hierarchies and occluded processes. The significance of viscerality and the viscera to human culture is considerable; their material and metaphysical import manifest across a range of cultures and histories. Mythology and religion are replete with visceral practices, from divine punishments to visceral offerings, the divination practices of auguries, to the quasi-scientific medical theory of the humours. We might say that our systems of knowledge flow through our insides, but equally that our insides provide an important model for functionality, from medicine to political theory, where, among many other examples, we discover its metaphorical centrality to concepts such as the body politic in Hobbe’s Leviathan, and its material centrality to contemporary biopolitics as envisioned by Foucault (who famously draws on the account of the public evisceration and execution of an attempted regicide at the start of Discipline and Punish).42 What is worth noting, however, has less to do with the historical minutiae of this or similar accounts, than with the fact that the internal functioning of the body and the internal functioning of political systems are bound together through a particular representational model. Because it is the generality of this representational model that makes it translatable, and also that accounts for the reciprocal significance of systems of aesthetic representation to the ways in which we understand viscerality, along with related bodily categories of flesh and incarnation, blood and circulation. An interesting and relevant modulation of viscerality – one that relates closely to questions of political and aesthetic representation – emerges in the recent work of Achille Mbembe. Drawing attention to the pending eclipse of the modern political subject by the advent and rise of new data-driven technologies, Mbembe outlines a dystopian future where data has ‘overcode[d] the subject’, the culmination of ‘multiple wave fronts of calculation [that] expand throughout the planet, incorporating more and more life and matter into systems of abstraction and “machine reasoning”’.43 Under such conditions, which are in many respects simply the culmination of the neoliberal logic of the intensified abstraction of capital that characterizes the contemporary understanding of risk, the reassertion of the viscerality of the subject becomes eminently political. Indeed, as Mbembe notes in a different context, the upsurge of affect above reason as the governing principle of much contemporary political activism is significant.44 If the danger of abstraction resides in an unmediated knowledge, a knowledge, in other words, that is able to bypass reason, the politics of

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viscerality constitutes a new political medium through which the political subject may be expressed. In this light, the vulnerable political subject as interpellated in terms of its viscerality might be defined as one who is so disabled by all kinds of power structures, that he or she is rendered physically ill with rage, grief and fear, none of which seem[s] to have an outlet … [T]his visceral subject, inhabits a frustrated body he cannot call home ….a body that is unable to shout in the face of the apparent impunity and mercilessness of the violence and horror inflicted on it by various structures of power.45

While in one sense the recovery of the political body of the vulnerable subject promises a means of countering its exponential abstraction by these structures of power, it remains unclear to Mbembe that this viscerality, occupying a space shaped by violence, is able to distinguish clearly between its constructive and destructive potential. One possible reason for this ambiguity relates to the fact that the politics of viscerality, in an ironically similar manner to the politics of abstraction, has in his view largely abandoned reason or the capacity to ‘properly identify the threshold that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, the quantifiable and the unquantifiable, the computable and the incomputable’.46 The challenge in this light becomes how to imagine and then represent the visceral subject as a ‘reasonable’ threshold figure, engaged in both the macrological struggle to lay claim to rights and protections for all those who are most vulnerable or at risk and the micrological struggle of the right of the particular individual to persist in a state of vulnerability, recognizing in vulnerability itself a source of shared existential modality regarding the human condition.47 In this light, the visceral subject, understood as an exemplar of the vulnerable subject, is one whose bodily being has been so abstracted by structures of power that it is necessary to find new means of presenting and representing the embodied condition in order to reclaim the right to a material political resistance. The shift that is required to accomplish this is then precisely from a reactionary politics of viscerality to a generative poetics of viscerality. Recalling the connections exposed above between viscerality and the sublime, it is perhaps no surprise that there is no conventional mode of representation that proves entirely adequate to this task. A similar problem haunts Halpern’s poetry and nowhere more intensely than in Common Place. The collection draws its content from public records which provide an oblique and incomplete view of the statesanctioned activities at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre (often simply called GITMO), which is perhaps the most ominous manifestation of the exceptional logic of the so-called ‘War on Terror’. In Common Place, Halpern directly addresses the effects of a radically asymmetrical exercise of power on the incarcerated body. The autopsy report of a detainee who appears to be a composite figure, the ‘everyman’ of illegal detention under a global state of exception, serves as the basis for Halpern’s risky poetic reflection. His name is redacted, given to the reader initially in the form of a placeholder (__________); yet, his story closely resembles so many reported experiences at Guantanamo Bay, including the notorious first suicide (an account of

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whose death has been disputed) of a Yemeni detainee. This confusion and profusion of names and identities are the first of many markers of the destructive power of biopolitical abstraction which moves through Halpern’s visceral poetics – the ‘my solider’ of Music for Porn elided into ‘my detainee’ in Common Place. Halpern’s poetry is itself situated in the space of suspended legality, of suspended norms or exceptional new norms, which Agamben recognizes in what he terms the nomos of the camp48 – ‘the camp [regarded] not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’.49 In this extra-legal location – a space of suspended legality enforced under the pretext of guaranteeing a securitized political freedom, but in reality simply subtracted from material structures and processes of accountability – the body of the detainee, reduced to bare life, extinguished and then abstracted to a report, becomes the focus of a radical poetic project. Halpern sets about translating this autopsy report, the very paradigm of abstract biopolitical discourse, into elaborate variations and alternations of lyrical verse and evocative prose, manifesting in powerful philosophical reflection, intimate love poetry, dark reveries and erotic dreamscapes. Whether or not this writing is able to rescue something of the loss of human life it sets about retracing, or whether it merely manifests another sort of violence, a charge which has been brought to Halpern’s work,50 must of necessity occupy an undecidable threshold. It is precisely by occupying this threshold – on one side of which is a quasipornographic fantasy, and on the other a devastatingly forensic political critique – that Common Place is able to offer a profound and far-reaching reflection on the viscerality of contemporary risk. This is a remarkably complex work, punctuated by opaque intensities, patterned by erratic repetitions and recurrences, evasive on account of gaps and recurrences that require a great deal of time to unfold and decipher. The body of the detainee, abstracted through the anonymous and unremitting forensic gaze that produces this autopsy report, a gaze which the poet must reproduce time and again, poses disturbing questions around the problem of witnessing and complicity. As Bellamy notes, ‘The autopsy report feels like vengeance; the detainee may be dead, but the state keeps observing him, stripping him of humanity until nothing remains but tissue pulp.’51 Halpern’s work brings into focus the hidden, raw wounds of a cultural complicity – of our witnessing and inaction in the face of ‘state-sponsored brutality’, recognizing that the sublime task of poetry lies in its capacity to transfigure this violence ‘into something akin to love’.52 To accomplish this, however, the poet must take immense risks, situating himself at the very periphery of what is poetically sayable: excepted, degraded and abjected for the sake of this love, his words must ‘turn […] the impenetrability of an autopsy report toward intelligible joy, its violence, a conjugal bower’.53 In short, then, the poet must risk a radical queer desire for the detainee, who, like the solider, must be rescued from his abstraction to waste: This is how the body of a soldier harbors my love for a detainee. The same river pours over the one without a drop of that love being subtracted from the other. You can see I’m aiming to preserve and nourish both young men under the double ray of tenderness and compassion, but these figures are one and the same while my

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yearning drowns his withdrawn form, my need to feel him close overwhelms the body’s inaccessibility, giving way to an equal but opposite excess.54

Under the state of exception, the figure of the detainee is divested of all rights, deprived of all value and reduced to pure waste. By mobilizing a desire that occupies a threshold – between life and death, eros and thanatos, creation and destruction – the poet is able to occupy an extreme space in which reality and fantasy both consume and produce one another in an attempt to revive and restore the human-made-waste. Such spaces of risk often seem to translate into the experience of reading and thinking through, or alongside, Halpern’s work. These poems aim to unsettle both psychologically and viscerally, testing tolerances and relentlessly interrogating the terrifyingly mutual implicitness of the most radical apparent contradictories: self-annihilating abjection and world-making desire. Displacing any easy sense of coherence and disrupting the reader’s comfortable sense of self-relation, the potential of this visceral risk lies in its capacity to generate a radical rift within the abstraction of the present. To resist abstraction, to insist on the visceral, however awkward, shameful or impossible such visceral affects may be, is also to insist on the political. It is precisely because ‘the absent detainee destabilizes all he comes in contact with’55 that Halpern’s Common Place is able to constitute an agonistic ground on which the two poles of contemporary risk – risk as abstraction and risk as it emerges in the vulnerable subject – can be effectively disputed.

The peripheries of risk: The vulnerable body and the state of exception In considering these visceral risks, the precise connection between vulnerability and risk, anticipated earlier but not fully explored, becomes a central concern. As suggested above, visceral risk is a localization at the level of the body of the vulnerable state of being at risk – of being subject to risk or the recipient of risk. In the context of the ascendency of risk as abstraction, visceral risks often remain unarticulated or ignored. It is taken for granted that we live in precarious times, but the sheer ubiquity of risk has the disturbing capacity to make itself into something unexceptional; the anticipated horizon of the everyday. In this context the contemporary manifestation of risk is comparable to what critics of neoliberalism have noted as the normalization of crisis.56 If we exist in a state of continual crisis, then crisis loses its capacity to mobilize us one way or another. We become increasingly passive, and this passivity has the effect of amplifying existing structures of power, providing these with the pretext for exercising their power in increasingly unaccountable ways in the name of this crisis – in the name of protecting a particular systemic state in a time of crisis. Yet in reality, against this horizon of crisis, risk takes on a very specific role or function. It becomes a means of locating crisis – of intensifying the situation in which a crisis is registered. In other words, in locating a particular risk, there is a move from a situation of general crisis to a situation of specific crisis that seems to call for or justify a particular action.

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Yet the location of risk often involves dislocation, the most notable example of which the Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, theorizes as the state of exception, establishing a legal framework through which a state could legally, and often indefinitely, suspend the ordinary application of law in response to the identification of a particular perceived threat or emergency.57 From this position, exceptional acts are habitually taken in the name of security to eliminate risks. Historically, this process has invariably involved the displacement and relocation of human beings identified as the source of risk: most infamously in the ghettos and extermination camps of Nazi Germany. Yet it is precisely the same logic at play in detention centres such as Abu Grahib or Guantanamo Bay, which operate legally under the exceptional measures of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, but extra-legally from the perspective of international law. These detention centres or camps are habitually located in peripheral spaces, outside of legitimate claims to sovereign territory, in order to circumvent, among other things, human rights legislation. Here, then, is the paradox on which the current argument pivots: the displacement of human beings to the periphery makes it possible for those wielding extra-legal power to treat these human beings as dehumanized bodies. As Agamben carefully traces, the location of the state of exception in the expression of sovereign power is very precisely tied to a biopolitics which exhibits itself most clearly in the capacity to reduce a human being to a bare life.58 Stated more directly, we encounter a brutal structural paradox: at the periphery, on the outside, it becomes infinitely possible to access the inside, the viscerality, of the human being. In what is undoubtedly one of the most extreme forms of risk management imaginable, the state of exception, the extra-legal periphery allows power to probe the recesses of being human, to exploit its weaknesses, its vulnerabilities – the soft spots of the body. Being outside is what provides access to the inside. In summation then, a visceral risk is a risk dislocated to the periphery, and by virtue of the state of exception59 relocated to particular bodies. In targeting the militant technocracies of the present, Beck has himself noted the similarities between risk and the exception in their shared capacity to suspend the prevailing rule of law: ‘[T]he expectation of catastrophe sets the political landscape in motion, opening up a power-play. New options appear on the table; risks can be exploited in order to gain power. This is the meeting point of the theory of risk society and Carl Schmitt’s reflections on state of emergency.’60 For, if it is true that in the contemporary world risk ‘is welcomed for its ability to suspend rules’,61 the consequences of this suspension invariably prove profoundly disturbing. Since risk is always asymmetrically distributed, and eminently redistributable, transposing the dubious financial logic of risk governance to the biopolitical sphere, it becomes all too easy to treat people and populations as mere abstractions. In such situations, the logic of risk is invariably used to justify the normalization of crisis and with it the exception: those who within the prevailing calculation of risk pose the greatest threat are themselves abstracted, excepted and physically displaced to the periphery. At the periphery the human is grasped in terms of its viscerality – almost coincidental to this risk calculation.

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Unremarkable: Radical risk at the apex of abstraction At the periphery, excluded from the protections afforded by law, it becomes clear precisely how the abstraction and displacement of risk become a source of great violence. Isolated, tortured and eventually driven to suicide, the body of Halpern’s detainee becomes a paradoxically visceral testament to the evisceration of our future under the totalizing regime of a calculus of risk. Deprived of rights and excepted from the application of law irrespective of guilt, the detainee becomes a carceral object, existentially impoverished. This point is clear, even from very start of the collection: A Square, A Cell, A Sentence: this blank resource whose waste excels, a darker place where bodies bend, ribs break in vaster banks, by blunting force, just say whose organ, say whose bone, drafting futures, time negated & not perceived as use, being raw, the stone, the teeth, what strange glamour, hangs like the sun, this deciduous mulch, his skin, the sky, the latch, the bone.62

What darker space are we occupying here? Is it the cell or the grave, or perhaps the recesses of the unconscious? Is there a difference? What we do discover is a place of torture and dismemberment where the ‘body bends’ and ‘ribs break’. Thus we gain access to the eviscerated world of the autopsy report – an abstracted account of statesanctioned violence; the forensic documentation of ‘times negated & not perceived as use’; a life reduced to ‘waste’, a ‘deciduous mulch’, a compost used to feed national fantasies of a militarized present and to justify the exceptional jurisdiction of a securitized state. What becomes apparent is the evisceration of the human subject alongside the abstraction of the human form: person made body, body made waste, waste made discourse, discourse put to ideological use. In countering the strategic use of this forensic discourse to gloss over this immeasurable violence – pushed to invisibility at the periphery, but unambiguous underpinning the state of exception – the poem takes on the burden of unwriting the abstract. Common Place takes shape as a transfigurative love poem: distorted, impossible, but opening a space where desire and shame, sexual pleasure and abjection, and, finally, life and death prove generatively interchangeable. Indeed, the question of interchangeability is central to the collection: generic, interchangeable, fungible, transferable or eminently substitutable are terms that Halpern uses repeatedly through Common Place to describe a mode of human being that has been utterly dismantled, turned inside-out, transformed into a broken network of viscera. This process of substitution and interchangeability is first registered in the redaction of the detainee’s name, marked in the text by a horizontal line between square brackets, [________]. Here then we find the apex of abstraction: a mere placeholder that is embedded in the text in multiple ways, but always allied to a diminishment of the visceral subject and an incapacity to signify. Reduced to a blank, the detainee is declared unremarkable, targeted, then erased by the calculus of risk: ‘The forehead reveals dark small raised lesions; see “Evidence of Injuries.” The eyes are unremarkable. The irises are

