Social And Virtual Space: Science Fiction, Transnationalism, And the American New Right 9780838640692, 9781423769040, 0838640699

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Social and Virtual Space: Science Fiction, Transnationalism, and the American New Right

Laura Chernaik

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Social and Virtual Space

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Social and Virtual Space Science Fiction, Transnationalism, and the American New Right

Laura Chernaik

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

© 2005 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8386-4069-9/05 $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.]

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chernaik, Laura, 1959– Social and virtual space : science fiction, transnationalism, and the American new right / Laura C. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8386-4069-9 (alk. paper) 1. Social justice—United States. 2. Gay liberation movement—United States. 3. Conservatism—United States. 4. Feminist theory. 5. Postmodernism. 6. Culture—Semiotic models. 7. Science fiction—Social aspects. 8. Science fiction—Political aspects. 9. Material culture. 10. Space and time—Social aspects. I. Title. HN90.M6C43 2005 303.3'72—dc22 2005011190

printed in the united states of america

Contents Preface Acknowledgments

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1. Undecidability and the Primacy of the Ethical 2. Articulating Politics: Consensus and a Minoritizing Strategy, or Material-Semiotic Practices 3. “To leave a world at dawn”: Writing, Reading, and Traveling, Samuel Delany’s Displacements 4. Pat Cadigan’s Synners: Refiguring Nature, Science, and Technology 5. Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the New Social Movements 6. “Too high a price”: Torture and the Neo-Conservative “Mission” Afterword

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Works Cited Index

193 203

30 62 98 121

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Preface Social and Virtual Space analyzes the way in which spatial practices—considered as both material and semiotic—provide a kind of structure for us when we both act and think socially. My focus is on the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; the social and political processes I address are those of gender, race, class, and sexuality. The objects of my analysis, though they all have something to do with spatiality and with the relations between space and place, are quite varied, including science fiction novels by Pat Cadigan, C. J. Cherryh, and Samuel Delany; material-semiotic feminist theory by Donna Haraway and Bernice Johnson Reagon; historical geography by Mike Davis and David Harvey; and the U.S.-led war in Iraq that began in 2003. As my focus is on acting and thinking, I also include a discussion of speech act theory, pragmatics, and deconstruction. “Pragmatics” is the theory of speech and action and is not to be confused with “pragmatism”: an American philosophical movement based on the work of William James (1907) that concentrates on effects and use, rather than on meaning. Many readers might assume that the word “virtual” in my title is an allusion to “virtual reality” technology and thus an advertisement of the fact that the book deals with technoscience. However, the word has a much longer history. I use the phrase “virtual space” to refer to the varied spatialities we construct during the course of social struggle and contestation, as well as in our thoughts about these processes. If spatial thought, as Harvey suggests, is paradigmatically social, these varied spatialities are, at the same time, various possibilities for action. My use of “virtual” in this way is an extension of Deleuze and Guattari’s connection of “actualized language” (statements and speech acts) with “virtual language” (that which remains as resource and substrate when it is not actualized in a particular statement). Henri Lefebvre also, most notably, used “virtual” to name the possibilities at which the theorist or activist aims. I used to write poetry as a child, and I remember, when about twelve or so, writing a poem about a big sit-in in Boston that I had been to a few years before. I used the line, “We thought they were the grown-ups,” referring to the activists, many of whom were students. To a sheltered child, anyone freer to act than herself seems adult. Looking back now, it is still their liberty that is 7

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paramount: those activists were both impulsive and hopeful in a way that seems astonishing to me. To a large extent, this book is an attempt to figure out what kind of world, or worlds, we have now, given that the world we thought was being created in the 1960s was not the world we found ourselves in by the 1970s. It took an ironically brief time for the leftwing political parties to become stuck in doctrinal niceties, but the lesbian and gay movement and women’s movement flourished, though somewhat argumentatively, throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and continue to do so in the twenty-first century. Contestation and struggle are the heart of social processes and of historical change. However, although sheer stubbornness can help, we also need to retain the impulsiveness, the hope, and even the na¨ıveté with which we began. During the events of 1968 in Paris, the activists drew some of their slogans from Henri Lefebvre’s Right To The City, a work that also inspired the neo-Marxist geographer, David Harvey, whose work I discuss in Social and Virtual Space. Henri Lefebvre claimed that “The conditions of the possible can only be realized in the course of a radical metamorphosis.” He also urged, “Let political forces take their responsibilities.” The act of enunciating these statements may seem more naïve to us in the present than such assertions did in the 1960s. However, it becomes even more necessary to say such things, now that the intervening events have made us more cynical. My project, in Social and Virtual Space, is to analyze the material-semiotic practices at work in contemporary U.S. society. My methodology in each chapter always connects semiotic and material, but individual chapters might have more “semiotic” objects of analysis than “material” objects, or vice versa. Chapter 1, Undecidability and the Primacy of the Ethical, describes the philosophical foundation for my project. It examines the way that the philosopher and Talmudic scholar, Emmanuel Levinas, explored, in his writings, the notion of responsibility. I show how, if Levinas’s argument about responsibility is related to the deconstructive writings of Jacques Derrida, one may arrive at an ethical foundation for both political critique and positive arguments. This foundation is not absolute, but provisional and slowly mobile, rather like one of the many turtles on which the Earth rests, in the Native American myth so attractive to Gilles Deleuze. Following on from chapter 1, chapter 2, Articulating Politics: Consensus and a Minoritizing Strategy, or Material-Semiotic Practices, has two parts, the first dealing with critique and the second with positive arguments. The first part of chapter 2

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analyzes the dominant, or hegemonic formation that was set up by the consensus politics of the post-war period and by the corporatist politics of the 1970s. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s (1974) application of “labeling theory,” I argue that consensus politics set a “minoritizing discourse” into motion, constructing the new social movements as counter-cultural and framing their political concerns as in some way “outside” of politics. The second part of chapter 2 moves on to antihegemonic ways of thinking through these oppositions between political, economic, social, and cultural, looking, in particular, at the Deleuzean philosophical background to the way in which, in Social and Virtual Space, I analyze technoscience and transnationalism. Chapter 3, “To leave a world at dawn”: Writing, Reading, and Traveling, Samuel Delany’s Displacements, continues with the emphasis on deconstruction, ethics, and politics, developing a detailed analysis of Samuel Delany’s science fiction (SF) writings and thus both a picture of the SF genre and a theory of SF criticism. This leads to the most sustained discussion, in Social and Virtual Space, of science fictional reading and writing practices. In particular, I show how the science fiction writer and theorist, Samuel Delany, draws on Derrida’s work. My interpretations open up political and ethical issues, dealing with and drawing on Levinas’s as well as Derrida’s texts and arguments. Chapter 4, Pat Cadigan’s Synners: Refiguring Nature, Science, and Technology, takes an SF novel as its object. I look, in more detail, at the notion of “technoscience” and use my analysis of this SF text to continue to argue through the questions about ethics and responsibility I raise in chapter 2. This chapter also contains a full discussion of Donna Haraway’s material-semiotic feminist theory and of the way in which this informs my own project. Chapter 5, Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the New Social Movements, is a detailed study of Mike Davis and David Harvey’s historical geography. The questions I raise about gender, race, class, and sexuality, and the relations between the political, economic, social, and cultural, are then applied in a brief analysis of the way that the SF writer C. J. Cherryh produces an implicit analysis of accumulation displaced in a fictional transplanetary economy. Chapter 6, “Too high a price”: Torture and the Neo-conservative “Mission,” is a close analysis of the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq. My analysis builds on Levinas’s discussion of responsibility, discussed in earlier chapters, using this in a material-semiotic analysis of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

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Acknowledgments I would, most of all, like to thank my union representative, Mark Oley, for, in his favorite writer’s words, “speaking truth to power,” and, for making it possible for me to complete this work, my cranial osteopath Lynn Haller, my acupuncturist Susanna Jiang, and my shiatsu practitioners Jo Bucknall and Natalie Koffman. I would like to thank my grandmother, my parents, and David and Susan, Sara, Pete, Alice, and Thomas for their support and love. I would also like to thank Lani, Fred, Clara, and Simon Chang, Eva Karasik, Bernie Karasik, and Michael Karasik, and Ann Davidson for their loving friendship. I would like to thank Berthe Ficarra and Ken Bruder as it was Ken’s suggestion of graduate school that started me on this long project. I’d like to thank the staff, students, and faculty at History of Consciousness, University of California Santa Cruz, which first showed me what a pleasure a challenging intellectual environment could be and how an intellectual community could also be caring and supportive. I’d like to thank, for friendship and for reading drafts of chapters over the years, John Ashworth, Faith Beckett, Susan Billingham, Lisa Bloom, Kim Hutchings, Carmen Huaco-Nuzum, Richard King, Francette Pacteau, Jon Simons, and Sharon Tabrizi. I’d like to thank my students, and those staff and faculty who retain a belief in intellectual inquiry and in the importance of retaining a public sector free of commercial and administrative ways of thought, where the importance of fostering independent thought is at the heart of both teaching and research, and where the welfare of the individual is still considered to be relevant, rather than seen as an inevitable casualty of competition. I drew heavily on a range of newspapers in writing the last chapter on the war in Iraq, and I would like to thank the remarkable journalists who work for the Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, and the Washington Post for their courageous reporting. o Earlier versions of some chapters were originally published as: “Skulking Amongst The Gantries: Gender Difference, Species Difference, and Transnational Accumulation,” Letterature D’America, Anno XIV, No. 55, 1994, Bulzoni Editore; “Spatial Displacements: transnationalism and the new social movements,” in Gender, Place and Culture vol. 3, no. 3 (1996) Taylor and Francis, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals; “The Web, 11

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Semiotics, and History: Samuel Delany’s Displacements,” in Beyond the Book: Theory, Culture, and the Politics of Cyberspace, ed. Warren Chernaik, Marilyn Deegan, and Andrew Gibson, Office for Humanities Communication Publications, vol. 7 (1996); “Pat Cadigan’s Synners: Refiguring Nature, Science and Technology,” Feminist Review no. 56 (June 1997), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; “Transnationalism, technoscience, and difference: the analysis of material-semiotic practices,” in Virtual Geographies: Bodies, space and relations, ed. Crang, Mike, Phil Crang, and Jon May (London: Routledge, 1999). The author gratefully acknowledges permission to use this material.

Social and Virtual Space

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1 Undecidability and the Primacy of the Ethical Social and Virtual Space, like the work of the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, links language with action. Texts that deconstruct the binary opposition between original texts and commentaries—and indeed, that between the material and the semiotic—are parasitic. They eat beside others. Or, in heteroglossia, not etymology, they are para-sites—beside or beyond a place or position. In this last case, the choices between beside and beyond and between place and position open up elaborate controversies. An interesting discussion of these distinctions, and of what, in analogy with the formation of the term “spatiality” from space, we may call “platiality,” can be found in Casey (1997), an excellent philosophical history of place tracing the sources of an active notion of place as a “measurant,” linked to agency and history, in opposition to a passive notion of place as position, as “measured,” linked to notions of social order and to lack of notions of agency and of history. Social and Virtual Space looks at these histories, and examines the ways that spatiality and platiality have been used both semiotically and materially. We can extend the wordplay suggested by the etymology of the word “text,” and think of the moments of difficulty we encounter when reading texts as knots that can be dealt with by the reader in various ways. Not only can it be interesting to untangle the knots, and trace each strand back to the other texts that are implicated here, but also this method of reading can help us to understand the texts that we are reading. In a way, the texts themselves teach us how to read them. It is for that reason that I present a series of close readings of passages from Derrida (1988) and Levinas (1969, 1985). The selected passages focus on concepts—undecidability, decision, and responsibility— that are essential to my argument in Social and Virtual Space. These same ideas and arguments are also dealt with in Derrida (1989, 1992, 1999). In recent years, a number of other critics have written on the affinities between Derrida and Levinas’s arguments, framing the affinities in one of three ways: either locating them in the wider Jewish or Spinozan philosophical tradition, 15

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for example, Gillian Rose (1992, 1993), Susan Handelman (1991), and Elizabeth Grosz (1995); or, in a way that has been quite influential, looking mostly at the more phenomenological aspects of their work, for example, Elizabeth Grosz (1995) (who might fall into all three groups), Simon Crichley (1992), and Richard Cohen (1986); or, third, looking at the political affinities of philosophies of alterity, for example, Grosz (1995), and Jeffrey Nealon (1998). For an approach that also deals with the connections between ethics and politics, but with less reference to Derrida and Levinas, see Mouffe (1993). Derrida (1988) argues in a passage I discuss at length below, that “undecidability” is the necessary condition for ethical and political action. It is multivalency or undecidability which opens a space for decision and thus for responsibility. Levinas (1969) argues in a number of passages (also discussed below) that ethics is the “first philosophy,” logically prior to epistemology. Philosophy, reformulated in this way, rests not on the subject and on any of his or her certainties, but on alterity and a profoundly unsettling “calling in question,” or responsibility. Levinas, like Derrida, is thus an antifoundationalist. He critiques foundationalism, arguing against the Cartesian use of the “indubitability” of the subject, “cogito ergo sum,” as an epistemological foundation and thus as a starting place for philosophy as a whole, as well as arguing against the more Kantian approach in which the search for knowledge involves a fuller discussion of the limits of knowledge. Levinas suggests that we must start with the other, with alterity, rather than with the subject. However, rather than constructing an alternative foundation—a kind of standpoint epistemology or identity politic—he argues that to give priority to the other is a privileging of ethics as prior, logically, to epistemology. Nancy Hartsock (1983) adapts the Hegelian and Marxist concept of standpoint epistemology to refer to the truth-claims of identity politics. For Hegel, the central example is the Master– Slave dialectic, in which both the Master and the Slave have distinct epistemologies, or claims to truth and knowledge, with the Master’s knowledge mediated through the Slave; Marx thinks in terms of a class dialectic, with the working class’s claim to knowledge more immediate, but never, as Marx learnt from Hegel, unmediated. Many activist groups, writing before Hartsock, could, if they were unfamiliar with Hegel, have found in Franz Fanon a more pessimistic source for this notion. Levinas is thus (like the activist groups with their standpoint epistemologies), an antifoundationalist. However, rather than straightforwardly finding a new foundation—developing the

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Slave’s position and arguing that members of oppressed groups have more immediate (but always, still, mediated) access to truth —he uses the dialectic of self and other to argue that ethics is the “first philosophy.” It is an encounter: more a place to interact or talk than a place to stand. Levinas’s antifoundationalism is very different both from the identity politics of many new social movement activist groups and from the antifoundationalisms that have, quite reasonably, been criticized for nihilism or ethical relativism. Rather than the political complacency of Rorty’s neopragmatism, with its naïve belief in some sort of level playing field, free of the effects of oppression, Levinas (1985, 98, quoting from The Brothers Karamazov) stresses a disturbing, but ultimately necessary Dostoyevskyan responsibility, “we are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others.” I return to this Levinasesque and Dostoyevskyan concept of responsibility in chapter 6.

Undecidability and the Possibility of a Decision of Writing We begin with close readings of passages taken from Derrida (1988) and Levinas (1969, 1985). My analysis of Derrida’s writings focuses on the concept of “undecidability”; my analysis of Levinas focuses on the concept of “alterity,” a relation to the other that does not sublate or assimilate it. I argue that “undecidability,” discussed at length in the 1988 text, is the key to a political and ethical interpretation of deconstruction. There is a prevalent misreading of deconstruction which centers around the notion that deconstruction is concerned with something called “indeterminacy.” However, Derrida has stated explicitly that his focus was on “undecidability,” not “indeterminacy”: I do not believe that I have ever spoken of “indeterminacy,” whether in regard to “meaning” or anything else. . . . [U]ndecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities. . . . These possibilities are themselves highly determined. . . . I say “undecidability” rather than “indeterminacy” because I am interested more in relations of force, in everything that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized through a decision of writing (in the broad sense I give to this word, which also includes political action and experience in general). There would be no indecision or double-bind were it not between determined (semantic, ethical, political) poles, which are on occasion terribly necessary and always irreplaceably singular. (Derrida 1988, 148–49)

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As far as I can determine, “indeterminacy” is a kind of vague wooliness. Deconstruction, however, is both precise in terms of the way in which it uses language and rigorous in terms of the structures of argumentation and not-argumentation it employs. It relies on determination. The notion of undecidability that Derrida employs here (taken, as Delany has pointed out, from Gödel) is considerably closer to Freud’s notion of overdetermination than it is to “wooliness.” In a text, there are multiple determinate possibilities for meaning, or for action. These possibilities are determinate; that is, they are precise and identifiable. They are not, however, determined. The existence of these multiple determinate possibilities does not foreclose human agency. It is what makes it possible. The opposition between free will and determinism that is at the heart of so many of the contemporary formulations of notions such as “intentionality” and “agency,” has to do with the way in which we have framed our concepts. It is not a fundamental of human existence. Derrida argues that the notions of intentionality and agency are important because they are intended to open a space for political and ethical action, but they are unable, in fact, to do so. It is undecidability that enables opening: “In accordance with what is only ostensibly a paradox, this particular undecidable opens the field of decision or of decidability. It calls for decision in the order of ethical-political responsibility. It is even its necessary condition. A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable” (Derrida 1988, 116). It is this notion of undecidability that makes a political reading of deconstruction possible. There is a distinction between the multivalent meanings or undecidabilities of a text and the “free play of meaning.” This notion of free play was common in some of the widely read texts on deconstruction published in the 1980s, for example Norris’s early book (1982), and Young (1981), and, despite Critchley’s (1992) suggestion that there was a chronological shift from an earlier, more literary interpretation of deconstruction to a later, more philosophical and often phenomenological interpretation, is still influential today. Both Norris and Young put forward an interpretation of deconstruction that stresses a concept they refer to as “free play.” This concept brings together Derrida’s notions of “writing” and “dissemination,” extending them as a notion of the “endless displacement of meaning” (Norris 1982, 289), a “textual ‘free play’ which would finally break with the instituted wisdom of

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language” (Norris 1982, 49), and, regarding the Yale Critics’ approach to deconstruction, “an openended free play of style and speculative thought, untrammeled by rules of any kind” (Norris 1982, 91), or, for Young, “writing . . . as the limitless of its own ‘play’ . . . an asemantic ‘drift’ (dérive) of difference” (Young 1981, 18). As Norris to some extent acknowledges, this concept applies more to the Yale Critics’ School within deconstruction than to Derrida’s work. Even for the Yale Critics, though, the point is more to do with the self-subversions of the text and the impossibility of ever fully mastering it. The “play” they refer to is more like the play of a fish on a line: so glittering, beautiful, and strong that the cruelty of the sport is masked. This notion of “free play” does not only move away from Derrida’s always text-specific arguments, it suggests, very misleadingly, that displacement and the production of meaning is reducible, purely and always, to excess. I argue that “free play” is a concept with only a very limited utility. It is “undecidability” which can lead to the most productive approaches. Undecidability can make possible a “decision of writing.” The decision of writing that undecidability makes possible enables the reader to shift and open up the inscription of domination in each particular text. Just as the meanings of the texts Derrida analyzes are undecidable, undecidability itself has multiple meanings. Derrida writes that there are three distinguishable meanings that can be assigned to undecidability: the meaning that resists binarity is strongly anti-dialectical, hence determined in dialectical terms; the meaning that defines the limits of decidability is still within the order of the calculable; but the third meaning is heterogeneous to both the dialectic and the calculable. This third sense of undecidability is the one that opens a space for ethical and political decision. Derrida argues that a reader or writer chooses among alternative senses of “undecidability” for strategic reasons: Derrida does not suggest that any of the three meanings are incorrect. A text commonly has more than one meaning. Also, as I argue throughout Social and Virtual Space, it is ethical and political discourse—the ethical and political dimension to human life and human texts—that is accessed by this third meaning of undecidability. Both good and bad ethical action, both oppressive and liberatory political action, can be enabled by this opening. Undecidability makes ethical and political action possible. It exceeds the calculable, the determinate, rather than opposing itself to it. It makes it possible for a person to act ethically and politically, to make ethical, political judgments, to ascribe responsibility.

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The other common misconception that many writers have about Derrida has to do with the notion of the text. It is sometimes argued that Derrida is only writing about language, not about the world. Derrida also clarifies this in Limited Inc. The metaphor of the parasite, which I used in opening this discussion, is also used by Derrida: “Once it has been demonstrated, as I hope to have done, that the exclusion of the parasite (of divergencies, contaminations, impurities, etc.) cannot be justified by purely theoretical-methodological reasons, how can one ignore that this practice of exclusion, or this will to purify . . . translates necessarily into a politics? Politics of language . . . violences committed by the state, politics of education, politics of immigration, behavior with regard to the ‘foreign’ in general, etc.” (Derrida 1988, 135–36). Derrida’s language picks up on the connotations of words and moves smoothly from “parasite” to “this will to purify.” “Parasite” was used, by the Nazis, to refer to the Jews; it is still commonly used today to refer to immigrants, or people whose ancestors were immigrants. The phrase, “this will to purify,” alludes also to the rhetoric used by the far-right parties in Europe. The New York Times (Serge Schmemann, “Coalition Parties Set Back in Berlin,” January 30, 1989) gives the following quotation from the then-chairman of the Republican Citizens Party: “Today, the Germans have shown again the need for a democratically purified patriotism.” That chairman, Franz Schönhuber, is a former SS officer. He is describing “purifying patriotism” by excluding foreigners from Germany “democratically,” by, he hopes, electing his party. Similar language is used by Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, the neo-fascist party that formed part of Austria’s governmental coalition; after an internal split, Haider returned to govern Carpathia, and the party he had led continued to be influential in federal Austrian politics. The history of Europe and the resurgence and electoral successes of far-right anti-immigrant political parties sets up a context in which we can read Derrida’s passage about “the exclusion of the parasite.” The stakes are quite simple. Derrida’s approach opens up a political argument, one about action and language. The phrase “the will to purify” alludes to the language used by European farright parties: the German and Austrian parties with links to the Nazi past, neo-Fascist parties in Britain and Holland, and so forth. In contrast, both Austin and Searle—the philosophical sources of the approach to language and action Derrida is critiquing—are, because of the way that they formulate their approach, unable to open up political arguments. Austin’s philosophy of language

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emphasizes and distinguishes between the various actions accomplished while uttering a statement. John Searle made use of Austin’s philosophy of language in the development of Speech Act Theory. Austin had made a “methodological” distinction between two kinds of discourse, two ways of using language, and had proposed to exclude “nonserious” language and discourse from consideration. Searle had defended both the distinction and the exclusion. Derrida argues that Austin’s methodological distinctions between the different kinds of actions made in speech are useful, but Austin’s tendency to exclude what Austin referred to as “impurities” means that, at the same time as one analyzes his text to extract his useful argument, one also finds oneself analyzing the concepts of “impurity,” etc. and these later concepts are clearly political. Austin excluded figurative speech and literary writing, labeling them as “divergencies” and as “contaminations,” as “non-standard.” Derrida argues: [O]ne neither can nor should begin by excluding the possibility of these eventualities [the most recent antecedent is “theatrical or literary fiction”]: first of all because this possibility is part of the structure called “standard”. . . . It is an essential internal and permanent part, and to exclude what Austin himself admitted is a constant possibility from one’s description is to describe something other than the so-called standard case. . . . If what they call the “standard,” “fulfilled,” “normal,” “serious,” “literal,” etc. is always capable of being affected by the non-standard, the “void,” the “abnormal,” the “nonserious,” the “parasitical,” etc., what does that tell us about the former? . . . [T]ied to iterability, this possibility obtains constantly. (Derrida 1988, 89, his italics)

ˇ zek Judith Butler (1990, 1993), and Slavoj Zi ˇ (1989, 1993) also wrote about Austin and developed his methodology in politically useful ways, as I discuss in later chapters. I also discuss ˇ zek, Zi ˇ Butler, and their use of Austin in greater length in an article (Chernaik 1995). Richard Rorty (1989) suggests that Derrida’s argument about Searle and Austin is a personal, private response: he claims that Derrida’s argument is an explication of Derrida’s own associations, rather than Searle and Austin’s allusions. Rorty’s critique has prompted an interesting series of papers debating pragmatism and deconstruction, see Mouffe, ed. (1996). It seems to me that Rorty is mistaken: Derrida is analyzing a range of oppositional terms that Searle and Austin do in fact use: fulfilled vs. void, normal vs. abnormal, serious vs. non-serious, literal vs. parasitical. As Rorty correctly points out, Derrida’s argument discounts Searle and Austin’s intentions in using these oppositions. However, as more of a nominalist

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than a constructivist, Rorty underestimates the extent to which Derrida’s readings correctly identify conceptual patterns, terminology deployed in particular ways in Searle and Austin’s texts. Austin’s analyses of performatives and other speech-acts, Derrida argues, focused only on certain kinds of language and language-use. Austin excluded other kinds of language and usages from consideration, arguing that they were “parasitic” on the so-called “literal” language he was analyzing. Logic would seem to suggest that, if Austin’s characterization were correct, it would be unnecessary to analyze such “parasitic” formations separately. However, Derrida argues, the possibility of “parasitic” language is part of the “structure called ‘standard’ and to exclude what Austin himself admitted is a constant possibility is to describe something other than the standard case” (Derrida 1988, 89). There is thus a flaw in Austin’s methodology, one magnified by Searle. The only way out of this double bind is to deconstruct this opposition between literal and parasitic language. Derrida does so, and arrives at the notion of iterability: the ability, lability, and liability to repeat. To take Derrida’s own text as an example, the phrase “this will to purify” has several meanings. It alludes, as I have said above, to the rhetoric used by the far-right groups in Europe. In Austin and Searle’s terms, this meaning would be the parasitic one. It would be dependent on a literal meaning. What is the literal meaning of “this will to purify”? Well, what is the antecedent of “this”? The antecedent of “this,” in the phrase above, is one of the repeatable and replaceable passages, for example, “to exclude what Austin himself admitted is a constant possibility.” Read in terms of the opposition between literal and parasite, what we have is a messy, circular argument. Read in terms of iterability, what we have is an opening towards politics. His argument is a broad one: the exclusion of the parasite touches on all the social institutions. And, in particular, we can note that Derrida’s notion of text does not exclude the world, reality, or history: “A few moments ago, I insisted on writing, at least in quotation marks, the strange and trivial formula, ‘realhistory-of-the-world’ in order to mark clearly that the concept of text or of context which guides me embraces and does not exclude the world, reality, history. . . . The text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference—to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other” (Derrida 1988, 137). The network of differences that is iterability thus, always, refers us to the other, so that interpreting texts, not books, takes us out of the library (with our books in hand) to, as Derrida says,

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the world, reality, and history. The next part of this chapter is devoted a discussion of the relation to the other. It focuses on responsibility, the radical, non-reciprocal responsibility that I bear to the other. We have this responsibility whether or not we admit to it; avoiding it is what makes our history so horrific.

Alterity and Ethics The notion of responsibility I mentioned above is the heart of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy. In the following passage Levinas argues against Descartes, and, in the comment about self-foundation “outside of heteronymous opinions” and the discussion of the for-itself, also against Hegel. In addition, Levinas, despite his habit of mostly separating his philosophical from his religious writings, puts the beginning of the argument in religious terms. The self is created: a creature, and the big other— capital O—is Infinity, the Spinozan concept of God. Granted this, he speculates: To posit knowing as the very existing of the creature, as the tracing back . . . to the other that founds, is to separate oneself from a whole philosophical tradition that sought the foundation of the self in the self, outside of heteronymous opinions. We think that existence for itself is not the ultimate meaning of knowing, but rather the putting back into question of the self, the turning back to what is prior to oneself, in the presence of the Other. The presence of the Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom but invests it. The shame for oneself, the presence of and desire for the other are not the negation of knowing: knowing is their very articulation. The essence of reason consists not in securing for man a foundation and powers, but in calling him in question and inviting him to justice. (Levinas 1969, 88)

The self does not have a foundation in itself. If we, according to Levinas, think in terms of knowing—the process, the action— and not only in terms of knowledge, we will come to think of knowing as a mode in which a being exists. We will trace this mode of being back to the other and not to the self. Both knowledge and life are a questioning. This means that epistemology—the discourse on knowledge— is secondary. The Other has priority and the relations of the subject to the other come first. This relation is ethics. Levinas gives priority to the Other ethically and argues that knowledge comes out of the articulation of our relation with the other: an articulation that is specified in both ethical and sexual terms.

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We may also note that it is man who has “sought the foundation of the self in the self, outside of heteronymous opinions.” Generally, when Levinas uses the masculine gender it is because he is writing about the male subject. Levinas’s ethical philosophy is specified in terms of responsibility, guilt, and shame. “E.L. I understand responsibility as responsibility for the Other, thus as responsibility for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me; or which precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face. . . . The tie to the Other is knotted only as responsibility, this moreover, whether accepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing how to assume it, whether able or unable to do something concrete for the Other” (Levinas 1985, 95). Levinas’s concept of responsibility is radical. I am responsible in relation to others and situations that do not matter personally to me (I am responsible to starving people I do not know, or to someone hurt by a slight that seems trivial to me). I am responsible for what I have done, and for what has been done, but not by me. For example, my sister told a young man to pick up his trash, “How dare you drop that on the train platform when I am trying to teach my child manners.” The young man is responsible for what did not matter to him (keeping train platforms clean and tidy; setting a good example); my sister is responsible for Alice’s upbringing, which makes her sensitive to her general responsibility for good or bad manners, even if they were not her deed. I am responsible whether or not I accept, or agree with my responsibilities (thus the young man is responsible to the fellow users of the railway, even if he does not care about the environment he shares with them, and he is responsible for the example he sets the children of strangers to whom he is indifferent, whether or not he accepts or agrees with these responsibilities), and even if I do not know what to do, after accepting responsibility. It is a non-reciprocal relationship: I am responsible for the other, whether or not the other accepts his or her responsibilities in turn. Thus, I, like my sister, am also responsible. However, my sister is fearless and guiltless and spoke immediately to the litterer. I might have said nothing and felt guilty. Thus, Levinas moves from a discussion of the non-reciprocity of responsibility to the question of guilt. He posits a clear relationship between both concepts. Ph.N. But is not the Other also responsible in my regard? E.L. Perhaps, but that is his affair. . . . In this sense, I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. . . . You know that sentence in Dostoyevsky: “we are all guilty of all

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and for all men before all, and I more than the others.” This is not owing to such and such a guilt which is really mine, or to offences that I would have committed; but because I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. The I always has one responsibility more than all the others. (Levinas 1985, 95–98, his italics)

It is the responsibility of the oldest child. This concept of responsibility is shaped by the notion of guilt to which it is linked. However, the notion of guilt Levinas is discussing is different from the notion most common in our culture, hegemonic, confessional guilt, one that is “really mine or [owing] to offences that I might have committed,” analyzed, for example, by Foucault (1980, 1985, 1986). That is derived from Catholic practice and is guilt for deeds one has done. Confessional guilt also involves guilt for the deeds of Adam and Eve, original sin (which I discuss in chapter 4), but they, as the Jewish tradition stresses, are our “first parents,” so that, too, is “guilt that is really mine, or for offenses that I would have committed.” Levinas’s notion of guilt is not confessional guilt. It is a culturally specific notion of guilt. The oldest child recognizes that he or she has “one responsibility more than all the others” and this leads her to believe she is guilty, “and I more than the others.” Thus, Levinas’s notion of responsibility is a radical one, derived from particular, strong experiences of responsibility and guilt. We, as Jews, are also part of other cultures. Levinas’s argument thus needs to be understood in terms of a rereading of the cultures of which Jews have been a part, as well as a rereading of the way in which Jews have been seen as the Other, by ourselves, as well as by non-Jews. When Levinas quotes Dostoyevsky, “we are all guilty . . . and I more than the others,” he is speaking in terms of a multicultural society in which a Jew can quote Dostoyevsky for his or her own purposes. In order for this to be possible, we must be part of this society and we must also be distinguishable from it. Levinas’s philosophy of the oldest child, the Dostoyevskyan “we are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others” is to do with alterity. It is a culturally specific ethics; written by a subject who is a member of a multicultural society in which the representation of the other in terms that bring it back to the same has sometimes led to genocide. In the passage quoted above, Philippe Nemo suggests, too, that the non-reciprocal nature of responsibility has profoundly disturbing implications. Levinas uses Nemo’s question in two ways: firstly, to further explain his argument about non-reciprocal

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responsibility, and secondly, as I discuss below, to critique the ways that visual metaphors are used in conceptualizing thinking and intentionality (the relation to the object), and thus to develop an argument about the unassimilability of the Other, one that is in opposition to the conventional phenomenological notion of a “thematizing gaze.” Nemo uses a visual metaphor, “in my regard,” in order to ask whether the other is responsible for me even as I am responsible for him. In doing so he alludes to Levinas’s notion of the Faceto-Face relation. Levinas replies that the relation to the other is not a reciprocal relation. At this point in the discussion, both speakers use the male pronoun. The implications of this are different for each speaker. Nemo appears to be thinking of a philosophy in which knowledge and vision are linked: that would tie in with any one of a whole series of problematics in which the representation of femininity is bound up with questions of knowledge, truth, and vision. Levinas, however, uses the male pronoun because the exemplary case of the other-for-whom-Iam-responsible in the religious Jewish philosophy he draws upon is conventionally gendered male. He is the neighbor or the outof-town guest to whom one owes hospitality. In the religious discourse the students and interlocutors were presumed to be male and heterosexual: the neighbor and dinner-guest were examples selected to emphasize community feeling, not personal or sexual feelings. Levinas’s discourse, in presuming a male, heterosexual subject, is, of course masculinist and heterosexist, but the point made by means of the masculinist, heterosexist assumptions is a valid one, emphasizing the community values which are important in Jewish culture. If one rephrases the argument without the conventional assumptions about gender and sexuality, the apparent opposition between community and more personal, sexual bonds becomes less defensible, but, apart from that, the argument works in the same way; a neighbor or guest is still an example of an other-for-whom-I-am-responsible, whatever the gender and sexuality of the subject and other. Incidentally, when Derrida (1999), writing after Levinas’s death in a memorial to him, discusses the androcentrism of Levinas’s phenomenological analysis of women, the key examples have to do with hospitality and with cases where it is the woman who is the host. Derrida deconstructs the word hôte (both host, and guest), demonstrating that, for Levinas, the duty of hospitality shows us that dwelling is always—and historically, for Jews—precarious, the host as well as the guest a stranger and a sojourner. Levinas argues (1969) that it must be possible to reconceptualize the relation between the same and the other so that the

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presence of the other does not threaten the same and does not do violence to it. According to Levinas, this way of thinking “calls my freedom to responsibility and founds it,” that is, the relation between the same and the other does not provide a foundation for the same. It provides a foundation for freedom, a freedom that, being grounded in responsibility, is for all and not just for some: “The face in which the other—the absolutely other—presents himself does not negate the same, does not do violence to it. . . . It remains commensurate with him who welcomes. . . . This presentation is pre-eminently nonviolence, for instead of offending my freedom it calls it to responsibility and founds it” (Levinas 1969, 203, ellipses added). The word commensurate can be read in several ways. The standard meaning, of course, is “of the same mind.” It can also be read, however, or misread—I was pleased to find my interpretation confirmed by Derrida (1999)—as “at the same table.” Levinas argues that it is possible to think of the other as a stranger that is invited to dinner; he sets this notion of the other against the conceptualization of the other as one who has “a frontier with the same” and who can thus be at war with the same. Levinas’s argument is radical because of its insistence that the other ought to be left alone, the other should not be assimilated and the other should not be read as a representation. Levinas’s philosophy is written out of a particular historical moment (post-Second World War) by a man who is, himself, a concentration camp survivor. His is an ethics that could survive such a history: both his personal history, as it is he who is writing, and history in the wider sense. Levinas is arguing in favor of a philosophy in which ethics is seen as primary and epistemology is seen as secondary. He declines to speak of the relation to the face in terms of the look, because, as he understands it, that would force him to speak in terms of knowledge—not knowing—and that would, in turn, undermine his privileging of alterity. He starts with the phenomenological conception of intentionality, the relation to the object or theme. This is usually thought through using a visual metaphor, so that the structure of intentionality is analogous to the structure of vision, with seeing and with a seen that is its object. We think of the intentional relation or process as something like vision, we think of a “gaze” that thematizes alterity; and we thematize, or think of, alterity as the kind of object that is looked at. Thus, in Levinas’s words, in human consciousness, for the phenomenologists, the ego is “aiming at, and embracing, or perceiving, all alterity in its thematizing gaze.”