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brown. The cornea are slightly cloudy.’ A few lines later we find that ‘[t]he tongue is unremarkable. The lips are without evidence of injury. What would it be like to kiss them? Transcription of the autopsy report gives way to these fantasies of contact … The chest is unremarkable. But how can the chest be unremarkable? His chest can only be remarkable, inconceivable referent to which my love fails to cling;’ and finally, ‘[t]he external genitalia are those of a normal adult circumcised male, and unremarkable. I just lost my place in the document. I don’t want to continue doing this tonight, but I’ll keep it up, as if under duress’.63 That this declared unremarkableness must be made remarkable requires it to become the object of near-religious devotion for the poet, the object of his ‘devotional kink’, as we have seen, for ‘[e]ach of these [abstracted characteristics declared unremarkable] deserves elaboration, friction, love’.64 The insistence on the torturous labour of tracing the ‘unremarkable’ is of particular significance, for what we encounter in this autopsy report, as already intimated, is, finally, the singularity of a subject made absolutely generic, absolutely interchangeable. The unremarkable is then what is unworthy of further commentary, unworthy of a second look. And it is precisely because this body is declared unremarkable, that it demands remark, demands our attention – an attention that through the incisive forensics of Halpern’s voice becomes scrutiny, giving a spectral form to the detainee’s lost viscerality. The more difficult feat of reanimating this loss, of accomplishing a task of public mourning, leads the poet to an impossible desire – indeed a desire for the impossible – which is precisely the inalienable desirability of every human life. In this process of poetic generativity, the text of the report in which ‘the detainee wavers between a vaguely whole figure of fantasy and a nightmare of fragments’65 itself acquires substantial agency. As the report is revisited, subjected to explicit readings, the object of so many quasi-pornographic revivifications through scrutiny, the report and its detainee themselves become, in a sense, capable of looking back – that is, of scrutinizing the poet and the reader – and thus of a species of agency that produces effects in the world. ‘The romance of Common Place is not a simple relationship of Halpern using a pornographic gaze to dominate and use this other, but the other’s refusal to be a compliant subject.’66 Thus we should read this field of risk as a field of ambiguous exchange, where the body at risk and the risk of the poet are seen as confluent. Acutely aware of the impossibility of meaningfully equating the abstraction of language and the viscerality of the body, Halpern is driven to explore an affective zone where the two are reciprocal. It is the intensity of desire that seems to promise the means of exceeding this broken economy, reaching towards a visceral desire for the visceral itself as a path to a weak redemption of sorts. In Halpern’s own words, Once his body is admitted and a relation felt, narrative returns like the repressed, which had been there all along, spilling over the structure of my sentence, awaiting its own improper content. Plastic flexi-cuffs around his hands and a ligature said to be identical to the elastic band of his army-issued briefs, neutered on contact with my syntax, turning that part of him that has no name, the part to which my happiness clings, into the most fungible of things, his ‘unremarkable genitalia’.

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Still, I can run my tongue along their edge, forcing arousal while reading this report where the wrongness of my object-choice feels unavoidable … I submit to what I can’t master and spread my legs for his dreamy cock … There will always be someone who falls outside the general equality, being unimaginable from inside the frame.67

Empathy The records redacted, the concrete incidents to which they refer rendered vague and fugitive, the work of the poet becomes one of bearing an impossible witness to that which evades the frame. The autopsy report provides only an oblique inventory of the prolonged torture and humiliation that the detainee must have endured – exceptional acts rendered unremarkable under the securitized gaze of the state of exception. The question that haunts Halpern is how it might be possible to retrieve even the trace of value from such encompassing waste, particularly when the detainee has been made to die at least two deaths: the physical death of his alleged suicide and the social death of his solitary confinement. How might it be possible to restore to the detainee some sort life from the posthumous violence of an autopsy report?68 To understand Halpern’s response, and the extent of its risk, it is worth recalling a central and compelling point argued by Eleni Stecopoulos in her book Visceral Poetics: that language is not only a natural phenomenon, but a visceral phenomenon – of body, breath, voice, cavity: a system of resonances in visceral spaces that are reproduced in our systems of signification. Stecopoulos is particularly interested in the ways in which the body becomes multiply signified by language, at once fragmented and potentially reconstituted. The significance of poiesis and poetry in this process is considerable. Indeed, Stecopoulos offers a remarkable series of insights relating to the idea of poetic language as a kind of homeopathic cure. This will not happen at the level of simple cognition though, but rather by recognizing that language is always imbricated in the divisions of our body from itself, linking our idiolect or private language to our idiopathy or private symptom.69 In Stecopoulos’s estimation, a ‘visceral poetics is always a negotiation of wholes and fragments, pressures and voids, that corresponds for me not to triumph over the oppression of signification, but to a macaronic, ethnographic poetics endlessly seeking out language that could embody it as indeed all and nothing at once’.70 It is by crossing a private idiolect of desire with the public discourse of the detainee’s radical undesirability that the hollowed-out signifiers of the autopsy report are reinjected with vigour. The poetry that emerges expresses what we might call an erotic thanatography – a literary language that is charged with the potential to write death back to life through the sublime transfiguration of absence and waste into a surfeit of value. Life, for Halpern, is both addressee and destination, and in this light both Music for Porn and Common Place must be read as tracts against death and as rituals of reanimation. The radical risk that Halpern takes lies in his refusal to accept the idea that the detainee has, in fact, been reduced to what Agamben would call a bare life, insisting instead on a weak potential for transfiguration glowing even in the most

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forbidden recesses of the abstracted body. For the parts of the autopsy, like the parts of the life and death narrative for which it is a substitute, never fully add up; and it is the generative power of the poem that promises to overcome the reduction of the body to a mere equation in a larger calculus of risk. In harnessing sexual desire to drive this erotic thanatography, Halpern seeks to counter the clinical thanatography of the autopsy report – once again to make remarkable what has been rendered unremarkable. What is witnessed here is nothing less than a reclamation of the exception. Where the state of exception constitutes the ground on which the most fundamental rights of the subject are completely usurped, displaced by a calculus of extreme risk management, here the detainee as exceptional figure is reinvested with a problematic, but still notable, agency. In this light, what Halpern risks is something profound. By relentlessly advocating for the right to desirability of even the most undesirable subjects we discover not an abstracted advocacy for universal human rights, but a visceral reassertion of these rights on the ground. This radical desirability discovers a forceful corollary in what Butler recognizes in terms of grievability: ‘Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?’71 Inserting desirability as a third term in this equation is a means of acknowledging the persistence of the body under the contemporary regimes of abstraction, or what we might otherwise call contemporary risk. The right to be grieved and the right to be desired are finally the visceral expression of the right to be loved. So fundamental are these to the human condition that deprived of these rights, the vulnerable subject becomes little more than an abstract idea.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 1999), 134. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 135–6. See also, Roy Boyne, Risk (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003), 3–7; Deborah Lupton, Risk (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 5–8. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Los Angeles and London: Sage, 1992), 33. This conception of risk is in the first instance predicated on the identification of exponential growth as the governing logic of capitalism, and in particular of the late capitalism that Beck places at the heart of his conception of the risk society. No longer able to extract sufficient capital from either natural resources or labour to sustain the imperative for high rates of growth, the logic of capitalism seeks a higher and more comprehensive form of abstraction, making risk itself the most prevalent form of capital (ibid., 40). On the historic antecedents of the conception of growth that informs capitalism, see Florian Shui, Austerity: The Great Failure (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 15, 47–9.

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8 9

10 11 12 13 14

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On the question of the logic of the market as a neoliberal quasi-religion, see Joshua Ramey, Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 1–3, 53–62. Martha Albertson Fineman’s account of the complexity of the vulnerable subject, and the demand on state institutions made by the vulnerable subject, is instructive in this regard. See Martha Albertson Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 20.1 (2008): 8–11 (1–24). Equally significant is the connection between vulnerability and the discourse of intersectionality, which aims at exposing and challenging institutionalized vulnerabilities that reflect larger social, political and economic inequalities at a structural level. See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2016), 17–19. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA and London: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22. See, for example, Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 1999); William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); and Ramey, Politics of Divination. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Giorgio Agamben, 8–9; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 69. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 20. See also Estelle Ferrarese, ‘Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World As It Is?’, Critical Horizons, 17.2 (2016): 152–4 (149–59). According to Beck, ‘while in classical industrial society the “logic” of wealth production dominates the “logic” of risk production, in the risk society this relationship is reversed’ (Beck, Risk Society, 12). For an overview on some of the key issues in the politics of the displacement and distribution of risk, see Iain Wilkinson, Risk, Vulnerability and Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 90–6. For an incisive account of disposability as a paradigm for understanding the relation between neoliberalism, violence and human life, see the second chapter of Brad Evans and Henry Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015). According to Lash, where Beck’s and Gidden’s realist conception of risk society rests too heavily on a broadly liberal conception of risk that manifests primarily through its increased rationalization and institutionalization (albeit both are critical of this position), the conservative constructivist position advanced by Douglas and Wildavksy asserts a sectarian understanding of risk that, far from being a potentially universalizable condition arising from an unavoidable relation to an unknown future, is regarded as a localizable threat posed by particular elements of society that disrupt the prevailing socio-economic order (Scott Lash, ‘Risk Culture,’ Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck and Joost van Loon, eds., The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (London: Sage, 2000), 47–62). It should be noted, however, that Lash’s essay was written in the late 1990s, a period during which the prevailing cultural paradigm was broadly postmodern, many of the assumptions of which have been subsequently questioned. Beck, however, disputes this claim, questioning Lash’s insistence on a realist-constructivist division in risk thinking, affirming instead a pragmatism that navigates between the two (Beck, World Risk Society, 134–6, 139–40).

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16 Lash, ‘Risk Culture’, 49. 17 Ibid., 50–2. In a move that predates and predicts its subsequent paradigmicity, Lash closely connects the logic that governs the identification and management of risks with neoliberal economic ideology and its figure par excellence, the economic subject, or what Foucault theorizes as homo economicus (Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchill (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2008), 268–71). 18 Jean- François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachael Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 99. 19 Ibid., 84. 20 In Kant’s terms: ‘Hence if in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls for our strength’. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), 121. 21 Lash, ‘Risk Culture’, 57. 22 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 101. 23 See ibid., 87–8. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 20. 25 Ibid., 18–19. 26 Ibid., 23. 27 Although there are many competing contemporary definitions of the event, what is common to all of these is a recognition that events are generative (productive of something new) in being disruptive (being a rupture of the status quo, from within or without) and that this disruption realigns the elements (Badiou) or components (Deleuze) of the status quo in order to produce this something new. This general architecture of the event is given a clear articulation in the opening of Žižek’s short book, Event. See Slavoj Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey through A Concept (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014). 28 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 28. 29 There might be a considerable number of such conceptual typologies. For the purpose of the present it suffices to focus on three principal expressions of risk as a concept: existential risk, which might otherwise be called fragility; the state of being at risk, which might otherwise be called vulnerability or precariousness; and the more colloquial sense of risk as a response to uncertainty. The case advanced in this chapter is that what appear to be three discrete senses are in practice imbricated at all levels, and hence the terminological slippage, rather than being a sign of conceptual inaccuracy is, in fact, the mark of a conceptual dynamism. 30 For Butler the question of legibility and illegibility is a measure of what does or does not have the status of reality as it is framed by those in power (Judith Butler, Frames of War (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 83). Illegibility in this context therefore indicates those political realities which are, on account of their vulnerability, regarded, in effect, as inferior or less real. 31 For differing views on the implications of algorithmic thinking to the contemporary constitution of the subject, see Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 95–6, 109–10); Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 5–8. 32 Sianne Ngai, ‘Visceral Abstraction’, GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 21.1 (2015): 33 (33–63).

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33 Halpern, Music for Porn, 11. The term is used repeatedly in both Music for Porn and Common Place. 34 Ngai, ‘Visceral Abstraction’, 36. 35 Halpern, Music for Porn, 80. 36 Ibid., 83. The sequence in Music for Porn progresses from ‘addressed the solider,’ through ‘undressed the solider’ and ‘caressed the solider,’ to ‘seduced the solider’ and ‘embarrassed our meat man’ (ibid., 76–83). 37 Halpern, Music for Porn, 83. 38 Ibid., 80. 39 Ibid., 48–9. 40 Ibid., 53. 41 Beck, World Risk Society, 135. 42 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1977), 3–8. 43 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 113. 44 Achille Mbembe, ‘Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality’, Franklin Humanities Center, Duke University, Duke Humanities Centre, 27 April 2016. Lecture. 45 Ibid. 46 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 113. 47 See Marc Botha, ‘Precarious Present, Fragile Futures: Literature and Uncertainty in the Early Twenty-First Century’, English Academy Review, 31.2 (2014): 14–16 (1–19). 48 The paradigmatic instance of the camp, in this sense, is the extermination camp of Nazi Germany, although Agamben traces its origins as well as its subsequent manifestations (Homo Sacer, 166–72). 49 Ibid., 166. 50 As Dodie Bellamy notes in a review of Common Place, ‘Is this text merely another white colonization of the suffering of a subaltern other? … Could he possibly get away with this? Of course he doesn’t get away with it. The project from the beginning is foreclosed. Much of the energy of the text arises from Halpern’s feverish grappling with his moral stance – and what ultimately redeems the book are its shifting layers of resistance and failure’ (Dodie Bellamy, ‘Adjustment Disorder: On Reading Rob Halpern’s Common Place’, The Fanzine, 7 September 2015, accessed on 10 July 2020, http://thefanzine.com/adjustment-disorder-on-reading-rob-halperns-commonplace/). 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Halpern, Common Place, 80. 54 Ibid., 79. 55 Bellamy, ‘Adjustment Disorder’. 56 See, most famously, Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London and New York: Penguin, 2008). 57 ‘The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of selfpreservation, as one would say’. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985), 12; see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2005), 1–24. 58 ‘The inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’ (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6; author’s italics).

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59 Or a similar suspension of the social laws or norms that have as their pretext (if not always their practice) the protection of the vulnerable and the pursuit of equality. 60 Ulrich Beck, German Europe (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 26. 61 Bruce Robbins, ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Ulrich Beck’s “German Europe”’. Los Angeles Review of Books, 18 July 2013, accessed on 20 July 2020, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-limits-of-cosmopolitanism-ulrich-becks-germaneurope/ 62 Halpern, Common Place, 11. 63 Ibid., 25–6. 64 Ibid., 27. 65 Bellamy, ‘Adjustment Disorder’. 66 Ibid. 67 Halpern, Common Place, 69. 68 This is particularly complex question in that the detainee is also the exemplary figure on which the weight of accountability for global terrorism is projected. 69 See Eleni Stecopoulos, Visceral Poetics (Berkeley, ON: Contemporary Practice, 2016), v–vii. 70 Ibid., 9. 71 Butler, Precarious Life, xiv–xv. Although the connection between desirability and grievability is seldom made explicit in Butler’s work (see Precarious Life, 20 and Frames of War, 183–4 as notable exceptions), they are in fact mutually implicit in her conception of the vulnerable subject which is grounded, if not limited, by the fact of its embodiment (its viscerality).

26

Hope Caroline Edwards

When activists heeded the call from Adbusters magazine to show up at Wall Street’s Liberty Square in September 2011 and to ‘bring a tent’, they did more than simply protest the city’s corporate interests. The occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, which rapidly spread to over 1,500 cities worldwide, sparked a global movement as ambiguous as it was hopeful. Three years after the onset of the global financial crisis, and in the wake of popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, something fundamental had shifted in the popular consciousness. What began as just another well-meaning leftist act of squatting rapidly accelerated into a national howl of rage directed against rising inequality, the foreclosure of homes and collapse of America’s middle class, increasing un- and under-employment, and the apparent immunity of multinational corporations from the obligation to provide reparations for their role in causing the financial crisis. Almost seven years later, we now look back at the cycle of struggles that spread around the world towards the end of 2011 in the knowledge that the movement failed to achieve its material aims. But its lasting symbolic achievement is unquestionable: hope was rekindled among campaigners not just for social justice but for many ordinary people who felt themselves excluded from politics. Like the inscription on the lofty arch of Hell’s portal in Dante’s Inferno, the abandonment of hope that had characterized the political apathy of triumphant globalization during the 1990s and early 2000s unexpectedly subsided, to be replaced with a reanimated sense of political optimism borne out of necessity.

Hope with/without optimism? In Dante’s Purgatorio hope, like charity and faith, is the highest of the theological virtues, ascribed by Aristotle and Aquinas to the sphere of rational human action inspired by the endless possibilities of divine love.1 This combination of virtue ethics with a Christian belief in the highest good (summum bonum) grounds the act of hoping within a rationalist framework: an instantiation of the future-oriented desire for something better, something lacking in the present time. As Terry Eagleton writes in Hope without Optimism, ‘one would prefer not to have to hope, since the need to do so is a sign that the unpalatable has already happened’.2 In its will to wrest a better

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futurity into the present and, in so doing, enact social and political change, hope can be seen as a category of desire: a human emotion, but one that is formed and disciplined through a process of learning; that articulates the imagination’s propensity for visualizing alternatives to the present status quo and participates in the collective activity of utopian dreaming. But is it the same thing as optimism? Optimists, Eagleton reasons, don’t require hope since their belief in progress and the inevitability of their continuing good fortune tends to align them with ruling-class ideology.3 Even if their optimism concedes that things can be improved and that the present is lacking in some way, the optimist is defined by a cheery fatalism, just as the pessimist can proffer no supporting evidence for the view that things will get worse, or continue to be bad, other than foreboding gut feeling. Lynne Segal offers a slightly different approach to the question of hope’s relationship to optimism. Like Eagleton, she proposes that hope should be learned, shared and nurtured which, as she suggests in Radical Happiness, requires ‘paying attention to any and all sites of resistance and alternative practices whenever they arise’.4 However, for Segal, hope can become aligned with optimism to produce ‘joyful moments of collective optimism, elation and [a] sense of agency’.5 Segal’s analysis is framed through her own experiences as a feminist activist who came of age, politically speaking, in the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. ‘The lasting significance of those years’, she writes, helped ‘many an ageing feminist keep a certain political optimism alive, whatever gloom we may feel about the present. Sharing those stories still hurls us back to the hopes of that time’.6 Writing in 2017, Segal identifies an interesting correspondence between the euphoric political energy of those mythologized soixantehuitard years and recent events since the Occupy protests in 2011. Informed by the lessons learned by late 1990s activist networks, the anti-corporate, anti-globalization movement became catalysed after 2008 when austerity measures in the UK and Europe led to social unrest, police brutality, riots and protests. And although, as Segal observes, ‘we know today that none of these disparate upsurges of resistance [in Greece, across Europe, in Syria, the Middle East and North America] have achieved their goals’,7 yet something fundamental has changed in contemporary politics. In the fragmented examples of disparate forms of grassroots community organizing – from anti-consumer collectives and alternative trading schemes, SlutWalks, trans-activism and contemporary squatting movements, to communal gardens set up in abandoned sites in New York, the Sisters Uncut bridge blocks across the UK in 2016, growing support for Green Party politics and the creativity of protestors visible in homemade banners – Segal locates a reinvigorated sense of joy. This joy is collective and expresses solidarity; like Aristotelian happiness (or eudaimonia), it is ‘not so much an emotion, a psychic state or inner disposition, but rather a way of acting in the world, a form of human flourishing’.8 Drawing on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets, Segal offers a historical overview of the decline of communal joy as European capitalism secured its cultural corollary in the bourgeois values of self-restraint, sobriety and a disciplined work ethic. This amounted to the ideological defeat of older forms of medieval festivity, with their pagan and folk origins, upending of social hierarchies, sanctioned laughter and ridiculing of power, and their carnivalesque atmosphere of frenetic, hedonistic possibility. Whether or not these earlier festivals could be

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described as a foretaste of, or preparation for, social unrest and revolutionary struggle – as Mikhail Bakhtin argues in Rabelais and His World – is less important for Segal than their function as interruptions into the grind of daily work and ‘joyful affirmation of collective existence’.9 In addition to the appeal of its boisterous profanity, the medieval festival is important to Marxist scholars such as Bakhtin for another significant reason: it represents a residual form of pre-capitalist temporality. In a section of The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2 entitled ‘Outlines of a Better World’, the German utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch similarly considers the Dionysian potential of public festivities and carnivals: from the amphitheatre in antiquity, or the mystery stage in the Middle Ages, to medieval parades, carnivals and church festivals. For Bloch, these festivals translate pleasure from the realm of individualistic gratification to the public arena, releasing, in the performative enactment of social disruption, a ‘pre-appearance’ or anticipatory consciousness (Vorschein) of utopian possibility. ‘This holiday world’, he writes, ‘celebrates joys for which in fact there becomes real occasion only later, i.e. liberation of the people is anticipated. Hence the easy transition from the dance around the linden tree to that around the liberty tree of the French Revolution.’10 These pre-capitalist rites of celebration and festival therefore go beyond the holiday’s function of enabling the worker to return to work re-energized and rested, capable of maintaining his machinic levels of productivity. Although the Protestant work ethic has diminished the jubilance of public holidays, there still lives on even in the bourgeois holiday the ghostly traces of a fuller sense of non-alienated life – the ‘real’ time of kairos perforating capitalism’s ceaseless self-reproduction through disciplined clock-time, or chronos, to reveal ‘halfsheltered spots’11 that speak of another time altogether. In what follows, I trace the contours of Bloch’s utopian philosophy of hope to open up some provocative questions for a politics of hoping in our contemporary political climate. Contra Eagleton, who assumes that the principle of hope is, however indefeasible, ‘without reason’,12 I suggest that Bloch’s writings emerge from a set of philosophical and historical contexts in which a turn towards hope is perhaps one of the most rational undertakings. Engaging with Bloch’s ideas clarifies the relationship between hope and temporality. It is not sufficient simply to say that hope is futureoriented; rather, as Bloch’s oeuvre teaches us, the hoped-for futurity is an ontological component of our experience in the present, which contains residual strands of past hopes, still waiting to be redeemed, as well as future-glancing anticipatory consciousness. In speaking of hope as an ontology I am signalling the presence of something that pulsates between presence and absence; that understands being to be, inescapably, an ongoing process of becoming – a process in which hope plays as vital a role as any other human emotion.

From the reality principle to the hope principle Whilst Ernst Bloch shares with Lynne Segal an interest in the possibilities of collective eudaimonia released through public gatherings for the purpose of festivity, protest or celebration, his ideas are worth returning to in our present historical moment for

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hope, rather as Nietzsche is without question the philosopher of power and Heidegger beyond doubt the philosopher of Being.’13 Perhaps the most overlooked of all the Western Marxists, Bloch’s immense philosophical oeuvre has been largely ignored in Anglophone criticism (and, to an extent, also in German scholarship) outside of the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies. There are some obvious reasons for this omission, including the impenetrability of much of his knotted, neologism-laden prose; the encyclopaedic array of references and obdurate refusal to offer coherent academic analysis; the dubiousness of his political beliefs (he publicly defended the Moscow Show Trials);14 and also the fact that many of his texts have yet to be translated into English. Bloch’s early engagement with Expressionism, most clearly seen in his first published text, Spirit of Utopia [Geist der Utopie] (1918), left an indelible mark on his writing style, manifesting in aphoristic fragmentation and messianic, even mysticist, passages of veering incantatory prose that can baffle the uninitiated. And yet Bloch’s work offers rich and productive insights for our understanding of hope – as a rational, political and collective act, a utopian practice of anticipation grounded in material conditions that cannot be laughed off as speculative, unfeasible or as pipedream. As Theodor Adorno observed in a public discussion with Bloch in 1964, The Spirit of Utopia was ‘responsible for restoring honor to the word “utopia”’.15 In redeeming utopia as a hopeful, and not a pejorative, concept, Bloch’s philosophy built a unique framework that draws on an encyclopaedic array of sources across innumerable philosophical and cultural fields, including Marxism, Jewish messianism, phenomenology, Classicism, Gnosticism and Expressionism. Bloch’s three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope [Das Prinzip Hoffnung] (1954–9), takes psychoanalysis to task early on in Volume 1 for the retrogressive temporal orientation of the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious, he writes, ‘is not a newly dawning consciousness with new content but an old one with old content that has merely sunk below the threshold’.16 Psychoanalysis’s preoccupation with childhood trauma and its iterated repression throughout adult life does not allow, Bloch reasons, for any sense of anticipation. This he names the Not-Yet-Conscious (Noch-nicht-bewusst), a ‘mode of consciousness of something coming closer’,17 which dawns from futurity and travels backwards into the present time. Freud’s repressive reality principle is, at a stroke, replaced with the hope principle: a striking ontology of utopian anticipation that sifts through the Schichten (layers) of consciousness to uncover the irrepressible power of dreaming that animates human subjectivity. As ‘the psychological birthplace of the New’,18 the Not-Yet-Conscious occupies a central role in Bloch’s utopian philosophy, articulating things strongly felt but only dimly perceived as if, as 1 Corinthians 13 describes, through a glass darkly. Bloch employed the poetic image of darkness, which he refers to as ‘the darkness of the lived moment’,19 to describe the unknowability of our experience of the present, understood as a gelid temporal realm of possibility with an inescapably polychronous composition: strands of the past remain alive within the fluidity of our present, as well as futural Vorschein. Bloch’s language here is notable for its use of negation. Utopia, as he describes it by quoting his friend Bertolt Brecht, expresses the recognition that ‘something’s missing’.20 To borrow from Ernesto Laclau’s more recent terminology of the universal, we might describe it as the ‘missing fullness’

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to which the particularity responds – at once a failed actualization and yet, in its failure, also simultaneously positing the possibility of such an actualization.21 Bloch’s descriptions of utopian hope thus rely on a negative ontology of absence, darkness, blindness and lack: in the obscurity of the present moment, we can only gesture towards those antonyms that would denote its full presence, lightness and clarity. The present is thus distinguished by its inscrutable character; or what we might, in more Biblical terms, consider to be its apophatic ‘not-knowing’.22 While Bloch refers to this as the ‘darkness of the lived moment’, the metaphor of darkness should not be taken to mean that the present is any less replete with utopian possibility. Bloch similarly describes the Messiah as the ‘darkness of the lived God’ (Shekinah) and hope as ‘the darkness itself ’.23 The ‘darkness of the lived moment’ thus represents the essential mystery with which each lived moment confronts us, its unknowability and multi-temporal suffusion of various futural and past utopian simultaneities. As Wayne Hudson reminds us, Bloch’s conception of a blind spot in our vision of the present is distinctly indebted to Schelling’s aesthetic philosophy: We do not see the moment in which we live: there is an invisibility at the heart of our existence. The moment is lived (gelebt), but not experienced (erlebt). It is ‘empty’, ‘dark’, ‘unmediated’, and only experienced before or after it has passed, especially in rare, short-lived experiences of an anticipatory ‘still’, in which a vertical lightning effect falls on the unmediated content of the moment, and makes it seem ‘almost mediated’.24

The moment, according to this formulation, is dark and lived but not understood or illuminated. In this sense, Bloch rejects the model of time-as-flow developed by William James and Henri Bergson, revisiting Plato to conceive of time as a severalized mass of discrete ‘now’ moments.25 This understanding of the present as the ‘darkness of the lived moment’ bears an interesting correspondence with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s model of historical images. Appearing at moments of crisis and danger with the shock of a camera flash or atomic explosion, sundering reality for an impossibly fleeting moment like a lightning flash whose illuminating brilliance recalls the dream of Enlightenment progress, and then disappearing just as abruptly as it arrived, this shared conceptualization of the micrological fragments of authentic truth that Benjamin and Adorno developed owes much to the fragmentary method of Surrealist painting and Soviet montage editing techniques in cinematic narratives.26 In this formulation, the present moment or ‘now’ is nonidentical with itself. The momentary completion of the ‘now’ (its movement from negativity to positivity) thus only appears in the cast of a utopian light, which returns us to the dual chronology of Bloch’s concept of the radically unprefigurable Novum. Bloch’s mature utopian philosophy in The Principle of Hope should be read comparatively with his early Expressionist text, Spirit of Utopia, where Bloch’s secularized understanding of messianic anticipation profoundly shapes his reading of hope. This messianic anticipation needs to be connected to concrete political events as he describes in the concept of ‘the leap’: what he calls in The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, a ‘dialectally mediated sudden change’.27 Bloch’s notion of ‘the leap’ (der Sprung) brings