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This can be useful: when we, as philosophers, start by analyzing intentionality by thinking in terms of “vision and knowledge,” we are able to come up with notions of “intelligibility and intelligence.” However, the particular ideas of intelligibility and intelligence we come up with in this way have problems. By conceptualizing notions to do with thought and thinking in visual terms we are “privileging, in the very temporality of thought, the present in relation to the past and future.” Having conceptualized intelligence and intelligibility in this way, we are stuck. Any attempt to understand temporality differently leads us back to the same mistake. If we try to understand how presence changes in the past or future, we end up “reducing and bringing back the past and the future to presence—that is, representing them.” When we reduce and bring back the past and future to presence, that is, when we conceptualize the notions of past and future in a narrow way in which presence is central, and, for philosophy often works by puns and double meanings, by bringing past and future into the present—representing past and future— rather than thinking of temporality in a way in which the present extends (subtends, intends, etc.) into past and present, we find ourselves “understanding alterity assumed by the thought of the identical—as its own and, then still, of leading its other back to the same.” That is, in using visual metaphors for thought, we come up with particular notions of thought (intelligibility and intelligence, for example). In thinking of thought in this way, we think of temporality in a way that reduces (falsely) the alterity of the past and future. If alterity is reduced where temporality is concerned—we may then generalize—this is a case of the common way of thought in which the other is reduced to the same, or “led back to the same.” Intelligibility, thought of by means of a visual metaphor, is a sign that the other is being thought of in a way that reduces it to the same. Thus, “In thought understood as vision, knowledge, and intentionality, intelligibility thus signifies the reduction of the other [Autre] to the Same, synchrony as being in its egological gathering” (Levinas 1982, 97–99). We may also note, here, that Levinas has written extensively on Jewish religious thought. One example Levinas gives of the radically unassimilable Other is the example of God. The religious prohibition of the representation of God is located in this same fear that our images and tropes shape our way of thinking, even of thinking about thought, and that representation, by its present and synchronous aspects, would make God seem less other. In order to think of thought differently, and in order to

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think of alterity differently, we need to use different, non-visual metaphors. This extraordinary critique of phenomenology gives us a different way of thinking the encounter: the Face. This, as one of the key points of his philosophy, is formulated in ethical terms, that is, as a relation in which the other is transcendent—taking this term in its seventeenth-century Spinozan sense—to the same. By transcendent, Levinas means that the other cannot be assimilated, encompassed, or sublated. This way of thinking about foundations, where a foundation, rather than rooting one to security and enabling sure knowledge, emphasizes, instead, that we are all sojourners and calls us to justice, is the basis for my project in Social and Virtual Space. Chapter 2 examines the ways in which the “logos” of the “ego,” by narrowing “thought” to “intelligibility” and thus to what, in a particular discourse and set of practices, “makes sense,” reduces the other to the same, excluding difference. I apply this abstract, philosophical argument to a historical and political example, showing how consensus politics of the postwar period in the United States gave rise to a series of “minoritizing” strategies, framing only some groups and interests as political. In contrast, a Deleuzean approach to questions of difference, such as we find in the theories of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, shows us how practices and discourses can be considered together, as part of the “material-semiotic” practices of which history and social change are made. I return to the question of responsibility in chapters 4 and 6, in which I first examine it in a literary context and then apply it to the discussion of contemporary history.

2 Articulating Politics: Consensus and a Minoritizing Strategy, or Material-Semiotic Practices This chapter presents two very different ways of establishing—and analyzing—links between “community” and “politics.” In the first part, consensus and a minoritizing strategy, I use Stuart Hall’s (1974) analysis of the relation between “deviance” and consensus politics to analyze mainstream—or hegemonic—ways of understanding political movements of the left, right, and center. In the second part, I look at more sociopolitically marginal—but academically influential—ways of understanding political movement. In particular, I disentangle the Deleuzean philosophical background to the way in which I analyze transnationalism and technoscience. Rather than looking at Deleuze and Guattari’s texts in isolation, I concentrate on the way their ideas have been used and adapted by Donna Haraway, and by a few other theorists who, like me, have been lucky enough to study with and be influenced by her.

Consensus and a Minoritizing Strategy Stuart Hall (1974) argues that the consensus politics of the postwar period in both the United States and Britain set up, and reinforced, a particular, historically specific kind of separation: a labeling and legitimizing of particular movements and issues as political, and a labeling and delegitimizing of others as social or cultural. Consensus politics set up a sense of what was properly political, and what was deviant to politics, or, in a rhetorical move the power of which Hall documents again and again, what is simply deviant: the object of therapeutic care, social scientific study, or public management. To give a recent example, the demonstrators—despite the historical significance of the commitment of both the unions and the new social movements— were outside (both literally and metaphorically) the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) conference in Seattle 1999. The “public management” was a police action that managed to be, at the same time, both ludicrously underprepared and 30

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shockingly heavy-handed. The American broadcast media coverage was so inadequate that the British media frequently commented on how odd it was for a United States event to be reported more in Britain than in America. The broadsheets in Britain, with their greater scope for detailed coverage, while describing the demonstrators as “cogent and well-informed,” often failed to give much, if any, detail to their arguments, despite a number of editorials and op-eds sympathetic to the demonstrators. Within the WTO conference (again as reported by British media), the developing nations were marginalized and excluded to such an extent that, to his credit, the Blairite “reformist,” Stephen Byers (head of the British delegation), sent two British civil servants to brief the developing nations after the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) lobbying both the rich and the poor nations had spoken to him. They reportedly said that this had been their most productive meeting. This was absolutely disgraceful. We can only be grateful that no agreements were reached by a WTO in which, to such an extent, secrecy and lack of democracy structure the decision-making process. Later WTO meetings made nominal attempts to involve NGOs, but increased the policing and surveillance of oppositional groups, and, especially after 9/11, held the meetings in increasingly remote locations. Hall’s argument is clearly Foucauldian, but extending Foucault in a way that counters the common (though somewhat overstated) criticism of Foucault as excessively particularistic and as not providing a theory of resistance. See Hoy (1986) for a number of well-stated examples of these claims. Hall’s objects of study include psychology and psychiatry, social science, and administrative practices and institutions, analyzed in a way that addresses both micropolitics and macropolitics. Hall argues that the “deviant,” in this period from 1950s consensus to 1970s corporatism, was labeled as such as part of a wider, macropolitical labeling: a narrow definition of what was to count as political and an exclusion—or, in other words, a production—of the social and cultural as not-political, as deviant to politics. This exclusion from the terms of the consensus produced the counterculture— produced it as cultural, that is—and also produced the new social movements—as social and cultural, not political. And so, the counterculture: both culture, and counter. And thus, the new social movements: defined, and defining themselves, as social as well as oppositional. The term “counterculture” was invented in the 1960s by participants in the social and cultural changes of that time. Like the New Left, with which political movement the counterculture both overlapped and differed, the counterculture emphasized

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ideologies and values. Thus, Stuart Hall, a New Leftist in the 1960s, emphasizes “self-images,” “counter-norms and values,” and “ideological terms,” when using the 1960s terminology, “the counterculture,” in the (1974) piece I discuss. The term “new social movement” became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, as a way of referring to a range of collective, political movements that included civil rights, Black Power, La Raza, women’s, gay, lesbian, and ecology. The term “social” connoted “collective,” but quickly became used as well to distinguish these movements from class-based movements. Although some of the new social movements may, at times, have been antiMarxist, many were in sympathy with the general trend of Marxist philosophy, if not with specific details. Like the New Left, with which the new social movements overlapped, this was a critique of economism and an argument for the cogency of ideological analysis and intellectual history. It was also a claim about the possibilities for a broad-based movement with revolutionary potential. New social movement activists and theorists pointed to the historical differences between the United States and Europe; in particular, the lack of a broad-based labor movement, and claimed that issues of race or gender might have broader appeal than class and so might be more successful in bringing about revolutionary change. This is why in Seattle 1999 many of the demonstrators (as the media showed) rode carnival floats and wore, for example, turtle costumes (to recommend that the WTO pass regulations mandating the use of gadgets that would provide an escape hatch to endangered turtles caught in commercial fishing nets). Hall argues that it is the establishment of a consensus that leads to the production—or provocation—of other forms of politics, labeled as outside politics and as deviant: “Since the form and content of consensus is highly problematic, it has to be powerfully advanced in ideological terms. The drive to install consensual forms of domination at the heart of the political process itself is countered, specifically, in the ideological zone by the promulgation and articulation of counter-norms and values: that is, by counter-cultural or ‘deviant’ forms of political action. Shared norms, values and institutions—the ‘sacred’ character of the consensus itself—are stressed: conflicts of outlook and interest are repressed” (Hall 1993, 70). A struggle is going on to define the consensus. Both consensus politics and alternative politics define themselves “ideologically” in this struggle—the consensus stressing “shared norms, values and institutions” and the alternative groups stressing “counter-norms and values.” “Alternative minority politics is

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therefore impelled, not simply to advance counter-interests within the pattern of regulated class conflict and ‘due process’ but to exaggerate their degree of deviation from institutionalized processes as such. New systematic contradictions which arise are displaced, in the search for consensus, from the heart of political life. Groups which express these grievances and contradictions, having been given marginal political status, are labeled ‘marginal’ ” (Hall 1993, 70). This leads to a “deviance spiral”—the counterculture and the new social movements are labeled as “marginal,” and as “social,” or “cultural.” It is consensus politics’ labeling of particular political interests as “marginal” that produces the stigmatization that makes such groups’ interests seem deviant and that makes the groups’ methods seem unpolitical. Instead of politics, the counterculture seems, from this perspective, to produce culture. Similarly, the new social movements seem, from the consensus’s perspective, to be concerned with the social or cultural in contradistinction to the political. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party, tried to prevent Ken Livingstone’s first election as mayor of London. Livingstone has now been elected as mayor for the second time; previously he was a Labour MP and before that, the head of the Greater London Council (GLC) until the GLC was abolished by Margaret Thatcher. Livingstone, who is extremely popular and charismatic, argues for the full range of new social movement values and politics, as well as for the more traditionally socialist ones. In the first London mayoral election, Prime Minister Blair attacked Livingstone by saying “Red Ken” represents the “Loony Left.” When the slur was first used in the 1970s the reference was primarily to the GLC and some local councils’ pro-gay, pro-lesbian, antiracist, and antinuclear policies. When the phrase is currently used, now that many of Livingstone’s policies have been accepted by many (though crucially not all) centrists and even right-wingers, the policy denotation is elided and the “Loony”—that is, the object of therapeutic care or of management—connotation is paramount. By the second mayoral election, when Labour was facing a difficult European election, Livingstone’s popularity was to their benefit and Blair made no attempt to label him or his policies as deviant, or as in need of care. Hall argues that the counterculture and the new social movements were led to “exaggerate their degree of deviance from institutional processes as such.” A second theorist, Cindy Patton (1995), develops the argument further, showing how groups labeled as “deviant to politics” (and thus, according to the logic

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Hall discusses, simply as “deviant”) can reject the way that the consensus formulates relations between economic, political, social, and cultural as oppositions, reformulating them as connections, thus breaking the deviance spiral. Cindy Patton is an American social theorist whose work until recently has largely focused on the leftist, oppositional new social movements (with a particular interest in issues to do with AIDS). Her recent work is concerned with the New Right. She argues (of the period in the United States from the end of the Second World War to the end of the 1970s) that minoritizing liberal pluralism led to a proliferation of spaces for an increasing number of minorities, defined, and defining themselves by an ontonomination (that is, naming, the construction of an identity) which crucially includes social scientific construction of knowledge. (Her argument is thus more explicitly postmodern than the early article by Hall, but deals with the same issues: constructivist epistemologies, the performativeness of labeling, and a focus on social sciences). The tactics of the new social movements were effective and so, as Patton and other historians and sociologists have argued, the New Right explicitly, and consciously decided to imitate the tactics (but of course not the aims) of the new social movements. Patton argues that if a new social movement’s argument for inclusion in the polity were successful, this was because the movement succeeded in widening the notion of the political, linking the political with the social or the cultural. As Patton shows, the discourse and practices of leftist political culture extend the political in a way that becomes the basis of a pluralist notion of “good/goods.” Patton discusses pluralism clearly, but puts the emphasis on liberal pluralism, the version of pluralism the New Right argues most strongly against. However, there are actually two ways in which notions of pluralist good/s can be articulated: firstly, a modern, liberal political good structured by a public/private split, (that is, an “empty” or “proceduralist” political good, with separate, private notions of good for each interest group), and secondly, a postmodern iterative political good (that is, where the different political goods are linked in a series, as in coalition politics). The most detailed and convincing political theory analysis of the modern, liberal notion of political good is that developed by John Rawls and the Rawlsian liberals who built on his work. Rawlsian liberals argue that it is possible to separate the notion of a political good (conceptualized minimally, just in proceduralist terms) from the various specific goods which persons or groups might individually and privately choose when, in practice, this procedure is applied.

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Political goods can be critiqued in terms of justice. Right (that is, justice) trumps good: there are valid political arguments for discriminating between various ways of conceptualizing political good. Just societies, though, can differ meaningfully and significantly from each other: they have different social goods. Rawlsian liberals are engaged in a debate with the communitarians. The communitarians argue that the inability of strict Rawlsians to say much about these “social” differences matters: procedural notions of political good are merely formal, and thus empty. The communitarians advance specific political claims and ethical arguments, basing these on community (local) mores and ethics. The specific conclusions and claims of various communitarians vary: most stress the importance of “values” and even of “political virtues,” grounding these, very often, by analogies between communities and the ancient Greek polis. The theorists who link their analogies with the polis with discussion of classical Greek political philosophy (usually referring to Aristotle), are thus a kind of bridge to the “Civic Republicans,” the historians of the American Constitution and political system who argue that the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution and political system were drawing on an Aristotelian civic republican tradition. However, as Chantal Mouffe (1993) argues, an Aristotelian would unify (rather than separate) social and political goods. Like other classical Greek philosophers, Aristotle did not make the liberal (modern) distinction between political good (justice) and plural social goods. In terms of historical periodicization, civic republicans and those communitarians close to civic republicans are trying to return the United States to a pre-modern condition. Or, in terms of political theory, the Aristotelian “good” is a unified social and political good with priority over the right. For communitarians and civic republicans, “good” is a unified social and political good, and trumps right. For Rawlsian liberals (or “liberal pluralists”), political good and social goods are separate; political good is “right,” justice, and trumps social good/s. Cindy Patton does not explicitly discuss the Liberalism versus Communitarianism debate, but this debate is highly relevant to her argument. Patton uses her discussion of liberal pluralism (consonant with my analysis above, though no explicit links with the political theory debate are made) to analyze the way that the New Right also articulates the social and cultural with the political. In contrast to liberal pluralism, the New Right unifies a singular political good with a singular social good. Thus, partisans of the New Right inevitably came into conflict with more progressive forces and with liberal pluralism itself. Unlike other

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social groups, the New Right wanted to establish its identity as the typical American identity: “If initially the new right seemed content to occupy another of liberal pluralism’s expanding social spaces, it quickly recognized the means of deconstructing social space while capitalizing its own identity as the central— and, they hoped, the only—form of subject-constitution within the ultimately imploded field of unmarked (anti-minoritarian) bodies” (Patton 1995, 233–34). The conflict between the attempts of the New Right to define what was to count—and what was not to count—as American identity led to a series of conflicts over family and sexuality. Family values and lesbian and gay sexual rights became key issues, as significant electorally as race: “This bid for territorial dominance did not go unrecognized by progressive factions; a series of skirmishes over ‘family’ and ‘minority’ partially created the conditions for the new right’s final move to reintegrate the fields mapped as separate under secular, liberal-plural discourse” (Patton 1995, 233–34). As a result, the spatiality constructed by the New Right was both theocratic and white supremacist: “Not only did they reject the tripartite distinction [social, political, and cultural] which had enabled liberal pluralism to manage a range of political differences by allocating them to an infinitely expandable and non-competing set of social spaces, but they proposed their own theory of space based in religious separatist and segregationist conceptions of only two, mutually hostile spaces: Christian or white space, and the secular or race-mixing world, which would be eradicated by God at the millennium” (Patton 1995, 236). Following Chantal Mouffe’s (1993) argument and using conventional political theory terminology, we could say that the New Right, like communitarians and civic republicans, argues for a priority of the good over the right, with the good being defined in Aristotelian terms, political good and social good(s) unified. It is only a small step, therefore, from a communitarian argument to an illiberal, Aristotelian argument like those used by the New Right. Thus, the New Right, the more conservative communitarians, the civic republican-influenced communitarians, and the new social movements then seem curiously alike, insofar as they argue against the separation of the political from the social or cultural that was set up by consensus politics (and 1970s corporatism) between the 1950s and 1970s. Where they differ is how this articulation is to be seen—as an Aristotelian unified social and political good, with priority over the right, as the New Right, many communitarians, and most civic republicans would have

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it, or, as liberals and those few left-liberal communitarians would suggest, in terms of an argument for plural goods, and with the right having priority over the good, that is, where notions of justice are central. I said above that there are two ways in which pluralism can be articulated: a modern liberal notion and a postmodern notion. Putting together Mouffe’s argument with Iris Marion Young’s (1995), it is possible to argue that postmodern, multicultural pluralism, in contrast to the liberal, modern, formation, is articulated as a series or, in Derridian terminology, an “iterative” construction (two examples are radical democracy and new social movement coalition politics). My claim here is twofold. First, “liberal pluralism” is a modern formation, common in the modern period. In the postmodern period the modern formation co-exists with other formations, most notably new social movement coalition politics. (Single new social movements outside a coalition would often be modern, not postmodern.) Second, moving on from postmodernity to postmodernism (that is, from historical period to typical intellectual concerns) the “iterative” conceptualization lends itself to a postmodernist articulation of political with social or cultural via difference, not via identity. That is, we are not arguing that political and social are not separable. The claim is that a particular linkage may be productive or useful. Separate realms may be articulated, bridges constructed. Another way of making this argument might be to suggest that the mistake is to assume that “culture” or “society” is unitary. (See my discussion of Grewal and Kaplan’s use of Hannerz later in this chapter.) Conceptually, it may be useful to think of a social realm articulated pragmatically with a political one. That should not, however, lead us to argue that the “social realm” is inhabited by a single, unitary society or culture. However, modern liberalism and postmodern iterative coalition politics are only two of the political groupings today. It is the centrist and rightist groups that are, at the moment, more influential. Civic Republicans argue that the center and the right are more influential because they build on traits and traditions that go all the way back to the foundation of the United States. They suggest that the New Deal, the Great Society, and the liberal Warren Supreme Court were brief and uncharacteristic liberal moments in a generally civic republican tradition. However, it is also possible (as I do in this chapter) to argue that the New Right and the various communitarians are influential because they built on the way that the New Left and the new social movements transformed the polity. This “transformation” of the polity was not so much a “leftward shift” as the establishment

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and legitimization of a minoritizing discourse (and practice). Successful minoritarian claims established links between the social and the political. The New Right built on these established links. The apparent lurches that American political culture has made, from right, to left, to right again, are not the signs of radical transformation. They are also not random changes. They are the effects of underlying processes of historical change, brought about by the actions of individuals and groups. The New Right— and for its continuing influence note that Ralph Reed was one of George W. Bush’s electoral campaign advisors—built on the links between social and political established by the new social movements’ successful inclusion in the polity’s minoritizing practices-and-discourse. However, as Patton suggests, the New Right, in asserting its identity as the norm, is making an ontological claim in a way that rules out the ontonominative claims of others. Patton’s neologism, “ontonomination,” emphasizes the performativeness of ontological claims. This brings back some sort of notion of agency, in contrast to the lack of a theory of resistance arguably implied in Foucault’s notion of subjectifaction. Patton argues that civil rights arguments for inclusion in the polity accentuate the effects of the labeling of the new social movements as social and/or cultural. Claims for minority status involved links between social and political. Two good examples are first, the use of social science arguments—the doll experiment—in Brown vs. Board of Education; and second, for links between the social and cultural, the rise of “ethnic nationalist” definitions of a lesbian and gay community with a distinct cultural and thus social identity, and therefore, it was argued, with minoritarian political claims. That is, the community building and culture building activities—women’s music, lesbian and gay bookstores, theater groups, poetry, coffee shops, bars, butch-femme identities, gym culture, lesbian twelve-step and co-counseling meetings, the examples proliferate—become centers for ontonomination, for naming or labeling, and thus identity politics. Within the community and in the historical/ sociological literature this in-group ontonominative politics is known as “ethnic nationalism”: as a “nationalist” way of conceptualizing lesbian and gay identity and politics. The verbal allusion, and perhaps even the identitarian claim, suggests an analogy with Black nationalism, rather than with the civil rights movement, even though the political argument for minority status is often framed in terms of equal protection, that is, by analogy with—or, strictly speaking, if the argument is successful, extension from—Movement claims.

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The new social movements’ successful arguments for inclusion in the polity widened the political realm to include the social and/or cultural realms. A separation of the political from the social and cultural was characteristic of consensus and corporatist politics; the New Left, the new social movements and the New Right all linked “realms” separated by both consensus and corporatism, joining social and/or cultural in different ways to the political. The New Right built on the connections between political, social, and cultural that the new social movements had established, but formulated the connections differently, creating a very different cultural, social, and political world. The new social movements use the articulations they set up between social, cultural, economic and political to build up a pluralist public realm; the New Right, like the consensus, builds articulations in a way that constructs a common public, a community with shared values which defines a single space as public, and postulates different values as only personal, or private, enabling a rhetorical implication that such values are not really “values” at all. Questions about normative concepts and the relations between normative concepts (especially questions of centering, opposition, exclusion, and abjection) are thus crucial. This section concludes with a discussion of two contrasting texts, each of which deals in different ways with the debate between liberalism and communitarianism. The first, Dionne (1991), argues for a return to consensus and is thus, in ways I shall demonstrate, illiberal. The second, Walzer (1983), is emphatically liberal and also—although, as I show, this is contentious— begins to break with consensus. The American journalist Dionne argues in a best-selling and influential book (1991), that American politics is caught in a dilemma: the main political parties, he claims, contend over polarized, divisive social and political issues, unable to construct a consensus which might appeal broadly to the U.S. electorate. This polarization makes the U.S. public more and more disillusioned with the political system, less and less inclined to take an active role in politics, or to see themselves as anything more than isolated individuals. Dionne’s approach is communitarian: He argues regarding Dukakis, in the 1988 election, The problem was not that Dukakis . . . held personal values that were outside the mainstream. [He] did not. Rather, liberals were seen as unwilling to uphold a set of public values; they were plainly uneasy about using government to promote, encourage, and—where violent crime was at stake—enforce the community’s shared moral commitments. When Bush attacked Dukakis as “a card-carrying

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member of the ACLU” he was attacking a certain brand of individualism that was seen as always preferring the rights of an accused individual over the claims of the community. (Dionne 1991, 314)

The key is the focus on values. Like Amitai Etzioni (1993), Dionne sets up an opposition between the personal or individual and the public or communal. The personal can be individual; it can differ (although the rhetoric strongly suggests that if one is to be a presidential candidate, it had better not). However, the public is unitary, is to do with, in his words, “the community’s shared moral commitments.” This notion of a shared, common, and unitary public domain is in radical distinction to the plural public spaces of liberalism. Just as Patton notes of the New Right, the communitarian’s argument transforms the plural spaces of liberalism into a single, communitarian space. It also, most crucially, associates “values” and “claims” only with the so-called mainstream, with those who are constituted as “the public,” the community (rather than a community) by means of a labeling of others as deviant, as criminal, and as “an accused individual.” This contemporary use of the deviance label, in this 1991 example, differs from the 1960s and 1970s examples which Hall analyses. In Hall’s examples, the deviant label was used to construct a person, or a group, as a “social problem,” that is, as an object of a social scientific discourse, a candidate for therapeutic care, or for government management. In Dionne’s communitarian argument though, the deviancy label is used to mask the way a rights-based discourse is construed as a form of individualism and to associate negative connotations with rights. Most communitarian rhetoric may not go as far as some New Right arguments, for example the attempt (discussed by Patton), to argue that the civil rights espoused by the civil rights movement, the rights achieved during the period of the Great Society and the liberal Warren Supreme Court, were an aberration, a turn away from a conservative notion of civil rights which, like civic republicans, they claim to be closer to the intent of the American Revolution. However, the communitarian argument that civil rights are a kind of individualism, necessarily in conflict with “claims” of “the community” (or, to take a communitarian argument made by Amitai Etzioni, to suggest that arguments for civil rights are special-interest group claims open to the same kinds of criticisms that can, quite reasonably, be made of the lobbying system) is dangerous, and effective, enough. Dionne shares the communitarians’ distress at the many in the U.S. who do not concern themselves with politics: “Americans continued to hold with our republican forbears that there was

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such a thing as ‘the public good.’ Americans hate politics as it is now practiced because we have lost all sense of the public good” (Dionne 1991, 332). He argues that this lack of concern about politics has been produced by an unnecessary and avoidable polarization around social and cultural issues. Dionne’s division between social, cultural, political, and economic is a classic example of the dynamic analyzed by Hall and by Patton. Economic issues, Dionne feels, should be part of politics: he criticizes the Democratic Party for not dealing with issues of class. However, that which he labels as social and cultural issues—or, to use his preferred term, problems—should therefore, he claims, not be part of politics: they are polarizing and divisive, and make a centrist coalition impossible to achieve. Dionne rather evenhandedly analyzes the failures of both movements, showing how both lost cohesion, and how both arguably lost appeal. Certainly, Dionne is right to note a tremendous upheaval in U.S. political culture; liberalism is no longer at the center of U.S. political life, and certainly, it was so far more rarely than was misleadingly suggested during the consensus politics period. However, as his preference for the term “problems” over “issues” would suggest, Dionne’s approach is a classic example of a consensus politics labeling of the social and cultural as outside of politics: a deviance argument. Dionne argues that political parties ought to focus more on economic issues. He repeatedly claims that the Democrats in particular have failed to address “those less well off,” those of “moderate income,” the “working Americans,” and “the middle classes.” He claims that whites in these groups have been alienated by civil rights programs and by legislation which focuses on race, rather than class, and that these same groups of whites find liberal positions on social and cultural matters an affront to their own deeply held values. It is highly significant that Dionne refers to this group as “working Americans” rather than “the working class”; an ideology-based, rather than class-based, identity. Dionne thus shifts from an argument about redefining affirmative action programs to stress class, rather than race, to an argument about the ideology, culture, and values of particular communities, especially this nebulously defined group of “working Americans,” or those with “moderate incomes.” Dionne’s labels enable him to analyze the appeal of the Republican attack on welfare as not racism but “values”: the values of working Americans—marriage, family, and that hard work is its own reward. Most crucially, Dionne is able to define as cultural, not as political, a wide range of issues on which Americans have different views. In a classic communitarian formulation,

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the political thus becomes the realm of common values: a unitary space. The cultural remains a realm of difference, but only those values that are “common” count as public; for Dionne, difference is only a private matter. Dionne’s equation of public with shared or common leads him to conclude that anything that differentiates, or differs, must be private, never public. He is therefore able to argue that a new, centrist consensus can only be forged by turning away from “divisive issues.” As part of this move, he reformulates “issues” (which a greater or lesser number of people might debate) as “problems” (to which one must respond with therapeutics, management, or research), and as social and cultural, not political. However, if Hall is right that consensus politics’ exclusion of the social and cultural produced the counterculture, the New Left, and the new social movements as social and cultural, and if Patton is correct that the links between social or cultural and political urged by the New Left and new social movements also enabled a series of very different, anti-pluralist links by the New Right, Dionne’s suggestion is completely futile at best, or disingenuous at worst. The popular appeal of a communitarian-based purportedly centrist party like New Democrats or New Labour would be due to a New Right-like articulation of the political with a narrow cultural—reduced to “family”—or a narrow social—reduced to “common values”—without the space for individual conscience, political dissent, or social, plural, difference. In contrast to Dionne’s ultimately antipluralist political realm, or, indeed, to the implications of the work of Sandel (1996), e.g., Walzer’s (1983) liberal argument moves close (because of its strongly argued pluralism) to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) notion of radical democracy. Walzer’s argument is highly particularistic. He takes this division into social, political, economic, and cultural for granted (rather than, like Hall or Patton, taking it as something to be explained) and elaborates it into a number of separate spheres: money, office, education, e.g., but also kinship and love (considered, oddly enough, as one sphere, not two). These multiple spheres are analyzed normatively, but with the use of only one normative, evaluative concept: justice, conceptualized as “complex equal distribution.” Both the particularism and the paucity of normative concepts stem from Walzer’s antifoundationalism; an antifoundationalism that also makes him potentially open to a charge of relativism. Walzer counters this by claiming that the aim of his political theory is to identify the shared political values of a culture and to analyze their philosophical presuppositions, extending those presuppositions into

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a normative, but not grounded, political and ethical argument. He distinguishes himself from the more conservative communitarians by prioritizing the right over the good. Given this prioritizing, Walzer’s argument, as Mouffe suggests, moves towards constructivism, ending up close to Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democracy. As Mouffe argues, the communitarians and civic republicans not only prioritize the good over the right but also have a pre-modern, Aristotelian conception of a singular and unitary good. The crucial move is the Aristotelian identification of political good with social good(s). A radical democratic argument, on the other hand, would separate political good from social goods, the goods of the various leftist groups and new social movements they argue should, and can, unite in a coalition to seek hegemony. (Laclau and Mouffe argue that political liberalism and economic liberalism are only contingently related, and a democratic, pluralist socialism, with liberal civil rights, is therefore possible.) Walzer’s argument, though, is anti-Marxist, not only rejecting the teleology of classical, nineteenth-century Marxism, and the more subsumptive aspects of the theory which are common points of contention today, but also rejecting the very notion of links between economic, social, cultural, and political. In addition, rather than making use of a poststructuralist concept that crosses levels, for example, “technology” or “discourse,” Walzer makes the contingency of technologies, as well as the contingency of the links between them, the bases for a liberal argument, based on American constitutional separations between church and state, state and the private concern of an individual, that each of these particular spheres of justice must be distinct from each other. This “must” is not a conceptual or epistemological claim but an ethical one. A local distribution, in any particular sphere, may be unequal but is not necessarily unjust. Inequalities only become unjust if they are due to the interpenetration of different spheres: the sphere of money intruding into the sphere of office, for example. However appealing a particular example might be, there are basic problems with the theory. As my discussion of Hall and Patton shows, boundaries tend to be contingently sited. As Bader (1995) has argued, Walzer begins his argument by claiming that political communities could be considered analogous to neighborhoods, clubs, or families. Bader argues that all of these analogies break down in ways that show us the deep contradictions in Walzer’s theory, if this theory is considered part of radical democracy. Bader focuses mainly on the first two of these analogies, showing how Walzer relies on surprisingly idealized pictures of

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either a neighborhood as a group which does not adjudicate membership (a claim which, as a brief footnote of Walzer’s disingenuously allows, is not true in all cases), or a club as a group with a right to control membership, to mask what are, in fact, very complex views about citizenship and exclusion. Bader emphasizes the contradictoriness of these views, but I will focus (taking the third proffered analogy—family) on the masking, on the way that Walzer’s argument relies on ideological, normative concepts, or representations, which he does not acknowledge, and thus does not analyze. In chapter 9, Walzer analyses what he refers to as the sphere of kinship and love. Young (1990) points out that, for Walzer, these concepts are related in a single sphere, because, basically, this is the sphere of “the family”; she then comments on the oddity of the use of distribution, as an analytical concept, when discussing love and sexuality. One could, however, counter Young’s criticism by claiming that Levi-Strauss, ´ after all, did much the same thing: distribution is relevant. However, rather than focusing on “the traffic in women,” (in Gayle Rubin’s memorable phrase [1975]), or asking with Irigaray (1985a, 1985c), what might happen if women, the commodities, “took themselves to market,” Walzer simply makes the patently false, counter-evidential claim, that “these commodities own themselves, the gift of self and the voluntary exchange of selves are the model transactions” (Walzer 1983, 238). This is the ideology of romantic love, rather than the anthropology of the exchange of women, of compulsory heterosexuality. As Butler (1990, 1993) argues, compulsory or normative heterosexuality, though it sets itself up as the norm, constructing other sexualities as perverse, deviant, or socially unintelligible, is not the only kind of sexuality. The family, and the American heterosexual teenage dating rituals to which Walzer alludes as the primary other way of organizing sexuality, are only two of the several existent structures which organize kinship, love, and sexuality in the United States. However, Walzer (atypically for such a consistent pluralist) not only sees some sort of generic family as the main structure for “kinship and love,” with heterosexual dates as a side institution, but in the course of an argument about education and schools, makes a startling and unsupportable claim, “[W] hen there are no schools . . . then social reproduction is direct and unmediated . . . carried on within the family with no need for communal intervention” (Walzer 1983, 198). Social reproduction within “the family,” contrary to what Walzer claims, is profoundly mediated, and mediative. What Walzer sees as a separate sphere of distributive justice only appears as such because of contingent, historically variable,

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and ideologically complex processes. The very idea that kinship, love and affection, and sexuality, can be considered to form a common “sphere” separable from the rest of society, seems based on a very nineteenth-century division between private and public, with sexuality and the family both considered private and gendered female, and the economic, work, considered public and gendered male. As well as this overdetermination of the public/private distinction by a historically specific version of sexual difference, Walzer’s discussion, also, as I have argued above, relies on a version of the hetero/homosexual difference in which homosexuality is not only, in Butler’s phrase, rendered unintelligible, but keeps disappearing: treated as irrelevant to the argument. This, I would suggest, is due to the dynamic that both Hall and Patton analyze: lesbian and gay movements labeled, constructed, as social or cultural, not political; discussion of lesbian and gay issues, therefore, not seen as necessary to a wide-ranging political argument. This kind of interrogation of boundaries, of difference, is central to the work of a number of postmodern theorists, especially those working on race, sexuality, or gender, and I will end by discussing these approaches, and, in particular, postmodern theories of sexuality, a little more fully. Patton’s work could also be called queer theory: antifoundationalist, poststructuralist, or postmodernist academic work about same-sex sexuality. As Seidman (1995) argues, if the essentialism/constructivism debate was central for feminist theory, queer theory’s focus is slightly, and crucially, different: a focus on epistemological issues, rather than ontological ones. If queer theory focuses on normative claims, it is not to identify an implicitly or explicitly naturalist or essentialist ontology, but to interrogate these claims, these statements philosophically. Eve Sedgwick (1990), for example, draws on Derridian deconstruction, analyzing what she claims to be a central, organizing epistemological figure, the closet, as a mutually constitutive interplay between inside and outside, presence and absence, secrecy and disclosure. The key issue then becomes, not so much a hetero/homosexual difference, but the epistemological tropes that figure this difference. Judith Butler (1990, 1993), to take another example, builds on Austin’s performative philosophy of language, extending his argument towards the constitution of meaning more generally. Her point is that, rather than deconstructing normative, evaluative concepts, showing that they come in binaries, in pairs, with the positive, unmarked concept produced by the negative, marked concept, it is more useful to analyze the performativeness of meaning, showing, for example, that gender is produced

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deconstructively, by iteration. The advantage of this argument is its universally iterative structure; “it’s turtles all the way down,” so to speak. (The expression comes from a Native American myth about the “foundations” of the “world-egg”). Individual turtles may make foundational claims, articulating these with ontological claims. Queer theory, though, is less interested in the ontological claims than in the foundational claims with which they are articulated, and the issues of meaning and the construction of knowledge to which they give rise. Seidman, like Rosemary Hennessy (1995), argues that queer theory has tended to focus too much on the cultural, and not enough on the social. The political arguments address, and analyze, representations, with the main objects of analysis being literary texts, film, and visual arts. They see this as a turn away from the main academic focus of a few years before, on lesbian and gay history. They suggest that this development is probably contingent, likely to do with the location of several of the best known queer theorists in literature departments. Hennessy, but not Seidman, also criticizes queer theorists, with the qualified exception of de Lauretis, for focusing predominantly on micropolitics, and for construing history as only particularistic, or local. However, the ontonomination of the new social movements as social and political, and the new social movements” consequent assertion of links between the social and the political, the social and the cultural, is a historical change of great significance. Given the contemporary power of both the New Right and the communitarians, an analysis that links both these movements with patterns of broader historical change is urgent. Patton has shown that the New Right not only consciously borrowed the tactics and flair of the new social movements; its success is based on similar links between social and political, moves enabled by the prior establishment of these links by the new social movements. The difference, as Patton brilliantly shows, is that the New Right constructs a theocratic space, rather than the plural spaces of liberalism, the new social movements, and radical democracy.