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together the qualities of interruption accorded to the Christian event of a miracle. Prior to its degeneration into ‘banal occultism’, Bloch writes, the miracle was understood in scholasticism to have ‘dwelt at the break-point of the natural world, at a point where a visible piece of the visible world visibly cracks’.28 Bloch’s argument is that the psychic structure of concepts central to religious mysticism – such as the leap and the miracle – retains a compelling expression of the ‘faith of hope’ which cannot be discredited when it appears in concrete utopian events.29 This is an important point and signals one of Bloch’s most influential ideas: the distinction between ‘abstract’ utopian dreaming and ‘concrete’ utopian praxis.30 If abstract utopianism names the universal human condition of hoping for, or fantasizing about a better life, then concrete utopianism is the process of learning how to instantiate such dreams through collective struggle. Both are necessary to Bloch’s utopian philosophy, and his refusal to repudiate our abstract utopian dreams indicates a commitment to uncovering the ‘gold-bearing’ utopian kernel even among the ‘rubble’ of escapist daydreaming.31 Once it has been reformulated within a secular historical context, the ‘leap’ thus articulates a moment in which that other world of utopian longing arrives in the form of a ‘lightning flash of a future knowledge striking unerringly into our darkness’.32 This ‘sudden flashing’ or ‘all-illuminating suddenness’ derives its revelatory character from the secularization of Parousia into what Bloch calls ‘process-figures’ or ‘tension-forms’.33 By stripping away the eschatological destination of utopian desire, Bloch reveals the latent content of reality understood as an unfinished process. This processual philosophy has finally become receptive to the pre-appearance of the utopian, hoped-for future, or what Bloch calls the ‘real world of hope itself ’.34

Radical atheism: Secularizing religious hope Our task of building hope in the contemporary moment might be seen, then, as requiring the recovery of an older sense of shared feeling, of learning to delight in each other’s presence, and peeling back the immiserating strictures of competitive individualism that neoliberal self-fashioning and consumerism impose on us. As Segal reminds us, this requires ‘find[ing] an adequate language of joy’.35 This task is more pronounced in a time of secular disenchantment since it necessitates the recovery of an older collective vocabulary that can articulate gratitude, give voice to the sense of being part of something greater than oneself and stretch religious and secular vernaculars into conjugation. But perhaps, as Segal indicates, we need not discriminate between the two in such strict terms. ‘If we are to reframe rather than ignore some of the communal strengths of religion’, she notes, we might be able ‘to learn something from those versed in the rhetoric of religion and the sacred’.36 Segal’s plea to reframe religious language, itself a Blochian project of repurposing or umfunktionieren, responds to more than a decade of discourse around post-secularism advocated by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, Harold Bloom, Cornell West, Richard Rorty and Hent de Vries. It signals a broader backlash against Enlightenment rationality, with its linear telos of conquest and modernization, and a pluralizing of conceptual frames through which to understand the staggering complexities of today’s

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imagined communities – beyond the static nation-state, participating in multiple digital publics and finding new ways of connecting identity with religious heritages. Critical theory is wary of religious discourse; it has not forgotten Marx’s analysis of ‘the opium of the people’ in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844). Here, Marx locates in religious institutions an inverted world of transcendental stasis that masks real, historical suffering and its contingent political causes through a narrative of glorified divine suffering. What is needed, then, is a sober-eyed analysis that can excavate the utopian impulse in religious hope, whilst insisting on the centrality of human action in political struggle. This is something that Ernst Bloch attempts in his theory of radical atheism. In Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of Exodus and the Kingdom (1968),37 Bloch teases out an anthropocentric reading of the Bible’s revolutionary impulses: what he calls its ‘underground’ influences, including apocrypha, Gnosticism, pagan astral myths and theosophical works. Engaging with Jürgen Moltmann’s study of Christian eschatology in Theology of Hope (1965),38 Bloch develops a radically atheist reinterpretation of the Biblical texts, situated alongside their historical contexts as well as divergent, contradictory exegetical frameworks. Traditional interpretation, he argues, has omitted the Bible’s seditious ‘slave-talk’,39 which includes what Bloch identifies as revolutionary historical struggles. In the people’s resistance to an authoritarian Yahweh in Exodus and Job, we can discern a series of proto-communist movements illustrated, for example, by ‘the demand for the common enjoyment of produce, for a solemn rest for the land, and from labor, and for the re-alignment of private ownership every seven and every fifty years’.40 By historicizing the Bible, Bloch argues, we can differentiate between two philosophical influences that are in tension with one another in scripture: first, a conservative strain whose conceptual systems derive from Greek thought (with its emphasis on anamnesis, or remembering the past) and, second, an apocalyptic strain which allows for an imagination of futurity as something utterly other, different, and yet-to-bedetermined. It is important here to differentiate between eschatology and messianism if we are to construct a viable conception of philosophical hope. As Giorgio Agamben observes: ‘The most insidious misunderstanding of the messianic announcement does not consist in mistaking it for prophecy, which is turned toward the future, but for apocalypse, which contemplates the end of time … [T]he messianic is not the end of time, but the time of the end.’41 Agamben’s borrowing of Gianni Carchia’s ‘time of the end’ – which Agamben reformulates as ‘the time that remains between time and its end’42 – insists on repositioning messianism as a political movement in contradistinction to eschatology. Jürgen Moltmann similarly denudes the term eschatology, arguing that its derivation from the Greek logos fixes it to a present (conservative) reality and prevents eschatological thinking from expressing (radical) futurity.43 Bloch, however, in characteristic neologistic fashion, sees no problem with reformulating eschatology into what he calls the ‘eschatology of truth’.44 This qualitative distinction allows for an understanding of eschatology as the progressive activity of men and women, guided by utopian images of secularized religious hope that oppose authoritarian regimes: stretching from the Biblical narratives of resistance to a draconian Yahweh in Exodus or Job, right through to the opposition of the peasantry or youth to

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capitalist modernization and rising fascism in the 1920s and 1930s Germany of Bloch’s experience. Bloch’s atheism thus uncovers the collective utopian desire for a concrete enactment of the new earth within, and not beyond, this world. This is crucial to deconstructing what he terms the repressive ‘Lord-God hypostasis’ in which Christianity conceals man’s alienation and supplants the revolutionary-historical stories of deliverance from Egypt with the creation myth and its ‘fool’s paradise’ of Heaven.45 Anticipating Jacques Derrida’s own reformulation of messianic hope as concrete political will in Specters of Marx – which he terms the ‘messianic without messianism’46 – Bloch defends the ‘transcendere without transcendence’: those radically atheist, utopian hopes that endure after ‘the fool’s paradise of the Other-world, has been burnt away to ashes’.47 Messianism, as he writes, ‘is the burning mystery of all revolutionary, all fulfilled enlightenment … [M]an must be able to see the Kingdom of heavenly freedom as his geo-graphical Utopia too. Atheism is the presupposition of any concrete Utopia, but concrete Utopia is also the remorseless consequence of atheism’.48 Bloch’s contribution here to a new concept of Marxist atheism (or ‘radical atheism’) insists that we should not negate religion’s usefulness for a utopian philosophy since religious expression has much to teach us about the function of hope in our everyday lives. Rather, we should make room in our theoretical and practical labours for what he calls ‘heretical hope, now set on human feet’.49 In this sense Bloch is a vital, yet overlooked, figure in contemporary debates concerning the role that messianic thinking has to play in political philosophy. More specifically, Bloch’s radical atheism offers us a compelling account of the way in which a messianic politics might be reformulated via a historicization of Biblical texts, a political reading of the foundational ur-narratives of oppression and self-government to be discerned in the Exodus myth, and a recasting of the role of nature in pagan and cosmic religions. Above all, Atheism in Christianity fleshes out that vital distinction to be made, as in Agamben’s formulation, between the end of time and the time of the end. In offering a lively account of the way in which the time of the end animates our collective dreams and social projects, Bloch thus illustrates how a processual reading of time can uncover the active currents of past hopes and futural anticipations which must be central to any politics of time.

Explosive hope or Messianic interruption The theological implications of utopian temporality are crucial to understanding Bloch’s immense philosophical recalibration of hope. His late concept of the ‘dialectical leap into the New’ thus builds on his life-long interest in Judaeo-Christian theosophical categories. This is developed in his early Expressionist text, Spirit of Utopia. In a chapter entitled ‘Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse’, Bloch describes his historicaltheological analysis as ‘a restless mobilisation, the site of true socialist ideology, the site of the plan for a great campaign by civilization and by culture … guided by the conscience of the Kingdom’.50 From the static Christian utopia of the Kingdom of Christ – which he memorably refers to as the ‘boredom of a permanent Sunday’ in Heritage of Our Times51 – Bloch distils a dynamic model of concrete utopian longing,

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that refuses to relegate agency to any heavenly hereafter. This he calls ‘explosive hope’;52 the ebullience of this detonative category of hope lies in the correspondence it establishes between the powerful utopian images of religious longing and the human emotional investment in the ‘awesome dimensions’ of such divine iconography. Bloch’s de-sacralizing of the utopian category of the Kingdom thus attests to his insistence that religion remains a viable and fundamental category of human experience and utopian anticipatory consciousness, provided that it is understood as dependent upon the collective actions of human beings working together in this world. ‘No social order’, he argues, ‘can do without this final link in the correlative series between the We and the final problem of the What For’.53 Religion, then, offers Bloch a rich terrain of emotional, imaginary and utopian landmarks that mobilize individual and collective longing into a powerful enactment of hope. Marxism and religion, writes Bloch, should be ‘united in the will to the Kingdom’, whose messianic prophecies represent ‘the act of awakening in totality’.54 This act of awakening reveals the eschatological implications of Bloch’s category of the Novum. As Jürgen Moltmann notes, it is an idea that dominates the New Testament and gives voice to a specific form of prophecy: at once anticipating a new Jerusalem that renews the past and restores what has been lost to the people of Israel, whilst also evoking ‘unbounded astonishment’ in its unexpected arrival. Yet if the Novum breaks entirely with all previous modes of understanding, ‘it would be impossible to say anything about it at all’.55 We can identify this eschatological category of Novum, then, as offering Bloch a concept redolent of the dual chronology of redemption of the past as well as anticipation of an unprefigurable other future, which breaks with the ordinary time of chronos to inaugurate an entirely new form of creation or creatio nova. This dual chronology is perhaps most clearly seen in Bloch’s description of the revolutionary, interruptive time of the Messiah: a time ‘midway between memory and prophecy’ which, at crucial moments of self-recognition, ‘arrests itself ’.56 Such moments secrete symbolic yearnings of powerful intent akin to the kind of metaphysical temporality illustrated by St Thomas Aquinas’ nunc stans (‘the now that stands still’) of ecstatic religious experience, complicating models of time-as-flow and re-introducing a montage-like effect of sudden juxtaposition, fragmentary ciphers, and the flashing revelation that time should be understood from the standpoint of utopian hope, or ‘what is according to possibility’.57 Here we encounter the latent mysticism of Bloch’s early utopian philosophy and the moment in which his intellectual friendship with Walter Benjamin can most easily be identified: the messianic arrival of utopian-historical possibility as an arrest, or interruption, of time itself. Benjamin shared his interest in Talmudic messianism and the Kabbalah with Ernst Bloch, with whom he became close friends in the early 1920s. Both men agreed that religious and utopian eschatological ideas should be reconceptualized within a materialist framework. The fusion of Jewish theology and communist political objectives that they shared – what has been called ‘messianic materialism’ – remains a crucial point of contention among scholars. To this end, Karl Löwith argued that Marxism is a secularized form of Jewish messianism, calling Communism ‘a kingdom of God, without God on earth’.58 In addition to a common interest in messianism, Benjamin shared Bloch’s fascination with utopia and devoted large sections of his notes for The Arcades Project59 to exploring the political

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mobilizations of the utopian-socialists Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon. The Arcades Project remained unfinished when Benjamin died at the French-Spanish border in 1940 and has been seen by critics as itself a utopian plan; what translators Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin describe as ‘the blueprint for an unimaginably massive and labyrinthine architecture – a dream city, in effect’.60 At the heart of The Arcades Project lies Benjamin’s attempt to arrest from the dominant historiography of the nineteenth century – the century, of course, in which the ascendant bourgeoisie ‘consolidated its positions of power’ – an Urgeschichte or ‘primal history’.61 The necessity, for Benjamin, to awake collectively from a capitalist dreamworld and to remember that things were not always this way signals the primary task of the historical materialist and offers a suggestive model for political hope. It relies upon the redemption not simply of the past as such, but the hopes of the past. This is something Benjamin’s redemptive reading of history shares with Ernst Bloch, who writes in The Principle of Hope that ‘there is no past which we ought to long to have back, there is only an eternally New which is formed from the expanded elements of what is past, and true longing must always be productive, must create a new Better’,62 and that the past secretes its own unactualized Novum, in which the careful historian may discern the ‘still undischarged future in the past’.63 Although Benjamin takes a dim view of ‘newness’ as the accretive novelty of modern consumerism – ‘[t]he dreaming collective’, he writes in The Arcades Project, ‘knows no history. Events pass before it as always identical and always new’64 – he does share with Bloch a redemptive model of historical time. Reanimating the incipient unrealized hopes of the past serves to denaturalize the present and shapes a ‘critical state’ in which the linear march of violent imperialism – what Benjamin calls ‘homogeneous empty time’65 and conservative historians refer to as ‘progress’ – is arrested. Benjamin takes his cue for this kind of redemptive historicism from the crystallized, fragmentary image – from history as image – whose encapsulation of the essence of its time can be seen in the techniques of Eisenstein’s montage cinema, for example. Benjamin memorably calls this ‘dialectics at a standstill’: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation … while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.66

As ‘the organ of historical awakening’,67 dialectical thinking is fundamentally involved with a reconceived understanding of historical time, a smashing of blind chronological progress through the sudden ‘flash’ of history: not as one more event in an incessant catalogue of destructive historical confrontations that proceeds in a linear direction like a Fordist assembly line, but as an inscrutable, powerful, momentary image. Like Benjamin’s disjointed experience of reading Baudelaire’s poetry when under the influence of hashish, this kind of image suggests a qualitatively different experience of time: ‘Long though [the night] seemed to have been … Yet it also seemed to have lasted only a few seconds, or even to have had no place in all eternity.’68 For Benjamin,