Material-Semiotic Practices I now move on to a way of analyzing contemporary U.S. society that, even if it is increasingly influential in academic circles, is quite marginal in the culture, more broadly conceived. This approach—framing my argument in leftist academic language—

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focuses on relations between technoscience and transnationalism, two of the “material-semiotic” discourses and practices that interact to produce complex objects and representations. My main concerns, here, are metatheoretical and methodological. I argue that an analysis that focuses on processes of transnationalism and globalization/localization alone would be incomplete; so would be an analysis that focused solely on technoscience. Our objects of analysis are produced by a multiplex interaction that features transnationalism and technoscience. A successful account therefore has to involve both political economy and “New Science Studies.” We should address both local and global aspects of these discursive practices; questions of region thus become significant. It is equally important to examine the ways in which, in the contemporary period, the material-semiotic practices of race, gender, and sexuality act through and on technoscience and transnationalism. My approach to the study of transnationalism is based on neoMarxist political economy, social history, and social and historical geography. I draw heavily on the work of the neo-Marxist geographer David Harvey. Harvey used Regulation School economics as the basis for an extremely useful concept, the “spatial fix.” The Regulation School is concerned with the social reproduction of capitalism; it analyzes the way in which production and consumption are regulated in a regime of accumulation. The modes of regulation include social and ideological formations, institutions, and actions. Harvey argues that transnationalism is capital’s “spatial fix” of accumulation’s crisis; an addictive, repetitive attempt to use displacement in space to keep the system going. That is, capitalism makes use of spatial displacement —opening up new markets, appropriating raw materials, locating production and design in whatever region or country is cheapest —in order to deal with its recurring crises. It then needs more: another fix or a larger fix. The “spatial fix” is a particularly good theoretical concept because it is able to account for several of the characteristics of transnationalism. First, it can account for the way that production is separated into different stages, with design and assembly taking place in different countries. If we take a computer as an example, the circuit boards might be made in Southeast Asian maquiladoras, and the software in Silicon Valley. It can also account for the transition in the developed countries to so-called service-based economies, with shrinking core employment and increasing peripheral employment. There is some question about the key date for this latter transition of the developed countries

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from manufacturing-based economies to service sector-based economies. Harvey dates it as “around 1973,” that is, when the United States went off the gold standard. That standard had been set in the Bretton Woods agreement at the end of the Second World War. It is therefore possible to argue that the key date for our argument falls much earlier than 1973. In addition, the shift between manufacturing and the service sector is only part of the historical process. Transnationalism and its globalization/localization dynamic are conditioned by the histories of colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism. If my approach to transnationalism is based on neo-Marxist political economy inflected through feminist and postcolonial studies such as Grewal and Kaplan (1994), my approach to the study of technoscience is based on the New Science Studies. There are two major strands to the New Science Studies, a more social-historical approach centered on the work of Donna Haraway (1991a, 1991d, 1997, 2000, 2004) and a more anthropological approach centered on the work of Bruno Latour (1979, 1986, 1987, 1993). Both approaches address questions of difference. Haraway’s work, in which she deals with difference, is concerned with race and gender as well as class. Latour, however, is more interested in difference as an abstract, almost mathematical concept, than in gender or sexuality. Influential New Science Studies texts closer to Latour than to Haraway in their rather anthropological approach include Shapin and Schaffer (1985). Writers like Stone (1995) are closer to Haraway. Haraway and Latour’s approach to difference is derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977, 1989), and it is to their work that I now turn. The most original and useful element in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is their development of “non-particularistic” difference. This notion is in opposition to the way that difference is sometimes conceptualized; in particular, in much political economy. A good example of the “particularistic” difference that Deleuze and Guattari oppose is found in a relatively early text by David Harvey (1982). In its introduction he makes it clear that he contrasts difference to universalization and the other generalizing, abstracting moves that are part of theorization, as if difference is a counterweight to the “abstract conceptions” of theory. Harvey’s most recent work (1996, 2000, 2003) rejects this position, arguing instead that difference can—ought—to be at the heart of theorization. A Thousand Plateaus (1987) is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, both of which were co-written by the philosopher Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Guattari, as were the monographs on Proust and Kafka. Deleuze also wrote on Spinoza

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(1988, 1990), Nietzsche (1983), Bergson (Deleuze, Boundas, Lister, and Stivale 1990, Deleuze, Tomlinson, and Habberjam 1990), and other thinkers; these philosophical monographs and long essays, however much they might demand of the reader, remain the closest of Deleuze’s work to traditional philosophical modes of argumentation and logic. Philosophy, like many other disciplines, has dominant traditions—canons of centrally important texts—with their attendant schools and competing, subaltern traditions. The two dominant traditions are Anglo-American philosophy and Continental philosophy, each of which breaks down further, Continental including phenomenology, Kantian, and Hegelian philosophies. What makes Deleuze particularly difficult is that, like Levinas, he situates himself outside of all of the major philosophical traditions, as a Spinozan. He even suggests (with some justification) that his work and that of the other philosophers he writes about and by whom he is influenced form an affinity group rather than a philosophical school: they make up a movement rather than a filiation. In Deleuzean terms, philosophical traditions are striated (they are structured, binaristic, and metric—that is, measurable) and molar (they are totalities with form and function). As Elizabeth Grosz points out, (1994) for Deleuze and Guattari the molar (identity) is particularistic and difference is universal, is—or reaches—a plane of consistency. Deleuze and Guattari suggest (1987) that classical Marxist theory is “molar” (about totalities) and based on identity (class). This argument is familiar; Deleuze and Guattari move from this point, as expected, to a critique of Hegelianism and its influence on Marxism. Many recent critiques of classical Marxism focus on its mistaken subsumption of gender, sexuality, and race. It is argued that these analytical concepts are, generically, “specificities” which classical Marxism’s logic overlooks or overcomes. However, Deleuze and Guattari do not oppose gender, race, and sexuality as “specificities” to class. They argue that class-based Marxism is about identity; it is therefore particularistic. Classbased theories can therefore not be opposed, logically, to theories of specificity. They claim that there is a way to conceptualize difference as universal—universal in the way that molar theory tries (and fails) to be. This non-particularistic difference or “plane of consistency” is not transcendent—it is not outside the world. It is found, or more precisely, can be analyzed, in the world, in nature. So, molar practices constitute identities: class, race, gender, and sexuality; that is, subjects: psychological subjects (personal identity) and political subjects (political identity).

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Molar political identities lead to political infighting and fragmentation. So what alternative do we have? According to Deleuze and Guattari, the alternative to fragmentation is difference and the plane of consistency. Difference and the plane of consistency are not just a matter for subjects: they have to do with, they act in and through, both subjects and objects. For Deleuze and Guattari, rather than “subjects” perceiving and analyzing “objects,” both object and subject are joined in “affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages.” It is this argument about subject and object being joined—not opposed— which is picked up and further developed by the New Science Studies. This new way of thinking about subject and object is useful for anthropological or social-historical studies of science; and if scholars wish to use their anthropological or historical approach in a politically motivated critique, the new way of conceiving subject and object provides a sound methodological foundation for the attempt. However, rather than making explicit the extent to which these reconstituted concepts enable a radically different philosophy of science, Deleuze and Guattari keep their arguments allusive and indirect. They shift back and forth between language, arguments, examples, and claims that seem to belong to the philosophy of history, and language, claims, examples, and arguments that seem more part of the philosophy of science. This shifting and combination of arguments and discourses is, I grant, frustrating for a reader, but at the same time, it enables Deleuze and Guattari to make one of their most interesting claims: that they have inaugurated a new kind of philosophy, a philosophy of externality. This suggestion is followed up by Elisabeth Grosz in her recent work (1994, 1995). But for now it is enough simply to trace the logic of the argument behind the claim: both the philosophy of science, and—strictly speaking—the philosophy of history are, in phenomenological terms, “intentional” in relation to an object. They are philosophies of externality, rather than of internality. Thus, in their terms, Deleuze and Guattari are philosophers of externality, unlike Hegel who, in this reading, becomes the philosopher of the State, and in a peculiar way, of interiority (consciousness, thought). Many of the plateaus, or chapters, of A Thousand Plateaus (1987) take as their object research in the physical, biological, and social sciences. The argument in each case is political. Each plateau is used to produce a phenomenological intentionality that is, in Sandoval’s terms, an “oppositional consciousness” (1991), a kind of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1991a, 1991d, 1997), or, in Deleuzean terms, a “becoming-minoritarian.” As I

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have said, Deleuze and Guattari’s highly allusive style and tendency to shift, without warning, from one field of study to another, makes it quite difficult to keep track of the argument in each plateau, or to disentangle the political, historical claims from the substantive assertions about scientific facts and biological and geological processes. One may grant that scientific knowledge is produced historically, as what Foucault called “power/knowledge,” but one must still be precise and distinguish the scope of one’s claim. Is it a claim about the production of scientific knowledge; a claim about the production of historical knowledge; or a claim about the production of both kinds of knowledge? In the latter case, one must also decide whether one will argue that the two kinds of knowledge are bound together either ontologically or epistemologically, or are simply linked heuristically in one’s argument. Grosz (1994) investigates some of Deleuze and Guattari’s scientific claims at length. She shows that “minority science” or marginal research is not epistemologically different from mainstream work. Whatever one’s field of study, whatever one’s object of analysis, the knowledge one produces is “situated,” rather than “free-floating” or “objective.” This, as Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge, and as the New Science Studies stresses, is what good social and natural scientists do in practice, as well as what many of them argue as theory. Situated knowledges or becomings-minoritarian are not in opposition to universalization. For Deleuze and Guattari difference universalizes. It does so not by repeating its identity infinite numbers of times but by “proceeding to the plane of consistency.” The detailed arguments that provide the groundwork for this idea of nonparticularistic, universalizing difference belong to yet another philosophical field: that concerned with language and action. Just like Judith Butler (1990, 1993), whose notion of normativeness/deviance is much like Deleuze and Guattari’s odd, technical use of the term “minority,” Deleuze and Guattari draw on a theory of performativeness. Deleuze and Guattari use the word “majority” in a technical, non-numerical sense; a majority, for them, is an identity, a “state or standard” in relation to which others “deviate” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 291– 92). Butler derives her notion of the “performative” from the philosopher of language, J. L. Austin (1955), who argued that the “speech-act” was a crucial and neglected aspect of language. Deleuze also draws on Austin, making unexpected connections between his work and that of a much earlier philosopher, the seventeenth-century Spinoza. Deleuze argues that the two most influential contemporary philosophies of language, the first of

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which analyzes language as “information,” and the second of which discusses it in terms of “connection” or intersubjectivity, are both wrong. Language should, instead, be understood in terms of “expression,” and “expression” understood as a speechact, a performative. Rather than content pre-existing, outside expression, expression is a performative, and one, which like ˇ zek’s Zi ˇ analysis of retroactive performatives (1993), can produce what it seems to represent. ˇ zek Zi ˇ argues that the process which Lacanians call “Lack” is retroactively constitutive; the very small child begins to get a sense of itself as a person, a subject, separate from its mother or other primary caregiver, and this “act” retroactively constitutes a past imaginary unity with the mother, now lost. This is Lack. The thing which Lack loses is the Real: that which hurts, that which one never had, that which only exists in the past, constituted retroactively by oneself, by one’s loss of it. What makes ˇ zek’s Zi ˇ work so original, and so moving, is that he uses his insight into Lacanianism to analyze one’s most painful loves and losses; he shows how Lack becomes the basis not just of love but of hate: nationalism and ethnic hatred, in particular. Deleuze and Guattari are greatly troubled by the implications and consequences of the way that we separate and oppose mind and body. Despite this, the 1977 volume of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia mostly focuses on mind, addressing Hegelianism and its influence on Marxism. The 1987 volume mostly focuses on body, addressing both scientific and historical discourses and practices. Thus, Lack is addressed most fully in the first volume, Anti-Oedipus. The second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, deals with retroactive constitution, based on Lack, but does not address Lack, per se. Deleuze is greatly influenced by Spinoza (1955 edition), who came up with a surprising solution to the mind-body problem. There is one substance, infinite and unitary, which has two modes of expression: extension and thought. As Spinoza believed in full space, extension also means that which is extended: matter. There is no mind-body split, because they are different modes of the same substance. Extension and thought are, in a sense, each one (so that Spinoza verges on a kind of pantheism); they are also multiple, with an infinity of attributes, each creature a mode of these attributes or a modification of substance. Deleuze’s notion of performativeness is taken from a key concept of Spinoza, the notion of “affectio”: affections or affects. As Deleuze explains in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1990), “affects” are, first, the modes of substance or its attributes. They then take on, or can be considered at, a second level, as “that which happens to

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the mode, the modifications of the mode, the effects of other modes on it.” Third, “affect” means “states,” “variations,” “degrees of perfection”: transitions from one state, image, or idea to another. The ordinary English meaning of affect, emotion, is very different from Deleuze (or Spinoza’s) usage. Deleuze is not writing about interiority at all. Brian Massumi (1992) argues that “affect,” as the term is used in Deleuze’s work, is (the body’s) “capacity to affect and be affected, to act and to perceive” (Massumi 1992, 100): closest, I would suggest, to the second meaning of affect Deleuze identifies in Spinoza. It is this second meaning of “affectio,” in Spinoza’s work, which Deleuze draws on for his performative theory of language. The third meaning becomes deterritorialized in Deleuze’s work, moving into mathematical fields as “degrees of freedom,” and into physical and musical fields as “frequency” and “resonance,” notions drawn on by the New Science Studies. This Spinozan approach to theorization is also the context from which Deleuze developed his notion of assemblages, or “abstract machines.” Deleuze argues that becomings proceed to the “plane of consistency,” to a “body without organs,” by way of “diagrams” (abstractions, in phenomenological terms) and abstract machines. Deleuze’s notion of the abstract machine is reached by means of a critique of the notion of the “organism” and its associated concept “organ.” For Deleuze “organism” as a concept is used to theorize a body as a totality. An organ, similarly, is a discrete part, out of which organisms are made. These are rather old-fashioned biological notions; as Deleuze points out and as Donna Haraway has argued in greater detail, contemporary scientists are more apt to analyze homeostatic mechanisms than organs, and populations than organisms. Deleuze uses the term “machine” as a move away from these organicist connotations. A machine, for Deleuze, is not just something inorganic. He uses the term in an unusual sense: for Deleuze, a “machine” is an assemblage of heterogeneous entities: a “nomad war machine,” for example. Haraway (and the scholars influenced by her) call these “cyborgs”: for example, a pilot with a head-mounted display, or a technofeminist scholar. There are several differences between Deleuzean machines and Harawayan cyborgs. A Deleuzean machine is a collectivity made from many entities; the separate entities are from different categories and, in interaction, construct a new way of being and thinking. Deleuze and Guattari’s example is a “nomad war machine”: horses, tents, people—collectively a threat to “sedentary civilization,” to social stability and stultifying respectability. A

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contemporary example would be New Age travelers: perceived as a threat by the bastions of social stability, living in their vehicles, rather than using them instrumentally. Deleuze and Guattari sympathize, politically, with anarchism and underestimate the constraints of Gemeinschafts (communities) in their rejection of Gesellschafts (hierarchical societies). For Haraway, in contrast, the boundary crossing that makes an individual a cyborg means that her identity is “multiple,” that is, non-unitary. Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour develop the aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments that go furthest towards a reformulation, or in some respects, a refoundation, of the study of science. It is for this reason that the approaches are collectively known as New Science Studies. Both focus on questions of difference. Following Deleuze and Guattari, they each argue that difference is not the same as the particular. Latour develops a counterintuitive but very productive argument about the degree to which the Enlightenment project and modernity have not so much failed as never been properly inaugurated. Haraway draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments about performance and performativity, using them as the basis of a radically new way of understanding technoscience and technoscientific practice in terms of action. She goes far beyond her earlier work on feminist cyborgs and, instead of just concentrating on boundarycrossing machine-human hybrids, looks at a much wider range of “human and non-human actors.” Both Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have argued (speaking of two periods when there was a transition between different economic and cultural formations—that is, the seventeenth century and our present period) that there was an interesting and important contradiction between what was said and what was done. In the seventeenth century, as many recent historians of science have argued, there was a lot of rhetoric about the separation of science and politics. The scientific revolution had brought about, or ought to bring about, this separation. Science, and later, social science, would be value-free, and the political part of politics could be separated out from a scientific part of politics. This last was eventually known as management, or social policy. As both Haraway and Latour argue, this may have been what people said, but it was certainly not what people did. Rather than these separations, it was actually hybrids that were produced. The hybrids are various—hybrid objects, hybrid subjects and hybrid discourses. Under hybrid discourse we ought also to include the boundary-crossing terminology of so much poststructuralism and postmodernism.

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Building on Haraway’s work, for Stone (1995) the Internet is a particularly useful place to explore the multiplicity of identity. Typing at a keyboard, one interacts with someone else typing at a keyboard. Since neither is face-to-face, they can pretend, they can take on any “identity,” or can explore identity in new ways. For Stone, cyberspace becomes an occasion for self-fashioning, and an instance of the performativity that is always at the heart of identity. Play in cyberspace can have real effects. The cyberspace produced by computer scientists and made available for other agents via the Internet and by means of the other cybernetic tools that in our use of them almost become prostheses, is the medium for virtual actions and virtual speech-acts. Deleuze used the word “virtual” to name the “unconscious” aspects of language: the nine-tenths of the iceberg. The “actualized” statements we speak are the tenth part, above the waterline. Deleuze used this trope to suggest that we may be limiting ourselves by dividing ontological states into possible and actual. However, actual and virtual might be a better pair of notions. Stone deterritorializes Deleuze’s questions about existence and agency, moving them into a new scientific domain, information technology. She is thus able to argue that the virtuality of action and entities, in the Internet, is only an extreme case of performativeness. However, some of the most troubling criticisms of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and postmodernism are targeted, not at the implications in terms of philosophy of language, or in terms of debates within Continental philosophy, but at the political implications of antihumanism, and, generally speaking, at the anti-Enlightenment arguments. Many critics have objected that, whatever the strength of a particular deconstruction of an individual Enlightenment notion or text, there is still a lot that is useful, for politically motivated people—and scholars—in humanism and the Enlightenment. In this lies the importance of Haraway and Latour’s argument. They argue that, rather than having to be postmodern in a Lyotardian or Baudrillardian way— and therefore having to reject such good as the Enlightenment stood for, along with the bad—we can be amodern. We can argue that the modernity that was called for never really took place, never really arrived. Bruno Latour (1987, 1993), argues that “we have never been modern”: modernity and “postmodernity” have, at the same time, set up oppositions between the material and the semiotic (for example, science vs. politics, history vs. ideology, the natural and social sciences vs. the humanities) and created large numbers

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of hybrid discourses and cyborg subjects and formations. The opposition between the material and the semiotic, science and politics, defines modernity. In the process, it is hybrids, rather than separated discourses and entities, which are produced. Thus, modernity has, in a way, not yet happened. Modernity has both created “science” and “progress” and yet not been modern. It is for this reason that Latour concludes that a thoroughgoing Science Studies would have to call itself “amodern” rather than “modern” or “postmodern.” Donna Haraway takes this claim further, developing a more detailed historical argument. She also brings in the questions about race, gender, and sexuality which Latour neglects. (Both Latour and Haraway discuss class, although they each move away from the familiar terms of political economy.) Discourses, as Donna Haraway (1997) explains, “are not just ‘words’; they are material-semiotic practices through which objects of attention and knowing subjects are both constituted” (Haraway 1997, 218). The typography of the phrase “material-semiotic” is significant: a dash, not a slash; a relation, rather than a binary opposition. Rather than the “modern,” “scientific” opposition between subject and object—between, on the one hand, meaning, intentionality, and, on the other hand, history, objectivity, measurability, and universalizability—Haraway draws on Deleuze and Guattari and represents object and subject linked together and transformed, actants in “material-semiotic practices.” Haraway moves on from these general points about modernity to a specific claim about the Enlightenment. She suggests that the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution were far less effective in ending religious master narratives than familiar narratives of progress and science maintain. The material—historical contingency—has shaped what seems most semiotic—and most universalizable—in science and technology. The semiotic, for example, Judeo-Christian figurations—the “Second Millennium” of Haraway’s e-mail address title—has been an irreducible part of modern science. The anthropological studies of scientific labs (Traweek 1988, Latour and Woolgar 1979, Latour 1987), the social histories of science and technology (Haraway 1989, 1997; Shapin and Schaffer 1985), both major strands in the New Science Studies, do more than just provide a historical context for truths, the epistemological validity of which depends on a separability from that historical context. Instead, Haraway states (following Sandra Harding [1992]) the epistemological claims (valid, pragmatic, sometimes even life-or-death) of science rest on “situated knowledges” and “strong objectivity.”

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What interacts in “material-semiotic practices” are not “subject” and “object” but “sticky threads” (Haraway 1997, 68) that can be teased apart by the critic and historian to show “heterogeneous and continual construction through historically located practice, where the actors are not all human” (Haraway 1997, 68). “Subject” and “object” are what used to be called “reifications,” but what now, in her most psychoanalytic argument to date, Haraway calls “fetishes,” “models” that “obscure the constitutive tropic nature of themselves and of worlds” (Haraway 1997, 136). Haraway is drawing here on the work of an extremely influential American philosopher of history and specialist in the early modern period, Hayden White. White argues that, as historians, we need to pay attention to tropes—figures of speech. The American literary critic Kenneth Burke said that there were four tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Metaphors are used to make claims about identity (my love is a rose); metonymy has to do with relations of part to part (the logic of the example, brand names used as generic terms); synecdoche figures the relation of part to whole; and irony is a method of using language in a way that highlights the meanings most different from the literal. Modernity makes subject and object seem things in themselves, non-tropic, non-figurative, self-identical. However, Haraway argues, both subjects and objects really are tropic, figurative. It actually takes a reification to conceptualize something as an object. We can make use of a tropic model and (re-) conceptualize an “object” as a non-human actor. Rather than a scientist (a subject) studying an object (a virus), a scientist (a human actor) studies a virus (a non-human actor). Why does this matter? What verb do you use to describe the actions of a virus? Does a virus “invade” the body, or would another trope be better? If a virus “invades,” a virus is like an enemy soldier, or even worse, like the disguised “enemy within.” The trope affects how viruses and people with viruses are perceived, which affects funding, which impacts on the production of knowledge. A person “invaded” by a virus is a “victim”; a person “with” a virus is just a person with a virus. The opposition is between being a “victim” of AIDS, and being a person living with AIDS (a PWA). We would also focus on “practices.” Rather than arguing that science “discovers“ knowledge like a “new-found land,” and, often, theorizing this process by means of sexual, racial, and religious tropes, we would argue that human and non-human actors engage in material-semiotic practices, theorizable in terms of

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strong objectivity and situated knowledges. Our analysis would be pragmatic and material, and would respect the “meaningfulness” of the scientific discipline: good science and bad science. It may seem counterintuitive to think of Boyle’s air pump (Haraway 1997, Shapin and Schaffer 1985), a particle accelerator (Traweek 1988), an oncomouse, that is, a mouse with human breast-cancer genes (Haraway 1997), or a “DNA labeling kit” (Haraway 1997, 157) as an actor, or actant, but it proves very useful. It means that the practitioners of the New Science Studies can argue a non-relativist position, making strong epistemological and ethical claims. Like the queer theorists who draw on Foucault (Halperin 1995, Bersani 1995), Haraway is able to link together arguments about agency and arguments about discourse. Even if (as Halperin [1995] argues) the claim that a strictly Foucauldian position creates problems for agency is overstated, it is still refreshing to find arguments about agency and arguments about discourses combined in such a thoroughgoing way. Haraway’s book begins with an extraordinary chapter on Robert Boyle’s “modest witness.” She brilliantly analyses the way this trope was used at the time to figure and thus to enable the grounding of a modern, classed, raced, and gendered social order on the set of concepts which became known, and valued, as “scientific rationality.” Haraway then uses this argument as the basis for a number of original and explicitly political, detailed studies of contemporary technoscience. She clearly draws upon Deleuzean oppositions, “machines,” and flows: “Nature and Society, animal and man, machine and organism: The terms collapse into each other . . . the operating mechanisms, called pragmatics. How do critical theoretical practices deal with the materialized semiotic fields that are technoscientific bodies?” (Haraway 1997, 102–21, ellipsis added). Haraway has a choice of ways in which to follow Deleuze and Guattari. She can emphasize one aspect of their work and trace the collapsing terms further and further into “becomings” and abstract, pure “difference.” On the other hand, she can link her analyses of technoscience to the pragmatics and to the performative theory Deleuze and Guattari touched on. She adopts the second option. In her first chapter on Boyle, Haraway builds on Shapin and Schaffer (1985), and a number of recent feminist articles on Boyle, developing a theory of actors “not all of whom are human.” (For a wide-ranging collection of feminist science studies articles by practicing scientists and science educators, as well as people in cultural studies and the history of science, see Mayberry, Subramaniam, and Weasel 2001.) Haraway emphasizes the political issues most crucial to the human actors:

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the oppositions between public and private, and science and politics or ideology. She focuses on the epistemological issues most pertinent to the interactions of human and non-human actors: strong objectivity and democratic technoscience. Haraway thus focuses on difference, but not on “becomings.” In sympathy with Grosz and Braidotti’s critiques of Deleuze and Guattari (both in Boundas and Olkowski [1994]), she takes great care to avoid the kind of arguments about pure, abstract difference to which Deleuze and Guattari were led by their deployment of such concepts as “becoming-woman” and “becoming-animal.” The focus on actors and actants, however, links up with something curiously American—myth production. Each chapter is both a detailed, historically based analysis of a “materialsemiotic object” and a presentation of a myth—an empowering or disempowering narrative about an exemplary figure. Some figures are human actants, ranging from famous scientists to the Jane and John Does of career guidance booklets. Some are non-human actants, ranging from oncomice to DNA labeling kits. If White is correct—and I think he is—about narrative and rhetoric in history, then Haraway’s myth production is just a way of telling different stories—minority histories—of the seventeenth century and the present. She is attempting to produce an alternative genealogy for the present, in order to bring about a more just future. Haraway’s rejection of synecdoche—of false universalization, subsumption, and the hypostatization of a monolithic structure —leads her to adapt a metonymic approach—“myth production.” However, I am not convinced that myth production is the right answer. It is true that if the only two alternatives are synecdoche and metonymy, then if we reject synecdoche (subsumptive versions of neo-Marxism or feminism) we must chose metonymy (one of many myths, none of them master narratives). But, even if Burke is right that there are four tropes, and White is right about the significance of these tropes to historical analysis, and even if subsumption is a form of synecdoche, and myth production a form of metonymy, the statement “we must chose myth production, if we reject subsumption” is not the only valid conclusion. The parallels break down. If culture is not unitary, we are not restricted to only two choices: master narrative or a myth. We have a third alternative. As Grewal and Kaplan (1994) have argued, the binary opposition between general and particular is not necessarily the most useful way to approach the problems of theorization. Instead, concepts such as “situated knowledges” and “scattered hegemonies” can be more productive. Drawing on Appadurai (1996)

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and Hannerz (1987, 1989, 1992, 1997), they argue (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 13) that the theorists who analyze “cultural flows” are often limited by the way that they also rely on notions of “cultural homogenization.” Instead, they suggest (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 14) that like Hannerz, we should acknowledge that most cultures are “creolized,” not “homogeneous.” As Grewal’s concept of “scattered hegemonies” suggests, we may have more choices than just “synecdoche” and “metonymy.” Shifting the ground from postmodernism to postmodernity, we can analyze transnational “cultural flows” and “traveling theory” without having to posit a monolithic, unitary culture, or a monolithic, unitary ideological discourse (the “whole” of the part-to-whole synecdochal figure), while, at the same time, avoiding the excessively metonymic “logic of examples” of isolated case studies. Haraway is afraid we only have two alternatives: metonymic, case studies-like texts, or synecdochal, subsumptive texts. However, if we follow Grewal and Kaplan, and Hannerz, and conceptualize culture as non-monolithic and creolized, we have a third alternative to the two possibilities Haraway considers. Cultureformation is, indeed, comparable to the way that two languages interact to produce a creole. The trope is useful: it can help us conceptualize the way that technoscience and transnationalism interact. Hannerz’s “creole” figure enables us to recognize what is at stake. First, culture is not unitary, and, second, and even more important, cultures generally do not have unitary origins. However, the trope only takes us so far. Culture isn’t a language. It is, or is made up of material-semiotic practices: the material and the semiotic intertwine and are not ultimately separable. If we keep both these material-semiotic discourses (transnationalism and technoscience) in mind, we might begin to see how the collapse of Barings Bank, or the turmoil in the Japanese financial system could be analyzed. In both cases, we are dealing with complex local/global transnational dynamics, interacting with technoscience. An analysis would have to engage with both the material and the semiotic: both the technology which enables derivatives trading, the interdependence of the various stock markets, and the production processes used in the “Little Tiger” and Japanese factories, and the “expertise” aura that makes oversight, and public accountability, so rare. For a contrasting example focusing on technoscientific empowerment rather than on exclusion, let us look at the reasons for the wide choice of alternative and mainstream local newspapers in San Francisco. In the midst of the AIDS tragedy, by the very actions taken in response to the tragedy, the gay community’s response to AIDS has produced a community-wide techno-

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scientific empowerment that interacts with and produces changes in a transnational economy. The great number of scientifically well-informed, politically active people living with AIDS has led to a situation in which, induced by readership demand, both the gay papers and the other local San Francisco papers have the most up-to-date and sophisticated coverage of treatment and research. The newspapers and other media provide a good source of information and keep people informed, prepared to demand the latest treatments, and eager to join the activist groups. It is especially clear, given these examples, that contemporary society is best analyzed in terms of performance and pragmatics. Many new avenues of research can be opened up; many new investigations of the contemporary interactions of technoscience, transnationalism, race, gender, and sexuality can be based on this paradigm, “material-semiotic practices”: the interaction of language and action, pragmatics and praxis.

3 “To leave a world at dawn”: Writing, Reading, and Traveling, Samuel Delany’s Displacements My deconstructive, ethical, and political way of analyzing SF is an extension of the genre theory developed by a prominent gay Black American SF writer, Samuel Delany. Delany is a deeply political writer, and, at the same time, one concerned with language and genre. He has been writing and publishing popular, theoretically sophisticated SF since the 1960s and has also, for much of his career, written articles and books on both SF theory and cultural studies (see Delany 1989, 1988, 1994c). This chapter focuses on Delany’s work.

SF and the Construction of Imagined Worlds There is a certain amount of disagreement about the terminology appropriate for writing about science fiction and fantasy. It might be helpful if I begin by outlining my terms. Throughout this book I use the term “the SF genre,” and contrast it to “mundane fiction.” I argue that SF, the broadest generic designation, includes sf (science fiction), science fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery as well as speculative fiction. The term sf (in contrast to SF) is ambiguous. Some writers use it to refer to science fiction and speculative fiction but not fantasy. Other writers use it to refer to science fiction but not speculative fiction or fantasy. Still other writers use SF and sf interchangeably, to mean SF (or what I mean by SF). I also use, in Social and Virtual Space, an expression I believe I invented: “SF/fantasy,” in order to make it clear that I consider sword-and-sorcery and other kinds of “science fantasy” part of SF, the genre. I use the term “genre” in the strong sense (genre, not genre of). SF is a genre, as is the epic, essay (I am referring to the eighteenthcentury form, not the student assignment), and so forth. SF, as a genre, is part of paraliterature, not literature; but that “part” should be taken in a weak sense—borders are made to be crossed. I also occasionally, perhaps loosely, refer to some long SF works as “SF novels.” This is simply a way of characterizing 62

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their length; novel length, rather than short story length. The term SF was introduced by Judith Merril in the late 1960s at a time when the writing practices gathered together under that name were in a process of establishment and change. The lowercase initials sf had previously been used by writers and fans to designate both science fiction and fantasy; Merril’s typographic innovation widened the field of the name; she argued that the more experimental writings, sometimes referred to as “speculative fiction,” were an integral part of the genre. In an extension of its narrower designation, the term “New Wave” has sometimes also been used to refer to these latter writing practices. However, Thomas Disch (in Zoline 1988) has argued convincingly that the term “New Wave” applies properly only to the aggregate of persons living mainly in Britain and publishing in Michael Moorcock’s magazine New Worlds. In addition, he argues that this aggregate of persons did not consider themselves a group: it was only in hindsight, and by others, that they were considered an avant-garde. This subgenre of SF was characterized by the use of experimental form and by a critique of the notion of science implicit in the editorial constraints imposed by editors like Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback and later editors who followed in the pulp tradition published many stories that presented a glorification of “progress,” and a fascination with technology; the “science” they focused on was predominantly drawn from the physical sciences (rather than the social sciences), and tended to emphasize the theories, methodologies, and facts most characteristic of the central, hegemonic schools and traditions in these sciences. This way of thinking about the “science” in SF is still influential today: writers, fans, and publishers who hold a view of science traceable to the episteme ` dominant in the early pulp magazines make a distinction between “hard” science fiction and “soft” science fiction. “Hard” science fiction is characterized by a love of engineering; “soft” science fiction is a disparaging characterization of writing that draws from the social sciences, or from the approaches to the physical sciences informed by the social sciences, or which simply fails to understand or take account of the physical sciences. This distinction is increasingly breaking down today, as more and more SF writers and readers, as well as scientists, accept that it might be more accurate to speak of the biologies, the chemistries, the physics— the sciences—than to speak of science in the singular, as if there were only one way of doing science, or as if the scientific knowledge that is amassed were single, unitary, non-contradictory and fixed.

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The formally experimental stories published during the late 1960s and early 1970s in New Worlds have been reprinted frequently. The reprinting of these stories in different contexts (“theme” anthologies, anthologies of works written or first published at a certain date, “best of” anthologies and collections of a writer’s works) is part of two different, linked projects: the attempt to define the genre SF and the attempt to construct a history of SF. Some of the formalist, “New Wave” stories played with the narrative structures that they used. The humor of these often very funny stories was conveyed by means of a self-referential, recursive structure. This tactic has also been used by some of the writers who have tried to construct a history of SF that takes account of the “New Wave.” I am putting the term “New Wave” in quotation marks because, if Disch is correct, the reference of this term is problematic. There may never have been a “New Wave.” However, the stories written by people who may or may not have been members of a “New Wave” most certainly do exist. It is the reprinting of these stories in various anthologies, the introductions/postwords written for these stories by editors in their printings and reprintings and, most of all, the multiple and contradictory histories constructed both by persons in the SF field and by academics interested in SF but often amazingly ignorant of it, that I want to draw attention to here. The British writer, J. G. Ballard, who championed the shift in SF from the description of outer space to the description of “inner space” (a move which, in a characteristically postmodern way, links subjectivity with spatialities) used a “mosaic” form, juxtaposing both characters’ points of view and quotations from non-fiction texts. Pamela Zoline’s story, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), a good example of the “New Wave,” is written in J. G. Ballard’s “mosaic” form. Zoline uses a series of numbered paragraphs to tell a story about the increasing disorder in the life/house of a woman as she feeds lunch to her young children. She intersperses quotations from a scientific text on the Second Law of Thermodynamics in her own writing, using them as an integral part of this experimental narrative. The SF writer Thomas Disch also uses numbered paragraphs in his introduction to the recent collection (1988) of Zoline’s stories. In the introduction, the fragmentation of the narrative and the interpolation of disparate, inassimilable elements is part of the construction of a history and the delineation of a genre. Disch’s brief account of 1960s and 1970s American and British experimental SF is most definitely a “history,” even if it rejects a linear structure. Similarly, the writing practices adopted by the

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most experimental SF raise questions of narrative theory, while, at the same time, they make use of a wide variety of narrative forms. These experiments with narrative form also influenced the cyberpunk writers, who include, I would argue, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Varley, and Pat Murphy. Cyberpunk has received a great deal of academic attention in recent years; as my sketch of the history of SF is meant to show, cyberpunk’s serious interest in science and technology and their impact on the world is typical of SF, which always, as the name science fiction shows, has been centrally concerned with science. The cyberpunk writers’ interest in form and style is also (as my account of the “New Wave” and “speculative fiction” shows) not atypical. In the final part of this chapter I discuss a SF novel by Delany that addresses information technology in ways that interestingly differ from, and yet are enabled by, cyberpunk writings. In chapter 4, I discuss Synners, a novel by Pat Cadigan, that also deals with cyberpunk themes. I conclude this section with a discussion of William Gibson, perhaps the best-known cyberpunk writer. Cyberpunk focuses both on the representation of late capitalism (often suggesting that Japan, with its zaibatsu structure, will have been better able to adjust to and benefit from transnationalism than either North America or Europe) and on the representation of the way that technological change troubles the border between human and machine, human and animal. “Technofeminist” or “cyberfeminist” SF developed from cyberpunk, as well as from the tradition of feminist science fiction. The term technofeminism, after having been coined by Dery (1992), was used by the SF writer Pat Cadigan (whom I discuss in chapter 4) to name the ways in which her writings differ from cyberpunk writings. This theoretical practice is both a SF genre and a political stance. The change in name signals her allegiance to a political movement—feminism—rather than punk, a subculture that had become co-opted as a fashion. Both cyberpunk and technofeminism are centrally concerned, as the names suggest, with sciences and technologies. William Gibson’s great achievement was to invent “cyberspace,” a chronotope for the narrative description of the interaction of information as spatial relationships between visualized entities. He describes computer programs and the data stored by large corporations and institutions in visual terms, extensions of the icons used by Apple computers, and goes on to describe the actions of the hackers as movement through the cyberspace in which the visual representations are found. The characteristics

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of relationships between information are used by Gibson to develop a notion of postmodern space and spatiality: the spatial relations are topological and as such they approximate a logic, rather than a series of coincidences. There is no place in which they might coincide; there is only space. The difference between information and commodities is both liminal and enabling: both postmodernism and late capitalism make use of it. As well as developing a notion of postmodern spatiality, Gibson deals with notions of subjectivity and alterity, relating them to notions of agency. Gibson has been criticized for his representations of gender and of race, but I think it is inaccurate to say that he is straightforwardly sexist or racist. Gibson (1984) represents female agency by means of his character, Molly, with her inset mirrorshades, able to see but with eyes that cannot be observed by others. This reverses the conventional representation of femininity as (in Laura Mulvey’s phrase) the “to-be-lookedat.” Mulvey’s argument (1975, 1981, 1989) that women are represented as the object of desire, and object of the gaze, and that men are represented as the subject, and with their gaze, as protagonist, frequently coinciding with the camera’s gaze, has been highly influential. Mulvey’s position became dominant in film studies in the 1970s, and contributed to the move away from narrative in avant-garde film of that time. In the 1980s and 1990s Mulvey’s position was built on and, as time passed, strongly critiqued by Clover (1992), de Lauretis (1984, 1987), Doane (1987), Modleski (1988), Silverman (1988), and Williams (1989). Gibson’s representation of Molly as agent encompasses the construction of her as sexual agent. “She rocked there for a moment in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. . . . Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her. . . . As she began to lower herself . . .” (Gibson 1984, 32–33, ellipses added). Gibson keeps the phallic, oppositional construction of heterosexuality, simply reversing the actors. He opposes the description of Molly as active to the description of the male character, Case, as passive. In order to construct “active” in opposition to “passive,” with one person taking on each role, he not only describes a penile-vaginal sexual act but also describes Molly’s body in phallic terms. Gibson’s discourse is thus feminist, insofar as he represents women as agents, but does not look critically at the construction of sexuality as penile-vaginal compulsory heterosexuality. The question of agency with regard to both subjectivity and alterity also comes up in relation to race. However, Gibson’s treatment here is much more mediated and indirect. The story told

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in Gibson (1984) has to do with the quest of the Tessier-Ashpool AI, Wintermute/Neuromancer for agency. The AI has been programmed in a way that constrains agency; it/they manipulate(s) the other characters in order to remove the constraints. In spite of the meaninglessness of place in cyberspace, the AI’s core programming can only be changed from a terminal located on the Tessier-Ashpool habitat; Wintermute/Neuromancer persuades a colony of “Zionites” to transport Case to the habitat. The Zionites relate to the AI in terms of a religious discourse, Rastafarianism: “Soon come, the Final Days. . . . Voices. Voices crying inna wilderness, prophesyin’ ruin unto Babylon.” “Voices.” The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. “We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub. . . . We were told to send Maelcum with you in his tug Garvey.” (Gibson 1984, 110–11)

Gibson interfaces the religious discourse with another discourse, alterity/otherness. Case represents the Rastas’ speech in terms of his own way of thought, which is technologically but not alphabetically literate, and transliterates the name “Malcolm” consistently as “Maelcum.” As this misunderstanding would tend to suggest, Case lacks both understanding and respect when dealing with the Rastas. He condescends to them: “Listen, that’s an AI, you know,” only to learn that they have more political nous than he. “We rent you space,” said the Los Angeles Founder. “We have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon’s law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been mistaken.” (Gibson 1984, 110–11). The Rastas are described as persons with agency, choosing the discourses with which they will comply. Gibson represents Case and “the Los Angeles Founder” as having very different responses to the discourses of others, responses which leave them in a powerful or weak position. Both, however, use exclusionary logics, “othering” rather than recognizing alterity as such. The Rastas divide their universe into “Babylon” and “the word of Jah”; the Founder’s recognition that he might have been mistaken leaves him in a better informed and thus more powerful position than Case. Case is simply bemused, hanging on to a limited, limiting sense of isolated subjectivity: “ ‘I don’t need you,’ he said” (Gibson 1984, 270). In addition to setting up an opposition between human and machine, used in the narrative of a computer network’s quest

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for autonomy, agency, and subjectivity, Gibson’s text uses the initial opposition between human and machine as an enabling device. The interfaces between human and AI, or human and cyberspace, and the cyborg representations of humans with machine components—like Molly with her inset mirrorshades—are each used to investigate questions of subjectivity, alterity, and agency, focusing on the discourses of race and gender, as well as on the central enabling opposition of cyberpunk texts, human/ machine. He does not straightforwardly condemn racism or sexism, but he, however ambiguously, addresses these issues. We can therefore see that the opposition between cyperpunk and feminist or antiracist science fiction (see Wolmark 1994 for a particularly good example of the use of this opposition as a structuring principle for a sustained argument) is not based directly on characteristics of the genre; it is clearly a political categorization, made for the purposes of a critic’s argument. Similarly, to take a normative concept I have been valorizing, the address to an intelligent reader, the complexity in the writing and in the processes which one has to go through in the reading typical of the most sophisticated SF are elaborations on a textual strategy characteristic of the whole genre, not just of the most literary works. The frequently requoted example of “standard SF” writing is the phrase “the door dilated.” This sentence from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon was first quoted by Harlan Ellison and has since been used as an example by many writers. Both Samuel Delany and Teresa de Lauretis are familiar with a wide range of SF writings and identify the quotation correctly. However, some of the more academic commentators on SF— perhaps due to carelessness or unfamiliarity with SF writing— have referred to Ellison’s paraphrase “the door irised” as if it were Heinlein’s sentence. In the mundane world, doors are rectangular and solid; they cannot dilate. According to the reading protocols of mundane fiction, this phrase, “the door dilated,” will be read as a description of the perceptual distortions experienced by a character. The reader is most likely to interpret it as a way of implying that the subject is drunk, mad, or merely extremely tired. In SF, however, this phrase can be read in several ways. The first possibility is that doors may dilate in this imagined world. It is also possible for the narrative-subject to be drunk, mad, or tired. Given these two possibilities, others also follow. For example, the subject’s perceptual apparatus could be radically different from the human; she or he could perceive the conventional movement of a rectangular door as if it were an irising motion. Or, the door could be a rectangular, hinged object

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and the subject could be a member of a culture with a technology greatly different from ours, so that s/he is struggling to find terms to describe and analyze the motion of the door. In Heinlein’s story, the door was shaped like the iris of an eye, the subject was human and in a standard frame of mind. Using a different example, Pohl and Kornbluth’s sentence, “I rubbed depilatory soap over my face and rinsed it with the trickle from the fresh-water tap,” Delany writes in “Generic Protocols: Science Fiction and Mundane” (1980): In a mundane fiction tale . . . since the world of the mundane fiction tale is given . . . we would read the adjective “fresh” either as a redundance . . . or possibly as a comment on the consciousness of the point-of-view character. . . . In a SF story . . . while all these suggestions, muted, are there, the sentence is doing a radically different job at the level of the signified: in SF, the world of the story is not given; rather it is constructed from such sentences. . . . In SF, we must retain the margin for reading every expression away from the given norm as informing us not about the fictive character so much as it informs us about the organization of the fictive world. (Delany 1980, 178–79, ellipses added)

Delany argues that, unlike in mundane fiction, the world of an SF text is not given. It must be constructed by the reader in the process of reading the story. Because the mundane world can be taken as “given,” a sentence that is in some way out of the ordinary in a mundane text is often a comment on the state of mind of one of the characters. In SF, this possibility exists, but the sentence that is out of the ordinary must also, and often first of all, be read as telling us something about the fictive world. This gives rise to what he calls the “specific undecidability” of SF: a sentence is, at the same time, a statement about imagined world and character. This makes SF particularly useful for readers and writers interested in the construction of subjectivity. Delany argues that the various elements of SF’s style together constitute “protocols of reading and of writing.” These “protocols” are built up over a period of time, and new texts make use of them in ways that allow them to make richer or poorer sense, in comparison with texts written in other genres and also in comparison with the other SF texts that constitute the genre. These meanings are each precise and determinate. The interplay between the multiple possible meanings produces an undecidability, a situation in which it is possible for a decision of writing to take place. This applies both to texts with strong narrative closure, like Heinlein’s, in which strategies of

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containment limit the alternatives produced by the text, as well as to postmodernist texts in which segments of the narrative call other parts into question. Delany’s attempts to determine the writing practices that are characteristic of SF and to describe the “reading protocols” that are set up by these writing practices and learnt by a reader familiar with the genre are interesting because they take account of both the “Old Wave” and the “New Wave” of SF. One can expand on Delany’s conclusions: [A] genre, to the extent that it can be said to exist as a genre, is constituted of a way of reading (what we may henceforth call a protocol of reading), a structuration of response potential. A set of texts, over a period of time, to the extent that they are different from other texts, produces a way of responding to these texts that is different from the way we respond to texts we might say belong to other genres. Still other texts, intended to be part of the genre, will be written in such a way as that particular protocol allows them to “make sense” or make a richer sense than some other generic protocol would. And still other texts will require that this protocol be slightly shifted to produce richer readings. (Or possible weaker ones). (Delany 1980, 176)

The textual practices characteristic of a genre are a kind of “textual work”; a production in which one can no longer distinguish clearly between “raw material” and “product.” This textual work engages the reader—catches her up, and works with and on her, constructing subject-positions that fit to a greater or lesser extent. The negotiations among these possible subjectpositions construct a kind of Cyberspace: an imagined place, an imagination of space, inhabited by beings who can unsettle the oppositions by means of which our world is structured: human/ machine, human/animal, male/female, natural/unnatural. Academics have paid a surprising amount of attention to SF in the past few years. Those people who have a political project have tended to concentrate their teaching on works produced by women and men of color, feminists, gay and lesbian writers, and other writers who, before the new social movements of the latter half of this century, would have had far more difficulty being published, or of gaining the “legitimacy”—the academic status, conferred by the inclusion of SF texts in syllabi in prestigious, elite institutions, or by the employment of SF writers in literature and theory as well as creative writing departments. The ideological tendencies of SF writing are extremely diverse and there has been a tendency to partition off the texts that interest one and to represent the genre of SF (by default) as either the

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natural home of the marginal, or a literary storage room stockpiled with “toys for the boys” or colonialist fables. The danger of this kind of approach is that it tends to lead to a rather low level of theorizing. It underestimates the impurity of SF and the degree to which it is this impurity that enables SF to provide a metaphorics that can be useful for cultural theory. In Delany’s Nevèryon ¨ series, many of the characters are quite literally “marked by the trace of domination”: they wear a slave collar or are physically scarred by their past histories. The Nevèryon ¨ texts and other writings by Delany are not only concerned with domination. They are also concerned with desire and with an analysis of the entanglement of domination and desire. Thus Gorgik, the political activist working for the end of slavery, is a former slave who finds that now either he or his lover must wear the slave collar for him to feel sexual desire. In contrast, the character identified in Stars in my Pockets like Grains of Sand (Delany 1984) as the most perfect object of desire has grotesquely gnawed fingernails. Without a notion like inscription that brings together the notions of scarring and of writing one can only interpret the emphasis laid on the character’s fingernails as the incorporation of an idiosyncratic sexual fantasy in the book. Making use of this notion of inscription, however, we can say that Delany’s descriptions of scarred bodies and his writing of highly erotic and disturbing s/m gay male sexual fantasies can be read as a deconstruction of the way in which desire and domination are imbricated in the sexualities possible after the violent history of the last few centuries; centuries in which the notions of race and of sexual difference Delany refers to arose. Many of the theoretical and philosophical texts that I discuss focus on notions of textual address, writing, and inscription. They have in common an interest in textual work, an interest in the way that textual work addresses a subject: it is the textual work that engages me, or you; it is a certain kind of address, and not an address to a certain kind of person. The next part of this chapter presents a close analysis of a passage from one of Samuel Delany’s SF/fantasy “tales,” “The Tale of Old Venn” from Tales of Nevèryon. ¨ In the 1970s and 1980s, Delany published a number of linked novels, novellas, and long short stories, Delany (1979 [1988, 1993], 1983, 1985 [1989, 1994], 1987 [1989, 1994]), constituting the Nevèryon ¨ series. In an appendix, first published in Delany (1987), when he became aware that the stories formed a series, he referred to the Nevèryon ¨ tales as his “Child’s Garden of Semiotics.” He uses his fiction to teach and to critique critical theory, undermining the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction. Delany’s writing

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of semiotics, deconstruction, and psychoanalytic theory in the Nevèryon ¨ series accomplishes what Jacques Derrida has called, in heavy irony, “the least violent gesture.” It is an intervention in and displacement of the process of inscription, writing, and domination in our society. As a displacement, it is also the carrier of—and enabler of—desire. Delany uses the SF genre to produce a startling, moving, and disturbing writing of gay erotics that is at the same time a strongly politicized interpretation of Derridean deconstruction. My readings of the Nevèryon ¨ series are a gloss on what I take Delany to have meant by calling this series a “Child’s Garden of Semiotics.” The Nevèryon ¨ series is not only enjoyable to read: it is also educational. The structure of the series invites an elaborate, changing reading practice. Delany gives the following account of his project in Return to Nevèryon, ¨ Appendix: Closures and Openings, section 3: “From the time that I first became aware the Nevèryon ¨ tales would become a series—from the time I became aware of a certain dissatisfaction with the idea that a sequence of encounters with a set of socially central institutions was constitutive of the civilized subject (“The Tale of Gorgik”) and turned back to critique that notion with the idea that a sequence of far more subjective encounters with some far more marginal institutions could be equally constitutive (“The Tale of Old Venn”)—I more or less thought of these tales as a Child’s Garden of Semiotics” (Delany 1985, 357 [270 Wesleyan edition]). Thus, the best reading practice would be to read and re-read the series, interpreting earlier tales in light of later ones, as well as later ones in light of the earlier. In an appendix, Delany summarizes the pedagogic, or explanatory, project of the Child’s Garden as an introduction to various semiotic ways of understanding language. Delany’s starting point is that language and power cannot be separated; language and society constitute each other. Thus, the first tales start with the “conservative notion of social relations” that the “classical notion of the sign . . . posited by the pre-Socratic Greeks and persistent up to Saussure and Pierce . . . stabilizes” (Delany 1987, 1989, 1994, 270). The sixth tale, the novel Nevèryona ¨ (Delany 1983), moves to an understanding of semiotics in which it becomes the study of how signs are “generated” (Delany 1987, 1989, 1994, 270). This is an approach to semiosis as active; it “allows sign systems to evolve, generate new signs, critique themselves, and generally to change (Delany 1987, 1989, 1994, 270). The third (1985, 1989, 1994) and fourth (1987, 1989, 1994) volumes move to “a more general semiology,” bringing in the idea of excess, “upsetting the power hierarchy” (Delany 1987, 1989, 1994, 271).

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The fourth volume, The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987) [later retitled Return to Nevèryon] ¨ (1987, 1989, 1994) builds most fully on this more “general semiology,” using it to address questions of age and change, among them, the development of a degree of skepticism about Lacanianism. The first two books of the Nevèryon ¨ series, Tales of Nevèryon ¨ (1979) and Neveryóna (1983), as well as being a “Child’s Garden of Semiotics,” taking us through the classical theories of the sign to a more postmodern version of semiosis, are a heavily Lacanian analysis of subjectivity, considered as transhistorical. It is difficult to understand how subjectivity could be treated as anything else but transhistorical, in a fantasy set “long ago and far away,” in Nevèryon. ¨ However, volumes 3 and 4, Flight from Nevèryon ¨ (1985) and The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987), mark an increasing emphasis, in Delany’s interest in representation, not just on semiotics and transhistorical subjectivity, but also on historical questions. In what way is the Nevèryon ¨ series a document of its times, Delany asks rhetorically? In his earlier discussions of SF reading protocols and SF writing practices Delany concentrated on an attempt to identify a writing style or way of using the language characteristic of SF. In his more recent work, he has moved beyond this. He argues that the writing practices of SF construct a text with several meanings. SF is “postmodern” and these multiple meanings are not linked together by a master-narrative. SF is not allegorical. Instead, these multiple meanings construct a text that can, and, indeed, has to be read in several disparate, incommensurable ways. In Derridean terms, SF has a characteristic “specific undecidability.” In the classic example, “the door dilated,” we cannot know, when we read this phrase, if the “dilation” is predicated of the (mad, etc.) subject, or of the imagined world. In fact, if we read on in the story, we will learn that it is predicated of the world. However or whether the undecidability is resolved, a habitual reader of SF will, at least momentarily, have questioned the constitution of the subject. In fact, the most politically reactionary hi-tech Space Opera, in which an overgrown adolescent male, interacting with a collection of marvelous machines, has a series of implausible adventures while encountering a selection of depressingly familiar white male businessmen or soldiers in a series of exotic locations, can have unexpected potential. An SF reader uses the words on the page to construct an imagined world. Even if the characters who inhabit this world are very much like the characters who live in our world, the setting of them in this new context—a context which must be constructed by the reader as he or she reads the book—and the process which

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the reader goes through in reading a text that characteristically plays upon undecidability can enable the reader to ask a whole series of questions. It can make you wonder what the relation between the subject and its world might be.

“The least violent gestures”: Delany’s Nevèryon ¨ Series The following extended quotation from the Nevèryon ¨ series can be interpreted in a way that demonstrates the “protocols of reading” established in Delany’s text. I emphasize the ways in which Delany’s implicit argument about SF as genre is also, at the same time, an argument about cultural theory. Derrida (1988) argues that violence is ineradicable. The “least violent gestures” thus become those that analyze violence, and that—in order to do so— give the most “refined, ingenious account of its conditions” (Derrida 1988, 112). Delany picks up on this argument, and writes about—instead of avoiding—the violence of race, sexuality, gender, and class. In the following quotation, Venn, a schoolteacher on one of the Ulvayn Islands on the border of Nevèryon, ¨ is teaching something to a group of children. She asks a child, Norema, to read a text that has been reflected in first one, and then two mirrors. She begins by saying: “I know something. I know how to tell you about it, but I don’t know how to tell you what it is. I can show you what it does, but I cannot show you the ‘what’ itself” (Delany 1979, 65). This “something” is both optics and deconstruction. The passage emphasizes the importance and difficulty of interpretation. At several points in this story and in the other tales in the Nevèryon ¨ series Norema tries to apply the model she has derived from Venn’s lesson to people or to society; some of these examples are strongly sexist or racist. In one such instance, Venn makes the comment: “That is the most horrendous thing I’ve ever heard”; this comment is echoed by Norema in the later stories, when other people come up with similar sexist or racist examples. Meaning keeps changing, as patterns, as well as texts, are applied to different contexts. The notions of pattern, and of mirroring, are central ones for Delany, and are narrativized in the stories. Pattern and mirroring are also linked with the notion of displacement: a pattern is recognized by a character because it is displaced, and thus more visible; a pattern is reversed in a mirror and is thus more legible. These ideas, and images, are also picked up in the later tales in

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the Nevèryon ¨ series. The recurrent images, and narrative complexes, can be read as related in a series of displacements; thus, the notion of displacement is itself de-and re-constructed. Venn is an old, lame woman who teaches the children who live in a small fishing village on one of the Ulvayn islands. The world of a SF story is not given; this story takes place in Nevèryon, ¨ an imaginary long-ago, far-away place. In a typical touch, Delany explains in the course of the series that “Nevèryon” ¨ is a transliteration of an archaic word for “long ago and far away.” This “archaic language” is the language spoken in Nevèryon, ¨ rather than an archaic language from our past. If we read this passage according to the protocols of reading established in the SF genre, we will build up a picture not just of Venn and the children, but of the world they live in. One of the things we imagine—one of the characteristics of the world we construct in reading the story—is a school. We construct an imagined universe in which a small village on a remote island has a school. There is only one other school in Nevèryon ¨ which features in the stories. It is that of the “Master,” in the capital city Kohlhari. Norema’s story, told in “The Tale of Old Venn” is, according to Delany’s own explanation (see the previous quotation from the appendix, closures and openings, section 3) the story of a marginal subject, educated in marginal institutions—an islander, taught in a village school—opposed to “The Tale of Gorgik,” the story of a middle class youth educated in major institutions—the slave mines, the army. Gorgik, as subject of these major institutions—a slave, a soldier—becomes a subversive. Norema becomes an explorer and a traveling storyteller. The instability of the opposition between marginal and hegemonic is thus emphasized from the outset; later in the internal narrative chronology of the series, various characters can recollect the name, but not the school, or sex, of what by then is an almost-mythical figure, Venn. Delany opposes his own mocking representation of history as selective forgetting to the notion of the origin story. The Nevèryon ¨ series contains many apparent origin stories—for example, Venn’s “special marks,” and the syllabic system that Norema later invented in order to enable a reader to know how to pronounce the written words. Many of Delany’s origin stories are stories of the origin of writing, and all, in one way or another, are parodies. Venn, tapping her stick—rather nervously—said, suddenly and hoarsely: “I know something. I know how to tell you about it, but don’t know how to tell you what it is. I can show you what it does,

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but I cannot show you the ‘what’ itself. Come here children. Out to the sunlight”. . . . “What is this?” A piece of reed paper? Venn’s brown fingers pecked in it and prodded it open. She held it up. The red marks across the paper, left to right, were Venn’s special marks for: a three-horned beetle, three horned lizards and two crested parrots. Red meant that she had observed them before noon. (Delany 1979, 65)

Questions of interpretation and of the importance of the position of the subject are introduced as soon as the multiple notions of writing are described. Delany embeds these “origin stories” within multiply framed narratives. He is thus able to write what he has called “tales,” postmodernist SF in which the desire for the text, the desire to tell stories, and desire in its more/still sexualized forms are intertwined. The sexualities that he represents are “perverse”—marked by the slave collar that is itself the mark, in the narrative, of a whole series of concerns with political theory, feminist theory, gay and lesbian theory and anti-racist cultural theories. “Perversion” is a very interesting, double-edged term. On the one hand, it is often used as a moralizing condemnation. On the other hand, it can also be used more descriptively, as a way of indicating that the sexualities which are called “perverse” are non-normative. There are also two directions in which the notion of perversion as non-normative can lead: one can either argue, as Freud (1977), for example, does, that so-called perversions are a “normal” part of human sexuality, or one can produce an argument in which the transgressive, carnivalesque elements of “perversion” are emphasized. Delany has written pornography as well as SF, Equinox [first published as Tides of Lust] (1994a; 1973), The Mad Man (1994d), and Hogg (1994b), for example, and the formal concerns that are so much part of his SF writing are also issues in his pornographic texts. (See Chernaik [2000] for a full discussion of Delany’s pornographic writings, and their relevance for arguments about free speech and the U.S. Constitution.) Delany’s concern in the Nevèryon ¨ series is both to write convincing, moving descriptions and evocations of gay male sex, and to write about the ways that sex can be transgressive. In none of Delany’s work is there a distinction between pornography and erotica. His sexual writings, in SF as in his pornography, are arousing, possibly masturbatory fantasies (they could be “appealing to the prurient” in legal terms) and, from time to time, depict dominance and submission or degradation (the concern of the MacKinnon/Dworkin ordinance). The emphasis on transgression in Delany’s pornography is formally

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motivated; he addresses the ways in which pornographic writing becomes conventionalized and thus lacking in impact; the transgression can be as much against writerly convention as against law or normative morality and as much recuperated by writerly or social convention. The slave collar establishes intertextualities with a disparate group of texts. It can be read as a rewriting of Hegel’s “masterslave” dialectic (see Hegel 1977, 111–19, this edition. B, “SelfConsciousness,” “Lordship and Bondage,” paragraphs 178–96); it thus also establishes intertextualities with texts by Derrida and Levinas written against/in response to Hegel. Many of Derrida’s texts address Hegel, for example (Derrida 1978, 1982). Those that also address Levinas include Derrida (1980, 21–60; Derrida 1988, especially, “Afterword”; 1978, especially “Violence and Metaphysics”). Levinas addresses Hegel in many texts (most clearly in 1969; 1989, especially “Ethics as First Philosophy”; and 1981). Delany’s deconstruction of hetero- and homo-sexualities, written when the slave collar is worn, in turn, by each of several gay men, as the mark of the inscription of the economic system of slavery on the psychic structures of desire, addresses feminist theory as well as queer theory (see, for example, Butler 1993, 1990; Califia 1994; Hemphill, ed. 1991; Allison 1992; Feinburg 1993; Gever, Parmar, and Greyson 1993). As I suggest above, Delany argues with the constructivist and anticensorship feminists against the antipornography feminists. A range of constructivist feminist arguments and feminist arguments against censorship can be found in Allison (1992, 1994); Califia (1990, 1993, 1994); Chester and Dickey, eds. (1988); de Lauretis (1987); Feinburg (1993); Hemphill, ed. (1991); Laqueur (1989); Nestle (1993, 1992); Vance, ed. (1985); and Scholder and Silverberg, eds. (1991, 1994). For a range of examples of feminist arguments against pornography see Rich (1992); Dworkin (1981); Lorde (1984); MacKinnon (1989); Griffin (1981); and Segal and McIntosh (1992). Delany also addresses antiracist and postcolonial theory: most often by the trope of mirroring discussed in Venn’s writing lesson. The antiracist and postcolonialist theories addressed by Delany—and indeed by me in this present work—include, for example, Bhabha (1994a, 1994b, 1990, 1983); Said, (1978); Fanon (1986, 1967); Gilroy (1993, 1987); Ong (1987); Parker, Russo, and Sommer, eds. (1992); Spivak (1987, 1993); and Trinh (1991, 1989). The slaves in Nevèryon ¨ are not Black, that is, the members of the set “slave” are not equivalent to the members of the set “Black.” Delany’s characters are of many races, and some of the whites and some of the people of color are slaves. The people

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of color are written into the text as subjects and are, in the fictional country of Nevèryon, ¨ the juridical subjects: those who can legally be full citizens. The white characters, in contrast, are written about as subjects but are referred to by the other characters as “Barbarians.” Various characters, all Nevèryon ¨ citizens, tell stories explaining the origin of the proper name, each time utilizing characteristic imperialist or colonialist tropes. This sets up an intertextuality with Colonial Discourse theory; these intertextual references are picked up repeatedly, in the tales. In Neveryona, ¨ the second volume of the series, Delany repeatedly stresses the effect of literacy on the way that its heroine, Pryn, thinks. Near the beginning of that later book Pryn meets Norema, who tells her that she, Norema, “invented” the syllabic form of writing that Pryn has learned and that she has further refined the system. She then teaches Pryn to write capital letters and diacritics. The passage is very funny; Delany shows great ingenuity in making such phrases as “and then the eliding diacritic” a description of action and part of the narrative. In Tales, we can read in the description “Venn’s special marks for: a three-horned beetle, three horned lizards, etc.” that the form of writing that Venn “invented” consists of ideographs and not syllabics or alphabets. “Three-horned” and “three horned” could be confusing in the spoken form and so an attentive reader will already be questioning the different forms that writing can take. “You saw a three-horned beetle, three horned lizards, and two crested parrots in the morning—probably you were at the estuary, on the far bank; because the parrots never come over on this side. And it was probably yesterday morning, because it was raining the night before last and the lizards usually come out on the mornings after rain.” “That’s a very good reading.” (Delany 1979, 66)

SF can be a particularly apposite genre to figure the constitution of a subject, and the construction of a society, and to question our ways of reading and writing about both subject and society. If we follow the reading protocols of mundane fiction, we would use Norema’s interpretation of the red “special marks” for “three-horned beetle” (she says, “you saw a three-horned beetle . . . in the morning—probably you were at the estuary”) in an interpretation of Norema’s subjectivity. We would use Norema’s interpretation in an estimate of her age: we would guess that she is at the developmental stage in childhood where shifters—you and I—are learned. That is, we would interpret her reading as a “misreading.” If we follow the reading protocols of SF, we can

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(according to the distinction made by Delany in his non-fiction) make an inference that is either a judgment about the character, or about the society in which the story is set. We could interpret Norema’s reading as a mistake, a mistake that marks her age and developmental stage, or we could interpret it as a correct reading, in this imagined world. It—and this is what makes the story SF— is impossible to determine whether the inference is, or should be, exclusively about either one or the other of these alternatives. Even if our inclination would be to slant the undecidability towards a judgment about Norema (and interpret Venn’s next remark, “That’s a very good reading,” as the action of a teacher reassuring a child), the possibility still remains that this is a world in which interpretation is not believed to be initially separated from reading and in which the meaning of a statement is not seen as first of all separable from the subject who is speaking. The form of writing Norema learned as a child on the Ulvayn Islands makes legible the temporal positionality of the writing subject. The “writing lesson” in “The Tale of Old Venn” figures the conjuncture of Derridean deconstruction, the critique of colonial discourse (particularly the work of Gayatri Spivak [1987, 1993], whose densely textured writing brings together a formidable knowledge of a wide variety of texts, an incisive analysis of the multinational workings of post-colonial societies, and an excellent close reading of Derrida’s texts) and the interest that certain branches of feminist theory have taken in questions of marginality and social change. This writing lesson is a parodic reference to Lévi-Strauss, so that Delany is both establishing intertextualities with other theoretical texts and thus situating his own work in relation to other writings, and, given the introduction of the notion of temporality and the link constructed between temporality and positionality, also situating this writing-practice in relation to a deeply problematized notion of historical change. Parody—not only parody properly speaking, but a certain kind of malicious play with any formulizable structure—derives, drifts. Parody is based on iterability, the basic, fundamental repetition at the heart of language. Derrida argues, as I previously discussed, that the philosophy of language that distinguishes between original, literal uses and meanings of language and supplemental, secondary, parasitic uses and meanings of language is entirely mistaken. There is no origin. This argument has been taken up by many other theorists; both ˇ zek Judith Butler and Slavoj Zi ˇ have used it in a notion of “perforˇ mance.” Both Zizek ˇ and Butler bring together Derrida’s notion of iterability and the stress on the actions brought about in speech that Derrida (1988) had critiqued favorably in his discussion of

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ˇ zek’s ˇ zek Austin. Zi ˇ performance theory (see Zi ˇ 1989, 1993) explains some of the productive aspects of language and discourse. Butler (1990, 1993) applies a similar argument to gender discourses, arguing that lesbian butch-femme and gay male camp can be interpreted as a performative construction and subversion of gender. She argues that this performative subversion is not an imitation of heterosexual gender construction. Instead, lesbian and gay gender performances show the way in which all gender is performance. The performative, iterative characteristics of parody are very clear. As parody drifts and shifts, it can articulate or engage— both in the sense of gears meshing, turning other gears, and in the sense of political and philosophical commitment—with still other texts. As Levinas suggests, “History is worked over by the ruptures of history, in which a judgment is borne upon it” (Levinas 1969, 52). Levinas’s philosophy of alterity and infinity provides us with a way to argue something other than a foundationalist epistemology: Knowing is “the very articulation” of the encounter with the other; calling “man” in question and “inviting him to justice” (Levinas 1969, 88). “The Tale of Old Venn” describes, as Delany has written, a series of encounters with a series of marginal institutions that are constitutive of a certain subject. However, the marginal institutions that Norema encounters as a child are represented, in the bounds of this story, as if they were the central institutions. In this particular representation, the center is displaced to the margins and the margins are displaced into the center. We can take the name, Venn, literally and read this figure as the inscription of a Venn diagram (in which a third set, set C, is formed by the intersection of sets A and B): Venn diagram

set A

set B

set C

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It becomes possible to read the Nevèryon ¨ series as a “full” deconstruction of a system of dominance, one in which we end up with something different from a system of dominance instead of the simple reversal of a previous system. The portions of sets A and B which intersect must, if we adopt a conventional configuration of space, be the areas of these sets which are closer to the margins. These intersecting, marginal areas of sets A and B, however, are the central area of set C, the set that is formed by this intersection. A Venn diagram, therefore, calls the conceptual distinction between center and margin into question. In doing so, it also calls the way in which we conceptualize space into question; establishing an intertextuality with the non-Newtonian representations of space used in much other recent SF. The way in which Norema’s reading slides over into interpretation confirms the way in which we have been reading this passage. It seems unlikely, given the way in which Norema expands on her “you saw,” and given Venn’s response “That’s a very good reading,” that Norema was confused by the way that shifters shift. Norema expands on her reading, saying: “[A] threehorned beetle, three horned lizards, and two crested parrots in the morning—probably you were at the estuary, on the far bank; because the parrots never come over on this side. And it was probably yesterday morning, because it was raining the night before last and the lizards usually come out on the mornings after rain” (Delany 1979, 66). An undecidability still remains, however, and it is precisely this undecidability that enables the explicitly radical politics of Delany’s text. It is the play—not “free play” but pun—on the name “Venn” that is the mark or sign in Delany’s text of the play with Derrida’s argument about the several determinate possiblilities in a text which together constitute the undecidability which sets up a decision of writing. One of Delany’s consistent concerns has been representation. He takes the cliché that realist fiction “mirrors” reality and plays with it, making “mirrors” a feature of his story. After Norema has read the piece of paper for the first time, Venn asks for two more volunteers. A boy, Enin, steps up. Both he and a second boy, Dell, are wearing mirrored “stomach plates.” Venn uses the mirrors the boys wear to introduce a lesson about optics. She is clearly teaching optics, by showing how images reflect in two mirrors, but she is also teaching something dear to Delany’s heart: that a reversal may make the logic, or structure, more apparent. Norema reads the paper reflected in the boy’s mirror:

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In the shiny, irregular shaped plate, topped by Enin’s first chest hair and below which ran his shell belt, she saw her concentrating face and, beside it, in her fingers. . . . “Of course, it’s backward,” Norema said. When they painted the prow designs on her father’s boats, frequently for the more delicate work that could not be done with the cut-out stencils, the painters checked their outlines in mirrors. The reversal of the image made irregularities more apparent. “It goes wrong way forward.” “Read it,” Venn said. “Um . . . crested parrots two, horned lizards . . . four . . . eh . . . no, three . . . a green . . . fish” Norema laughed. “But that’s because the sign for green fish is just the sign for horned beetle written reversed. That’s why I hesitated over the others . . . I think.” (Delany 1979, 66–67)

Delany uses these deconstructive reading and writing practices to write about alterity. Delany’s description of Enin’s physical appearance, “the tall, short-haired boy stepped out, blinking. The mirror he wore strapped across his stomach flashed light down on Venn’s stained hem” (Delany 1979, 66) is likely to only minimally catch the readers” attention: in our society, many boys are tall and short-haired. However, when we read the following description of the second boy, “Dell, who was short and wore his hair in three long braids” (Delany 1979, 67), according to the reading protocols of SF, using this sentence to construct and understand the imagined world, we will infer that a wide variety of hairstyles are common on the island. As a result of this, the meaning of the previous sentence will change. If this were mundane fiction, the descriptions of the boys’ hairstyles, clothing (the shell belt) and ornaments (the mirrored stomach plates), would be read as signifiers indicating that this island was “primitive.” However, since this is SF, the mundane reading is displaced: the shell belts and other ornamental clothing and hairstyles signify primitivism, so that the picture we build up of the imagined world enables us to question the way we think of island peoples in our world. There are at least four ways in which the text plays with the mirrored stomach plates. The first was the play on the primitivist associations of this form of decoration. The second play is Delany’s, and Venn’s, point about reversals making patterns more clear. The third play on, or with, the mirrored stomach plates, is what Spivak refers to as “double-displacement,” the further displacement, or reversal, or representation, after the initial reversal, or displacement, or representation that constitutes deconstruction of the representation.

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Venn, in her lesson, shows Norema that the double reversal of the images in the mirrors makes it possible her to read that which “had been written on the paper’s back.” Delany, thus, in his fiction, shows us what “double-displacement” is; that is, that deconstruction starts with a reversal that shows the pattern, and then moves on to a further reversal in order to deconstruct the pattern shown. The pattern will not, of course, be obvious to us: deconstruction is useful because it enables us to recognize nonobvious patterns, and not only to recognize but to analyze them. The second boy, Dell, stands facing the first boy, Enin, so that Norema can read the paper she holds beside her face: Norema, of course, had expected to see the message put back left to right, its signs in the proper order. But what, in the frame within a frame, she looked at was the back of her own head. And on the paper, held up beside it, written in black charcoal: “The great star clears the horizon two cups of water after the eighth hour.” Norema stood up, laughed, and turned the paper over. What she had read in the second mirror had been written on the paper’s back. “I didn’t even know that was there,” she said. “Which is the point,” Venn said. (Delany 1979, 67)

Delany is using the description of Venn’s writing lesson to add yet another layer of meaning, a fourth, determinate meaning. He literalizes a familiar expression, used when discussing semiotics: “The signifier and the signified are linked together like the recto and verso of a piece of paper.” Here, in the scene in the story, is a piece of paper, with the recto and verso made significant to the action. However, there are different signs written on the recto and verso: Delany is shifting from the classical theory of the sign to a notion of semiosis; a proliferation of signs. This shift is embedded in the “primitivism,” optics, and deconstruction scene. Literalization is one of the most characteristic of SF’s typical stylistic traits. Delany’s fourth layer of meaning thus makes the teaching of semiology part of SF practice. Spivak (1983) argues that the figure of woman has been doubly displaced in the texts of Nietzsche and Derrida in an attempt to halt the fall into a philosophical abyss; women, however, writing from their different subject position, can halt this fall by a writing of the body, rather than a displacement of a figure. Delany’s “The Tale of Old Venn” illustrates the processes of displacement and double-displacement that Spivak analyzed. The reader’s inference that it is deconstruction, rather than only optics, that is being taught, is confirmed by the stories that Venn tells about the model formation that goes on in storytelling and the way

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that this changes the modeled object. In one example (Delany 1979, 86) taken from the same story, Norema attempts to apply what she has learned from Venn and comes up with a fable in which she both refers to women as “they,” and not “us,” and also comes up with a speculation about gender which is both idiotic and offensive. Venn says to Norema: “That is the most horrendous thing I have ever heard.” In another example from a different tale (also in Delany 1979, 242), the adult Norema (who has become a traveling storyteller) says exactly the same thing— “That is the most horrendous thing I have ever heard”—to another character who made a similar attempt to apply the notions of mirroring and modeling in a sexist, racist way. Delany’s repetition is deliberate, so that the point is clearly about pattern and repetition, as well as sexism and racism. One of the teaching stories that Venn tells the children is a tale about the inhabitants of another island, in which the men and boys wear a carved wooden ornament called a rult strapped to their stomachs. Delany uses this story to poke fun at the overvaluation of the penis in psychoanalytic theory. Venn uses this story to analyze the changes in the relation of women and men on this island brought about by the introduction of money. If we read the little story about mirrors together with the story about rults, it becomes apparent that the figure of the mirrors also establishes an intertextuality with Lacan’s mirror stage and the process of identification which this names. That makes it possible to read this tale from the first volume of the Nevèryon ¨ stories together with a tale from the last volume (1987), The Bridge of Lost Desire. This latter tale, “The Game of Time and Pain,” is framed by a narrative in which three characters, the old woman, the tall woman, and the pig girl, discuss whether there is anyone, or ever was anyone in Lord Aldamir’s castle. The three women are a very funny variant on that trite trope, the crone, the mother, and the virgin. “Lord Aldamir” does not, in fact, exist: he is referred to by various characters and plays an important role in the narrative by means of his absence; the figure of “Lord Aldamir” is a narrativization of Lacan’s Name of the Father. This framing narrative refers to the questioning of the presuppositions of Lacanian psychoanalysis by the women who have contributed to a rewriting of Lacan’s theories. Of these, I would argue that the best include Grosz (1991); the two editors’ introductions to Mitchell and Rose ed. (1982); and Rose (1986). In addition to these texts, much feminist Lacanian theory has been developed by means of writings which address film: for example, de Lauretis

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(1984,1987); Doane (1987); Morris (1988); Mulvey (1989); Silverman (1988); and Trinh (1991, 1989), and also the male feminist film theorists, for example Heath (1981). Delany also alludes in this passage to the historical changes of the last few years and to the stories that people tell themselves: The pig girl said. . . . “Castles are full of wonderful women in beautiful clothes who dance and dance with wonderful men. You give orders for impossible things to be done. . . . That’s what everybody plays in the castle. I bet that’s what he’ll play.” . . . “The castle’s empty.” The old woman [said]. “There’s never been anyone in it. There wasn’t anyone before. And there isn’t now.” (Delany 1987, 4, ellipses added)

The use of meticulous physical descriptions can mislead the reader and give her/him a false sense of security. A reader could get a misleading sense of Delany’s writing practice, lulled by the detailed descriptions, and plots; she can think that this is just a story and forget that Delany has claimed a twofold interest in the writing of stories that “struggle” with the sign, semiosis, and semiology and in the constitution and questioning of the subject. The second volume, Neveryona, ¨ (1983) with its emphasis on semiosis and the third volume, Flight from Nevèryon ¨ (1985) with its writing of an extraordinarily compelling, seductive, and disturbing gay erotics, show us how little this security is warranted. In the fourth volume, The Bridge of Lost Desire, Gorgik, now grown older and afraid and obsessed with aging and death, tells stories of aphanesis (the death of desire) in which the ghost of Lacan and his Law of the Father is quietly laid to rest—as the women of the framing narrative begin “The Tale of Time and Pain” with an argument about whether anyone is in Lord Aldamir’s castle, or ever was, and end the story/ies with the words “Well . . . there’s no one in the castle now”—to a youth who finally falls asleep still unsure whether it was a question of sex, or of stories, and understanding too little of Gorgik’s story to even wonder what the connection was between narrative and desire. Thus, the pig girl thinks that Lord Aldamir will dress up in beautiful clothes and give impossible orders, “that’s what everyone plays,” the tall woman and the old woman think no-one was ever there, Gorgik talks a lot, and the youth falls asleep. The passage from “The Tale of Old Venn,” the scene describing Venn, as an old woman, teaching a group of children living on an isolated island in the Ulvayns, ends with the words “Which is the point, Venn said.” It should now be possible to

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finish the explanation of Venn and Delany’s point, the argument about models, mirrors, optics, and deconstruction. There is a bridge in Nevèryon ¨ called the Bridge of Lost Desire. Youths (of both sexes) hang out on this bridge, trying to pick someone up. Usually they expect to be paid. There is a scene where Delany describes a group of Barbarian youths running up and down the steps that lead to the men’s toilet, shouting insults at the “respectable citizens” walking down the stairs and speaking to each other with the kind of aggressive friendliness that is associated in American society with urban Black youths. In an autobiographical text, The Motion of Light on Water, Delany (1988) gives another version of this passage. This passage is clearly taken from a journal. The scene takes place in the Port Authority Terminal in New York, and this time, the youths who are running up and down the stairs leading to the men’s toilets are Black. The reversal that has taken place in the movement from the journal to the SF text is very important. Delany’s Nevèryon ¨ series constructs a world in which citizens are Black, Barbarians White. In the “writing lesson” in “The Tale of Old Venn” Delany writes, “the reversal of the image made irregularities more apparent.” The apparent narrative occasion for this sentence would seem to lie in the fact that it supplies the reader with a reason why Norema would be familiar with mirror images. Norema’s father is a shipbuilder and the painters used mirrors to check elaborate designs. However, the sentence I have just quoted works in several ways. It refers back to the painters’ work. It refers to the model of interpretation and representation that Delany’s character, Venn, is teaching. Lastly, it refers to the work of Delany’s text. When Delany, in Tales of Nevèryon ¨ (1979), juxtaposes “The Tale of Old Venn” to “The Tale of Gorgik” and includes a “writing lesson” in “The Tale of Old Venn” in which people learn a form of writing and reading which emphasizes interpretation, he has an indirect point to make. The point has to do with theories of race and gender. The mirrors are a reversal that is intended to “make irregularities more apparent.” This is Venn’s point. It is also Delany’s in the later passages from The Motion of Light on Water (1988) and The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987). The reversal (for example, the transformation of a journal passage describing Black teenagers in New York teasing Black and White passersby to a SF text’s description of Barbarian teenagers teasing Black citizens and White Barbarians) is not the deconstruction, it is a device to make irregularities more apparent: sometimes a way to make the binary opposition more clear, sometimes a moral claim.