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therefore, a genuinely progressive historical understanding as expressed in historical materialism lies in what we might identify as the interferences of time, where, as he writes with Bloch’s concept of the Novum in mind, ‘the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn’.69 Benjamin’s own version of ‘explosive hope’ is, like Bloch’s interruptive time of the Messiah, rooted in a Jewish redemptive theology of memory as expressed in the notion of Eingedenken or ‘remembrance’.70 As Anson Rabinbach notes, Jewish messianism is ‘allergic to political evolutionism which it avoids in whatever form: Social Democracy, Zionism and liberalism’.71 As with Bloch’s delinearization of historical time, in Benjamin’s thinking the Messiah becomes a crucial figure of non-contemporaneous times, whose redemption casts a utopian light on each memory from the past, but only ‘as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.72 Grounded in a strong tradition of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, Benjamin’s ‘historical apocatastasis’73 – the culminating moment in which history and its narrative representation, its deceased agents and curious scions, are reconciled with God – reveals the depth of his messianic reading of historical redemption. Paraphrasing Hermann Lotze, Benjamin holds that ‘the genuine conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption’. For him, therefore, the authentic concept of universal history ‘is a messianic concept’.74 Although historical progress could not, for Benjamin, be sundered from the notion of its ‘progression through homogeneous, empty time’, a redemptive understanding of historical time reveals its utopian-messianic possibilities: ‘For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.’75 Our project of repurposing a political understanding of hope as an active, rather than a passive, process of utopian dreaming has finally come up against the unavoidable fact of hope’s gloomy pessimism. Walter Benjamin famously wrote in ‘Thesis II’ that ‘we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power’76 – a qualification that, in the light of the tragedy of his own suicide, has led many scholars to consider Benjamin’s philosophy as one of tragic pessimism that believed in ‘[h]ope, yes, but not for us’.77

Conclusion: Hope against hope In 2016, on the quincentenary of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Verso released an anniversary edition of the text. Writing in one of two introductory essays for the edition, China Miéville defended the value of utopian dreaming: ‘[T]he fact that the utopian impulse is always stained doesn’t mean it can or should be denied or battened down. It is as inevitable as hate and anger and joy, and as necessary. Utopianism isn’t hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire.’78 This returns us to the question of how hope, utopia and optimism might, or might not, be interrelated. As we saw earlier in Eagleton’s defence of hope ‘without optimism’, Miéville similarly decouples hope from any cheery outlook or complacent expectation. Need and desire are what Bloch would call ‘expectant’ emotions, into which he lists anxiety, fear, hope and belief.79 Unlike emotions such as greed, envy or admiration, these seemingly negative expectant emotions are distinguished by their vital sense of anticipation, of yearning for the future: not as the repetition of the same, but as a qualitatively different time of

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utopian fulfilment. I would suggest that Miéville’s utopian defence could be recalibrated to include hope as a political category, if by hope, as I have been arguing in this chapter, we mean an active process of collective yearning towards possible ends. Yet the question of hope ‘but not for us’, of Benjamin’s tragic hoping against hope, returns us to a catastrophic vision of redemption. As Benjamin’s contemporary, Gershom Scholem, writes: ‘Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasized – a theory of catastrophe.’80 In Benjamin’s writing, the saturnine collective tradition of Jewish Eingedenken comes up against the exigencies of living under fascism. As Eagleton puts it with reference to Bloch’s philosophy of hope: ‘If hope in Bloch’s view is an ontological affair rather than a state of mind, it is perhaps because only an assurance as deep-seated as this could survive the dark historical age through which he lived. Common-or-garden hope might not have proved resilient enough.’81 I have suggested above that our own historical moment would benefit from a recalibration of hope, understood as an active process of utopian dreaming that is guided by material, and possible, changes. The ‘dark historical age’ that Bloch and Benjamin shared, and to which their different projects of historical redemption responded, remains an instructive example in how to hope at moments of political despair. In one sense, this might be seen as excessive or historically anachronistic (although Bloch’s model of utopian temporality privileges anachronisms if they are consciously repurposed). However, the global financial crisis of 2007–8 has unbolted neoliberal historical time into an undeniably new era of profound political, economic and social uncertainty. As the American economist Paul Krugman wrote in his 2008 analysis, The Return of Depression Economics, ‘the kinds of problems that characterized much of the world economy in the 1930s but have not been seen since – [have] staged a stunning comeback’.82 As capitalism struggles on through this latest crisis, the decision by various governments to respond to spiralling debt by imposing austerity cuts (e.g. in the UK, Germany, France, the Baltic states and in Greece), recalls 1930s Weimar Germany in another sense: the emptying out of the political mainstream and increasing number of political parties and organizations moving further to the left – and the right. Left-wing populism has been felt in the swelling membership of Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza and the pro-Corbyn Momentum movement in the UK; whilst the frightening rise of the far-right political party Golden Dawn, with its xenophobic ultranationalism and Neo-Nazi culture of violent gangs, like the growing Front National in France, signal a parallel shift to the far right in European political culture. In Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right (2017), Neil Faulkner contrasts the ‘“first-wave” sledgehammer fascism of the interwar period’ and our own ‘“second-wave” [of] creeping fascism’.83 He recognizes that although there are distinct structural differences between these two historical moments, ‘in the hollowedout spaces of the neoliberal dystopia – in the social vacuum created by the system’s rampant individualism, consumerism, and greed – [fascists] can quickly attract a mass following. The human wreckage of the capitalist crisis becomes the raw material for fashioning new fascist movements around the myths of nation, race, and family’.84 Although it might not have reached the ‘dark historical age’ of Bloch and Benjamin, our own time of post-financial crisis austerity and political nativism85 presents some dark harbingers of political uncertainty and the uncanny realization of dystopian

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projections: from the echo of Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ in the phrase ‘alternative facts’, introduced into popular usage by Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway, to the demands painted on activist banners at the Women’s March in January 2017 to ‘Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again’. It remains crucial, therefore, to continue to insist on the importance of hope as a utopian counterweight to our own dark, dystopian times of post-truth politics and geopolitical instability. As I have suggested, this requires rethinking the relationship between hope and temporality. Hope is not simply futureoriented, nor is it trained on some vanished, gilded past. As Sean Grattan puts it in Hope Isn’t Stupid, we need to develop a utopian consciousness that is less focused on engineered societies, as the genre of the literary utopia imagines, and ‘more interested in utopias that slip through the cracks, those that hide their utopianism, or those whose utopianism (even if seemingly outright) meets with critical silence’.86 Crucially, as Segal reminds us, collective expressions of joy ‘keep open spaces of hope and possibility’ at a time of ongoing crisis and austerity.87 To the call of contemporary thinkers on the left such as Sara Ahmed and Lynne Segal to understand the importance of affective engagement in political life and to reclaim shared experience – what Segal calls ‘that “we-mode”’88 – I would add the utopian dimensions of politicized hoping, developed out of the abstract escapist hopes we share as a species, and learned and trained into a political orientation through concrete practice. Bloch has taught us that such educated hope is not only possible, but necessary.

Notes See Dante, Paradise, in The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin Classics, 2012), Canto XXV. For a useful discussion of the highest good (summum bonnum) see Rachel Barney, ‘The Inner Voice: Kant on Conditionality and God as Cause’, in The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant, ed. Joachim Aufderheide and Ralf M. Bader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 158–82. 2 Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 5. 3 Ibid., 2–4. 4 Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso, 2017), 202. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., xv. 7 Ibid., 205. 8 Ibid., 16. 9 Ibid., 69. 10 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vols. 1–3, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986, 1995, 1995), 909. Subsequent references to all volumes of The Principle of Hope will be referred to as PH1, PH2 and PH3. 11 Bloch, PH2, 907. 12 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 95. 13 Ibid., 90. 1

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14 Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996), 17. 15 Theodor Adorno quoted in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 1. 16 Bloch, PH1, 115. 17 Ibid., 116. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 12. 20 Bloch, Utopian Function, 15. 21 The phrase is borrowed from Ernesto Laclau, ‘Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity’, in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007), 28 (20–35). 22 Bloch, PH 3, 1310. 23 Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 201. 24 Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982), 96–7. 25 Hudson, Marxist Philosophy, 97. 26 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 113. 27 Bloch, PH 3, 1307–8. 28 Ibid., 1307. 29 Ibid., 1309. 30 Bloch, PH 1, 15. 31 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (London: Polity Press, 1991), 116. 32 Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 229. 33 Bloch, PH 3, 1308, 1322. 34 Ibid., 1374. 35 Segal, Radical Happiness, 76. 36 Ibid. 37 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009). 38 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993). 39 Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 2. 40 Ibid., 86. 41 Giorgio Agamben borrows this phrase from Gianni Carchia in The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 62 (italics in original). 42 Ibid. 43 Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 16–17. 44 Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 45. 45 Ibid., 224, 229. 46 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), 92. 47 Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 224. 48 Ibid., 225, italics in original. 49 Ibid., 225.

Hope

447

50 Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 268–9. 51 Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 137. 52 Bloch, PH 3, 1193. 53 Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 246. 54 Ibid., 278. 55 Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1996), 27–9. 56 Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 200. 57 Bloch, PH 2, 864. 58 As Warren S. Goldstein notes, critics such as Jürgen Habermas, Rolf Tiedemann, Richard Wolin and Stephen Eric Bronner view Benjamin’s theoretical conjunction of Marxism and messianism as fundamentally incompatible, whilst Irving Wohlfarth, Michael Löwy and Susan Buck-Morss have defended this materialist secularization of messianic time as complementary. See Goldstein, ‘Messianism and Marxism: Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch’s Dialectical Theories of Secularization’, Critical Sociology 27.2 (2001): 246 (246–81); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 42. 59 Das Passagen-Werk was first published posthumously in 1982 (edited by Rolf Tiedemann) and translated as The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). 60 Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ‘Translator’s Foreword’, in The Arcades Project, ed. Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), xi (ix–xiv). 61 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 476, 393. 62 Bloch, PH 3, 998, my italics. 63 Bloch, PH1, 200. 64 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 546. 65 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, [1947], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 261 (253–64). 66 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462, my italics. 67 Ibid., 13. 68 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 481. 69 Ibid., 474. 70 James McBride, ‘Marooned in the Realm of the Profane: Walter Benjamin’s Synthesis of Kabbalah and Communism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 57.2 (1989): 249 (241–66). 71 Anson Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism’, New German Critique 34 (1985): 82 (78–124). 72 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 255. 73 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 459. 74 Ibid., 479, 485. 75 Benjamin, ‘Theses’, 261, 264. 76 Ibid., 254, italics in original. 77 Walter Benjamin quoted in Bram Mertens, ‘“Hope, Yes, But Not For Us”: Messianism and Redemption in the Work of Walter Benjamin’, in Messianism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th Century German Thought, ed. Wayne Cristaudo and Wendy Baker (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2006), 63 (63–77).

448

Future Theory

78 China Miéville, ‘Close to the Shore’, Introduction to Thomas More, Utopia (London: Verso, 2016), 6 (3–9). 79 Bloch, PH1, 74. 80 Gershom Scholem quoted in Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 59. 81 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 95. 82 Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2008), 181. 83 Neil Faulkner, ‘Donald Trump’s First 100 Days: Can We See Signs of Creeping Fascism?’ Public Reading Rooms website, n. date, accessed on 6 June 2017, https:// www.prruk.org/trumps-first-one-hundred-days-the-contradictions-of-creepingfascism/ 84 Neil Faulkner qtd in Neil Faulkner, ‘Donald Trump’s first 100 days.’ 85 As Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser argue, nativism masquerades as populism and a reaction against elites in our contemporary moment of resurgent nationalism and economic discontent. See Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, eds., Populism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press America, 2017). 86 Sean Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 2. 87 Segal, Radical Happiness, 267. 88 Ibid., 25.

Index absolute fragment 291–2 hospitality 401, 402, 406 nonabsolute 288, 289, 291, 292 abstraction 1, 33, 34, 83, 109, 118, 175, 195, 232, 265, 276, 316, 334, 412–19 risk 419–23, 425–8, 428 n.5 Theuwsian form 184 time and 177–82 viscerality and 420 accountability 2, 18, 29, 205, 335, 412, 422 activism 30, 35, 137–8, 140, 260, 349–51, 355, 362, 375, 377, 420 actor-network theory (ANT) 26–7, 107, 311, 313–15, 317 actuality 82, 163, 187, 188–91, 405 Adams, Jon 28 Adorno, Theodor W. 84, 199 n.24, 200 n.33, 206, 221, 282, 436, 437 aesthetic reflexivity 414 revolution 247–50 thinking 18 Aesthetic Dimension, The (Marcuse) 240–1 affective turn 12, 108 Africa 153–5, 158 n.29 Agamben, Giorgio 12, 14, 16, 89, 94, 106, 129, 132–7, 163–5, 167–8, 171, 172, 173 n.23, 174 n.24–174 n.26, 174 n.28, 269, 288, 412, 422, 424, 427, 439, 440 agential realism 27, 37 n.9, 317 Age of Extremes (Hobsbawm) 41, 46 aggressive masculinity 370 Althusser, Louis 4, 239, 257, 258 amalgamation 300, 303 amār 259 amāra 259–60 ambiguity 17, 84–5, 180, 187, 234, 239, 282, 287, 297, 322, 327, 421

American Journal of Medical Science (Nott) 302 Amin, Samir 148–9 anarchist tradition 339 Anaxagoras 312 Anaximander 312 Andel, Jaroslav 241 animate organism (Husserl) 125 annihilation 17, 18, 203, 268, 312 ANT. see actor-network theory (ANT) Anthropocene 7, 263, 269–70, 275, 306, 346–8, 350–6, 364 antiquity 117, 168, 169, 208, 247, 367, 435 anxiety 26, 34, 158 n.30, 190, 237, 325, 327, 365–6, 370, 387, 443 Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 14, 129, 132, 137–40, 376, 377 apeiron 169, 311–12, 317 aphorism 25, 165, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287, 292 Aporias (Derrida) 405 Apter, Emily 22, 256 Arab revolutions 43 Aravamudan, Srinivas 350 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin) 129, 441–2 archē 65, 106, 163 Arendt, Hannah 67, 74 n.90, 160, 204, 208, 264, 267–70 Aristotle 12, 29, 93, 95, 97, 102, 111, 125, 163, 169, 215, 285, 313, 333, 389, 433 Aroch Fugellie, Paulina 15 Arrighi, Giovanni 154 art 17–18, 252 n.46 and asceticism 42, 83 avant-garde 241–3 fragmentary 290 political 187 and revolution 240, 241, 243–7, 250 Schlegel’s 247–50