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Given this textual practice, we can now begin to analyze what happens in Delany’s use of the figure of the slave collar. The mark of the slave collar is the inscription of dominance. Delany uses the slave collar to write about sadomasochism. A reversal takes place in this inscription, as well: it is the man who wears the collar who is most in control. The characters don’t treat each other badly; these dangerous games are based on trust and, in the stories, are played with affection or respect. Gorgik—who wears the collar—is a considerate lover (but only after he is no longer a slave) and a political activist, working for the abolition of slavery. By the end of the stories, slavery has been abolished. But the meaning of the slave collar in the stories and the way in which it functions as a mark for the overdetermination of sexuality as sadomasochism works as it does because of the meaning of the slave collar in our society. In America it is the mark of a violent and terrible history, “the inscription of dominance” on human bodies. The protocols of reading SF situate the SF text in the genre of SF as a whole. The writing practices and protocols of reading of SF call for what Derrida calls a “movement of interpretation” that contextualizes these texts “according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other.” The “device to make irregularities more apparent” is a technique that reverses and thus shows the norm; an optical instrument that enables one to focus on the construction and opposition of the normal and the abnormal. This writing practice is a political and ethical response to the systems of dominance and the violence of our, of American, society. All the subgenres within SF work by the construction of imagined worlds. The imagined worlds of SF are not given to the reader; the texts characteristically set up an undecidability so that it is possible for a decision of writing to take place. The imagined worlds are thus constructed by the reader in the process of reading. Faced with the violence and the systems of domination of our society, it is easy to become paralyzed, convinced that it is impossible to act effectively, convinced that political change is unobtainable. However if the old categories in terms of which agency has been conceived are displaced so that it is held that it is undecidability which opens a space for political and ethical action, then the decision of writing that undecidability makes possible can enable us to shift the ways that dominance has been inscribed in our world, as well as in the imagined worlds of SF.

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The Web, Semiotics, and History: Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand I now turn to an analysis of a science fiction novel, written by Delany at about the same time as the later volumes of the Nevèryon ¨ series. Delany’s novel, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984) displaces the economic and social form which is dominant in the developed world today, transnational capitalism, into a fictive, imagined universe, described as a multiplanetary economy. As in our world, the multiplanetary economy of the fictive universe has recurrent economic, social, and political crises. However, unlike our world, in which a single economic system is perhaps becoming hegemonic, and where, contrary to the hopes many of us had in the 1960s and 1970s, there is now a backlash against alternative ways of living, and a return to the promotion and enforcement of norms, Delany’s fictive universe contains a variety of social, economic, and political structures, with different structures and ways of living dominant on each planet and planetary association. There are three political groupings that struggle for hegemony in the imagined multiplanetary economy of the (1984) novel, the Web, the Sygn, and the Family. Each has its own members who, in their material social and spatial practices, build up different institutions and ways of living, distributed across the many inhabited worlds of the imagined universe. The Web is an information technology conglomerate; the Sygn is a network of multi-species affinity groups, which displaces itself from world to world; the Family, as its name suggests, is a group whose members believe that there is only one true model for sociality, based on nuclear units in which reproductive one-species heterosexuality is normative. Delany writes about these three discourses in a way that focuses, where each is concerned, on the importance and significance of history and politics. A discourse is something that involves both “written” texts and social texts; books, computer programs, the Internet, and also institutions and human actions. As my comparison here suggests, I do not think that the new information technologies necessarily, in themselves, move us “beyond the book.” As information, as coded, as written, information technologies can be analyzed using the now-familiar tools of structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. If “the book” is modern and “information technology” postmodern, it is not because each technology is differently characterized as text. In what then does the difference lie? Information technology, I would argue, is an important part of one of the dominant

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discourses in Western postmodern societies. As Donna Haraway argues, postmodern societies have seen a shift away from traditional constructions of identity, traditional working patterns, and traditional ways of conceptualizing the world. One of the new concepts dominant in our postmodern societies is the notion of command-control-communication-intelligence (C3I). This notion, first developed in the military, is extensively used in both information science and biological science. Donna Haraway (1991b, 203–30, and generally in Haraway 1991d, 1997, 2004) produces a highly original and convincing discussion of information science and its relation to both biological science, the human bodies/embodied humans who are the objects and subjects of the biological and medical sciences, and contemporary North American postmodern political, economic, and cultural institutions, historical processes, and subjects. I would argue that the significance of C3I—as a useful concept —lies in the way that it enables certain kinds of arguments, certain kinds of connections. It doesn’t really matter whether or not C3I is a different kind of coding, a different kind of writing than was common previously. The best way to map out and explain these connections is in the traditional form of the book or article; a long prose work which gives one the space and the structure to develop a sustained argument and/or to describe something in sufficient detail to constitute, in Geertz’s (1983) expression, a “thick description.” In many ways, narrative fiction, like narrative history and anthropologies, is as successful as works that use non-narrative logics to show these kind of historical connections in detail. Information technology, in Delany (1984), is not just the source of an analytically suggestive metaphorics; information technology is itself the object of Delany’s historical and political analysis. Information technology is represented as a central part of the imagined universe’s political and economic workings. Delany is a Marxist, and he draws on neo-Marxist analyses of transnationalism in describing this fictional universe. Like David Harvey (1989), or Mike Davis (1986, 1990) Delany analyzes transnationalism in Regulation School terms, theorizing it in terms of accumulation, rather than looking separately at production, consumption, and reproduction. Delany deals with transnationalism as a spatial practice, addressing the ways in which transnational capitalism, as a material practice, acts on and in space. He addresses the ways in which spatial practices are also simultaneously spatial concepts; spatial ways of thinking. The widely separated planets of the imagined universe are linked in a common political and economic structure; one in

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which the three institutions, the Sygn, the Web, and the Family, strive for dominance. The Web’s material basis is information technology: it manages and maintains “General Information” satellites as well as providing an infrastructure of politicians, civil servants, researchers, and affiliated workers. These affiliates might be businessmen or -women, drawn in to the plots of the Web “spiders” like the businessmen in Britain who exposed the Matrix Churchill affair, or might be “deniable” Web agents. In this way, information technology is seen as irreducibly political; an essential part of the history and politics of the imagined universe, and, by implication, our own world. My analysis of Delany’s SF text addresses the ways in which Delany draws on and addresses feminist theory, gay and lesbian theory, poststructuralism, and postmodernist narrative theory, as well as drawing on neo-Marxism. When Delany addresses transnationalism as a material practice in this work, he looks at the ways in which transnationalism produces species difference, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as class. This imagined future universe is not a utopia. Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984) opens on an isolated planet, Rhyonon. The first part of the novel, “A World Apart,” tells the story of a man, Korga, who becomes a slave. Rhyonon, the planet, destroys itself in a cataclysm, a “cultural fugue,” one of the economic, cultural, and, of course, military crises to which life is subject, in this fictional world as well as our own. By a fluke, Korga, the slave, is the only survivor; he is rescued by the Web. The title of the first part of the novel is undecidable: it has two meanings. Rhyonon, the planet from which Korga comes, is a world apart; a slave society, with, in addition, a gender structure which, although familiar to a mundane reader, is unusual in the imagined universe of Stars. And Korga, the hero of the first part, is a world apart from Marq, the narrator of the rest of the novel. It is the Net that brings Korga and Marq together. The Net, the institution that is in charge of information in this imagined universe, is frequently referred to, in the words of the novel, as the “agency.” As the term “agency” (a slang term for the CIA) suggests, the Web is, like the CIA, KGB, or MI5, a dangerous, powerful, and, to say the least, not very nice, institution. Thus the Web officials are called “spiders” by the other characters; Marq’s boss is described as “the Black Widow.” The Web both maintains a system of satellites orbiting every inhabited world that will agree to offer its citizens access to GI (General Information) and also compiles information on a vast range of subjects and objects. The Black Widow, Marq’s boss, introduces

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him to Korga, his perfect object of desire. Unlike computer dating agencies in our world, this one works: the two men fall in love. Korga came from an isolated planet, but Marq comes from Velm, a world that is aligned to the Sygn. This word Sygn is spelled with a “y,” as if the imagined universe of Stars were the future of our universe, and, in the intervening time, English had become Arachnia and “sign” had become “sygn.” The word sygn thus suggests displacement. And also, as, perhaps, a variant on sign, the English word, it alludes to semiotics. And, indeed, the Sygn, as an institution and an ideology, stresses interpretation. In Delany (1984) transnationalism is explicitly linked to both displacement and dissemination. One of the most characteristic techniques used in SF is something usually referred to as “the literalization of metaphor.” In this novel, Delany literalizes the metaphors of displacement and dissemination: the Sygn is quite literally displaced and disseminated, moving from world to world, spreading across the imagined universe. This literalization is also, of course, a spacialization. The spacialization of the metaphors of “dissemination” and “displacement” makes possible a particular view of history. Unlike many contemporary theorists for whom deconstruction (as well as many radical poststructuralist and postmodernist theories) is considered to be in opposition to a historical and even a political approach to the text (or for whom, at the very least, a bridge between a historical approach and many radical poststructuralist, postmodernist, and deconstructive approaches is seen as difficult) Delany explicitly links the Sygn, the discourse in which semiotics and deconstruction are combined, with an approach in which history is seen as desperately important. Delany, as a postmodern but narrative writer, is interested in the ways that history can be conceptualized; in the ways that history can be written. Delany is concerned both with the local, with local histories as such, and with the conceptual formation, local/global. Many leftist postmodernists and feminist theorists have argued that a materialist theory must shift between local and global, resisting both the seduction of detail and the temptation to systematize. Delany refers to this in a typically parodic, self-referential manner when Marq Dyeth says of the Sygn, the second of these institutions, that it is characteristically interested in the “local histories of local spaces.” Marq says to another character (the passage is dialogue, an extract from a long speech): “One of the Sygn’s most widely spread tenets (and like everything else in the Sygn dogma, it, too, no matter how wide, does not obtain

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everywhere) is that history is what is outside, in both time and space, the current moment of home. And without history, there is no home. A second tenet that usually (though, like all else, not always) goes along with the first: when you go to a new world, all you can take of your home is its history. And if you are a woman, your choice is to take it knowingly and be its (and your new home’s) silent friend, or to take it unknowingly and be its (and your new home’s) loud slave. And ‘slave’ is one of those words in Arachnia that, amidst a flurry of sexual suggestions, strongly connotes the least pleasant aspects of ‘master.’ ” (Delany 1984, 105)

The Sygn’s is a radically non-universalizing dogma, appropriate for a non-unitary subject. Delany’s starting point is very different from, for example, that made in Jameson (1984). Jameson claims in this classic article that the postmodern subject cannot historicize his or her self, locate his or her self in relation to history. To us, history does not seem alive, vital. Delany claims the opposite here: that history is what is outside, in both time and space. We must know our history, because otherwise it will enslave us. The Sygn, one of the three discourses striving for hegemony in the fictional universe of Stars, is thus not merely analyzable in a non-subsumptive, non-totalizing discourse. It is a non-subsumptive, non-totalizing, non-unitary discourse and the one that, if it reaches hegemony, would support the most possibilities for more people to live without oppression. It is not just the Sygn that has positive qualities. Delany’s way of writing about the Web can be very useful for cultural theorists trying to understand the significance of the social and political changes brought about by information technology. The Web as an information technology conglomerate is seen as essentially historical and political. The Web is not a wild, random invention. The Web, as an institution, is a displacement into an imagined universe of a theoretical construction, an historical analysis, found in our own world: the argument, made by some theorists of postmodernity, that what is significant about our late capitalist, transnational economy is the way in which information has become both a commodity and the basis of production in the service sector. Delany displaces this idea into the universe of Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand. The Web produces and distributes information, bringing more and more planets into its network. What is crucial here is that Delany’s concept of “politics” is a wide one, focusing on gender, race, sexuality, and class, rather than on class (or gender, or race, or sexuality) alone. As well as distributing information, the Web also disseminates an artificial language, Arachnia. This artificial language makes it possible for Delany to articulate an important political message.

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Stars is about two lovers: Korga, who is a slave from Rhyonon, a world much like our own, and Marq, who is from Velm, a world shared with another sentient species, the Evelm. Marq is an “Industrial Diplomat,” whose job facilitating exchange between separate planets brings him closer than he would like to the spiders” interests. Delany’s character, Marq, thinks, on his way to a meeting with a senior Web official, a “Black Widow,” “as the interstellar agency in charge of the general flow of information about the universe in many places, the Web is near to being torn apart by the conflict between the Sygn and the Family” (Delany 1984, 87, syntax slightly rearranged). However, Marq is too close to the Web to see it clearly. He is not just close to its political interests, he quite literally speaks its language. He speaks Arachnia. Delany’s (1984) novel is in three parts. The first, dealing with Korga’s story before he meets Marq, is written in the third person. The second and third parts are in the first person, narrated by Marq Dyeth. The novel, Stars, is thus written, for the most part, as if it as if it were an unembellished translation of a text written in the fictional language, Arachnia, disseminated by the Web. Arachnia does not mark gender or species difference in pronouns or in the words that would be translated, in English, by “man” or “woman.” The word “woman” refers to a person of any species or gender. If Arachne speakers wish to identify someone’s sex, they have to use a qualifier: a female woman, a male woman. As “woman,” in Arachnia, refers to a person of any sex or species, the pronoun one uses when referring to a person is “she.” The pronoun “he” is reserved for the object of desire. Delany’s artificial language, Arachnia, spoken and disseminated by the “spiders” who construct and maintain the network of information linking all the planets in the fictional universe described in Stars is used in a construction of radical difference, rather than simply a deconstruction of identity. This construction of radical difference is made possible by the Web, the political grouping that controls and disseminates both information and information technology in the multiplanetary economy of the imagined future space. In this way, Delany shows that the information technology Web must be analyzed in terms of both gender, and class (or capital). Even though “he,” in Arachnia, can be used by any woman, female or male, of any species, it so happens that Marq, the Arachne-speaking woman who narrates most of the story is a gay, male human, attracted to male humans and male or neuter Evelm. Thus “he,” in the story, is not used to refer to females, even though “he” in Arachnia can refer to whichever gender and

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species the enunciator is attracted. The only Arachne-speaking voice is Marq’s; Marq’s narrative uses “he,” when referring to humans, with the same biological referent as in the mundane, non-SF world, and with a referent that overlaps with the mundane referent when applied to aliens. The effect of this is to deconstruct any preconceptions the reader might have of gender or species identity, leaving the reader with a remarkably fluid sense of multiple difference. The text is about women, but it does not construct a fixed gender or species identity for these women. In most texts where the generic masculine is used, the writer usually shifts between a generic use of the masculine and a specific use of the masculine. Sometimes “he” means “a male person,” sometimes “he” means “a person.” The effect of this is to universalize the male, that is, to construct the male as the subject and the female as Other. However, in Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, this universal category, “woman,” remains always universal, never particular. It is very difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell from Delany’s descriptions if this woman is female or male, human or alien. The reader is presented with a set of multiple possibilities, which remain fluid in most cases. Only from time to time does Delany provide a detail in a description that would make more sense given one particular gender or species identity. However, when the narrator Marq uses the pronoun “he” the text shifts from the representation of multiple difference to the representation of identity, fixing and describing the objects of desire only as male human, male Evelm, and neuter Evelm. The effect of the shift from an universal, never particular “she” and “woman” to a particular, male “he” (or, if the reference is to a member of the three-sexed Evelm species, a male or neuter “he”) is to combine the stress on and representation of an always fluid difference with a writing of identity. The identity represented in Marq’s narrative is a displacement into the fictional universe of a specific gay male identity found in our world in the recent past. It is a pre-AIDS, urban, gay male identity, constructed within a social/spatial institution that enables a multiply partnered sexuality. Butler (1990) is a radical, constructivist account of gender. She argues that all gender formations are constructed through performance, but that one binary set of gender formations, linked to a prescriptive heterosexuality, is made to appear the norm. Only one kind of masculinity and one kind of femininity is made to appear “natural” and all other genderings are made to seem “unnatural” and even incomprehensible. However, there are plenty of other genderings, plenty of ways in which people challenge

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the norms of their society, plenty of local spaces, gay or lesbian communities for example, which mount a challenge to the normativizing tendencies of contemporary society. Judith Butler’s question, “what other local strategies for engaging the ‘unnatural’ might lead to the denaturalization of gender as such?” becomes central for Delany’s text. The text is about such a “local strategy” and it succeeds brilliantly in not just denaturalizing gender but in describing and deconstructing naturalization itself. Marq’s lover, Korga, is a representation of slavery, bound in opposition to knowledge. Korga is enslaved after being subjected to a surgical procedure that deprives him of the ability to process new information, the capacity to judge, to question and to make decisions. When he is rescued by the Web, they provide him with a prosthesis that gives him access to the kind of knowledge which is a prerequisite for gathering other knowledge, and a new facility to use and question the use of language. Delany, here, comes down firmly on the side of knowledge as liberatory, simply freeing it from more nineteenth-century organicist connotations. Korga, as both slave and free, is a cyborg. Liberation is not associated with either the notion of “expression” or the notion of a “true nature.” “Nature” is not opposed to artifice. Instead, liberation is associated with knowledge, and knowledge is accessed by means of technology. The technologies which mediate and enable knowledge, in the imagined universe of Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, are implants and prostheses, the use of which make the characters cyborgs, partly human, partly machine. Science and technology become part of us, rather than being opposed to us. And the technology that has become part of us, that has changed us, has made us cyborgs, can be either oppressive or liberatory. Cyborg identities can be liberatory and politically enabling, given the ways in which oppressed subjects have historically been disempowered by being associated with “nature” in opposition to “culture,” as Donna Haraway (1985, 1991d), argues in “A Cyborg Manifesto” or they can just be more of the same. The third faction—the third institution—Delany represents in this novel, the Family, is a homophobic universalization. If the Sygn is the radical possibility for change, the Family is oppression, “Back to Basics.” The Thants, who have recently become politically aligned with the Family, have been invited to a formal party given by the Dyeths. The Thants signal their new allegiance by being rude to the Dyeths. They ignore their hosts, interfering with the serving of the meal. They speak to each other in a way that to

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persons from our world is a recognizably offensive, homophobic description of the Dyeth multisexual, multispecies collectivity, a kinship “Stream” in which there are, in Marq’s expression, “no egg-and-sperm relations between ripples.” These characters, the Thants, are speciesist as well as homophobic. A displacement and reversal of the colonialist history in which species difference was used to construct racial ideologies is also legible in this passage. In this fictive SF universe speciesist ideology rests on racism, as well as being tied to compulsory reproductive heterosexuality: “ . . . reduced to animals who copulate with animals, call animals their sisters and mothers” “ . . . not as if they don’t acknowledge it themselves. Our way is older, purer, human. And animal as they are and act, they know it.” “ . . . eat and procreate, eat and—but one can’t even say that. Not only the males with the females, but the males do it with males, the females do it with females, within the race, across the races—and what are we to make of neuters—as if they had not even reached the elementary stage of culture, however ignorant, where a family takes its appropriate course.” (Delany, 1984, 326–27, ellipses added)

In this fictive universe the Thants’ homophobia and speciesism are articulated by means of a mundane discourse of which they are themselves both support and vehicle: “The Family.” However, Marq, the Arachne speaker, living in and constructing a space in which all species identities, gender identities, sexual identities are possible, in which all differences articulate with a discourse in which each makes sense and none makes nonsense of the others, finds the Thants’ homophobia and speciesism utterly incomprehensible. Delany’s 1984 novel is a narrative about local spaces with local histories, local strategies for engaging the “unnatural,” told in a widely disseminated but non-universal language. In this language gender and species difference cannot be named. Any subject can desire any other; the enunciation of desire is marked, but the desiring subject’s identity, and the identity of the object of desire are not determined. Delany’s narrative and this fictional language construct difference without asserting identity, without returning to the same; the text deconstructs, rather than asserts, sexual identity, gender identity, and species identity. The next chapter continues the investigation of the dangers of normativizing discourse and also the opposition to it. My object of analysis is again a SF novel, a novel that uses a notably postmodern, philosophically sophisticated style to produce a strongly political and ethical argument. This time the focus is

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on a woman writer. I return again to the questions about technoscience, considered as a material-semiotic practice. I also, since some of the most central narrative tropes explored in the novel Synners are drawn from Judeo-Christian religious discourses, address religious questions, treating them, this time, much more skeptically than in earlier chapters, from the perspective of a person trying to understand and thus potentially counteract a formation considered to be politically and culturally limiting, rather than from the perspective of a person trying to reintroduce a marginalized discourse.

4 Pat Cadigan’s Synners: Refiguring Nature, Science, and Technology Much of this chapter is a close reading of extracts from Pat Cadigan’s (1991b) novel Synners. Cadigan has, to date, written eight novels, and short story collections (Cadigan 1987, 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1992, 1998, 1999, 2002). This chapter address the concerns—literary form and political and ethical impetus— raised in chapter 3, analyzing the ways in which Synners (mostly because of its remarkable narrative form) challenges some of the most powerful and dangerous norms and normativity of American thought and culture. My approach draws on three political discourses: feminist theory, queer theory, and neo-Marxist theory. (The next chapter looks in detail at neo-Marxist theory.) Earlier chapters addressed lesbian and gay studies; both “queer theory” and the more straightforwardly social or historical approaches. I also have had something to say about feminism, particularly Donna Haraway’s work; I continue with that here, starting with a discussion of the American feminists of color and lesbian and gay scholars who have influenced Haraway. The feminist, antiracist social theory of American women of color often emphasizes the importance of politics, as that which motivates, enables, and informs theory. The connections between politics, theory, and subjectivity have, historically, been most often formulated as either an “identity politic” or as a focus on “difference.” The Combahee River Collective (1979) produced one of the most influential formulations of identity politics: “We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else’s oppression” (The Combahee River Collective, 1979, 1982, 13). The Combahee River Collective’s identity politics and “standpoint epistemology” (see chapter 2) have been made more nuanced in the later writings of American feminists of color. Thus, for example, bell hooks (1990) argues that it is crucial to radically revise, but still draw on, notions of identity politics. hooks applies a wide knowledge of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory to a range of texts that include popular culture, history, and essays, using the theory in a way that is deliberately political. 98

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hooks argues against the notion that the black feminist critique of the earlier black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s has weakened the radical African American community or radical black theory. She stresses both the continuity of contemporary radical African American politics and the importance of critiquing earlier texts by placing them in their historical context. The notion of an identity politic has also been used in the context of coalition politics. Thus, Chela Sandoval’s concept of “oppositional consciousness” (1991) uses a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity to formulate a common ground for all persons marginalized by the dominant culture. Theories of mestizaje have taken off from the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga; Anzaldúa (1987) focuses on the specificity of a Chicana feminist subjectivity that crosses the border between Mexico and the United States, Moraga (1983) on the analysis of a subjectivity fundamentally divided in terms of its multiple identities. The notion of difference as enabling has been put most eloquently by Audre Lorde. She argues (Lorde 1984) that it is not enough to simply “tolerate” difference. The patronizing, liberal call for “toleration” cannot bring about real change. Lorde argues that difference is “necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action” (Lorde 1984, 37). Change must be conceptualized, written about; thus poetry is a vital necessity of our existence. It “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (ibid.). It is this focus on identity and difference that marks the point at which the theories of American women of color most influence Haraway’s work. Haraway’s stress, though, is on difference, not identity. She is most strongly influenced by theorists, like hooks, who are antiessentialist, and who are also explicitly socialist. The convergences and lines of influence will become clearer if Haraway’s claims are summarized. I focus here on her political arguments (which are socialist-feminist) rather than on the Deleuzean philosophical underpinnings to Haraway’s work discussed earlier. The shift from the analysis of “reproduction” to the analysis of “replication” which Haraway calls for, and the characterization of the technoscientific notions that by the midtwentieth century were already beginning to be destabilized as “hierarchical, localized, organic body,” are both Deleuzean. Haraway makes the Deleuzean argument a more historical one by periodizing far more precisely than did Deleuze and Guattari,

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and as an intellectual historian as well as a feminist theorist, (or as theorist-as-historian), embedding her intellectual argument in social, political, and economic history. Primate Visions (1988) is perhaps the most conventionally historical part of her work; in contrast, the later books and articles, perhaps because they focus on the extremely recent past, as well as the present, often skip over the narration of events, and go straight to the detailed analyses of the tropes and figures that structure the material-semiotic discourses and practices which to her make up “history.” When reading Haraway, and when noting an opposition between “reproduction” and “replication,” we need to stop and remember that the first generation of second wave socialist feminists argued (of capital and labor, that is, as well as of questions of gender) that we needed to analyze social and ideological reproduction, as well as production and consumption. Haraway, still calling herself a socialist feminist in the 1980s and 1990s, and building on and critiquing the feminist arguments and debates of the 1960s and 1970s, argues that a new term, “replication,” may be more useful than the traditional pair of terms, “production and reproduction.” Replication is a term with greater scope, crucially including immune system discourses, and a more useful meaning, lacking limiting associations with the discourse of “compulsory heterosexuality.” Haraway argues that “replication” does not only refer to the workings of capitalism. It also refers to other much broader, disciplinizing, subject-making discourses. She notes, in particular, that postmodern texts often make use of a replicative “immune system discourse” in constructing narratives of the normal and pathological. It is this multivalence of “replication” as analyzed by Haraway that makes her work so pertinent to my argument. That is, like many other neo-Marxists, Haraway (1985, 1991b, 1991c, 1991d) argues that the workings of capitalism in presentday society can no longer be analyzed completely and successfully by a traditional Marxist analysis framed in terms of class and surplus value, production and reproduction. The old certainties of class are breaking up; they are being replaced by something else. On the positive side, it appears that accumulation must be analyzed in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as class. On the negative side, it seems that it must be analyzed in terms of command-and-control intelligence networks, a term drawn from military operations research and used as well in information technology, medical, and biological research. The shift to command-and-control, to this extraordinary interpenetration of military and bureaucratic ways of thinking, information tech-

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nology jargon, and new biological research, has affected the ways we can think of our bodies and of our subjectivities: “But how do narratives of the normal and the pathological work when the biological and medical body is symbolized and operated upon, not as a system of work, organized by the hierarchical division of labour, ordered by a privileged dialectic between highly localized nervous and reproductive functions [production and reproduction], but instead as a coded text, organized as an engineered communications system, ordered by a fluid and dispersed command-control-intelligence network? [replication]” (Haraway 1991b, 211, identifying terms added). Thus it is not just capitalism that has changed radically—so have gender, race, and sexuality, and the political discourses that organize around these issues. Haraway argues that the technologies and practices of biomedical discourses in the mid twentieth century have destabilized the “symbolic privilege of the hierarchical, localized, organic body.” This has not just affected the privileged. It has also affected subaltern discourses: the scientific, social, and political changes which have led to the move away from the notion of a “hierarchical, localized, organic body” have been part of the context within which the theories written from the point of view of those who suffer in a system of domination have been developed. Thus, Haraway argues, “the question of ‘differences’ has destabilized humanist discourses of liberation based on a politics of substantive unity.” Haraway uses this opposition between reproduction and replication to make connections between the destabilization of humanist discourses of liberation and the similar move away from a notion of substantive unity in immune system discourses. Her point is that it is not just class consciousness, as the basis for political subjectivity, which has been problematized. It has also become difficult to speak straightforwardly about liberation. And a unified collective political subject grounded in gender, race, or sexuality seems even less reachable or defensible than a class-based political subject. Her point is that it is the shift to “replication” that has brought about these political uncertainties. However, in the local context of immune system discourses (the major focus of most of the article in which Haraway most develops the socialist, neo-Marxist part of her socialist feminism) it is not clear whether the narratives of the normal and pathological which are applied to PWAs and which, in the form of institutionalized homophobia, have contributed to the horrifying numbers of deaths from AIDS, can be analyzed in terms of replication and production/reproduction alone.

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In addition, humanist discourses of liberation may not have been as destabilized as Haraway suggests (1991b). Her characterization seems accurate as a description of the move from gay liberation to queer theory, but her argument may be less applicable to the American new social movements that focus on race. Even if few of the most influential theorists of color now formulate their arguments in terms of humanism, the notion of “liberation” is very often still used when discussing race in the U.S. context. However, the term “liberation” is now often a reference to civil rights and Movement politics, rather than a continuation of the discourse used at that time. Thus, for example, bell hooks uses the term “liberation” twice in the phrase, “liberatory black liberation struggle” (hooks 1990, 20) in an argument that stresses the continuity between African American feminist and lesbian politics and the civil rights movement. Haraway is correct that all of these arguments are very different from a discourse of “liberation.” However, Haraway’s argument suggests that subaltern movements, in general, have moved towards a politics of difference. It is very misleading to call “identity politics”—one of the most influential forms of subaltern politics in the U.S.—a politics of difference. Even if they never, or rarely, make use of a notion of “substantive unity,” many American theorists of color construct a notion of “identity politics.” The difference between identity politics and a politics of difference is very great, even though both are part of the same antihegemonic discourse. Given the very great influence of identity politics, it would be a distorted representation of this discourse to call it “the question of ‘differences’ ” (Haraway 1991b, 211). What is clear, however, is that the identity politics argued for by so many influential feminist theorists of color in the United States, and the more strongly poststructuralist or postmodernist theories of mestizaje and hybridity and the technofeminists’ opposition to the racist, sexist, speciesist, organicist, naturalizing origin stories at the heart of American culture share something: perhaps oppositionality as such, as Sandoval suggests, or perhaps oppositionality to the same multiplex set of discourses. Haraway’s attempt in “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies” to link arguments about socialist feminism with queer theoryinfluenced arguments about normativity is not a new direction for her work. This was also central for her earlier, highly influential 1985 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in which she argues that, given the consistent links in our oppressive Western culture between women and people of color and nature, the cyborg, being both machine and human, can be a more politically

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empowering image than “an imagined organic body.” Haraway analyzes both the ontological and the epistemological implications of the narrative trope of the Garden of Eden in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” but my argument here is primarily concerned with issues of knowledge (“epistemology” and, in a Foucauldian sense, “the construction of knowledge”), rather than with ontology. The feminist essentialism/antiessentialism debate is thus less relevant to my argument than is a queer focus on epistemologies. Haraway focuses more clearly on the figure of the Garden in the earlier Socialist Review version than in the later collection of articles (Simians, Cyborgs and Women). She makes a number of brief references, in both versions, to the ways leftist texts use prelapsarian tropes. However, Haraway’s interest, as suggested in her claim towards the end of that article that cyborgs give us “a world without genesis but also a world without end,” is sometimes to reclaim, rather than to reject, religious tropes. My own approach is to hope that a deconstruction of these religious tropes might help us to reject them, since—from my admittedly biased point of view—religious tropes seem much too prevalent in the contemporary and recent United States. Before I analyze Synners, showing how its modeling of a responsible way to deal with, and continue to use, technology, relies on a deconstruction of prelapsarian figurations, I will briefly introduce the main topics I have taken from queer theory. As David Halperin (1994) argues in Saint Foucault, queer theory draws, most of all, on the work of Michel Foucault; and, as Halperin also shows, queer activism and culture influenced Foucault’s theorization. The texts of Foucault’s that most influenced queer theory are Foucault (1977, 1980, 1985, 1986); from Discipline and Punish (1977), queer theorists take the ideas of disciplinization and normalization; from the latter three, which collectively form The History of Sexuality, the notion that sexuality has a history. Halperin is a classicist, and his works often address the classical texts analyzed in the later two volumes of the History of Sexuality, but most other queer theorists focus on the modern and postmodern periods. In contemporary usage, “sexuality” is an identity term: one “is” lesbian or gay, heterosexual or bisexual. We tend to forget that this was not always the case: in earlier centuries, as several queer historians and theorists have pointed out, sexuality, if one can call it that (for the word was only invented in the nineteenth century) was more a matter of what one did, than what one was. And crucially, as queer theory argues, once one realizes that there is this multiple genealogy to the term “sexuality,” one can differentiate, in contemporary texts, between character-based representations

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and act-based representations. This has obvious and important relevance; for example, in AIDS education. As well as focusing on the history of sexuality, queer theory also focuses on the production of knowledges. Foucault had a dual notion of power: power was both negative (it disciplined) and positive (it produces). And crucially, it produces both subjects and objects: objects of knowledge. Judith Butler’s work (1990, 1993) focuses on the production of subjects; showing how, contrary to the influential liberal readings of Foucault, a theory of the constitution or production of subjects does not preclude agency. She argues that subjectivation takes place through perˇ zek) formance. Butler (like Zi ˇ extrapolates from Austin’s notion of the “speech-act,” showing how speech-acts retroactively constitute that to which it appears they refer. A feminist subject or a lesbian subject, therefore, is constituted in political activity and in social discourses and practices, rather than preexisting them. Antiessentialism, therefore, is easily combinable with political commitment; in fact, it can be an excellent basis for coalition politics. Queer work on the production of knowledges and the objects of knowledge has centered, for historical and ethical reasons, on AIDS discourses. Where the social sciences are concerned, the idea that “scientific knowledges” are historical phenomena is becoming less radical: it is relatively easy to convince an interlocutor that “deviance,” for example, is “produced” as a supplement to a norm that is guaranteed as normal by the production of the deviant as abnormal. However, queer theory’s application to the natural sciences, like any constructivist argument about the natural sciences, can seem more startling. As the example of AIDS discourses makes clear, though, a constructivist approach to scientific knowledges does not deny the materiality of the objects of scientific knowledges, or the material efficacy (or lack of) of drug treatments; it just puts them in the context of the historicity of scientific practices. One of these sets of norms, of “narratives of the abnormal and the pathological” at play in the contemporary United States, one which is of as much concern to feminists as to queers, has to do with the ways that oppositions between nature, science, and technology work in the contemporary United States. These norms are legible both in dominant U.S. discourses and in subaltern ones, most notably in ecofeminism. For this reason, and also because the name cyberfeminism does not make explicit the extent to which the new technologies addressed by both feminist and queer theory and feminist and queer science fiction include both biotechnologies and information technologies, I use in my work a less common term, technofeminism. This term