450

Index

video 16, 17, 177, 183, 185, 197 Wagner’s 84 assemblage 4, 6, 7, 24–9, 73 n.66, 95, 99, 108, 109, 300, 307, 351, 352 atheism (Bloch) 438–40 Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of Exodus and the Kingdom (Bloch) 439–40 Atkinson, Sarah 31, 32 Attridge, Derek 32, 33, 199 n.20 Auden, W. H. 78 Aufhebung 45, 84 Austin, J. L. 107 automaidan 257 autonomy 28, 65, 97, 98, 100, 125, 181, 246, 291, 334, 336–7, 340, 341 autopoiesis 109 avant-gardes art 241–3 political 241, 243, 245, 246 revolution and 237–43 Bachelard, Gaston 238, 257 Bacon, Francis 103, 281 Badawi, El-Said 259 Badiou, Alain 11, 16, 91 n.65, 163, 168–72, 174 n.30, 174 n.32, 214, 226–35, 258–60 Bakhtin, Mikhail 435 Ball, Hugo 238 Bal, Mieke 16–17, 184 Barad, Karen 27, 37 n.9, 105, 313, 316–18 Barkan, Leonard 283 Barthes, Roland 195, 215–16, 274, 292 Bastiani, Lazzaro 77 Bataille, Georges 219, 220, 340 Bateson, William 300 Baudrillard, Jean 282 Bauman, Zygmunt 157 n.28, 282–3 Beate, Jahn 364 Beckett, Samuel 12, 19, 20, 83, 213–15, 217, 220–1, 288 Beck, Ulrich 33, 411, 412, 419, 424, 428 n.5, 429 n.12, 429 n.15 Beethoven 221 Beijing’s Besieged by Waste (Wang) 351–2 Being and Event (Badiou) 168, 229–31 Bellamy, Dodie 422, 431 n.50 Bellini, Gentile 77

Benjamin, Walter 16, 46, 87, 123–5, 129–33, 135, 164–5, 167, 168, 179, 216, 247, 268, 437, 441–4, 447 n.77 Bennett, Jane 312 Berger, Adolf 160 Bergson, Henri 36 n.4, 197, 437 Berlant, Lauren 110–11 Berlin Wall 10, 41, 42 Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker) 88 Bhabha, Homi 25, 150, 304–6 Biko, Steve 374–6 Bion, W. R. 215 biopolitics 4, 16, 33, 34, 56, 69, 164, 165, 269, 270, 282, 306, 416–17, 420, 422, 424 Bishop, Elizabeth 203, 204 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 374–6 Blair, Patrick 298 Blanchot, Maurice 282, 284, 286–90, 293–4 n.24, 348, 356 Blink (Gladwell) 329 Bloch, Ernst 35, 44, 45, 435–45 Blühdorn, Ingolfur 352, 353 body politic 10, 11, 53–8, 64–8, 75 n.98, 273, 413, 417 Bohr, Niels 238, 317, 318 Bonnet, Charles 217, 218 Bonneuil, Christophe 346 Book of Life, The 389–90, 395 n.40 boosterism 12, 88, 91 n.76 Borges, Jorge Luis 23 Botanic Garden, The (Darwin) 298 Botha, Marc 33, 34 Botton, Alain de 395 n.40 Boucicault, Dion 303 bounce-back effect 383 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 50 Bowden, Brett 363, 364 Bowler, Peter J. 57 Braga, Célio 191–3, 200 n.34 Brennan, Timothy 152, 153 Breughel, Pieter 78 bridge 137–40 Brucke, Ernst 62 Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (Harman) 314 Buell, Lawrence 352 Bürger, Peter 243 Bush, George W. 307

Index Bush, Vannevar 323, 330 Butler, Judith 33, 34, 56, 406, 412, 428, 430 n.30, 432 n.71, 438 buzzwords 2, 25, 32, 94, 335, 383 Calarco, Matthew 14, 20 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 195, 215 Canguilhem, Georges 62, 257 Cantor, Georg 169 Capital (Marx) 117 capitalism 4, 15, 23, 24, 43–5, 56, 66, 70 n.33, 87, 118, 119, 125, 145, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156 n.15, 157 n.28, 176, 258, 259, 264, 268–73, 276, 350, 352, 390, 413, 414, 416, 428 n.5, 434, 435, 444 Caputo, John D. 397 Carpaccio, Vittore 11, 77–9 Casarino, Cesare 189–90 cascades 4, 110, 115, 386 Cassin, Barbara 255, 256 catastrophe 18–21, 30, 31, 35, 44, 45, 78, 87, 94, 165, 213–21, 255, 367–70, 372, 374–6, 412, 424, 444 causation 226, 227, 233, 234, 312 Cavell, Stanley 95–6, 100, 107 Central Places in Southern Germany (Christaller) 145 Centre for Theoretical Studies (CTS) 340 Césaire, Aimé 366, 375 Chain of Being 368, 369 Chamberlain, M. E. 361, 362, 365 Chave, Jérôme 63 ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ (Derrida) 281, 288–9 Chirac, Jacques 47, 50 Christaller, Walter 145 Christianity 120, 440 Cisco Systems 323 Claim of Reason, The (Cavell) 95–6 Clark, Timothy 23, 30 Clark, T. J. 45 class memory 45–6 Clemens, Justin 16, 63, 73 n.66 Clements, Frederic 63, 73 n.66 Clifford, James 198 n.10 climate 345 change 22, 23, 30, 31, 36 n.7, 53, 94, 263, 271–5, 321, 330, 347–50, 353, 354, 356, 390

451

ecocriticism 345, 347, 354–6, 358 n.38 global warming 21–3, 30, 94, 351 zombification 352–4, 357 coding 325 Cohen, Tom 355, 358 n.34 Cold War 15, 41, 42, 93, 103, 104, 146, 147 Colebrook, Claire 23, 24 collective memory 10, 48, 49, 177 Colonial Desire (Young) 304, 305 colonialism 50, 51, 145, 148, 176, 264, 268, 301, 305, 354, 363–7, 371 colonization 31, 144, 145, 327, 337, 361–3, 365–7, 370, 371, 375. see also decolonization Comandon, Jean 123 Coming Community, The (Agamben) 106, 132, 133 Common Place (Halpern) 33, 34, 416, 421–3, 425–7, 431 n.50 commonwealth (Hobbes) 79–80 communism 10, 41–5, 51, 117, 125, 237, 258, 260, 441 Communist Hypothesis, The (Badiou) 258 communitarianism 10, 11, 54, 56, 67, 70 n.18, 93, 94, 96, 133, 263 community 3, 9–11, 14, 22–4, 48, 53, 73 n.70, 272, 290, 334, 375 and body politic 10, 11, 53–8, 64–8 ecological body 58–9, 62–6, 73 n.66 individual body 58–60, 62–5, 67, 68 of knowledge 94, 96 political and ecological 66–9, 74 n.90 scientific 97, 108, 234 social body 58–60, 62, 64–6 subjectivity and 132, 137 thought 93, 97, 102–4, 107 conditional hospitality 399, 400, 402, 403, 408 n.11 Condition of the Labouring Classes in England (Engels) 87 consumerism 292, 438, 442, 444 consumption 44, 147, 220, 292, 346 contemporariness 288 contingency 20, 87, 103, 162, 171, 172, 227–8, 235, 270, 273, 287, 384–6, 390, 415 continuism 347–52 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, A (Marx) 439

452 Copernican Revolution (Kant) 21, 237, 247, 249 core-periphery 147, 149–52, 155, 156 n.15 Creative Evolution (Bergson) 197 Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right (Faulkner) 444 Critchley, Simon 28–9 critical practice 354–6 critical thinking 2, 3, 26 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre) 88 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 238 Critique of Violence (Benjamin) 167 cryptography 322, 325 cultural hybridity 304–5 identity 14, 51 memory 9, 10, 179 revolution 21, 239–40, 250, 258, 268 syndrome 351 theory 4, 8, 14, 94, 151, 235, 304, 306, 347 Currie, Mark 19, 20 Cuvier, Georges 218 Dada revolution 238 Dalice (Braga) 191–4, 196 Daly, Nicholas 303 damnés 373–8 Dancing in the Streets (Ehrenreich) 434 Dante 215, 433 Darwin, Charles 10, 59, 60, 62, 64, 71 n.34, 72 n.59, 218, 263, 299, 300, 303, 306, 326 Darwin, Erasmus 298 Davis, Angela 370 Death Penalty (Derrida) 253 decision-making 20, 272, 322, 328, 329 de-coding 325 decolonial attitude 31, 365, 374–6, 378 turn 365, 374–7 decolonization 4, 10, 30, 31, 361–3 activism 377 aesthetic performance 376–7 anxiety 365–6 coloniality 366–7 damné 375–8 decolonial turn 374–5 metaphysical catastrophe 367–71

Index modernity/coloniality 371–2 power and knowledge 372–4 Western modernity 363–4 deconstruction 26, 99, 305, 322, 407 Delany, Samuel R. 175–6, 185 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 27, 36 n.4, 68, 75 n.98, 151, 189–90, 194, 199 n.14, 200 n.36, 226, 311, 415 de Man, Paul 99 democratizes 187, 329 denaturalizing process 150, 177, 187, 442 Denkkollectiv 12, 97 Denkstil 12, 97 dependency theory 15, 38 n.16, 146–9, 151, 156 n.5 Derrida, Jacques 14, 21–2, 25, 32, 129, 132, 134–7, 225, 226, 253, 254, 260, 268, 281, 282, 284–92, 294 n.24, 305, 311, 325, 326, 397–407, 408 n.2, 408 n.14, 409 n.26, 409 n.34, 440 Der Ring 85–7 Descartes, René 112 n.29, 238, 376 dialectics 13, 24, 41, 44, 45, 84, 85, 95, 98, 117–21, 125, 145, 151, 160, 166, 172, 217, 220, 228, 442 Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic (Badawi and Hinds) 259 Die Gedanken Sind Frei 203–8 Die Walküre 85–6 Diner, Dan 47 disciplinary matrix 93, 97, 102, 106 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire) 366, 375 Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau) 81 Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Earth (Cuvier) 218 disfazione (Leonardo da Vinci) 219, 220 dissemination 3, 4, 21, 25, 28, 93, 94, 321–31 distribution 20, 21, 24, 27, 109, 160, 225, 229, 231, 232, 245, 321 Division of Labour in Society, The (Durkheim) 59 Doktor Faustus (Mann) 221 Dominus, Mark Jason 162 dos Santos, Theotonio 147 double-bind 404

Index double coding 102–4 double movements 17, 175, 185, 193, 195, 196 Dreyfus, Henri 105 Dunwich Horror, The (Lovecraft) 308 Dupré, John 307 Durkheim, Emile 59, 60, 65, 66, 71 n.38, 71 n.42 Düttmann, Alexander Garcia 17–18, 28 Duxiu, Chen 239 Eagleton, Terry 433–6, 443, 444 Earth Party, The: Love and Revolution at a Time of Climate Change (Marshall) 349–50 ecocriticism 345, 347, 354–6, 358 n.38 ecological community 53, 57–9, 62–6, 73 n.66 political and 66–9 Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) 148 Economic Image-Function of the Periphery, The (Brennan) 152 economic liberalism 11, 106 Edwards, Caroline 34–5 Ehrenberg, Alain 37 n.15 Ehrenreich, Barbara 388, 434 Eiland, Howard 442 Einstein, Albert 238 Eisenstein, S. M. 42, 121–3, 442 El-Desouky, Ayman 259–60 Elias, Norbert 44 Eliot, T. S. 25, 99, 349 embodied knowledge 326 emergence 4–6, 20, 23, 30, 46, 54, 104, 125, 143, 169, 228, 231–5, 240, 247, 249, 250, 258, 268–70, 341, 346, 350, 364, 368, 372, 375–7, 387, 392, 393 Emile (Rousseau) 81 empathy 192, 194, 427–8 Encyclopaedia Britannica 297, 299 Engels, Friedrich 87, 120 Enquiry into the Modes of Existence, An 314 entanglement 4, 6, 7, 9, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 36 n.8, 37 n.9, 95, 99, 105, 363, 365, 417, 419 enthusiasm 206, 219, 249, 383

453

epistolarity 183 epistolary metaphor 182–5 epochal temporality 234 Erjavec, Aleš 20–1 erotic thanatography 34, 427, 428 ethico-political 53, 56, 133, 134, 136, 137 Eureka moment (Kuhn) 102, 103 European Enlightenment 31, 363 Euskirchen, Eugénie 356 event 11, 16, 18–21, 41, 49, 100, 162, 170, 171, 215, 216, 225–35, 237, 238, 244, 246, 258, 263, 268, 274–6, 288–91, 338, 403–6, 430 n.27 excellence 335 exceptio 159–61, 172 n.4 exception 16, 20, 25, 33, 34, 81, 89, 103, 105, 106, 110, 159–72, 172 n.2, 172 n.4, 174 n.24, 176, 232–5, 243, 334, 369, 388, 389, 416, 421–5, 427, 428 exceptionalism 89, 160 exception handling 159, 161 exemplum 105 Existence and Existents (Levinas) 312 extended phenotype 11 extraordinary set 170 face 132–4 Fairchild’s mule 26, 298–300 Fairchild, Thomas 298 Fall of Icarus, The (Breughel) 78 Fanon, Frantz 15, 38 n.16, 149, 362, 366, 370–6 fascination 13, 25, 26, 441 fascism 49, 125, 165, 167, 207, 243, 250, 267, 440, 444 Faulkner, Neil 444 Fear of Breakdown (Winnicott) 19, 215, 216 Felski, Rita 95, 107 Ferguson, James 154, 157 n.28, 158 n.29 Feyerabend, Paul 93 Fineman, Martha Albertson 429 n.7 Fisher, R. A. 325–6 Fish, Stanley 30, 96 Flaker, Aleksandar 244–5 Fleck, Ludwik 12, 97, 107 floating-point arithmetic method 161 Forster, E. M. 323

454 Foucault, Michel 12, 16, 19, 26, 94–6, 105–10, 164, 165, 167, 190, 217, 218, 250, 258, 266, 298–9, 311, 336, 375, 391, 412, 420, 430 n.17 fragility 7, 32–4, 290, 340, 413, 414, 420, 430 n.29 fragmentation 10, 24–5, 27, 85, 197, 220, 281–92, 293 n.20, 293 n.24, 294 n.24, 436 Frank, Andre Gunder 147–9 Fredrickson, Barbara 386–7 French revolution 21, 41, 43, 218, 237, 239, 250, 435 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste 346 Freud, Sigmund 4, 20, 220, 348, 436 Friedli, Lynne 388 Friedman, Milton 104 Fried, Michael 99 Fukuyama, Francis 41 Furet, François 43, 46 fuzzy concept 22, 32, 94 Gabriel, Kay 254 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 191, 192 Gaia 11, 314 Garner, Alexander 216 Gaussian Blur (Theuws) 177–9, 186, 189 gender 132, 160, 352, 365, 369–71, 398 Generelle Morphologie (Haeckel) 62 Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Fleck) 97 Ghosh-Schellhorn, Martina 157 n.20 Gibson, Andrew 11, 12, 20, 35 Giddens, Anthony 412, 429 n.15 Gladwell, Malcolm 329, 332 n.18, 387 Gleason, Henry 63, 73 n.66 globalization 50, 143, 151, 157 n.20, 157 n.28, 158 n.29, 271, 304, 306, 433 global warming 21–3, 30, 94, 351 Goldberg, David Theo 305 Goldstein, Warren S. 447 n.58 Gómara, Francisco López de 364 Goodman, Nelson 99, 107 Goodstein, Eban 356 Goya, Francisco 187 Grant, Madison 303 Grattan, Sean 445 Great Patriotic War 49

Index Griffiths, Matthew 349 Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre (GITMO) 421 Guattari, Félix 415 Gulags (Stalin) 46, 48 Habermas, Jürgen 337, 375, 438 Hacking, Ian 93 Hacktivists 330 Hadot, Pierre 138 Haeckel, Ernst 10, 59–62, 64, 66, 71 n.42, 72 n.49 Hägglund, Martin 232 Halberstam, J. Jack 88 Hallward, Peter 226–7, 229 Halpern, Rob 33, 34, 411, 415–23, 425–8 Hamilton, Clive 356 happenstance 292, 295 n.79 Hardt, Michael 306 Harman, Graham 22, 27, 314 Hartley, Daniel 112 n.19 Hartog, François 44 Harvey, David 145, 156 n.5 Hatoum, Mona 182–4, 189, 194, 199 n.15 Havel, Vaclav 42, 213, 214 Head, Dominic 354 Hegel, G. W. F. 9, 13, 20, 41, 45, 84, 93, 102–4, 117, 118, 120, 145, 227–9, 247, 273, 333 Hegelian 9, 41, 45, 84, 93, 102–4, 118, 120, 228–30, 273 hegemony 2, 10, 15, 21, 35, 41, 104, 339, 347 Heidegger, Martin 68, 84, 163–5, 173 n.16, 194, 267–9, 316–18, 333, 436 Heidegger on Being and Acting (Schürmann) 163 Heimlichkeit 97–8 Heisenberg, Werner 20, 317, 318 Heraclitus 117 Heritage of Our Time (Bloch) 440–1 hermeneutics 20, 27, 28, 47, 95, 98, 100, 106, 107, 213, 322 Hernández Navarro, Miguel Á. 177, 199 n.15 Herzogenrath, Bernd 75 n.98 heterochrony 184–8, 190 Hinds, Martin 259 History of Jamaica (Long) 301

Index History: The Last Things before the Last (Kracauer) 47 Hobbes, Thomas 1, 12, 54–7, 60, 66, 68, 69 n.10, 79, 80, 89, 314, 334, 335, 420 Hobsbawm, Eric 41, 46 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 68 holiday 35, 47, 109, 346, 435 Holocaust 45–6, 48–51, 52 n.27 homeostasis 58, 109 homo faber 109, 264, 267 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben) 16, 164, 167, 173 n.23, 412 hope 10, 30, 34–5, 433, 443–5 explosive 440–3 optimism 433–5 principle 435–8 radical atheism 438–40 Hope Isn’t Stupid (Grattan) 445 Hope without Optimism (Eagleton) 433–4 Horizon of Expectation 44, 46, 225 hospitality 29, 32, 33, 134–7, 397–407 absolute 401, 402, 406 conditional 399, 400, 402, 403, 407, 408 n.11 and forgiveness 403–4 gift and 403 of invitation 135–7, 401, 406 unconditional 399–405, 407 of visitation 135–7, 401, 406 Hospitality and Responsibility (Derrida) 402 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney) 148 Hudson, Wayne 437 human condition 268, 270, 354, 421, 428 Human Condition, The (Arend) 208 humanism 218, 351, 353 humanity 3, 6–8, 12, 19, 23, 26–30, 36 n.7, 36 n.8, 44, 49, 81, 94, 98, 99, 106–9, 118, 144, 150–2, 175, 214, 242, 244, 263, 269, 270, 273, 322, 323, 333, 334, 336–9, 341, 346, 350, 353, 363, 368, 369, 422 human revolution 246 Humboldtian model 29, 333, 338 Huntingdon, Henry P. 356 Husserl, Edmund 125, 313, 314, 333

455

hybrid 25–6, 147, 150, 283, 297 cryptids 308 cybrids 307 Fairchild’s mule 298–300 identities 304 Nott’s mulatto 300–4 post-colonial 304–6 zone 26, 301 Hydromedusae 72 n.46 I Can Be You (Segura) 180–2, 184, 196 IEEE 754 161–2 impenetrability 18, 205, 206, 422, 436 imperialism 33, 145, 146, 268, 272, 276, 442 impossibility 190, 206, 215, 256, 266, 275, 283, 284, 287, 288, 322, 356, 374, 404, 426 independence 31, 49, 281, 285, 316, 361, 362, 364, 367 indeterminism 25, 37 n.9 individualism 53, 58–65, 67, 68, 71 n.38, 197, 438, 444 Industrial Revolution 117, 364 Inferno (Dante) 215, 433 infinity 169, 171, 398 injustice 10, 80, 88, 94, 110, 140, 176, 260, 312 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 160 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 161–2 Institute of National Remembrance 49 institution 25, 28, 96, 103–5, 109–11, 148, 204, 285, 333–41, 355, 363, 365, 377, 390, 439 intellectual property 330 intelligibility 97, 101, 105 interconnectedness 4, 7, 26, 27, 413 interference 18, 22, 25, 99, 100, 110, 253–60, 443 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 275 intimacy 85, 106, 110, 180, 185, 191–6, 208, 286 intra-action 26, 27, 37 n.9, 316, 317 Iovino, Serenella 355 irreversibility 19, 20–4, 263–76 Islamic Revolution 250 Isolated State, The (Von Thünen) 144–5, 155

456

Index

Jameson, Fredric 43, 118, 173 n.19 James, William 386, 437 Jing, Chai 351 jouissance 26, 290 Judt, Tony 46, 50 Julie (Rousseau) 82 Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira 448 n.85 Kamuf, Peggy 254 Kantian revolution 249 Kant, Immanuel 21, 28, 29, 32, 100, 116, 179, 189, 190, 198 n.8, 216, 217, 237, 238, 247, 249, 399, 401, 404, 406, 408 n.11, 414, 415, 430 n.20, 445 n.1 Keating, AnaLouise 138 Keats, John 283, 331 Kentridge, William 180, 181, 184, 187, 189 Kierkegaard, Søren 20, 166 Kino-Fist 121 Kipling, Rudyard 301 Kipnis, Laura 207 Klein, Naomi 272, 358 n.23 knowledge exchange 28, 327, 329 knowledge is power 330 Knowlton, Nancy 357 Kolbowski, Silvia 262 n.24 Koselleck, Reinhart 41, 42, 44 Kouvelakis, Stathis 244 Koyré, Alexandre 238 Kracauer, Siegfried 47 Krugman, Paul 444 Kuhn, Thomas 12, 13, 21, 93–111, 234, 238, 326 Lacan, Jacques 68, 88, 196, 228, 255, 333, 338, 340 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 84, 283, 284, 288, 290 laissez-faire approach 57, 66 Lash, Scott 414–15, 429 n.15, 430 n.17 Latour, Bruno 12–13, 23, 26, 27, 94, 95, 101, 107, 108, 112 n.25, 112 n.29, 270–5, 306–7, 310 n.39, 311, 313–17, 318 n.2 Lautréaumont, Comte de 346 Laverdant, Gabriel-Désiré 242, 244 law exception 161 law [LAW] 315

Laws (Plato) 21–2, 253–5 Leavis, F. R. 104 Lenin, V. I. 21, 119 Leonardo da Vinci 219, 220 Leslie, Esther 13 Leverkühn, Adrian 221 Leviathan (Hobbes) 54, 55, 420 Levinas, Emmanuel 14, 32, 189, 194, 312, 397–9, 401, 404, 405, 408 n.6, 408 n.7 Lewis, Simon L. 364 liberal democracy 41, 329, 417 liberalism 11, 41, 42, 88, 106, 260, 443 liberation movement 4, 42, 47–9, 111, 149, 206, 274, 361, 362, 435 Limoges, Camille 59 Lingis, Alphonso 68 Locke, John 364 Logic of Scientific Discovery, The (Popper) 101 Logics of Worlds (Badiou) 168 London Review of Books of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Prendergast) 255–6 Long, Edward 301 Long, Maebh 25, 411 Long Revolution, The (Williams) 38 n.26, 110 Los desastres de la Guerra (Goya) 187 love and rage 375 Lovecraft, H. P. 308 Loves of the Plants, The 298 Löwith, Karl 441 Luckhurst, Roger 26 Lunacharski, Anatolii 243 Luthar, Suniya 390 Lyotard, Jean-François 414 Machine Stops, The (Forster) 323 McHugh, Heather 283 MacIntyre, Alasdair 334 McLaughlin, Kevin 442 maidan 257 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 31 Malone Dies (Beckett) 215 Malraux, André 247–9 Mann, Thomas 87, 221 Mansueti, Giovanni 77 Mao Zedong 240

Index Marcuse, Herbert 4, 93, 240–1 Marrano memory 45–6 Marshall, George 349–50 Marxism 13, 24, 38 n.16, 88, 107, 109, 110, 112 n.19, 147, 239, 274, 436, 441, 447 n.58 Marxist (Williams) 109 Marx, Karl 59, 68, 70 n.30, 70 n.33, 95, 117–20, 145, 190, 242, 245, 273, 274, 439 Maslin, Mark A. 364 mass movements 13, 43, 118–19, 125 Master–Slave relation 368 materialism 7, 8, 13, 24, 36 n.8, 38 n.22, 95, 107–9, 152, 206, 441, 443 Mbembe, Achille 33, 420, 421 Measures of Distance (Hatoum) 182–3, 189, 194–5 meddling 254, 260 Meillassoux, Quentin 233, 235 Meinong, Alexius 313, 314 Memex (Bush) 323, 330 memory 9–10, 17, 20, 21, 30, 35, 179, 186, 188, 195, 203, 269, 284, 341, 370, 403, 441, 443 acts of 188–91 class 45–6 collective 10, 48, 49, 177 cultural 9, 10, 179 history and 41–3, 46–7 Holocaust 45–6, 48–51, 52 n.27 prophetic 176 utopias 43–7 Mendel, Gregor 300, 326 Meredith, George 172 messianism 35, 46, 436, 439–41, 443, 444, 447 n.58 metabolism 58, 70 n.30 La Métamorphose des dieux (Malraux) 247 metaphysical catastrophe 31, 367–72, 374–6 Miéville, China 443–4 migration 16–17, 175–7, 206 and abstraction 177–82 epistolary metaphor 182–5 installation 191–7 phenomenon of 176–7 present 188–91

457

skin and space 196–7 and time 177–82, 185–9 video and 185–7 migratory aesthetics 16, 175–8, 183, 190, 195, 197 Millett, Kate 274 Milne-Edwards, Henri 59, 60 Milner, Jean-Claude 205, 206 Miracle of the Cross at the Rialto (Carpaccio) 77–9 miscegenation 26, 300, 302 missa solemnis (Beethoven) 221 modernism 19, 25, 99–100, 103, 221, 242 modernity 9, 10, 13, 26, 29, 31, 45, 54, 81–3, 87, 99, 100, 147, 151, 218, 246, 247, 269, 274, 276, 282–4, 323, 363–4, 367–72, 374–8 modernization theory 146, 147, 149 Moi, Toril 107 Moltmann, Jürgen 439, 441 Mont Blanc (Shelley) 13, 115 Moraga, Cherríe 376 morality 81, 217, 338, 348, 401 More, Thomas 443 Moretti, Franco 22, 109 Morra, Joanne 201 n.37 Morton, Timothy 285–6 Motion of Light in Water, The (Delany) 175 Motograph Moving Picture Book, The 122 Mousourakis, George 172 n.4 movement 4, 9, 13, 93, 115–25, 147, 150, 171, 175–8, 180, 182, 183, 185–7, 191–6, 238, 240–7, 249, 250, 258, 260, 264, 273, 274, 276, 282, 285, 290, 292, 362, 386–90, 400, 403–5 Mudde, Cas 448 n.85 multi-temporality 186–8 Musée des Beaux Arts (Auden) 78 Music for Porn (Halpern) 33, 34, 416–19, 422, 427, 431 n.36 Muybridge, Eadweard 122–3 Nachträglichkeit 20, 99 Naficy, Hamid 183 Nancy, Jean-Luc 25, 68, 281, 283, 284, 288–92, 312 national sovereignty 353 Natter, Wolfgang 54 natural balance 57

458

Index

Nazism 43, 46, 48–50, 84, 125, 165, 173 n.16, 177, 270, 412, 424 Nealon, Christopher 355 Negri, Antonio 306 neoliberal capitalism 152, 413, 416 neoliberalism 2, 4, 11, 21, 33–4, 38 n.25, 44, 56, 58, 94, 104–6, 109, 207, 257, 387, 417, 423, 429 n.14 network 6, 7, 11, 24, 26–8, 94, 95, 108, 109, 234, 311 Latour’s 313–16 philosophy 311–13 re-engineering 316–18 network [NET] 315 Newig, Jens 353 New International Division of Labor 153 New School for Social Research (NSSR) 341 Newspeak 1, 2, 445 New York Review of Books, The (Snyder) 257 Ngai, Sianne 417 Nietzsche, Friedrich 45, 62, 73 n.62, 84, 87, 174 n.26, 208, 218, 265, 282, 436 9/11 attacks 33, 34, 387, 412, 416 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 1 Nixon, Rob 412 Nochlin, Linda 283 nomination 160, 230, 231 Notes on the Theory of Winds (Kant) 116 Nothing Is Missing (Bal) 184, 189, 195 Nott, Josiah 26, 300–5 Novum (Bloch) 437, 441–3 object-oriented ontology (OOO) 312–14 Occupy Wall Street (Apter) 22, 34–5, 256 October Revolution (Eisenstein) 42, 237–9, 241, 250 Octoroon, The (Boucicault) 303 Oppermann, Serpil 355 optical unconscious 179 order and chaos 25 Order of Things, The (Foucault) 298–9 organismic biology 65, 66 Orientalism (Said) 144 Origins of German Tragic Drama, The (Benjamin) 164–5 Orwell, George 1, 2, 18, 111, 445 Otherwise than Being (Levinas) 398 Oxford English Dictionary 159, 297