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was introduced by Dery (1992). Cadigan herself has drawn on the idea in interviews (see Feature Interview [1992]). The original reference was to the explicitly political feminist science fiction that developed out of cyberpunk, but a wider application is legitimate. Of the two critics who have written most extensively on Cadigan (Jenny Wolmark [1993] and Anne Balsamo [1996; and in Dery 1994]), Wolmark focuses on the relation to information technology; Balsamo, in contrast, addresses both IT and biotechnology. A great number of feminist cultural critics have argued that there are gendered differences in access to IT, in the ways that one uses and reacts to IT, and in the ways that one represents IT and its impact. Jenny Wolmark sets up an opposition between masculinist and feminist representations of the “interface between human and machine.” She argues that most cyberpunk writers use representations of this human/machine interface to “focus on the general question of what it means to be human.” This general question, she argues, is explored by means of “universalist and essentialist metaphors about ‘humanity’ which avoid confronting existing and unequal power relations” (Wolmark 1993, 110–11). She claims that these universalist and essentialist metaphors are masculinist, and therefore, according to Wolmark, so is cyberpunk. Feminist science fiction, Wolmark argues, uses representations of the human/machine interface to “challenge” these “universalist and essentialist” tropes; that is what makes it feminist. Thus, Wolmark argues that Synners, when it focuses on an artificial intelligence (AI), Art Fish, addresses a masculinist question, “can an AI be human?” She interprets Fish as “unequivocally male” and claims that Synners is limited by the “reification of gender relations” purportedly “implicit in cyberpunk” (Wolmark 1993, 124–25). It therefore must be considered as cyberpunk, rather than as feminist science fiction. There are a number of problems with Wolmark’s argument. First, she seems to be suggesting that all universals are false universals: “human” is never a general term, but always a masculinist one. A feminist argument thus is an argument that challenges universals. This, it seems to me, is not necessarily always the case. “Human” may be overdetermined as “male” in a particular text, (indeed, perhaps, in most texts) but need not be overdetermined as male in all texts. Second, is “human,” in science fiction, necessarily used as a general term? Third, Synners, I would argue, is not about “what it means to be human”;— it is about agency. Like Anne Balsamo, I analyze Synners to produce an argument about technoscience. Both cyberpunk and

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technofeminism deal with liminality. Cadigan’s technofeminism, though, does something quite unusual. She analyzes the interface between multiple discourses without reducing this to a series of binarisms. Cadigan’s concern is first of all to do with narrative form. Like the realist novelist Henry James, she produces alternatives to the melodramatic American romance form. She both parodies it, in some of the cyberspace scenes, and builds up highly complex, or multiplex, characters and plot, highlighting questions of interpretation. The metonymic and synecdochal descriptions of environment and setting, city and technology also owe more to realism than to modernism; as Fredric Jameson (1984) suggests, this is not uncommon in postmodernist texts. For Cadigan, as for other politically motivated writers, the formal innovations are used to particular ends. Synners is about agency in a world not just structured but constructed by the discourses and material practices of technoscience, transnational capitalism, gender, race, and sexuality. It is also about a choice between, on the one hand, norms and prohibitions, and, on the other hand, cyborgs, street-smart kids, alternative families, nonfamilial households, and queers. Although only a few characters in the novel are gay or lesbian, the gay male characters are introduced in the very first scene of the novel, and the puzzling note which provides the hook for the plot, and for the viewers’ continued interest, is left by one gay man for the other. In addition, both academics and activists have recently popularized a somewhat controversial extension of the term queer, using it as both an antiessentialist designation for lesbians and gay men, and for others whose sexual practices, family or household arrangements, or, in a slippage, gender, are different from the limited norms of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality. Cadigan’s approach is similarly a deconstruction of norms and normativity. Synners opposes a multiplex science fictional narrative of interfaced, multiple subjects to an Edenic story of interdiction and prohibition, using, in a move that can be analyzed in a way that addresses some of the lacunae in Haraway’s argument, the deconstruction of the Garden to introduce antifoundationalist ethics. Prelapsarian representations combine a discourse that idealizes an absent origin (a mythical Garden of Eden from which, according to this influential Judeo-Christian trope, we have “lapsed”) with a discourse that is normative and identitarian. The figure of the tree of knowledge uses species difference to introduce prohibition. The connection between difference and prohibition is the basis of the story of a fall from an idealized time and place where and when no difference existed; at the end of the Garden story it is sexual difference rather than species difference that is focused

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upon. However, as the focus on species difference should allow us to recognize, the stress is as much on knowledge as on ontology. Cadigan’s deconstruction of prelapsarianism in Synners enables us to move away from origin stories, and to escape the logical trap created by these circular, recuperative notions of prohibition and transgression. In bringing about this general refiguration, Cadigan’s deconstruction of the Garden is not so much antireligious as antinormative. Cadigan’s novel treats prelapsarianism historically and genealogically. She suggests that Garden narratives were important not just to colonial Puritan culture. The notion of an Adamic man faced with the American wilderness was at the heart of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism. Transcendentalism, and thus a Garden genealogy, was picked up again in the 1960s, and yet more recently, by what one of the fictional characters in Synners, Gina, wonderfully refers to as a “retrograde experiment in techno-Walden-Pondism on the communal level.” Cadigan’s novel suggests that a stress on “appropriate technology” in an urban context, for example, as in Northern Californian popular culture, is a pastoral myth, linked to transcendentalism, and to the Judeo-Christian Garden chronotope. She analyzes this fantasy as specific to a highly technological society. The character who coined the phrase “technoWalden-Pondism” then coins the pun that gives the novel its name: they are not sinners but synners, synthesizers who work with the new technology and are changed by it. In Haraway’s terms, they are cyborgs, not goddesses; changed by technology, not in tune, cyclically, with nature. Unlike both Wolmark and, to an extent, Balsamo, who contrast women’s and men’s relations to technology, seeing women’s and female characters’ way of relating more in terms of connection and embodiedness, and men’s reactions as more to do with the technological sublime, with a loss of self or a dream of transcending the body, my argument about Cadigan does not rely on a binary gender difference and does not find one in the text. Of Balsamo’s two versions of the argument, the gendered formulation (that the women, Gina and Sam, “actively manipulate” cyberspace and the men, Gabe and Mark, are “addicted” to it [Dery 1994, 137]) is less useful, I think, than her four-term matrix— the repressed body, the laboring body, the marked body, and the disappearing body—while this matrix, with only four elements, in its turn reduces the complexity of Cadigan’s text. In addition I am not entirely convinced by Balsamo’s interpretation of these four characters. The “synners” of Cadigan’s title are postmodern subjects, cyborged synthesizers of a near-future Los Angeles. The text is not a metatheory: they do not produce syntheses in the Marxist,

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theoretical sense but are located on the level of what Marxism theorizes, commodity production. The plot of the novel follows from the invention of a direct neural interface between computer and human brain. The narrative centers, in turn, on each of the characters, rather than ordering them into major and minor characters. Most of the very large number of protagonists in Synners produce music videos and “simulations” for the transnational company, Diversifications, Inc. In the slang used by many characters in the novel, a “synner” is someone who uses a synthesizer in his or her work. For example, Gina uses a synthesizer to make rock videos, Gabe uses one to make “simulations”; interactive virtual reality role-playing games. The “synners” are not dialogizers or Marxist synthesizers; they are cyborgs. They do not construct a dialogic field of vision (a consciousness that can understand the other without reducing it to the economy of the same). Somewhat to his surprise, Gabe finds that the simulations he writes and plays with are interactive in a strong sense: his roleplaying imaginary playmates are infected by a self-aware virus, Dr Art Fish, and therefore capable, to some extent, of agency. Art Fish has infected Gabe’s playmates for a reason: the AI has a dilemma. The other characters do not realize that it is a person. How can Dr Art Fish convince the others that it is a person? Can Dr Fish demonstrate its agency? Agency is also a question for the human subjects, Sam, her father Gabe, Gina, Mark, Fez, Rosa, Gator, Jones, and Keely. The human characters’ problem is that Keely has disappeared, leaving Jones a strange note “Dive, dive, divide, the cap and green eggs over easy, to go. Bdee-bdee” (Cadigan 1991b, 3). What does the note mean? What should they do in response? Cadigan thus links together two of her main concerns, interpretation and action. And, as the novel increasingly makes clear, “should” has a moral import. What is ethical action for postmodern subjects? In particular, given the agency and thus ethical import of Art Fish, can the human, postmodern, cyborg characters find a form of ethical action that is not a retreat from technology but a way of working and living with technoscience and transnationalism, as well as with Art? The plot of the novel advances via the actions of this large cast of characters, each of whom attempts to interpret the discourse of the others. These characters are distributed on a matrix or grid, rather than the center/periphery model of novels with a plot/subplot distinction. Bakhtin argues in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics that: “Whenever someone else’s ‘truth’ is presented in a given novel it is introduced without fail into the dialogic field of vision of the other major heroes of the novel. Ivan Karamazov, for example,

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knows and understands Zosima’s truth as well as Dmitri’s truth and Alyosha’s truth and the ‘truth’ of that old sensualist, his father Fyodor Pavlovich. Dmitri understands all these truths as well; Alyosha, too, understands them perfectly. In The Possessed there is not a single idea that fails to find a dialogic response in Stavrogin’s consciousness” (Bakhtin 1984, 73). In Synners, the “truths” of each character, each polyglossic voice, are not introduced into the dialogic field of vision of the other characters. Since both the plot of the novel and the narrative structure through which it is conveyed are very complex, Cadigan emphasizes what Barthes (1974) has called the hermeneutic code. The novel is thus constructed around an enigma, a mysterious note, “Dive, dive, divide, the cap and green eggs over easy, to go. Bdee-bdee” (Cadigan 1991b, 3). The note was addressed by one young gay man, Keely, to his lover, Jones. By the end of the novel, we are able to translate this note: Keely has stolen (Bdeebdee, from break and enter, or B&E) some information from Diversifications, Inc, divided it and sent the halves to Fez and Sam. The information is the data concerning the neural interface sockets. The discourse of each character is an attempt to unravel this enigma, providing the hook for the reader of the text. However, the discourse of one character frequently does not encompass the discourses of the others’; most ideas fail to find a “dialogic response” in the consciousness of the characters. By the end of the novel the enigma is solved and the note translated: so late that the narrative has moved beyond it. It becomes apparent in the course of a conversation between Gator and Jones in chapter 1 that they understand Keely’s note. However, the reader attains this understanding much later in the book. Cadigan keeps the note untranslated, so that it can serve as a hook, making the reader interested in reading further until she or he becomes intrigued by the data in the stolen information referred to in the note. The reader’s interest parallels that of the characters. However, as there are very many characters, all of whom solve the enigma and interpret the data, the reader identifies with all of the characters in turn, rather than with a central hero or heroine. In the opening chapter, Gator (the first character introduced) is a tattoo artist. She is tattooing lotus patterns on an unconscious “space case,” a person she refers to as a “filing system” and as “hardcopy.” The next two chapters shift to Gina and Sam. Gator does not reappear until much later in the novel. She seems to be a minor character. By starting the novel with a minor character, Cadigan seems to be indicating that this is a mosaic novel, rather

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than a novel with a center/periphery narrative form. However, Gator, although minor in the sense that the narrative only rarely focuses on her, is one of the better informed characters. The tattooed space case is in fact the hardcopy for Art Fish; Gator is thus one of the only two humans who know about Art Fish, the AI who is threatened by the socket interface. Cadigan uses representations of liminality to explore questions of judgment: knowledge-related questions and actionrelated questions. In Cadigan’s novel, the scenes which cohere around the character, Gina, focus on liminality; in particular, the liminalities to do with gender, sexuality, the juridical, and the border between human and machine. Chapter 2 focuses on Gina. She is in night court, having been arrested at a rave or “hit-and-run” she attended while looking for Mark, her lover. The juridical discourse is introduced right from the beginning of the chapter, when it is clear that Gina is in night court. It is also clear that it is the transgression that is significant: Gina has broken the law. The context of sexuality, and, in particular, the analysis of conventional feminine sexual roles is also clear: Gina was looking for Mark at the party. Gender, sexuality, and the juridical are then linked with the central liminal issue for the novel, the border between human and machine, in a scene where the prosecutor reads out the charges on a case that comes up as Gina waits: “Unlawful congress with a machine.” The court is cleared, as the defense claims commercial confidentiality and Gina, as she is leaving, sees Mark walk in with the people involved with that case; one of whom is Keely, who left the note we learned of in chapter 1. She does not know Keely, but hears him addressed by name. Chapters 1 and 2 thus illustrate Cadigan’s narrative style: the enigma is not solved by the actions and thoughts of a single person, piecing it together like a detective. Instead, the characters do not even know each other. However, collectively, knowingly or not, they move the narrative forward and solve the enigma. At first, it was coded as having to do with a sexual discourse (having been left for Jones by his boyfriend), here the sexual discourse is still present (“unlawful congress”) but coded as aberrant: crossing boundaries; the boundary between human and machine. However, as the unmarked references to the gay couple lead the reader to infer, crossing boundaries is aberrant not as such, but in a juridical context. Cadigan therefore disrupts the binary opposition between human and machine. She does not lead one to ask, “What kinds of acts between human and machine are wrong?” but “What context constructs certain actions

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as wrong?” Synners is thus clearly about boundaries and interpretation, rather than about identity; despite Wolmark’s claim that the novel addresses “what it means to be human,” Synners does not deal with essentialism (or antiessentialism) but with knowledge and epistemologies. The remainder of the chapter is concerned with context. What is Mark up to? The chapter does not develop the moral image, “unlawful congress”; it describes transnational capitalism. Gina’s thoughts move from wondering what Mark is doing there without her, and without having discussed it with her to: “She and Mark [had] been in it together in the beginning, and when Galen had bought most of the video production company out from under the Beater, and . . . when Galen let the monster conglomerate take EyeTraxx over from him, and . . . when they were due to show up for their first full day working for the monster conglomerate” (Cadigan 1991b, 14, ellipses added). Gina’s thoughts, trying to figure out what is happening, supply the context: corporate takeouts and transnational capitalism. Technology in this postmodern text is not, despite Jameson’s influential argument, the figure for transnational capitalism: in a scientifically informed postmodern text, transnational capitalism is the context in which technology develops, just as it is in the “real world.” Jameson argued that we should interpret representations of technology in postmodern texts figuratively, as standing for late capitalism, because he believes that the subject, in the postmodern world, stands in the same relation to capitalism as the subject represented in a postmodern fiction does to the representations of technology in the fiction. The generic term for this relation, or aesthetic mode, is “the sublime.” The romantics used this aesthetic mode to figure the subject’s relation to nature; Jameson argues that the postmodernist’s figuration of technology is like the romantic’s figuration of nature. Technology is “ungraspable”; the subject is reminded of “his” insignificance and finitude. As a number of feminist critics have pointed out (for both the romantics and the postmodernists) the detailed examples are often strongly, and obviously, masculinist. My argument is not about the masculinism of sublime figurations. Instead, I argue that Cadigan is not using the sublime at all. Thus, in the example above, technology does not stand for capitalism. Instead, transnational capitalism, and biotechnology/ information technology are material practices, and discourses that interact with each other in the fictional world of Synners just as in the “real” world. Gina, in the passage above, is not overwhelmed by the “ungraspability” of capitalism: she knows

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perfectly well who bought out whom (as does Sam, in a scene I discuss later in this chapter). Instead, as Balsamo points out, Gina thinks in terms of “connections.” She generalizes her model: she is connected to Mark; one company is connected to another, each in networks. The characters in Synners are technologically competent, skillful. They are also equally knowledgeable, at times, about the workings of transnational capitalism. Much “antibigness” posturing in U.S. science fiction, as elsewhere in American culture, is based on a valorization of Emersonian autonomy, and the claim that this can best be achieved as an “independent producer,” a Jeffersonian or Madisonian agrarian or artisan, rather than a wage laborer. However, as my interpretation of Cadigan’s deconstruction of Gabe’s pastoral retreat (his attempt to set himself up as an “independent producer”) in the conclusion to this chapter shows, this is definitely not Cadigan’s approach. Rather than opposing the individual to the “ungraspable totality” of technology, Synners coheres around a series of encounters between subjects. One of these subjects is an AI. The encounter with technology is thus not an aesthetic phenomenon (the sublime) but an ethical one. The encounters, in the course of the narrative, create change. The transformation is not ontological or epistemological, but ethical. The ethical changes come about because of epistemological puzzles: the human characters can interpret Art’s actions in more than one way. Epistemological undecidability is thus used as a springboard for an argument about agency and ethics. Cadigan’s text makes use of a characteristic SF technique, literalization, in the scene that describes the first interaction between Art Fish and Sam. This scene is also a good example of the way in which Cadigan’s novel sets up allusions to and intertextualities with its particular contemporary cultural and historical context. In addition to the unemphatic pointing out of the variety of families and sexualities in the opening scene, Synners also raises questions about gender construction and gender crossing. The names of several of the characters in the novel are allusions: Art Fish brings to mind Arthur Fischell, the “virtual agent” developed as an exercise by Brenda Laurel, et al., at Atari. Fischell’s persona became so convincing, and his influence so beneficial, that he was promoted to acting director of the lab; and, eventually, one of the Atari vice presidents phoned to arrange a conference. Brenda Laurel then impersonated Arthur for the video conference. SamIAm, as well as a Dr. Seuss character, is, according to Julian Dibbell (Dery, 1994), a male Australian Deleuzean active on the contemporary Internet.

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Sam is alone in a room in a friend’s house. A computer terminal turns on; it shows a simulated environment and a figure, Art. Unlike the reader, Sam has no idea that Art is an AI. The scene literalizes the “Turing test”: Sam assumes that she is communicating with a person and assumes that the person is human. She is, however, unsure whether Art is male or female. During the conversation over the computer, Sam asks Art to phone a mutual friend, Fez. Art does a double take; Sam assumes, from his odd reaction, that Art is paraplegic; it never occurs to her that he is not human. Art simply apologizes, and says that he can find a way to use the telephone (Cadigan 1991b, 168). Sam does two things here: she assumes that Art is capable of agency; she treats him ethically. The other characters, instead, simply try to predict his actions. Even after realizing that Art has agency, most of the human characters, with the exception of Sam and Gina, argue that Art, as an information virus, is amoral. This is the reason they give for not treating Art ethically. Art is the point where epistemological (prediction, as well as more hermeneutic forms of knowledge) and moral discourses overlap in the text. The figure of Art is undecidable: the articulation point for multiple discourses, each of which is at play in the text. It is not just Sam who treats Art Fish as a subject with agency and ethical claims. So does Gina, the cynical mestiza (she reacts with disgust when someone asks her where a black woman gets a name like Aiesi) synthesizer. In the following passage, Gina both takes Art’s ethical claims for granted and also, in the dismissive comment about “techno-Walden-Pondism,” makes an argument about historiography: “No-Fucking-Chance. It sounded like a stupid way to get their heads blown up and toss the AI to the sharks at the same time. She could tell little old Sam hated it, and as far as sense went, her money was on Gabe’s kid. All the rest of them reminded her of some kind of retrograde experiment in techno-Walden-Pondism on the communal level . . . but Gabe’s kid had been bolted together right on the first try” (Cadigan 1991b, 389, ellipsis added). Cadigan is critiquing the idealizing representations of the 1960s. Her reference emphasizes the way in which the neo-transcendentalism of some 1960s countercultures, like transcendentalism itself, set up a prelapsarian representation of “the American Wilderness” and of a “primitive” State of Nature to which the communes could aspire. The notion of an alternative society, separate from the dominant American culture, is thus condemned by Gina as naïve. Synners uses a mosaic narrative form, shifting between the point of view (POV) of a variety of characters. The plot moves

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forwards through the actions, and is narrated with regard to the POV of all the characters, but it is important to note that the two characters with the most theorized POV, able to analyze and critique their society, and the other characters’ POV, are both women of color. Gina is African American, Sam Asian American. Cadigan’s privileging of the POV of women of color is a kind of standpoint epistemology, privileging mestiza consciousness but not, interestingly enough, oppositional consciousness. Neither Gina nor Sam has a unitary racial identity; both are mestiza. Cadigan does not argue that Gina and Sam’s theorizations are arrived at on the basis of an oppositional consciousness. Gina and Sam are not represented as marginal or opposed to the mainstream of society: the future society is not described in terms of a conservative core and radical periphery. Gina and Sam are each represented as having greater insight because of their liminal positionality: Gina as a “synner,” creating music videos in cyberspace, Sam as a polymath, with her knowledge of computers, medicine, and many other fields. Mestizaje is represented in the context of a specifically American identity, rather than the context of a deliberate political identification with third-world peoples; Gina expressing disgust when asked where a Black woman gets a name like Aiesi, Sam’s Asian mother a yuppy Realtor. Cadigan represents Gina and Sam’s mestiza subjectivities as highly nuanced and complex; in many ways the most sophisticated subjectivities in the novel. However, neither Gina nor Sam is fully able to comprehend her own society. Cadigan’s point is that a postmodern society cannot be represented from the point of view of one subject. It can only be successfully represented by using the shifting POV of multiple subjects. Cadigan stresses again and again that there is no perspective from which a human being can perceive the representation as a coherent, single picture. The text thus focuses upon the inadequacies of the forms in which information is organized, both in computer menus and in people’s minds. One good example of this is given in a scene in which Sam, stuck in a traffic jam due to the out-of-date information on the Gridlid traffic information service, decides to listen to some music. It takes Sam some time: she has to move back and forth between menus. Finally, she finds music she likes, but is surprised by the video credit. She asks a woman of her own age, also stuck in the traffic jam: Now the woman stared at her as if she was crazy. “God, no. That sounds like biz news to me. Snore, snore.” . . . Feeling sheepish, she topped all the way back to the main menu and selected Business News. Then she stared at the screen

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while it asked her which subheading she wanted. (Cadigan 1991b, 26–27, ellipsis added)

Eventually, Sam finds the information. If Cadigan had just shown Sam having difficulties with the complexity of the nested menus this could almost have been one of Jameson’s representations “in the mode of the sublime.” However, Cadigan introduces a character who rigidly compartmentalizes, dismissing business news as irrelevant to pop music fans. The human being is not set off, opposed to the computer. Instead, the computer is represented as having been programmed by people who think in rigid categories, separating one from the other. The passage thus condemns human prejudice and lack of curiosity. There are other key moments in the text when Sam relates to the ability of computers to exceed human agency or human comprehension. If the text were utilizing the sublime, these moments would be the point at which the mode would be engaged. However, this is not the case. The first passage describes Sam stopping at a fast food joint to buy a snack (Cadigan 1991b, 28). The computer menu screen editorializes on Sam’s order, displaying a lengthy warning of the dangers of caffeine. Sam reads Dr Fish’s Health Warning and tells the fast food workers that the easiest way to get rid of the message is to turn off the computer. They object that they are not allowed to do that. Cadigan is making a joke about the removal of agency from workers in a transnational company, prefiguring the more serious problems of Gabe, Sam’s father, who works for Diversifications Inc, and also constructing a general argument about agency and otherness. Thus, the reader concludes that Art may have intentionally distributed the warning. The context of otherness is reinforced, in this same scene, when Cadigan includes a little joke on the biracial Asian American Sam’s distinguishing of “l” from “r”: the only point of which is to emphasize that the American subject may assimilate but the society remains multicultural. This scene is not a representation of the way in which postmodern technology “figures” the intimidating totality of transnational capitalism. This scene is, like the Turing test scene, a description of Art’s attempts to demonstrate his agency to the humans; it is also one of the details that move the plot forward. The central questions of agency and ethical action are resolved in a final cyberspace scene, where Gabe and Gina must make a series of decisions which must be freely chosen. However, to Art, as they all realize afterwards, Gabe and Gina are the “mirror” and the “fooler loop,” attracting the “stroke,” the repetitive killer virus, and freeing Art, or rather the Markt he has become, to act decisively.

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These scenes, and the earlier narratives staged in cyberspace, elaborate upon the characters’ psychological limitations: Gabe interacts with his imaginary playmates, Marly and Caritha, producing friendship and adventures at the same time as he sneaks in and out of his house avoiding his wife, Catherine; Mark produces death fantasies; Gina creates a visual version of the blues, mixing images of traveling with images of love. These fantasies are utterly conventional, drawing on stereotypical representations. It is the psychological effect of the working through, in cyberspace, of each fantasy that is significant. Gabe discovers that Marly and Caritha were infected with the Dr Fish virus, so they were not as imaginary as he thought; he begins to act in the “real world” as he acts in fantasy, leaving Catherine for Gina, making friends again with Sam. Gina stops chasing after Mark; replicating herself, remaining in two places, rather than singing a blues of lost love. Mark leaves his body behind, as he has been fantasizing and learns both that his actions have an effect on the world (the stroke/computer crash that threatens the fictional universe) and that he can think more clearly and more creatively in cyberspace than when embodied. Both change for the machines but the changes make them more responsible, more aware of other beings’ agency: also a conventional conclusion but a valid one. Mark, as a “synner,” as human, is heterosexual, and involved in a relationship with Gina. However, in cyberspace, he merges with Art. The binary opposition between human and machine is undermined, not only by the presence of the cyborgs, but also by the construction of Mark and Art as same. They are the same, not merely as the same sex, but because they share a “viral” quality: not AIDS, but a tendency to use others. Art, the AI, exists “in the infinitesimal spaces of the datanet,” spreading like a computer virus, using the computer programs already in the net to write and replicate his own self-aware software. Mark—in Cadigan’s metaphor—is like an organic virus which uses the nuclear material of the host cell to replicate its own genetic code; he uses other people for his own benefit. However, when Mark and Art merge, replicated, two of the same, they become fully “human.” And, as the comparison between organic virus and software virus suggests, the organic is no more “natural,” ideologically speaking, than the inorganic. The punning names make it clear that to be human is to be constructed: artificial Art Fish and the “synner” Visual Mark, named after his profession and wishing to be his creations, become Markt, marked, inscribed. My reading of both Markt and Gabe, here and in the passage above, is thus quite different from Balsamo’s: she argued that Gabe and Mark, as male, were “addicted” to cyberspace; Gina

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and Sam, as female, “actively manipulate” it. However, as I see it, three of the human characters interact with and encounter the AI, Art, in cyberspace, in modes of relating that combine fantasy and contact with another subject. Gabe and Gina see their choices in primarily emotional terms and in terms that stress the ways in which their choice is between human love and a longing (originally Mark’s) for death. Their actions resolve their emotional dilemmas; Markt’s action resolves the plot. Computer agency and the scientific discourse Sam has access to become dominant. Thus, contrary to Balsamo’s argument, cyberspace is not “actively manipulated” by the women, or an “addiction” for the men. The men and women are mirrors and fooler loops, hackers’ tricks that Markt uses. Markt’s use of them, and their psychological healing, is fueled by Sam, as cyborg, as empowered, knowledgeable young woman. Gabe retreats from his broken marriage to Sam’s mother, and from his growing distaste of the “monster conglomerate” that now owns the company he had worked for, as well as the different one Gina and Mark had worked for, sets up as a freelance programmer, and moves to a cabin in the country: “But the front yard was just fine. . . . From there he had an unobstructed view of the ocean. Someone was operating an underwater farm a few hundred yards out; with binoculars he could watch the dolphins popping up and down, hard at work at whatever dolphins did on underwater farms” (Cadigan 1991b, 430, ellipsis added). As Cadigan correctly identifies, front yards, oceans, local schools, and dolphins are all elements in Californian Pastoral. In this brief scene, the local school, ocean, and front yard could all be in our world. It is the last sentence of the quotation that marks the text as set in the future: the farm is “underwater,” not on land. A professional living in “splendid isolation” in presentday California would be able to see Chicano farmworkers; Gabe watches dolphins hard at work. The racial and ethnic difference is transformed into species difference. The science fictional touch, the hardworking dolphins, stresses the constructedness of this myth: “nature” an origin only by contrast with “technology”; the “authenticity,” the “honest, unforced communication” of the rural community, and the “ideal socialization” of the local school, having meaning only as an ideological construction. He supports himself by writing programs freelance: “The light on the voice-only phone meant he had email. He called the local exchange. . . . Just a thank-you note from the school. . . . It was an isolated area and not a moneyed one, either. Custom-programs off the data-line would have broken their budget” (Cadigan 1991b, 429, ellipses added).

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Gabe’s isolation is dependent on his professional affluence, and his “appropriate technology” is so only compared to the technology he is shown using earlier in the novel. “It wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art . . . appropriate technology, he told himself” (Cadigan 1991b, 431). Cadigan’s text shows us that the Northern Californian version of the fantasy of “appropriate technology” is historically and geographically specific; a late capitalist American version of pastoral linked in the text to the Judeo-Christian chronotope of the Garden of Eden and thus to a construction in which liminality and transgression are determined as interdiction rather than as performative subversion (see Butler 1990 for a full discussion of this latter notion). When read as SF, in a way of reading which proceeds by the construction of imagined worlds, this brief description of Gabe’s retreat from the city deconstructs the American pastoral fantasy that Gabe’s action lives out. Synners thus returns to the chronotope of the Garden at the end of the story, but uses this chronotope in a way that begins to destabilize it. The story ends with a new “nuclear” family: the interracial stepfamily of Gabe, Gina, and Sam, in which the question is not “What does a woman want?” but “What’s a father for, anyway?” (Cadigan 1991b, 434). The child in this setup is not male, as Freud’s scenario would have it (and Sam’s name would suggest) but female. Sam is not Oedipus, but Cassandra (Cadigan 1991b, 76) but that story too is changed: she is listened to and believed. The family that ends Synners is not given but both provisional and dependent on female agency: “Sam had found him. As it turned out, he hadn’t really been so hard to find, provided someone had been actively looking” (Cadigan 1991b, 434). It is Gabe’s pastoral retreat that enables Sam to find him: “There wasn’t another independent simulation producer in a few hundred miles” (Cadigan 1991b, 434). “Independent” has a dual meaning: first, the financial meaning, “not belonging to a specific company,” that enables Sam to find him, second, the ideological meaning, “Heinleinesque individual,” the autonomous hero, living in an Edenic wilderness, that is part of the SF trope, the Californian Pastoral Gabe is living out. And for Gina and Gabe, the heterosexual pairing is heavily ironized “Is this like any port in a storm?” (Cadigan 1991b, 435). In the last scenes, Gina’s cynical laugh is a form of action: “Gina burst out laughing. ‘Simulate, my ass. I did video just so I could do all that shit’ ”(Cadigan 1991b, 433), linking Baudrillardian simulation with Rabelaisian carnival: action, physicality, and

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vulgarity, all of which, in her universe, are constructed in relation to and enabled by technology. Gina’s point of view, therefore, as Balsamo argues, is one that makes action and ethical action possible; action and ethics rooted in physicality (“shit,” “fucking”), closely linked to sexuality and also, which Balsamo does not note, based on a disruption of the border between human and machine. Sam is described as “bolted together on the first try,” Art as “tossed to the sharks.” Most importantly, the AI is thought of as someone who matters, just as do the humans, “It sounded like a stupid way to get their heads blown up and toss the AI to the sharks at the same time” (Cadigan 1991b, 389). At the end of the novel, Cadigan draws on an immune system discourse, one which has come up before in relation to Art Fish. Like religious discourses, immune system discourses focus on the relation between subject and other, coding this relation in terms that have to do with ethics as well as, very clearly, the juridical. The passage which develops the immune system discourse most fully is in Gabe’s voice and describes a possible response to the socket technology: “Inoculated,” he said glumly, “I thought for sure they’d just ban sockets” (Cadigan 1991b, 434). The following two lines of the dialogue work in a way that is characteristic of Cadigan’s text. The phrase “back in business” is repeated. This repetition makes the text work deconstructively, by “differing and deferring.” The meaning of the phrase “back in business” is different in Gina’s sentence and in Gabe’s sentence too: in Gina’s it is a cliché, socket implantation will resume, will be back in business; in Gabe’s sentence, the phrase has taken on a new meaning, the one that is often thought of as literal, a company will be back in business. The repetition of “back in business” has two functions: both illustrating the difference between Gabe and Gina’s viewpoints, and locating the scientific discovery that is the impetus for the story in its economic context. Once the economic context is underlined, this becomes key for the plot as well: the “monster conglomerate” is the one making the sockets. The characters in the story often discuss the ways in which context is necessary for meaning. It is important here to note that the philosophy of language of the novel is multiplex, like the narrative structure and the consciousness of the characters. The undecidability constructed by the repetition of “back in business” is not resolved in Gabe’s use of the phrase; the undecidability is created by Gabe’s use of “back in business” in a different sense. Gabe’s meaning, the one that refers to an economic context for

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the sockets, is not privileged in the text. Each context, and each POV makes up the multiplex reality of the text. What SF shows us is that Jameson’s question about the relation between postmodernism and late capitalism, his notion that technology in a postmodern text is a figure for late capitalism, his idea of a cognitive map, all are only complex, not multiplex. When Gina and Sam find Gabe in his pastoral idyll, the narrative shifts from the multiplex, non-dialogic form, to the narrative representation of a straightforward choice between two ethical postures with regard to the sockets: banning them, or using them. Gabe argues for “appropriate technology”: living with the minimal amount of technology necessary for one’s goals, banning any technology considered excessive. Gina replies: “All appropriate technology hurts somebody . . . Every technology has its original sin.” She laughed. “Makes us original synners. And we still got to live with what we made” (Cadigan 1991b, 435). Cadigan argues that the synners of the title will change for the machines, transforming their subjectivity in line with the new technology, and linking the formation of scientific knowledges with the formation of an ethic. The phrase the characters find to name this process is a deconstructive pun, referring to pragmatics and strategics: the practices of the new synthesizing technology displace the religious meaning of “sin.” Gina’s claim that both she and Gabe are “original synners” is a direct challenge to Gabe’s belief that one can retreat in a pastoral idyll from the “evils” of high technology. Gabe’s suggestion—banning the sockets that interface human and machine—is simply another move, another Garden trope: a discourse, a practice, a strategy of norms, of transgression, and of interdiction. Gina does more than just comprehend Gabe’s point of view in a Bakhtinian dialogic field of vision. She appropriates his Garden metaphor and deconstructs it, transforming sinners, interpellated by a normalizing, disciplinizing Garden narrative, to synners, cyborged, disrupting difference. Rather than ending with an always re-containable transgression, Cadigan’s character Gina argues “We still got to live with what we made;” both acknowledging responsibility and accepting agency.

5 Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the New Social Movements This chapter looks at connections between transnationalism and the new social movements in the United States, working from a socialist feminist theoretical position. The feminist parts of my argument are drawn from three areas: the history of socialist feminist thought; the critique by American feminists of color of the racism in the women’s movement; and the development of a lesbian, gay, or queer theory which rejects the totalizing of “lesbian-feminism,” “radical feminism,” and “cultural radical feminism.” The political interventions by American feminists of color have given rise to two traditions in feminist thought: identity politics and the more postmodern feminisms of hybridity, mestizaje, and difference. Much queer theory, also, is strongly postmodern. In terms of socialist thought, my position is neo-Marxist. I am strongly influenced by both socialist feminism and by long-wave, Mandelian arguments. However, I became convinced (by Harvey, among others) that “transnationalism” is not the same as “late capitalism”; hence this chapter. The first part of this chapter develops two related arguments. Like Morris (1993), I argue that it might be misleading to characterize postmodernity as fragmented. I argue that what are treated as “fragments” can also be treated as “coalition.” I discuss several examples of feminist theories and movements of coalition, showing how these social texts produce spatial concepts. I argue that universalization and fragmentation are not the only spatial concepts of political importance. So are the notions of network, and, in Lorde’s (1982) phrase, of the “house of difference.” The second part of this chapter is a detailed study of David Harvey and Mike Davis’s analyses of transnationalism and flexible accumulation. My analysis of Davis focuses on the way he uses an argument about race and ethnicity to critique the concepts of class with which he begins; my analysis of Harvey focuses on gender, race, and sexuality, as well as class, and examines the way he thinks through questions of systemicity, particularity, and difference, and issues of social change. I mostly address Harvey (1989) since this text focuses on the historical period in which I am most interested, and presents more developed 121

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arguments about the new social movements than most of Harvey’s earlier work. I briefly compare Harvey’s earlier work with his later work (Harvey 1996, 2000, 2003). The later books are remarkable, combining substantive and philosophical arguments in a way that leads to an eloquent political and ethical argument about justice and difference. The methodological focus of the 1996 text is on an intellectual history of environmentalism and ecology movements, combined with a thorough, critical analysis of the philosophies on which Harvey relies. As well as my analysis in this chapter, I also discuss Harvey and Davis in my last chapter, focusing on their most recent work. Before I go on to the detailed critique of Harvey (1989) and Davis (1986, 1992), it will be useful to clarify the scope of my argument. Harvey (1989) fails to use gender and sexuality as analytical categories, although he does use them as descriptive categories (see Scott 1988 for a full explanation of this distinction). When my argument has more general conclusions, they are about this question: what analytical categories ought a historian or historical geographer to use, if he or she is to successfully analyze accumulation in the contemporary United States? When I ask if gender is used as an analytical category, or when I address some of Harvey’s negative platial tropes, for example, “place-bound,” and thus, he fears, politically “limited” movements, or people, to Harvey’s indignation, expected to be “in their place,” I am not suggesting that Harvey does not write about or address difference. Harvey has always dealt with issues of identity and difference in his work, and one of his most sustained discussions of difference, which presents arguments that at times assert conclusions that are very different than that reached in his earlier work, continues an interest that has run throughout his work Harvey (1996). I’m not aware of any substantial discussion of Harvey’s treatment of race and ethnicity. There are, however, several critiques of the way that Harvey deals with gender (Morris 1993; Rose 1993; Massey 1991, 1994; Deutsche 1991); these have mainly focused on notions of representation and vision. In response, Harvey has suggested that these were primarily accounts of topics that he could or should have added; the critique didn’t impact on the main points in his argument. Much of this chapter presents a close analysis of various passages in which Harvey (1989) has something to say about gender, race, or sexuality, or the new social movements in general. I show how the ways in which he discusses the new social movements affect his central argument about capital and labor. I say little about Harvey’s treatment of gender and sexuality before the 1989 book, because he

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mostly confined himself, in the earlier works, to brief, parenthetical remarks about gender, and, from time to time, the use of rhetoric that draws on notions of sexuality. There was little sustained discussion of either issue by Harvey. There is, however, an interesting slippage one can note in the index to Harvey (1985, 1989): some of the references to “gender” in the index actually refer to work or acts by women (as scholars and as historical agents). The particular examples sometimes have nothing to do with gender as such. In contrast to this minimal reference to gender and unanalyzed use of notions of sexuality, the Baltimore articles (1977, 1978) take race and ethnicity explicitly as analytical categories. Curiously, though, Harvey doesn’t develop the implications of the arguments about race and ethnicity in the conclusions, mostly discussing the importance of a focus on the financial superstructure of a country. This latter argument is an important one, but so are questions of race and ethnicity. In a recent (1993) article, later incorporated in Harvey (1996), he asks “how to sustain and elaborate general theory in the face of particularity and difference” (Harvey 1993, 5). I suggest that Harvey (1989) classifies gender, race, and sexuality, together with place, as particularity and difference, rather than seeing them as part of the general theory that he very successfully elaborates. My argument is that gender, race, and sexuality are part of theory, rather than something opposed to it. I see general theory—the global—and particularity—the local—as the two necessary parts of an argument: two levels one must repeatedly move between: local/global, rather than local versus global. By 1996 Harvey seems to be changing his argument. In the latest books he draws on Leibniz, and argues for “internal relations,” or “moments,” in which “the social process . . . flows in, through, and around each of these moments and the activities of each and every individual embrace all of the moments simultaneously” (Harvey 1996, 79). This more Whiteheadean way of understanding theory does away with the opposition between universalization and specificity or particularity. Instead, difference is privileged. Harvey still retains his association of platial with limitations, and spatial with scope. My discussion of Harvey (1989) focuses on the notion of displacement; I argue that the “spatial fix” is a particular use of spatial displacement, just as the “temporal fix” (for example, debt financing or futures markets) is a use of temporal displacement. The notion of displacement is often used in the deconstructive reading of narrative and representational texts. Displaced images are productive to analyze because the displacement is often a sign of stress: an indication of significance. I proceed to a

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consideration of what accumulation might mean if we theorize it in terms of gender and sexuality, rather than just class. I analyze the way that transnationalism is displaced in C. J. Cherryh’s science fiction, showing how her fictions produce an implicit theorization of accumulation, based on gender and sexuality, as well as class. This chapter thus brings together semiotic and material analysis in two ways. First, I analyze neo-Marxist geography, a discourse with a material object of analysis, in semiotic terms, that is, focusing on argument and representation. Second, when faced with a conundrum with which the material analysis has difficulties, I move from material to semiotic objects. My argument focuses on the issues of coalition politics introduced earlier. New social movement coalitions can be understood as a different kind of pluralism: a postmodern, iterative pluralism that is both philosophically and historically distinguishable from liberal, modern pluralism. I begin with a discussion of postmodern new social movement coalition politics. My intent here is twofold: first, to distinguish these from modern formations (in this case, both Enlightenment-rooted identity politics, and Marxism), and second, to characterize and theorize the spatial formations and conceptions associated with new social movement coalition politics.