Packham, Catherine 57 paideia 29, 338 parabole 111 paradeigma 12, 93, 94, 97, 102, 103, 105, 111 paradeigmata 99–102, 104–6 paradeigmatic process 12, 13, 93–106, 109–11 paradigm 5–7, 9, 12, 20, 21, 24, 45, 48, 50, 83, 84, 93–6, 116, 167, 168, 185, 190, 234, 237, 238, 244, 246, 250, 252 n.46, 269, 326, 364, 368, 369, 372, 375, 376, 397, 412, 413, 422, 429 n.14, 429 n.15, 431 n.48 double coding 102–4 Kuhnian 93–100 and positivism 100–2 post 106–11 reverse process 104–6 paradigm shift 93, 98, 102–4, 234, 326 Parmenides 27, 312 Parsons, Talcott 146 Pascal, Blaise 88, 285 Passing of an Illusion, The (Furet) 43, 46–7 Passing of the Great Race, The (Grant) 303 Pasteurization of France, The (Latour) 313 Patton, Paul 199 n.14 performance of seriousness 352 Pericles 253, 261 n.2 peripeteia 18, 19, 215 peripheral capitalism 148–9 periphery 15, 16, 21, 24, 30, 95, 143–55, 155 n.1, 156 n.5, 156 n.15, 157 n.20, 176, 412, 413, 422, 424, 425 personal resilience 384–9 Philosophical Palingenesis (Bonnet) 217 philosophy 3, 10, 21, 27, 28, 35 n.3, 62, 87, 95, 101, 107, 138, 164, 169, 181, 217, 218, 226, 227, 231, 233, 237, 238, 246, 247, 255, 257, 281, 283, 285, 311, 333–5, 337–8, 397, 398 Barad 317 Benjamin 443 Bloch 435–8, 440, 441, 444 Hegel 333 Kant 21 language 95, 101, 107, 112 n.10 Levinas 397 network 311–13

Index of Nietzsche 218 political 10, 62, 412, 440 Schelling 437 Socratic 337 Žižek 227 Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 333 Physics (Aristotle) 102 Pinker, Steven 88 Plato 21–3, 29, 135, 252 n.46, 253–5, 261 n.2, 285, 287, 333, 337, 338, 437 pleasure 80, 122, 179, 190, 292, 334, 435 poetic generativity 426 political 190 art 187 avant-gardes 241, 243, 245, 246 body 54, 56–8, 413, 417, 421 community 53, 54, 56, 58, 64, 68, 74 n.90 and ecological community 63–9 economy 15, 59, 144, 145, 148, 149, 171, 356, 390 effect 9, 15, 187, 189, 244 ideology 250, 387–8 movement 116, 118, 125, 439 philosophy 10, 62, 412, 440 process 264 reversibility 23, 266–7, 274, 275 revolution 21, 239–41, 243, 244, 246, 249, 268 theory 6, 54, 67, 145, 255, 264, 267, 273, 416, 420 thinking 12, 19, 21, 22, 24 unconscious 4, 109 violence 94, 419 Political Theology (Schmitt) 165–6 politics 21–3, 30, 32, 45, 48, 56, 58, 63, 65–7, 84, 95, 140, 146, 168, 176, 185, 187, 242, 254, 256, 257, 266–70, 273–5, 305, 307, 314, 315, 347, 350–3, 384, 385, 388, 412, 421 Bartleby 260 biopolitics 4, 16, 33, 34, 56, 69, 164, 165, 269, 270, 282, 306, 416–17, 420, 422, 424 environmental 350 Heidegger 267 resilience 385 simulative 352, 353 Stiegler 273

459

symbolic 30, 352, 353 US 350 of viscerality 420–1 Walzer 54 Politics of Nature (Latour) 314 politics [POL] 315 polupragmosunê 261 n.2 Polyani, Michael 326 popularization 148, 151, 321, 326–9, 387 positive psychology movement 32, 386–93 positivism 12, 93, 100–2, 104, 109, 362 postcolonialsim 151, 304–6 post-genomic techniques 6, 7 Potter, Emily 349 pragmatism 13, 95, 96, 100, 107, 109, 429 n.15 Praxinoscope (Reynaud) 123 Prebisch, Rgaúl 147, 148 precariousness 33, 154, 420, 430 n.29 Prendergast, Christopher 255, 256 preposition [PRE] 315 presentism 44–5, 190 Prigogine, Ilya 15, 22, 38 n.16 principium 163 Principle of Hope, The (Bloch) 43, 435–8, 442 Principle of Responsibility 43 privacy 17, 18, 28, 188, 204–8 privatization 44 proletarian revolution 239 Proust, Marcel 160, 220, 221 psychoanalysis 19, 99, 124, 215, 255, 340, 416, 436 Purgatorio (Dante) 433 Putin, Vladimir 48, 257 Pythagoras 312 Quesnay, Francois 57 Quijano, Anibal 147 Quine, W. V. O. 1, 35 n.3, 101, 107, 155 n.1 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 19–20, 30, 35, 231 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 435 Rabinow, Paul 105 Radical Happiness (Segal) 434 Rancière, Jacques 21, 89, 96, 239, 246–9 rape 370, 371 Rebirth of History, The (Badiou) 258 reconciliation 47, 228, 268, 270

460

Index

Red Army 49 reductionism 6, 7, 37, 313 re-encoding 325 reference [REF] 315 religion [REL] 315 remainder 9, 11–12, 77–89, 190, 200 n.32, 248, 256, 291 Repetition (Kierkegaard) 166 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 335 resilience 30–2, 383–4, 392–3 complexity 391 complexity and contingency 384–6 in context 389–90 critical 390–2 governance and responsibility 386–9 retrospection 20, 225, 228, 229 Return of Depression Economics, The (Krugman) 444 reverse process 104–6 reversibility 19, 23, 30, 263–76 revolution 12–13, 19–21, 94, 98, 103, 104, 116–19, 121, 218, 244, 258, 259, 268 aesthetic 247–50 Arab 43 art and 243–7 and avant-gardes 237–43 Bergson 197 cultural 21, 239–40, 250, 258 European 167 French 21, 41, 43, 218, 237, 239, 250, 435 human 246 Kantian 249 permanent 101 political 21, 239, 241, 243, 244, 246, 249, 268 scientific 234 velvet 42 Reynaud, Charles-Émile 123 risk 7, 9, 33–4, 137, 138, 281, 287, 411, 428 n.5, 429 n.15 body at 413 defined 411–13 empathy 427–8 militarized capital and the nation 416–19 radical 413, 425–7 sublime and aesthetics 414–16 viscerality and insistence 419–23 vulnerability and 423–4

Risk Cultures (Lash) 414 ritual 130–2 Rivera, Diego 240 Robinson, Kim Stanley 349, 350 Rodney, Walter 148 Romanticism 13, 21, 115, 166, 283 Rose, Nikolas 307 Rostow, W. W. 146, 147 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 12, 48, 81, 82 Roux, Wilhelm 62–3, 67, 72 n.59 Russell, Bertrand 80, 231 Russian Revolution 21, 43 Rweyemamu, Justinian 148 Said, Edward 144, 151 Sattelzeit 42 Saunders, Trevor J. 254, 255 scale 30–1, 65, 68, 105, 106, 333, 346, 348, 349, 356, 383, 384, 392 scale effect 346 scarcity 88, 205 Schatzki, Thomas R. 54 Schlegel, Friedrich von 25, 237, 247–9, 282–4, 286–9, 293 n.24, 294 n.24 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 281 Schmitt, Carl 54, 56, 165–8, 174 n.25, 314, 412, 424 Schopenhauer, Arthur 12, 82, 83, 85, 87–9 Schröder, Gerhard 47 Schürmann, Reiner 163 Schwelle 131 schwellen 131 scientific community 97, 108, 234 scientific revolutions 21, 234, 238, 239, 306, 326, 334 Scott, Joan W. 175 Scotus, Duns 163 Scripps, E. W. 328 Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista 77 Sebald, W. G. 221 Second World War 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 146, 243, 323 Segal, Lynne 434–5, 438, 445 Segura, Jesús 180–2, 184, 196 Seligman, M. E. P. 32, 387, 388, 390 semi-periphery 154 semipredicate problem 162 Sense of the World, The (Nancy) 281, 288

Index Serres, Michel 78 sex 369–71, 418 sexuality 207, 352, 365, 369, 370 Shadow Procession (Kentridge) 180, 181, 187 Shannon, Claude 323–6, 330, 331, 332 n.11 Shannon-Information 330, 331 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 13, 115–17 Shklovsky, Viktor 17 Shulevitz, Julie 207 Signature of All Things, The (Agamben) 106 simulative politics 352, 353 Singer, Hans 147, 148 singularity 14, 94, 97, 103, 132, 133, 187, 206, 256, 289, 347, 348, 405–7, 413, 426 siphonophores (Haeckel) 60, 61, 64, 65, 72 n.46 Smith, Adam 10, 37 n.13, 57–9, 364 Smith, Keri 304 Smith, Mick 10, 11, 22–4 Smith, Neil 157 n.28 Snow, C. P. 104, 334 Snyder, Timothy 257 social community 58–60, 62, 64–6 social constructionism 27, 108, 109 Social Contract, The (Rousseau) 81 socialism 10, 41–6, 241–2 social revolutions 237, 239–41, 247 sociogeny 373 sociopolitical revolution 237, 239, 243 Socrates 253–5, 261 n.3, 287, 337 Sollors, Werner 303 sovereignty 12, 16, 42, 47, 54, 57, 132, 164–8, 173 n.23, 174 n.25, 268, 291, 306, 353, 363, 412 Soviet Union 49, 119, 239, 240 Spirit of Utopia, The (Bloch) 436–8, 440 spiritual activism 137–8 Stages of Economic Growth, The: A NonCommunist Manifesto (Rostow) 147 Stalin, Joseph 19, 46, 214, 240, 243 state of emergency 16, 165, 424 Stecopoulos, Eleni 427 Stiegler, Bernard 267, 273, 274 Structuralism 109 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn) 12, 93, 238

461

Struggle of Parts in the Organism, The (Roux) 62 subjectivity 4, 14, 47, 129, 132–4, 136–9, 181, 221, 267, 270, 362, 363, 367, 368, 372, 373, 376, 377, 391, 392, 414, 418, 419, 436 Sunstein, Cass R. 266 Suroweicki, James 329, 332 n.18 surrealism 348 sustainability 32, 352, 383 symbolic politics 30, 352, 353 Szabolcsi, Miklós 241 tableaux 178, 217 tabula rasa 23, 155 taxonomia 217, 218 techtology 60, 62, 64 Thacker, Eugene 307–8 Thatcher, Margaret 56, 335 Theology of Hope (Moltmann) 439 Theory of the Subject (Badiou) 231 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx) 242 Theuws, Roos 177–9, 182–6, 189, 194 Third Reich 47 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Klein) 358 n.23 Thomas Aquinas 433, 441 thought community 93, 97, 102–4, 107 threshold 6, 14, 15, 20, 106, 129, 175, 265, 271, 272, 301, 324, 346, 348, 355, 356, 387, 421–3, 436 bridge 137–40 experiences 129, 131–5, 137, 139 face 132–4 ritual 130–2 visitor 134–7 time and abstraction 177–82 of heterochrony 185–8 matter and 197 Time Matters (Casarino) 189–90 Time That Remains, The (Agamben) 168 tipping point 5, 18, 19, 32, 129, 272, 356 Tipping Point, The (Gladwell) 387 Tlostanova, Madina 376 Todorov, Tzvetan 364 Tóibín, Colm 203 torture 19, 214, 370–2, 425, 427 totalitarianism 15, 41–4, 143, 267, 285

462

Index

Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 398 totalization 25, 54, 281, 283, 289, 294 n.24, 323, 425 Towards a Theory of Montage (Eisenstein) 121 toxic positivity 12, 88–9 transhumanism 264 transparency 18, 29, 205, 335, 337 Traverso, Enzo 9, 10, 17, 34 Trexler, Adam 347–9 Tristan und Isolde 84–7 Trotsky, Leon 119–21 trust 95, 98, 204, 206, 340 Tulving, Endel 9, 37 n.10 Turing, Alan 324–5 Turner, Stephen 328 Turner, Victor 130–1, 133, 138 2MOVE: Double Movement, Migratory Aesthetics 176, 191, 198 n.4 Types of Mankind (Nott) 302 Umschlag 85, 87 uncertainty 7, 20, 27, 31, 37 n.9, 104, 226, 227, 317, 322, 324, 347, 411, 413, 414, 430 n.29, 444 unconditional hospitality 399–405 Under the Dome (Jing) 351 unexpectability 226 unforeseeability 20, 225, 226 Ungar, Michael 392 unmaking 23, 263, 264, 267, 268, 270–3, 275 untranslatability 18, 22, 256, 257, 326 Utopia (More) 443 utopias 42–7, 245, 445 van Gennep, Arnold 130 Varda, Agnès 206 velvet revolutions 42 Venuti, Lawrence 200 n.32 vibrancy 24 Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, The (Rousseau) 81 Vietnam War 4, 146 violence 22, 41, 48–50, 80, 81, 86, 94, 139, 140, 144, 167, 168, 187, 189–91, 195, 219, 260, 268, 270, 285, 351, 368–71, 405, 416–19, 421, 422, 425, 427

Virchow, Rudolf 62, 67 virtuality 155, 234 viscerality 33, 34, 413–15, 419–22, 424, 426, 432 n.71 Visceral Poetics (Stecopoulos) 427 visitor 134–7 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig 65 Von Thünen, Johann Heinrich 144–6, 155 Voyous (Derrida) 405 vulnerability 12, 15, 32–4, 205, 207, 208, 288, 289, 412–14, 416, 418, 420, 421, 423–4, 429 n.7, 430 n.29, 430 n.30 Wagner’s operas 12, 83–8 Wallerstein, Immanuel 15, 38 n.16, 109, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156 n.14, 156 n.15 Walzer, Michael 54, 56, 58, 66–8, 70 n.18 Wang, Jiuliang 351–2 War on Terror 412, 421, 424 Washington Trilogy (Robinson) 349 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 25, 349 Waugh, Patricia 12–13, 24, 411 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) 37 n.13, 58 Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (Ehrenberg) 37 n.15 Weaver, Warren 324 Weber, Max 42, 45 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour) 314 Weiszäcker, Richard von 47 Wells, H. G. 323 Weltanschauung 241, 341 Western modernity 31, 363–4, 367 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 415 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 326 Wikipedia 329 Williams, Raymond 35, 38 n.26, 109–10, 297 Winnicott, Donald W. 19, 20, 215, 216 Wisdom of Crowds, The (Suroweicki) 329 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 22, 95, 99, 101, 107, 109 Wong, Alvin K. 351 Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, The (Benjamin) 124

Index World Brain (Wells) 323, 330 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 362 Young, Edward 305 Young, Robert 157 n.18, 304–6, 308

ZAD (Zones à défendre) 256 Zeitgeist 46 Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory 169 Žižek, Slavoj 227–8, 230, 235, 260 zombification 352–4, 357 zoopraxiscope (Muybridge) 122, 123

463

464

465

466