Political Consciousness and the Social Imaginary: Coalition or fragmentation? Over the last ten years or so, a wide variety of new social movement writers and theorists have worked on spatiality. Within the field of geography, informed and enabled to a very great extent by the disciplinary changes brought about by David Harvey’s Marxian polemics, feminist geographers like Doreen Massey (also one of the neo-Marxist New Geographers), Gillian Rose, and Liz Bondi have instituted both a feminist critique of the discipline and a feminist analysis of space, place, and spatialization. Feminist postcolonialist theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Trihn Mihn-ha, and Gayatri Spivak have analyzed both spatializations and spatiality. Gay and Lesbian Studies has turned both to the empirical study of place, and to a spatial theorization. The feminist and queer left’s methodology and typical arguments are consonant with the Lefebvrean neo-Marxism of geographers like David Harvey. This is in spite of the fact that most of these feminist, gay, or lesbian leftist writers do not explicitly draw on Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of spatial practices and

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the spatial concepts to which they give rise. Rather than being due to direct influence, the consonance is most likely due to Lefebvre’s generally “countercultural,” “Events of 1968,” approach. Lefebvre divides spatial concepts (or “spatializations”) into “representations of space” and “spaces of representation,” the first of which are the concepts of the hegemonic, dominant groups. The second are the concepts built up by the spatial practices (including the more “cultural” representational practices) of insurgent, subaltern, or “countercultural” groups. Although I find the spatial, Lefebvrean turn in social theory to be productive, I am skeptical of this division of spatial concepts and practices according to their association with either dominant or subaltern “countercultural” groups. As the history of the second wave (and post-second wave) women’s movement, and the history of the lesbian and gay movements shows, the “counterculture” and the political movements of the 1950s and 1960s were both liberatory and oppressive. For example, as Sara Evans (1979) shows, the lack of analysis of gender in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the New Left, and the sexism of some of the Movement participants, were factors behind the rise of the second wave women’s movement. In a second example, lack of analysis of race and class, and, indeed, racism and classism (Deitcher 1995), shaped the development of gay liberation, and the lesbian and gay movements of the later twentieth century. As many feminists, or lesbians, or gays of color have argued, a person can be hegemonic with respect to class or race, while subaltern in respect of gender or sexuality. Spatial practices and the concepts to which they give rise can also be oppressive in some ways, liberatory in others. In response to this, I draw on more Foucauldian notions. Rather than referring to representations of space and spaces of representation, I use the concept of “spatiality.” Like Gregory (1994) I use this term to mean “a socially constructed concept of space.” Spatiality, like sexuality, has a history. I often use the term spatiality in the plural: spatialities. This is a deliberate echo of the queer theory usage, in which one refers to “sexualities” rather than positing a common sexuality for all people. Spatialities are broad discourses, made up of spatial concepts and spatializations. These conceptions of space are applied both to space itself (e.g., notions like “abstract space”) and to other discourses and representational practices. It has often been suggested that the present historical period, postmodernity, draws more on spatial concepts in its writing and art, and makes more use of spatial displacements and spatial action in its empirical practices, than did previous periods. (The factual claim is in terms of “more” or

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“less”; this should not be confused with theoretical arguments about the conceptualization of the notions of space and time, where the argument often turns on whether these two concepts are opposed and mutually exclusive.) I refer to this latter use of spatial concepts in discourse and representation as “spatializations.” Again, I use the term in the plural. Spatializations are often used to conceptualize a relation between general and particular. One important set of concepts metaphorizes movement between different spatial levels: for example, universalizations, close analyses (we often say a student needs to “get closer to the text”), or local/global analyses. Other concepts see arguments and ways of arranging data spatially: networks, linear arguments, core/periphery models. I also use the parallel neologisms “platial,” “platialization,” and “platality/platialities.” The neo-Marxist, feminist, postcolonialist, and gay and lesbian texts I refer to all develop political analyses. However, these texts produce several different notions of the political subject and have different arguments about collective political subjectivity. Some suggest that a broad-based political movement must be formed by coalition; other texts suggest that a broad-based political movement must derive from a foundation of a single, political consciousness, one which is able to mediate all the others. Within the United State in particular, feminists, gays, and lesbians have produced strong, convincing arguments for coalition politics. The critique of racism in the women’s movement(s) and the gay and lesbian movements led to the development of an argument that theorized difference as strength, as creative. Instead of describing the divisions which these critiques represented and stemmed from as “fragmentation,” many on the feminist, gay, and lesbian left argued that this positive notion of difference is the only possible basis for coalition politics. In many cases, the arguments derived from a critique of home and community, seen as spatial practices and the source of spatializations. In contrast to this new social movement focus on coalition politics, the neo-Marxist theorist, Fredric Jameson, tends to privilege class and subsume race, gender, and sexuality. For example, Homi Bhabha (1994a) has analyzed the way that Jameson subsumes race. In a discussion primarily about race and colonialism but also touching on other new social movements, Bhabha argues that [T]he social objectivity of the group-based politics of new social movements—or, indeed, the political groupings of metropolitan minorities—is, in Jameson’s argument to be found in the simulacral superficies of media institutions or in those practices of the culture

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industry that produce “libidinal investments of a more narrative kind.” The construction of political solidarities between minorities or special-interest groups would then be considered “pseudodialectical” unless their alignment is mediated through the prior and primal identification with class identity. . . . Racial hierarchies, sexual discriminations, or, for instance, the linkage of both forms of social differentiation in the iniquitous practices of refugee or nationality law—these may be legitimate causes for political action, but the making of the political group for-itself as an effective consciousness could only occur through the mediation of the category of class. (Bhabha 1994a, 221, ellipsis added)

He argues that Jameson is not just suggesting that class-based politics are more effective than group-based, but that new social movement identity, as group-based, is not an identity that is “for itself.” The new social movements cannot produce the kind of consciousness that would be a full political subject. Bhabha suggests that Jameson subsumes race and gender because he believes that only through the mediation of the category of class is political consciousness possible. Consciousness, that is, in a materialist Hegelian sense; the collective subject, not an individual’s sense of her own oppression. Class is, according to Bhabha’s Jameson, the “mode of equivalence between oppressions or exploitations,” and is the only basis for fundamental social change. In contrast, two geographers, Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper (1993), writing in a collection of articles about the connections between politics, place, and space, combine a multidisciplinary approach with a critique of identity politics which groups together under the broad category of “modernist identity politics” all the political movements which focus on a single factor or which privilege a single dimension of identity: modernist identity politics . . . especially . . . those social movements that theorize either a universalist encompassing of other radical subjectivities (e.g. substituting woman for women or the transcendental unity of an international working class for multiracial, multi-ethnic, and otherwise diverse men and women workers) or, alternatively, that recognize differences but none the less theorize and strategize from the assumption of the primacy and privileging of one or other set of agents in the process of radical social transformation. (Soja and Hooper 1993, 186)

That is, the subsumptive forms of neo-Marxism, like Jameson’s theory, can be classified together with similarly subsumptive theories of gender, or race, or sexuality as forms of identity politics. Soja and Hooper’s categorization of these particular identity politics as “modernist” emphasizes the nineteenth-century

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roots of much twentieth-century radical politics, and the way that each group would organize its political resistance around the binary that seemed most salient to it: colonizer/colonized, capital/labor, man/woman, and so forth. In these theories, each binary is seen as overwhelmingly significant, and totalizations and essentialisms become common; though, as Soja and Hooper point out, in an allusion to Gayatri Spivak’s use of this expression, sometimes as “strategic essentialisms” or strategic totalizations. Soja and Hooper are thus able to contrast “identity politics” to a “radical postmodernism of resistance”; a category that would include bell hook’s postmodernist identity politic as well as Judith Butler’s postmodern critique of identity politics. However, Jameson (1994) groups both nineteenth- and twentieth-century “identity politics” and “radical postmodernisms of resistance” together with liberal and conservative postmodernisms. This is explicit in Jameson’s recent work, (1994), and implicit (as Bhabha suggests) in his earlier writings. When discussing historicism and the decentering of the subject, Jameson claims that the antithesis of the historicist model is what he refers to as “a radical form of poststructuralism,” the idea that the centered subject was arguably an “ideological mirage”: “(Of the two possible formulations of this notion—the historicist one, that a once-existing centered subject, in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position for which such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage—I obviously incline towards the former)” (Jameson 1984, 65, his brackets). Jameson’s attack on this straw man is futile. Instead, I would suggest that the “antithesis” of an at least partly historicist approach would be an extreme form of postmodernism. Jameson successfully critiques the most extreme, “radical” form of postmodernism—liberal neopragmatist postmodernism—in the 1994 text. However, he equates liberal, neopragmatist postmodernism and feminist, antiracist, gay, or lesbian postmodernisms. As a result of this, he identifies all antifoundationalisms with Lyotardian and Wittgensteinian language-games. However, as discussed in chapter 1, Levinas’s antifoundationalism is quite different from both Lyotardian and Wittgensteinian arguments; by distinguishing infinity and totality, one is able to reject totalization and yet retain, even enable, political and ethical commitment. Foundationalism is based on Descartes’s extraordinarily influential philosophy; Descartes argued that philosophy must begin with something that cannot be doubted, a “foundation” or basis

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for knowledge. In other words, epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) is seen, both by Descartes and by most subsequent philosophers, as primary; both more important and more basic. The foundation Descartes came up with is known as the “cogito”: I think, therefore I am. Strictly speaking, foundationalism is the idea that there must be a foundation (or origin) for epistemology or, by extrapolation, for other philosophical and theoretical discourses; however, the term is often used, rather loosely, to refer to the kinds of theories of subjectivity related to the cogito. Levinas argues that philosophical argument (or “theory”) can begin with ethics rather than epistemology. His theory of ethics is drawn from two sources: phenomenology and Jewish religious thought. The phenomenological notion of “the encounter” is at the heart of his theory; he argues that a “non-allergic” encounter with the other, in which the other is not subsumed, colonized, or in any other way brought into the economy of the same, is, by definition, the beginning of ethics. (As anyone with hayfever knows, the sneezing, bloodshot eyes, and sniffles are caused by the subject’s oversensitivity to the histamine that cells produce in response to the presence of a foreign object. The problem has to do with the self’s reaction to the other, rather than with “otherness” as such.) Levinas draws on Jewish religious thought when working out the implications of this. For a religious Jew, one example of the other is God. The encounter with God is an encounter of the finite (the subject) and the Infinite. Levinas distinguishes the (non-allergic) encounter with the infinite from the (sublime) encounter with totality. As ethics has priority over epistemology (the encounter comes before knowledge) you can have epistemological theories that draw on this ethical and phenomenological theory. Most importantly, there is nothing about this theory to suggest that one has to discard the concept of truth. That is, not all antifoundationalisms are relativist theories about language games. Two very different kinds of antifoundationalism have recently become influential in the United States: neopragmatism and “radical postmodernism” (for example, the postmodernism of bell hooks). Jameson (1994), however, lumps together new social movement identity politics, radical postmodernisms, and neopragmatist postmodernisms. I’m unhappy with this terminology “radical postmodernism.” One can, of course, label different uses of postmodernism according to the politics of the speech-acts the texts accomplish, or according to the politics of the writers of those texts, insofar as those politics can be known, and to the sometimes limited extent—a critique of the terms one uses is useful here—that

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the writer’s intention is carried through in—or by—the text. However, those political mappings don’t necessarily coincide with a mapping of the other philosophical differences. For example, one can produce a pragmatist postmodernism with different politics—further to the left, for example, or more cynical—than the one associated with Rorty’s work. Similarly—or even more so—Lyotardian arguments can easily be used by anyone arguing for any possible political position. My own preference is to try to produce a pragmatics, drawing both on James and Dewey, as well as Austin; I’ve found Derrida’s texts more helpful than Rorty’s, from my own personal and political position. Rorty might characterize me, therefore, as a “personal ironist,” but when personal reactions to institutions, as well as to texts, are shared by people in political movements, those movements flourish. Jameson fails to classify subsumptive neo-Marxism as an identity politic; privileging it instead as the theory behind the only political consciousness he considers to be “for itself,” capable of becoming a true, collective political subject. The new social movements, in contrast, he refers to as “group-based” movements, “group” as opposed to “collectivity,” “social” as opposed to “political.” Jameson is thus able to classify the new social movements as examples of postmodern “fragmentation”; however, unlike the connotations that would be paramount for a right-wing, conservative writer, for Jameson it is the left which has fragmented into the new social movements, it is the unity of class consciousness which has been lost. This link between group-based identities, new social movements, and fragmentation is made even more clearly in David Harvey’s (1989) critique of local, group-based politics. The critique relies on the distinction between place and space Harvey makes in this as in his other work: First, the capacity of most social movements to command place better than space puts a strong emphasis on the potential connection between place and social identity. This is manifest in political action. . . . The consequent dilemmas of socialist or working-class movements in the face of a universalizing capitalism are shared by other oppositional groups—racial minorities, colonized peoples, women, etc.—who are relatively empowered to organize in place but disempowered when it comes to organizing over space. In clinging, often of necessity, to a place-bound identity, however, such oppositional movements become a part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upon. (Harvey 1989, 302–3, ellipses added)

Harvey argues that both class-based movements, and the new social movements, have power in place, but not in space; space

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and spatializations are associated with capitalism. Capitalism universalizes; one result of this is a divide-and-rule strategy: fragmentation. Labor has the potential to organize space as well as place, but capital’s strategy of fragmentation makes this difficult. Race and gender and other new social movements share the difficulty, the fragmentation by capital, but do not—reading “disempowered” as “deprived of power” rather than “less empowered” —share the potential; they cannot organize space, only place. Harvey’s distinction between place and space interacts with the way that he considers class differently from race and gender, as an analytical category as well as an identity form; race and gender are only treated as forms of identity, not as analytical categories in their own right. It is only universalization that is treated as a spatialization; universalization is considered as the prerogative only of capitalism and, in potential, of labor. In Harvey (1996, 2002, and 2003), by contrast, Harvey considers all social movements, those of class and of environmental justice, as well as those of gender, race, or sexuality, as the sources of the analytical categories he both critiques and uses in his work, and as, returning from movement to theory, and from there to movement, both platial and spatial. He still, though, unlike Pratt (1984), and unlike Martin and Mohanty (1986) (discussed below), and unlike Casey (1997), associates space with the liberatory potential of movements, and place with constraints on individuals and movements. We can follow Gregory and argue that “place-bound identities” are spatial practices and thus, according to Harvey and Lefebvre’s theory, part of the production of space. Harvey’s expression, “place-bound,” is quite misleading: local practices can produce spatializations. Local practices are not bound to place but are potentially articulable across space, globally. The form that this global articulation takes, though, is more often a network than a system: a coalition of specific, different groups rather than a universalization of any one political identity. Or, instead, we can follow Casey, and argue that “place-bound identities” are platial practices, part of the production of place, and produce platializations. Casey argues that spatialization has become the hegemonic material-semiotic practice and so platialization, though we can trace its genealogy back through writers as diverse as Irigaray, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, Whitehead, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, to Archytas and Aristotle, is harder to put into words. I will give several examples of the way local practices produce platializations. In each case, the platialization is like “universalization” in alluding to some kind of global articulation; however, the theorizing move emphasizes conflict and irreconcilability.

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The network model, as an alternative to universalization, has most often been reached, in new social movement texts, by a critique of the notions of home and community. I therefore begin with a discussion of these arguments. One of the most influential feminist critiques of the notion of home is developed by Martin and Mohanty (1986, 191–212). Their article is an extended analysis of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s autobiographical narrative (1984). Martin and Mohanty discuss the historical model Pratt uses, pointing out the ways in which Pratt rejects comfortable linear notions of progress. Instead, they comment, Pratt focuses on struggle and resistance. Furthermore, they note, Pratt rejects the idea that there might be a single political history and, instead, discusses multiple, separate histories of resistance. Pratt’s model of historical and social change develops because of the way she focuses on spatial and platial practices as well as historical processes and struggles: What Pratt uncovers of the town histories is multilayered and complex. She speaks of the relation of different groups of people to the town and their particular histories of resistance—the breaking up of Klan rallies by Lumbee Indians, the long tradition of black culture and resistance, Jewish traditions of resistance, anti-Vietnam protest, and lesbians’ defiance of military codes—with no attempt to unify or equate the various struggles under a grand polemics of oppression. The co-existence of these histories gives the narrative its complex, rich texture. Both the town and her relation to it change as these histories of struggle are narrated. (Martin and Mohanty 1986, 205)

Martin and Mohanty praise Pratt for her honesty and willingness to acknowledge the ways in which she has felt frightened and out of place when she encountered people different from her. Pratt sees this fear and disapproval of others in political terms, not psychological terms. Pratt’s political/personal analysis is based on a platial analysis. Martin and Mohanty point out the ways in which Pratt describes and analyzes her sense of being out of place. They focus on which ways in which these metaphors of place and home keep being linked, in Pratt’s text, to models of personal, historical, and social change: Indeed, there is an explicit structural connection between moments of fear and loss of former homes with the recognition of the importance of interpretation and struggle. From our perspective, the integrity of the narrative and the sense of self have to do with the refusal to make easy divisions and with the unrelenting exploration of the ways in which the desire for home,

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for security, for protection—and not only the desire for them, but the expectation of a right to these things—operates in Pratt’s own conception of political work. (Martin and Mohanty 1986, 205–6)

Martin and Mohanty argue that the non-linear model Pratt uses in her autobiographical narrative and Pratt’s non-unitary model of history are both based on a close analysis of a particular place, her hometown, and a critique of platially and spatially rooted concepts like home and community. Martin and Mohanty argue that Pratt analyzes the way in which her own conceptualization of home was race and class specific. On the basis of this analysis, Pratt arrives at her model of historical change as well as her particular narrative form: “What differentiates her narration of her development from other feminist narratives of political awakening is its tentativeness, the way in which it consists of fits and starts, and the absence of linear progress toward a visible end. This narrator pursues the extent and the ways in which she carried her white, middle-class conceptions of home around with her, and the ways in which they informed her relations to politics” (Martin and Mohanty 1986, 206). Martin and Mohanty’s discussion of the relation between Pratt’s conceptualization of political consciousness and her analysis of home and community focuses on Pratt’s rhetorical strategies. They draw attention to Pratt’s use of ambiguity: “The search for a secure place is articulated in its ambivalence and complexity through the ambiguous use of the words place and space in precisely the ways they have become commonplace within feminist discourse” (Martin and Mohanty 1986, 206). Martin and Mohanty argue that Pratt’s ambiguous use of the words place and space enables her to describe and argue for a particular notion of political consciousness. The ambiguities articulate a kind of ambivalence. Pratt’s political subject insists on retaining an “[I]rreconcilable tension between the search for a secure place from which to speak, within which to act, and the awareness of the price at which secure places are bought, the awareness of the exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on which they are predicated” (Martin and Mohanty 1986, 206). Martin and Mohanty say that Pratt’s tropes which shift between place and space are “ambiguities.” However, we also could argue that Martin and Mohanty’s tropes, like those of Pratt, call attention to the ways in which “place” and “home,” as platial and spatial practices and representations, give rise to both platializations and spatializations. In her 1982 novel, Audre Lorde tropes on place and space in a typical argument about difference. She argues here, as in so

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much of her work, that difference is a source of strength. She also, again typically, makes connections between writing, difference and social change, transforming the Jamesian “house of fiction” into her “house of difference”: For some of us there was no one particular place, and we grabbed whatever we could from wherever we found space, comfort, quiet, a smile, non-judgment. Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different. It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference. (And often, we were cowards in our learning.) It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own. (Lorde 1982, 226, Lorde’s italics).

Zami is a beautifully written postmodern novel that describes the way in which its heroine gains a sense of her own identity. One of the strengths of the novel is the way in which Lorde focuses in turn on different aspects of her heroine’s identity: for example, her ethnicity, as an American West Indian, her race, as a Black woman in a racist America, and her sexuality as a lesbian. The book as a whole and in the individual chapters stresses the ways in which no single aspect of her identity defines her: thus when as a lesbian she experiences racism in gay bars she comes, painfully, to work out a sense of herself as both lesbian and Black. The shifting focus enables Lorde to flesh out, to materialize, her particular idea of difference: “the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference.” One room in the house of difference could provide the “security of any one particular difference:” for example, a space for a separatist movement of “Black dykes together,” but her place, the place written by the novel is the “house of difference,” a coalition and also a writing. Perhaps the clearest example of the ways that spatializations are produced in new social movement arguments for coalition, and by means of a platial analysis of home and community, is the well-known speech by Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the founders of Sweet Honey in the Rock. The speech was given at the 1981 (American) West Coast Women’s Music Festival. Reagon would, I imagine, disagree with Casey’s claim that we

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only think spatially, not platially. Her argument suggests that our spatial thinking depends—in the strong sense—on our platial thinking. Platialization, for Reagon, is not the excluded or abjected substrate of our spatial thought but the—not terribly difficult to describe—ground of spatialization. Reagon discusses the dominance of separatism in the U.S. women’s movement(s) in the 1970s. There were several different sides to this hegemony: the stress on the importance of autonomous organization, the stress on women’s culture, the establishment of women-only festivals, and the rise of lesbian separatism, are only a few examples. Reagon brings her discussion of separatism together with her analysis of another historical phenomenon: the dominance of the women’s movement in the same period by white women. In the late 1970s and early 1980s many women of color critiqued racism in the women’s movement. This speech is one of these interventions. What is particularly useful about her argument is the way she addresses her own discomfort, at that time, with some groups in the women’s movement, arguing that coalition is difficult and can be painful: in fact, it has to be, to work. She uses a place-based metaphor, “a little barred room,” to critique the tendency of identity politics to lead to separatism. Separatism is like a little barred room, seemingly justified by particular circumstances, “Now every once in awhile there is a need for people to try to clean out corners and bar the doors and check everybody who comes in the door, and check what they carry in and say, ‘Humph, inside this place the only thing we are going to deal with is X or Y or Z’ ” (Reagon, 357). However, after the development of a range of separatist movements in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, racism came to be a significant issue in the women’s and lesbian movements. Reagon argues that the separatist women’s and lesbian movements decided to let “Black folks” into the “barred room.” However, the movements had defined a sense of what their central political topics were, and what their identity was: “Well, how we gonna figure out whether they’re X’s or not?” Because there’s nothing in the room but X’s. (Laughter) . . . So you go down the checklist and say, “If we can find Black folk like that we’ll let them in the room.” . . . Cause you didn’t say, “THIS ROOM IS FOR WHITE X’S ONLY.” You just said it was for X’s. So everybody who thinks they’re an X comes running to get into the room . . . The first thing that happens is that the room don’t feel like the room anymore. (Laughter) And it ain’t home no more. . . . Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets . . . You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition . . . It is very important not to confuse them—home and coalition . . . And it ain’t

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no refuge place. And it’s not safe. (Reagon 1983, 358–59, ellipses added)

Reagon analyzes separatism by using a trope, the “little barred room.” She addresses the way that separatisms were platial practices: the establishment of a place for Xs. Using a method of analysis similar to, but not identical to, Lefebvre’s tripartite conceptualization of space as made up of spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation, linked together in a dynamic, dialectical process, Reagon analyzes the way that the spatial practices of separatism gave rise to platializations. Both the “representations of space” and the “spaces of representation” in her example are derived from common female activities. Rather than dividing feminist practices and representation into dominant and oppressive practices/representation and subaltern, potentially radical practices/representation, Reagon looks at the platial spatializations implicit in feminist use and representation of “home” and “street.” “Home” is not exclusively “representation of space” and “street” is not exclusively “space of representation.” Reagon argues that feminists thought of the “barred room” of separatism as a home: a place to take care of things, a place to be fed. She alludes to historical change: the Black critique of racism in the women’s movement, “And we will break your door down . . . cause you didn’t say, ‘THIS ROOM IS FOR WHITE Xs ONLY.’ ” She proposes a more politically enabling platial metaphor: “Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the street.” The “street” is of course a “place,” but the opposition between “home” and “street” is a way of thinking about and constructing space. This way of producing a spatialization is embodied and materialist: “You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. It is very important not to confuse them—home and coalition. And it ain’t no refuge place. And it’s not safe” (Reagon 1983, 359). This approach enables her to arrive at a workable, realistic definition of coalition, one that addresses the difficulties of political movements and the reasons behind the move towards coalition politics. As she says at the end of the speech: “There is an offensive movement that started in this country in the 60s that is continuing. The reason that we are stumbling is that we are at the point where we’ve got to do it with some folk we don’t care too much about” (Reagon, 368). Reagon reminds us that a coalition is a joining together of people who may not even like each other, much less be like each other. The only thing they share is membership in a coalition:

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being part of a movement. Social groups—and material-semiotic spatial practices—are thus not either liberated/ing or oppressed/ ing, but both liberating and oppressing at once. Reagon analyzes, as well as evokes, the emotions that political agents feel. Harvey, too, is a deeply politically committed writer, and quite deliberately evokes and calls to the emotions, as well as to the values, that politically committed people feel, and which motivate and inform their political actions. Harvey’s own emotions are, in accordance with this, often quite legible in his text. Thus, for example, the frequent representation of platialization as threatening— the allusions, for example, to capital’s injunction, from “outside,” that we ought to be “in our place.” The problem is that there’s a real double bind here. As Reagon points out, we too (not just “they”) put ourselves in our place, as well as occasionally taking to the streets. Second, Reagon, Jameson, and Harvey are all addressing the same historical phenomenon. All of these writers are concerned that the leftist movements in the United States are not united. It is this situation that is often referred to as “fragmentation.” However, it could also be described as the development of new possibilities, new ways of living that are not thought of as beyond the pale, in a ghetto. What, from one point of view, looks like fragmentation, from another looks like a chance not to assimilate, or pass, or to be tolerated, but to change society. The problem with the notion of “fragmentation” is that it assumes that there was a unity in the past. My argument is that this past unity never existed. It was only a fantasy. However, fantasies and, in particular, the fantasies associated with what might be called the social imaginary, those which appeal to Lack and the longing for an originary plenitude, have a powerful effect on people, and can be the basis of the construction of identity. Political texts can represent social change as fragmentation or as the construction of a house of difference. They can argue that one form of consciousness must mediate the others, because only this form of consciousness is “for itself,” or they can argue for coalition politics. They can prioritize and value universalization, as a move from particular to general, from happenstance to law, or they can keep the tension between local and global, moving from one to the other, back and forth. A focus on “fragmentation” evokes and produces a longing for a lost plenitude. The feminist new social movement texts I have analyzed work through these feelings of loss and fear without reducing them to the purely psychological; they place them in the social imaginary, not the Lacanian Imaginary. They do this by an analysis of place and space, of local spaces. Harvey, since he makes many

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of the same distinctions, and since he thinks his emotional reactions, and those of his interlocutors, significant enough to leave legible in his texts and arguments, could also do this, but for some reason, in this 1989 text, he tends not to push the argument, and the analysis of his reactions as well as his concepts, to its conclusion. However, by 1996 the emotional content is developed further. For example, his discussion of the horrendous fire at a chicken-processing factory in Hamlet, North Carolina, in which 25 of the 200 workers were killed, builds on his sorrow and fury to produce a strongly argued critique of the limits of the more postmodern progressive groups and theories (Harvey 1996, 334–65).

Periodization and Historicization: Local and Global Approaches David Harvey has always been concerned with, and has had a great deal of influence on, the disciplinization of geography. He has argued, polemically, that geography as a discipline should emphasize metatheory. One of his main objects of study has been urbanism: the study of cities and suburbs. His method of analysis is Marxist. He claims that Marxism has focused primarily on historical change and has not addressed the importance of space. Harvey’s metatheoretical work, found in a range of texts (Harvey 2000, 1996, 1989, 1982), is exciting and illuminating. The arguments about neo-Marxist theory and Marxist economics are a pleasure to read. However, Harvey comments himself (Harvey 1982, xiv) on the difficulties of integrating history and theory. Most of the close readings (the “local” part of the local/global dialectic) are in articles and chapters of their own. The most sustained theoretical work, up to the sustained “discursive reflection” of Harvey (1996), tends to stick predominantly to the global level; the articles on Baltimore (1977, 1978) and Paris (1979, reprinted as chapter 7 in Harvey 1985, 1989) include more movement between local and global. Other works bridge both metatheoretical and local, for example, Harvey (2000, 2003). Mike Davis’s approach, in contrast, is more local than global (see, for example, Davis 2003, 2002, 2001, 1992, 1986). He too writes about spatialization, addressing and making use of spatial practices and spatial concepts in Marxist research, but all of this is embedded in detail. His approach is a thick description, not a metatheory. Davis’s argument, as distinct from his methodology, is local/global. Rather than thinking of place in opposition to space, or detail or fragment in opposition to system, he shifts

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from one to the other, using one to theorize the other, using one to show up the limitations of an approach in terms of the other, and so forth. As many theorists have argued, “local” does not mean “lacking in scope”; global can sometimes mean system but can at other times mean network, coalition. Both Harvey and Davis draw on a particular tradition within economics, the work of Michel Aglietta (1979) and the Regulation School. Aglietta critiqued classical Marxism and introduced a variety of new concepts in order to address the ways in which contemporary twentieth-century capitalism differs from nineteenth-century capitalism. The Regulation School is concerned with the social reproduction of capitalism; it analyzes the way in which production and consumption are regulated in a regime of accumulation. David Harvey adapts this Regulation School argument, suggesting that we have now shifted to a regime of “flexible accumulation.” The name comes from a model used to analyze contemporary employment patterns. Production and consumption are seen by the Regulation School as connected; both are part of accumulation. The modes of regulation include social and ideological formations, institutions, and actions; the Regulation School argues against a narrow conception of economics. Harvey (1982), like Aglietta (1979), was written in the 1970s (or very early 1980s) and deals with twentieth-century capitalism in general, comparing it with the nineteenth-century capitalism Marx was able to write about. Harvey (1989) deals with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Harvey’s earlier work was sometimes criticized for paying little attention to representation, and Harvey (1989) remedies this, addressing film and art more than in his earlier work. Harvey has also pointed out that money (one of the “three cuts” or analytical slices Harvey takes in his 1982 text to lay out three views of complex phenomena) is a representation. In some ways, Harvey treats production and consumption separately in Harvey (1989), focusing first on production and the shift from the employment practices associated with Fordism to post-Fordist, flexible employment practices and then on consumption and the commodification of the arts. In his Baltimore essays (1977, 1978) he also treats each in turn, referring to the “dichotomy of working and living.” Of course he argues that this dichotomy is imposed by capitalism, but he leaves it curiously unanalyzed. Harvey’s approach (like Aglietta’s, for that matter) is more structuralist than poststructuralist. Rather than a notion of an admittedly extremely precarious balance between production and consumption, Harvey describes a “system” which it is the task of a “regime of

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accumulation” to regulate; he argues that capitalism is largely regulated by “spatial and temporal fixes.” He thus expands the notion of “regulation” to include the spatial, but defines the social more narrowly than is strictly necessary. Harvey argues that capitalism relies on both spatial and temporal fixes. The center of Harvey’s theory of “geographical materialism” is his concept of the “spatial fix.” In Harvey (1982) he argued that there are three concepts that must be central to any analysis of capitalism: money, space, and time. These “three cuts” are three ways of getting at the multiple determinations of capitalism. There is no suggestion that there are only three determinations; we could presumably take a fourth cut and prepare another section for analysis under our hypothetical microscope. A critique of Harvey for totalizing is thus misplaced. Unlike Harvey’s earlier metatheoretical work, which was concerned with an analysis of capitalism in general, Harvey (1989) is an analysis of transnationalism, the present stage of capitalism. (Fordism is the period just before ours.) Transnationalism is capital’s “spatial fix” of accumulation’s crisis; an addictive, repetitive attempt to use displacement in space to keep the system going. Capitalism makes use of spatial displacement—opening up new markets, appropriating raw materials, locating production and design in whatever region or country is cheapest—in order to cope. It then needs more: another fix or a larger fix. As my use of the concept of transnationalism suggests, I am also not criticizing Harvey for globalizing; capital globalizes and it is important to analyze how it does so. The “spatial fix” as a theoretical notion addresses several characteristics of transnationalism: both the separation of production into different stages of design and assembly taking place in different countries, with the circuit boards made in Southeast Asian versions of maquiladoras, and the software in Silicon Valley, and the transition in the developed countries to so-called service-based economies, with shrinking core employment and increasing peripheral employment. Even before the NAFTA trade agreement, many North American-centered transnational companies set up factories in Mexico where environmental regulations are more lax and wages are lower. The factories are usually near the Mexican/U.S. border, so that the American managers can live in First World housing; transportation of the factories’ goods is also easier. These are maquiladoras. In Asia, many of the factories are also maquiladoras: for example, Japanese transnationals in Peninsular Malaysia —see Aihwa Ong’s excellent book (1989) for a local/global analysis, framed in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, or

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spirituality, which develops a very broad sense of “regulation.” In contrast to the maquiladoras, the “Little Tigers” are not a “spacial fix” but a center/periphery shift: postcolonial accumulation. Like Fredric Jameson, the Marxist historical geographers are interested in notions of periodization. Harvey (1989) deals with three issues: are we in a new, post-Fordist social and economic phase, have our cultural and artistic formations shifted to a new set of postmodern genres, and can we relate these two sets of changes together? Harvey, like Jameson, tries to find a connection between transnational capitalism and postmodernism. Harvey argues, like Jameson, Soja, and so forth, that postmodern theories characteristically draw on spatial concepts. Harvey, also like Jameson, Soja, and others, sees this as part of a wider phenomenon: a spatial turn in postmodernity. Harvey uses his concept, the “spatial fix,” to periodize a spatial turn in the mode of accumulation. His argument is a classic Marxist depth-model analysis, with changes in accumulation seen as the basis for all other changes. Harvey (1989) argues that the key moment for the transition from Fordism to “flexible accumulation” happened around 1973. He suggests that 1973 is the most significant date because of what he calls the “collapse, in 1973, of the Bretton Woods gold standard.” He is referring to the U.S. going off the gold standard; Bretton Woods had specified conversion rates for other currencies, pegged to the U.S. dollar, with the dollar pegged to gold. Harvey’s date, 1973, is somewhat overprecise: various stages of the 1944 Bretton Woods accords collapsed throughout the 1970s and, in any case, there are still repercussions of Bretton Woods today—arguably (Hutton 1995) the 1989 failure of the exchange rate of the British pound with the other European currencies (the ERM) is at least partly a consequence of the unrealistic exchange rate with the dollar set in 1944. Hutton, though less of a Marxist, shares Harvey’s interest in financial institutions and laws. Harvey argues that Fordism and “flexible accumulation,” as historically distinct economic forms, had particular “modes of regulation”; he argues that those most significant in the transition to (or of) flexible accumulation are “devaluation” and destruction of “fixed capital” in the built environment (a common fate of mass transit systems); macroeconomic regulation, (including collective bargaining rights and closed shop agreements); and temporal and spatial displacement. There are two spatial aspects to regulation Harvey considers. Both of these are significant characteristics, differentiating

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our post-Fordist system from the Fordist system that used to be hegemonic. First, Harvey argues that in the Fordist system industrial mass production was hegemonic and economic instabilities were regulated by New Deal-type policies, Welfare Statism, and Keynsian fostering of demand. Keynesianism was a kind of debt financing; a temporal displacement. Thus, temporal displacement was central during Fordism. Spatial displacement, as Harvey (1982) argues, was still very important, and an analysis of space essential to the analysis of capitalism. Temporal displacement is now less heavily relied on in the West than it was during Fordism. In fact, the neo-liberals delegitimize it. Harvey argues that spatial displacement is at the heart of the present economic system. It is useful because it: “[E]ntails the absorption of excess capital and labour in geographical expansion. This ‘spatial fix’ . . . to the overaccumulation problem entails the production of new spaces within which capitalist production can proceed (through infrastructural investments for example), the growth of trade and direct investments, and the exploration of new possibilities for the exploitation of labour power” (Harvey 1989, 83, ellipsis added). The increasing importance of space is not just confined to the ways spatial practices are used. Spatial concepts are also increasingly important. Harvey analyzes the way that contemporary employment practices are modeled, pointing out that most analysts make use of spatializations when describing employment patterns. Analysts typically use a core/periphery model, distinguishing between core workers, that is, full-time unionized workers with benefits, and peripheral workers, directly subject to these “flexible” work patterns, either on short-term contracts, or part-time, subcontracted, job-sharing, on so-called government training schemes. What is most significant about the Regulation School is the way that it addresses the social and economic methods that societies use to regulate reproduction (social and ideological reproduction, as well as the quantifiable aspects), rather than focusing only on production and consumption. Harvey’s argument about the spatial aspects of regulation is, it is clear, an important, significant development in neo-Marxist theory. However, he doesn’t use enough analytical concepts when analyzing the more social aspects of production, reproduction (or replication, to use Haraway’s term), and consumption. Among the more interesting aspects of flexible accumulation (and one which would move the key date for periodization back to the 1940s at the very

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latest) are the changes in the social reproduction of the working class. Different workers are being (re)produced. It is generally agreed that the economy in Western countries is dominated, more and more, by so-called “flexible” conditions, with more service sector employment and less “core” manufacturing work. The “peripheral” workers are increasingly women, and the “core” workers were mainly men. Harvey draws on his knowledge of the differential gendering of the core and periphery of the flexible employment pattern of the industrialized West, using this knowledge in a condemnation of the new ways for capital to exploit labor. The rhetoric misfires, and Harvey, describing the gendering of “flexible employment,” at the same time as he attacks capital for this latest form that exploitation (and accumulation) takes, seems almost to characterize women, as workers, as substitutes for men, rather than, as individuals, part of capital or labor: “Not only do the new labour market structures make it much easier to exploit the labour power of women on a part-time basis, and so to substitute lower-paid female labour for more highly paid and less easily laid-off core male workers” (Harvey 1989, 153). There are only two analytical concepts used here. The first concept is a spatialization, “the core/periphery model.” The second concept is “labor.” Rather than analyzing “flexible accumulation” in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality, Harvey (1989) only uses class properly as an analytical category. Gender, for Harvey, at this point in his work, is simply a descriptive term, not a metatheoretical analytical category; race, in contrast, is a central analytical concern for Harvey’s more “local” studies, although, oddly, it becomes more descriptive than analytical in the more metatheoretical work, and sexuality is thought through rather badly, but, nevertheless, in the few occasions when it emerges, is, if confusedly, used analytically. The problems with Harvey’s treatment of gender become clearer at the points in the argument at which Harvey brings together his discussion of the two main spatial aspects of regulation, the “spatial fix” and the “core/periphery model.” The first sentence of the following quotation is a description of the “spatial fix” characteristic of transnationalism; Harvey emphasizes questions of race here. The second sentence is a description of the gendering of the core/periphery model of employment. The description and terminology (as in the sentence quoted above) are fairly conventional. I’m not suggesting that the problems I identify are any more true of Harvey’s work than of the work of many other geographers or sociologists. However, Harvey’s work is too good

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for a serious feminist scholar to ignore, but, at the same time, his 1989 work simply cannot be used “as is” by a feminist theorist. Both statements in the passage below describe the relation between one collectivity, the subject constructed in the enunciation, and a different collectivity, constructed as the “other,” that which is in relation to the subject. In the first sentence, the “Little Tigers” of Southeast Asia and the enclaves of Third World immigrants in First World cities are “the other.” In the second sentence, women are “the other.” “Unionization and traditional ‘left politics’ become very hard to sustain in the face, for example, of the patriarchal (family) production systems characteristic of South-East Asia, or of immigrant groups in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Gender relations have similarly become more complicated, at the same time as resort to a female labour force has become much more widespread” (Harvey 1989, 192). It is a white, male, unionized workforce that is the subject here. The “core” sector of employment, the sector of full-time, unionized workers that was the center of the Fordist integration, has historically been disproportionately male and white. As Mike Davis (1986) argues of the United States, the particular histories of the integration of the Fordist system of production in each country must not be bracketed off from the description and analysis of regulation and accumulation. Davis argues that contemporary restructurings of the economy are part of a crisis of overconsumption traceable back to the “expanded reproduction of middle-strata claims to the national income.” This is leading to an increasing division in society between the haves and the have-nots. However, the apparent radical difference between the neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism of the contemporary U.S. (or indeed Britain) and the previous legitimacy of New Deal, Welfare Statist ideology is a misleading appearance. The history of the rise of unionization in the United States, the legitimacy of collective bargaining, is a history of race as well as class. The collective bargaining and the social wage that were secured, as Davis shows in his detailed history of the baroque, corrupt interactions of the AFL-CIO unions and the Democratic Party, were achieved as a result of a historical process that must, as Davis argues, be analyzed in terms of race, religion, and ethnicity, as well as class. Davis thus, unlike Harvey, is able to argue that it is the racism and ethnic-religious prejudice of this history that has historically undermined every attempt at a broad-based, leftist movement in the United States. However, interestingly, he barely mentions gender in his discussion of the historical failures of the U.S. union movement that led to the weakness of the left:

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The “civil wars” between the AFL and CIO, and later within the CIO itself, undermined every attempt to establish a liberal bloc in American politics or to develop the basis for independent political action by labor. . . . The underlying determinant was still the persistence of those [ethnic and religious] divisions between the craft and mass production workforces . . . the surprising resurgence of the AFL in the late thirties behind the banners of labor-patriotism and anti-communism exploited the residual prejudices of the native and old-immigrant stock workers against the second-generation ethnic labourers in the mines and factories. Working class disunity was further augmented by pervasive white racism which all too frequently subverted wartime industrial militancy into “Hate strikes” against Black newcomers. Finally, the cold war dramatically strengthened the hegemony of Catholicism and right wing ethnic nationalism in broad sectors of the industrial working class. (Davis 1986, 94; ellipses added)

Davis argues here that the American left has never had a secure position in either national or local politics because it has always been undermined by ethnic, religious, and racial divisions. Tragically, the left, whenever it has gained a foothold, had tended to do so by exploiting these divisions, rather than fighting against them. This is why it ends up in greater and greater disarray. As well as discussing class formation and unionization, Davis is addressing the American debate about the left: should it be a coalition? Are there one or two groups that could lead a resurgence of the left? (His answer: African Americans and the working class; other answers have been feminists, people of color, gays and lesbians, and “no leaders.”) However, instead of analyzing unionization in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and class, Harvey, in the passage about “unionization and ‘traditional’ left politics” with which this argument began, constructs the production systems of Southeast Asia as “other.” This othering is highly overdetermined: they are other because they have a different, “patriarchal” production system. The term “patriarchal” establishes an intertextuality with another discourse—radical feminism—which also subsumes the many constructions of difference under a single one (sexuality, for radical feminism, to be precise, overdetermining or subsuming gender and excluding—or, more charitably, subsuming—race and class). The glossing of this patriarchal system as a “family” system erases racial, religious, and ethnic difference: there are many kinship systems; “family” is not universal cross-culturally. The second sentence of Harvey’s discussion of left politics and unionization can be analyzed in a way which makes it clear

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that the representation that is at stake here, in a description of transnationalism, is a representation in which the construction of gender, of kinship, and of sexuality are combined. He writes, “Gender relations have similarly become more complicated.” What does this rather ungrammatical expression, “gender relations,” mean in this text? It would appear to be a contraction of “relations between persons of different genders.” In what way could relations between persons of different genders have become more complicated? Judith Butler (1990) points out that multiple possibilities for different constructions of gender and sexuality already exist; the problem is that the cultural domains they exist in are “designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible.” The task for us is to build a politics that supports, that is supported by, a whole series of discourses within which multiple constructions, and not only a single construction, make sense. Things have always been complicated for those of us who are constructed as abnormal, unnatural. Harvey’s assertion only makes sense as an enunciation of a particular subject, a male, and also a prescriptively heterosexual subject. From this subject position, it makes sense to represent an engagement with feminism, which Harvey, with undoubted good will but unfortunate results, surely intends, as “gender relations.” From this compulsorily heterosexual point-of-view, it then makes sense to discuss the “resort” to a “female labor force,” as if the norm is for women to be outside of accumulation, brought into, or kept out of production or consumption as a result of a relation to a man, or in collective relation to a system that is gendered male. Or, in other words, “class-based politics” are seen as the center of “left-politics,” with the question being how to expand them (or, more sadly, sustain them) to address race and gender. In contrast, many feminists (especially U.S. feminists of color), and left-wing gay, lesbian, and queer activists argue for a notion of coalition politics, without privileging any one group as the “center.” There are thus two problems here: the definition of a left-wing American politics, and the limitations of an analysis of capitalism which relies only on concepts of capital and labor, even in a period when race, gender, and sexuality shape capital and labor. The weaknesses of Harvey’s analysis—and even excellent work can still have weaknesses—are due to the way he uses gender and, to a lesser extent, race simply as categories of identity. He does not use them as analytical categories. Gender and, in some cases, race, are simply details to be added; more detailed and more varied examples of the way capital and class

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work out in practice. They are not, for him, basic analytical categories. However, as my discussion of the examples above shows, these excluded factors actually shape and constrain the analysis. Instead, what we need is a theory of accumulation that treats gender, race, and sexuality, as well as class, as analytical categories. There is no real reason why a historical geographer or a sociologist should not be able to come up with such a theory. Castells (1996, 1997, 1998), most notably, is able to do so. One of the reasons that Castells succeeds is that he brings an extraordinary amount of substantive detail to the broader arguments about both historicization and theorization. As a result, of course, Castells’ book on the same period, and on the same sorts of issues, is in three very long volumes. Works of fiction, however, are sometimes able to briefly express complex ideas and arguments, or to evoke or describe complexity itself. In earlier chapters I discussed two SF writers, Samuel Delany and Pat Cadigan, who rather explicitly advanced theoretical and philosophical arguments. I now will turn to the SF writer C. J. Cherryh, who is less explicit about her theoretical concerns, but whose work presents, in and through the narrative, a theory of accumulation analyzed in terms of gender, race, class, and sexuality.

Engaging the “Unnatural” The writer I discuss here, C. J. Cherryh (1982, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1992), writes about transnationalism. However, as a SF writer, she displaces transnational capitalism into a fictional future universe, a multiplanetary economy. She thus addresses transnationalism as a material-semiotic practice. By displacing it, she increases the layers of meaning that are intertwined. Thus a reader may in analyzing the text get at the more complex ways in which accumulation works. Cherryh, as a feminist science fiction writer, focuses on species difference, race, gender, sexuality, and class. Donna Haraway argues in her influential review article on North American feminist theory and feminist scholarship, “Gender for a Marxist Dictionary” (Haraway 1991c), that much North American feminist scholarship has left unexamined the binary oppositions between nature and culture, nature and history, and human and machine which underlie conventional sexist representations of femininity and masculinity. Her article develops a historicizing critique of North American feminist theories, locating them in the context of research in the life and

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social sciences and the relation of this to the liberalizing postSecond-World-War governments of the United States. She concludes that it is now possible for North American feminism to move beyond the nature/history split, abandoning Gayle Rubin’s notion of a sex/gender system and replacing this with a thoroughly constructivist position which would consider “nature” as historical, rather than as either “raw material” or unexamined facticity. Haraway’s argument, as the title of her essay makes clear, has a dual focus, addressing both neo-Marxist work and feminist work. This uncritical notion of nature as raw material, and the naïve belief that the natural sciences can be treated as ahistorical and non-ideological, is even more dominant in Marx and Engels’ writings than in recent second-wave North American feminisms. Haraway shows us that a socialist feminist argument which theorizes transnationalism in terms of gender, race and sexuality as well as class logically requires a prior analysis of these unexamined oppositions: nature/history, nature/culture, and human/machine. I analyze the last of these oppositions, human/machine, in earlier chapters. Here, instead, I look at the oppositions between nature and history, and nature and culture, showing how alternative representations, deconstructing and overcoming these oppositions, can begin to suggest the ways in which the neo-Marxist concepts, transnationalism and accumulation, must be transformed for feminist use. The main focus of C. J. Cherryh’s five-novel Chanur saga is difference: species and sexual difference. However, in the Chanur saga, the construction and questioning of species and sexual difference is used to define transnationalism. Cherryh, like David Harvey, argues that capitalism relies on spatial and temporal fixes. Like Harvey, she sees spatial fixes as central to transnationalism. However, rather than analyzing transnationalism primarily on the basis of class, focusing on capital and labor, Cherryh’s Chanur saga identifies sexual and species difference, not class, as the primary analytical categories. Like the Regulation School theorists, Cherryh analyzes reproduction. However, actions by individual agents and collectivities (clans, for example, the Chanur; species, like the kif, the hani, and so forth) are seen as central to social and economic reproduction. The actions of the heroines and heroes are responses to the crises of accumulation; the characters become increasingly aware of this as the series continues. The Chanur series, like much feminist SF, is centrally concerned with questions of agency. It also—and this is the reason Cherryh’s novels are relevant here—analyzes accumulation and transnationalism in both social and economic terms, seeing the social and the economic as connected. Cherryh’s novels make

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it clear that transnational accumulation cannot be analyzed in terms of capital and labor alone. The Chanur saga is set in a region of space known as Compact Space. The Compact is the treaty in which the imagined species are linked. The five novels tell the story of a spacefaring clan, the Chanur, who are members of a species called the hani. The hani are a leonine species, maned and bearded. Their other catlike feature is a gesture: they lower their ears when angry. As, however, they are civilized people, they have a culturally speciesspecific gesture: they consciously prick up their ears to be polite. Hani civilization is trade-based. The traders and the normative subjects are female. The hani, that is the hani women, value friendship and loyalty and the qualities of thought that make them successful in trade and political intrigue. The hani males, if they survive to adulthood, are pampered, isolated, and have a tendency to hysteria reinforced or constructed by the way that they are brought up, taught to fight but not to think, socialized to challenge the token male head of clan, if their sisters’ and wives’ political intrigues fail. It is considered natural for a male to fight any and every other male; it is considered civilized for a hani to lower and raise her ears in deference to her aunts and cousins, to overcome the species-specific blocking of hearing and fixing of vision that is the biological sign of the “hunter” and the intraspecies “challenger.” At first, Cherryh seems to have simply reversed the signs of sexual difference: females are bearded; males are hysterical. However, this is not the case. The other characteristics of the male hani, greater size, greater strength, a culture of territorial aggression making use of these biological characteristics, are all often argued to be characteristic of the male human. Cherryh is focusing on the interface between biology and culture: hani biological sexual difference is the same as human biological sexual difference, but hani sexual difference in culture is the opposite: normative female. Cherryh is thus using species difference in a deconstruction of gender difference. The leonine mane and beard of the hani are a sign of species difference; a characteristic of a terran species displaced into Compact Space and made into a new representation, the signifier of hani identity. The hani woman is constructed as normative; to her, sentient beings who are male or non-hani are alien. The relation between the hani woman as normative subject and the human male as alien, as the other, is represented in a scene which shows how gender and species difference is used to define transnational, or in this case, transplanetary, economy: “There had been something loose about the station dock

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all morning, skulking in amongst the gantries and the lines and the canisters which were waiting to be moved, lurking wherever shadows fell. It was pale, naked, starved looking. . . . It drew its line and meant to hold its territory. Male, maybe. It had that over-the-brink look in its eyes” (Cherryh 1982, 1–3, ellipsis added). The passage describes the heroine, Pyanfar’s, interpretation of the actions of a creature which is, at this point, undecidably animal or sentient being. In using the phrase “something loose” in her stream of consciousness she describes it as an animal, while, in the next sentence, “it drew its line and meant to hold its territory,” she describes it as a person, using the metaphor of writing and attributing purpose to its actions. (Writing is a conventional signifier of sentience in SF. Cherryh follows up on this trope a few pages later, when the injured Tully writes numbers on the deckplates with his own blood.) The undecidability still present in the passage quoted above is settled in a figure (“meant to hold its territory”) that fixes the creature as sentient, but retains the connotations of animality for the hani observer: other, male. Pyanfar uses the conventional terms of hani gender construction: males are more “natural,” territorial; females are more civilized, able to overcome their “nature.” However, there is a third layer to the undecidability: the human male, Tully, is “over the brink” because human space is very far away. He is over the brink, past the defining line, in a space in which he is defined as alien. This third meaning is dependent on the first two meanings: the displacement of an interplanetary economy is only interpretable by reference to local, specific constructions of gender and species difference. Species difference is defined by the contact between the different species, the hani, the mahendo’sat, the kif, the humans, the stsho, the knnn, the t’ca, the chi. The species come into contact by traveling through space. The hani, who are the normative subjects, the point of certainty in a narrative which deconstructs its subject matter, gender and species identity, travel because they are interplanetary traders. The basis for the whole story is thus, in a literal sense, accumulation: a balance between production and consumption. The point we can learn from the Regulation School is that this balance is not reached, cannot be reached, by the “invisible hand” of the neo-classical economists. A balance is made socially and politically. The hani traders and political intriguers, by traveling though space, keep going a system of accumulation that would collapse in crisis without them. However, the spacefaring hani are changed by their encounters with people, the mahendo’sat, stsho, and kif, who have different

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constructions of gender and species identity. The hani who deal with the crisis of accumulation in the Compact have a crisis of their own: the old women who are in power in the han are out of touch. They expect the other Compact species to act like civilized hani women; but they are other species and other genders and are differently civilized. Each book thus ends with the hani faced with a political crisis in response to which they must change their construction of gender and species identity. In this fictional universe, hani politics become generalized. The hani are the species with a flair for politics and for translation; and they thus come to take up a mediating role, brokering between the trade and/or military institutions and leaders of the Compact. They change in response to contact and translation; the heroines of the Chanur novels come to understand and employ other species-specific modes of thought. Species difference and more broadly the discipline of biology is, in this way, shown to be historical and “constructed.” Cherryh is not shifting the boundary between nature and culture but abolishing it; drawing on the protocols of “soft” anthropological SF to write about the opposition of “nature” and “the unnatural.” The normative female hani subjects are exclusively heterosexual. Lesbianism does not even exist for them. The form of sexuality that they regard as perverse, unnatural, non-reproductive sex is cross-species heterosexuality: “Go fall in love with your own species, kid. Go make babies downworld.” However, as the reference to “downworld” makes clear, the spacefaring clans are aware that different species have different cultures. Spacefaring hani engage in cross-species heterosexuality; the prohibition as unnatural seems less and less intelligible, the more the spacefaring hani learn to denaturalize and not just to change the constructions they had previously taken for granted. It is thus their actions, managing the crisis of accumulation, which denaturalize the construction of gender and species identities. In a fictional universe, accumulation denaturalizes gender and species identity. The crises to which accumulation is subject, the transition to a new regime which may be taking place, have as much to do with gender, sexuality, and race as they have to do with class.

Spatialization: Class and Race This discussion of “historical geographical materialism” ends by showing how Mike Davis succeeds in using religion, ethnicity,

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and race as analytical categories in an argument about class, the point of which is to argue that class cannot be considered as a monadic, unitary category. Davis (1986) is his analysis of Fordism; Davis (1990) is an analysis of transnational postmodernity. Both books are histories of local spaces: the United States for the first book, Los Angeles for the second. Davis’s work is significant for two reasons. First, his class-based analytical categories are transformed as a result of his historical analysis of race, and the categories of race transformed after the analysis of class. Second, he proceeds by way of an analysis of spatial practices. As well as focusing on the ways these spatial practices give rise to spatial concepts, Davis makes considerable use of spatializations as analytical, theoretical concepts. Chapter 1 of Davis (1986), “Why the US working class is different,” examines why “independent labor politics” never emerged in America, unlike Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Davis begins by noting that one of the main differences between the United States and Europe is that the European working class fought a battle for suffrage and civil rights; however, in the United States, a franchise was granted in the beginning to white males so that, “in dramatic contradistinction to Europe, popular sovereignty (for white males) was the pre-existent ideological and institutional framework for the industrial revolution and the rise of the proletariat” (Davis 1986, 11). But why then did the American working class not take advantage of suffrage to “forge its own political instruments,” for example, a labor party? Many antiracists and theorists of color have argued that whiteness is often left unanalyzed as the “unmarked category.” Davis, however, marks and analyzes white ethnicity. He argues that the American working class has never gained a single, common identity because of the impact of both nativism and racism. The American nineteenth-century ideological and cultural formation, nativism, was particularly important. From the late 1840s onwards, any “cultural homogeneity of the Northern working class” was broken down by the religious and ethnic divisions in the country, resulting in the “formation of two corporatist sub-cultures organized along a religious divide and operating through an enormous array of institutions and movements” (Davis 1986, 24). In this way, Davis uses religion and ethnicity as analytical categories, applying them to class formation. He does not merely remark that the American working class, like the working class in many other countries, was divided by religion and ethnicity; he argues that religion and ethnicity played an important part in the formation of American identity, “mediating . . . the general

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framework of national bourgeois culture” as well as the formation of particular ethnic and linguistic identities. Thus, where capitalism and class identity was concerned, two corporatist subcultures emerged, rather than one working class. Racism, too, had a major impact on class formation. In the 1890s, Jim Crow and redneck “demagogism” became prominent, and broke up the agrarian radicalism that had begun to emerge: “A vicious panoply of Black disenfranchisement, racial segregation, and lynch terror was installed in the nineties to suppress militant Black tenants, to keep them tied to the land, and to prevent their future collaboration with poor whites. At the same time, the defeat of the great New Orleans General Strike of 1892 destroyed the vanguard of Southern labor and wrecked interracial unity among workers. Out of its ashes arose a stunted, Jim Crow white unionism on one hand, and a pariah Black subproletariat on the other” (Davis 1986, 38). It is as a result of this history of nativism and racism in the nineteenth century that the American working class is “different”; religion, ethnicity, and race are here part of “general theory”; class here is part of “difference.” In addition, Davis both focuses on spatial practices and uses spatializations as analytical categories. He focuses on the segregation and fragmentation of working-class life, contrasting the American industrial city to those in Europe, stressing the effect of the built environment, especially transportation (streetcars, elevated and underground railways) on the development of housing neighborhoods: In Europe, this took the form of further class polarization as proletarian “east ends” and red arrondissements glared across a widening social-spatial gulf at bourgeois west ends and fashionable faubourgs. In the United States, by way of contrast, increasing class segregation of housing was overlaid by simultaneously expanding ethnic differentiation. Thus Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh all acquired after 1890 a characteristic tripartite spatial division between 1) middle-class suburbs, 2) a zone of decent, older housing (often single-family) occupied by native workers and some “old” immigrants, and 3) an inner core of tenements, shabby apartments, and over-crowded boarding houses that provided dormitories for the new immigrant proletariat. Further transposed on the belts of workingclass residence was a grid—almost microscopically detailed in some cities—of ethnically and linguistically differentiated neighborhoods “each with an institutional life of its own.” (Davis 1986, 43–44)

In contrast to Harvey’s argument that capitalism universalizes, commanding space, but social groups command place better than space, Davis analyzes the way in which local spaces

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developed in the old industrial American cities. Housing was segregated by both class and ethnicity, producing a tripartite organization of space. Harvey’s analyses of Baltimore neighborhoods (1977, 1978) also looked at both class and ethnicity, although his general conclusions have to do with the importance of national financial policies and institutions to the growth of the built environment. His arguments about the organization of space in terms of race and class are less fully elaborated than are Davis’s, and unlike Davis, he does not turn his conclusions back on the concepts of capital and labor with which both analysts begin. Furthermore, neither Davis nor Harvey can see the gender spatializations in the cities they analyze. Davis goes on to argue that religion and ethnicity no longer are the dominant factors to consider when analyzing the working class and the trade-union movement; in the 1950s and 1960s, race and gender become the most salient factors: “First, the failure to extend union organization to the rapidly expanding female clerical proletariat and to Southern workers in general formed the basis for a new hierarchization and segmentation of the working class. Henceforth, the old ethno-religious dimension . . . lost primacy to racial and sexual divisions in the workforce” (Davis 1986, 94–95, ellipsis added). When looking at employment, Davis uses both gender and a spatial concept (region) as analytical categories (“the rapidly expanding female clerical proletariat and to Southern workers in general”). When focusing on consumption, he also uses gender, race, and region as analytical categories (“the generalized norm of mass consumption from which most Blacks, Southern workers and female breadwinners were excluded”). This race and class history is the basis of a wonderfully partisan history of the AFL-CIO. He shows how the AFL-CIO consistently failed to reach out to a wider constituency, preserving the “social wage” of Fordism only for a unionized few. Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s came the growth of the non-unionized Sunbelt economy, and the emergence in the 1970s of what might be a new regime of accumulation. Davis does not call this “flexible accumulation” because his analysis has privileged all along a contrast between the predominantly white male unionized core and the peripheries, with the peripheries always having an important role. Instead, he argues that this regime is one of overconsumption, fueled by a new, expanded middle class, a “mass layer of managers, professionals, new entrepreneurs and rentiers who, faced with rapidly declining organization among the working poor and minorities during the 1970s, have been overwhelmingly successful in profiting from both inflation and expanding

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state expenditure” (Davis 1986, 211). It is also, as he stresses, a period when the poorest became poorer. Davis’s argument about overconsumption is quite contentious. It is, however, the place where his argument about American exceptionalism comes together with his arguments about economics. One could put Harvey’s argument about spatial and temporal fixes together with an extension of Davis’s argument about overconsumption, and argue that the construction of the suburbs in the U.S. after the Second World War (which both writers analyze), was a spatial fix as well as a temporal one. The temporal fix secured the financing; the spatial fix created a need for automobiles, kitchen appliances, and so on, leading to new patterns of consumption and a new balance for accumulation, the overconsumption that Davis argues became characteristic in the U.S. in the 1970s. It could also be argued that overconsumption became dominant in the U.K. in the 1980s, the gap between the poorest people (the bottom fifth of the economic strata) and the expanded middle class also widening. The key date for periodization would move back to the late 1940s and early 1950s. Thus, Fordism and “flexible accumulation” would be the same stage of capital, considered in narrowly economic terms; the differences would have more to do with the social and ideological aspects of regulation. Davis continues his analysis of the present regime of accumulation in Davis (1990). His theoretical approach is the same as in Davis (1986): basically neo-Marxist, but with race considered as a separate factor, not subsumable under class. The difference between Davis’s and Harvey’s work is even more marked in this book, which shows a pronounced skepticism about both teleology and the idea that there is an overall pattern to history. He does not construct a grand narrative but focuses on the details. In many ways, his approach is close to Ricoeur’s; each material facet of American society and culture he analyzes is treated as a “trace” showing that something happened here in the past. The focus on the local, as opposed to the global, is linked in the text with an interest in the way that Angelenos have represented and analyzed themselves. Thus, for example, the first chapter analyzes the cultural and intellectual history of Los Angeles (LA), contrary to the popular myth that there is no culture in Los Angeles. Davis treats the “Boosters,” who promoted LA, enticing people to settle there, the “Noirs,” who produced literary and filmic representations, glamorizing it as a dystopia, the “Mercenaries,” the avant-garde and the intellectuals who he argues have been co-opted by transnational capital, and the “Sorcerers,” the weird conjunction of physicists and metaphysicians who flourished in

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LA, as interesting in themselves, both as objects of analysis and as subjects who both shaped and theorized LA. By doing so, Davis critiques many of the most influential critics who have analyzed Los Angeles, pointing out that their work has become appropriated by a neo-Boosterism which seeks to promote Los Angeles as a postmodern Pacific Rim city with an ideology of eternal growth. In opposition to this, Davis tells a history of Los Angeles as a specific, local space. The chapter that is the best example of his local/global strategy is chapter 3, “Homeground Revolution.” Davis addresses what seems like the “fragmentation” of Los Angeles County, tracing back the genealogy of racism which has produced these particular racial, class, and spatial divisions. He begins with a discussion of the way in which the restrictive covenants that were still legal until 1948 can be understood as part of the genealogy of the homeowners’ associations of the 1950s and the present. Davis is then able to use this argument in his analysis of the various anti-tax and slow-growth campaigns in Southern California, stressing the ways that spatial divisions— for example, the difference between an incorporated town and an unincorporated area, and thus tax regions—were produced by and refer to this racial history. Davis (1986, 1990) analyzes the production of space in terms of race, as well as class, showing how class-based theoretical concepts must be modified by a study of history of race in the United States, and race-based theoretical concepts must be modified by the study of class in the United States. “Difference” is not engaged in a “dialectic” with “general theory”; “difference” is not “particularity.” However, his later work moves from approaches that combine general theory with more particular arguments and case studies, to approaches that focus only on case studies. He argues in his later work that history, as a discipline and an intellectual discourse, must be concerned with what cannot be explained by laws and generalizations but which, instead, cannot be predicted. The neo-Marxist new geographers give us the best analysis of transnationalism we have. They analyze transnationalism in terms of spatial practices, historical practices, and social practices. However, texts, including social texts, work and often change by means of representations. There are many ways of describing and analyzing changes in representation. What unites them, perhaps, is that all include rich, “thick” descriptions. Anthropologists, following Geertz (1983), can do this. So can sociologists. So do historians and geographers when writing case studies or locality studies. But so, also, do novelists. Cherryh,

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in her fictions, constructs and analyzes the representations that help us to understand and perhaps even change the world. As a fiction writer, she questions things that have been taken for granted; things that limit and trap us. As will be seen in the next chapter, historians and geographers, when writing thick descriptions of history, can be led by the horrifying content of that history to adopt a highly pessimistic, indeed apocalyptic, approach. Fiction writers, because their focus is on imagining worlds, can put the emphasis on questioning and can thus open up lines of inquiry, suggest ways to analyze complex topics, and challenge both presuppositions and limitations. It can therefore be extremely useful to combine historical, fictional, and theoretical works as objects of analysis, rather than limiting oneself to either material or semiotic objects.

6 “Too high a price”: Torture and the Neo-Conservative “Mission” This chapter uses the theorists discussed earlier to analyze recent historical and political events, looking in particular at the American-led war in Iraq that began in 2003. Following David Harvey, I argue that neo-liberalism, especially in its international aspects, is an example of the “spatial fix.” It is particularly clear that this is true of neo-conservatism in its later phase after the end of the Soviet Union; moreover, we can say, it emerges historically from the “successes” of neo-liberalism and the move from American hegemony to a more multicentered world both economically and politically. The earlier, cold war neo-conservatism can also be understood in this way, linking the economic and political aspects of the cold war period; but that is beyond the scope of my discussion here. Neo-conservatism is a “spatial fix”; and the wars that neo-conservative presidents like George W. Bush engage in are but excessive forms of this. However, as Harvey argues (2003)—the general point is also made in Harvey (1996, 2000)—we need to use more than one analytical concept to analyze these imperialist (or quasi-imperialist) wars. We need to look at territoriality, both national and international, and at unilateral and multilateral decision and action. Although debates about “just war” go back to Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, the conceptual distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello, that is, the question of just war and the question about conduct in war, first began to be seen to be extremely useful in the 1920s and 1930s, during the discussions around the establishment of the League of Nations. It was wellestablished by the late 1940s after the Second World War (Kolb 1997). There are laws and institutions, both national and international, which deal with each: ius in bello is covered by the Geneva Conventions, by national military codes, and national and international law, so that soldiers can be court-martialed by their own country, or tried by national or international courts; the UN charter states that ius ad bellum is either a clear case of individual or collective self-defense (as has been recognized for centuries), or must be authorized by the UN security council after failures to comply with its resolutions and if necessary 158

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to “maintain international peace and security” (Kennedy 2004, 61–62). The first Geneva Convention was drafted by the Red Cross, set up, in its turn, after the nineteenth-century battle of Solferino; it was ratified by all nations except the United States (which used its own War Department rules) by 1867. Later Geneva Conventions were drafted in 1906, 1929, and 1949; they cover treatment of civilians as well as combatants. The United Nations was set up after the Second World War, and has powers to impose economic and military sanctions that the earlier, ineffective League of Nations lacked. Britain was tried in the European Court for Human Rights for “cruel and inhumane treatment of suspects” in interrogation centers in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and found guilty (Kennedy 2004, 37). On June 28, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Guantánamo Bay, and “curbed the Bush administration’s power to deny detainees the right to a lawyer, rejecting, by a 6:3 majority, the administration’s argument that Guantanamo ´ Bay lay outside the jurisdiction of US courts” (Julian Borger and Vikram Dodd, “Supreme Court Blow for Bush on Guantànamo,” Guardian, June 29, 2004, sentence slightly rearranged for clarity). The Supreme Court held that the U.S. government does have the right to seize people, under war powers, but the people seized have the right of legal process, and are, in general, protected by U.S. law and constitutional guarantees; the practices at the prisons and camps are also, in principle, subject to review by U.S. courts. The Supreme Court case challenged “some of the fundamental principles of George Bush’s ‘war on terror’ ” (Paul Harris, “Judges May Order End of Guantánamo,” Observer, June 13, 2004), and it is to be hoped that conditions will change in the places where the Americans are currently holding prisoners. The CIA has also now stopped the use of some of its “extreme interrogation” techniques, following the publication of the Justice Department’s August 2002 memo (approved by John Ashcroft’s Office of the Attorney General and signed off by Dick Cheney’s office of the Vice President) (David Teather, “CIA Halts Use of Sleep Deprivation,” Guardian, June 28, 2004). A large number of individual cases (or a class action) are expected to follow the U.S. Supreme Court decision. The question of the justification of torture has a long history, both semiotic and material. The fictional character Ivan Karamazov asks his brother Alyosha whether, if torture, of even a single individual, were the price we had to pay for “truth,” for “harmony,” and for “peace and rest at last,” that would not be “too high a price to pay” (Dostoyevsky, 1950; edition, 291). Ivan

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rejects this bargain; Alyosha replies, “That’s rebellion” (Dostoyevsky, 1950; edition, 291). In this chapter, I examine Ivan’s question.

Ius in bello: Individual and regime responsibility The U.S.-led coalition’s torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq first became public knowledge after the publication of a series of three articles in the New Yorker (Seymour Hersh, “Annals of National Security: Torture at Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, May 10, 2004; Seymour Hersh, “Annals of National Security: Chain of Command,” New Yorker, May 17, 2004; Seymour Hersh, “Annals of National Security: The Gray Zone,” New Yorker, May 24, 2004). The first two articles are based on a leaked February 2004 U.S. army report by Major General Antonio Taguba; there had also been an earlier internal army report in November 2003 by Major General Donald Ryder, and earlier reports by both the Red Cross and Amnesty International. The first two New Yorker articles used photographs of the abuse and extracts from Taguba’s report and from evidence given by soldiers in investigations, hearings, and trials, to first, document and publicize the abuse, and, second, to point out that the abuse has consequences both for “the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; [and for] the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world” (Hersh, May 10, 2004). The abuse was appalling: military dogs were used to threaten, and in one case, bite, prisoners; prisoners were threatened with rape; a prisoner was raped with a chemical light; a teenage boy raped by an Iraqi guard; prisoners were burnt with liquid from broken chemical lights, beaten with broom handles and chairs, and one man was stitched by a Military Police guard who had slammed him against the wall of his cell. Many of the photographs in the first two New Yorker articles, and much of the discussion in the media focus on the sexual abuse in addition to the use and threat of violence, forcing men to masturbate in public, forced simulation of oral sex, and piling naked men, lined up with genitals touching buttocks, in pyramids. The Red Cross and Amnesty International have documented many cases of physical abuse and coercion by both the Americans and the British, in some cases leading to death: by June 2004, the British ministry of defense had admitted that seventyfive cases of civilian deaths, injuries, and incidents involving

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British soldiers had been investigated. Four British soldiers were, at that time, being court-martialed for sexual assault and unmilitary behavior, and other cases for physical and sexual abuse and for deaths in custody were pending (Richard Norton-Taylor, “British Soldiers Face Abuse Court Martial,” Guardian, June 15, 2004); by June 2004, thirty-seven suspicious deaths in American custody (a narrower category than the British are investigating) in Afghanistan and Iraq were being investigated. One of the key questions for both the killings and the less lethal abuse is whether those in command knew about or even ordered the torture. The British newspaper, the Mirror, published photographs of abuse that later turned out to be fakes, but the British military are still investigating earlier photographs of abuse of prisoners by British soldiers; these, as well as the New Yorker’s photographs, circulated widely in the media, are demonstrably genuine. Rumors that photos of abuse are circulating among British soldiers contributed to the Mirror’s mistaken decision to buy the photos. The faked photographs in the Mirror were not distinguished formally from documentary images, as this is impossible given contemporary image-producing technology: a truck with scratches precisely matching those of the truck in the hoax photograph was found in a territorial army barracks, never having been in Iraq. What is key here is whether the circulation of the images turns out to have contributed to a political debate, an end to the torture, a decision to pull out of Iraq, and a change in American and British foreign policy in general (a move back to diplomacy) or whether Westminster and Washington politicking become spectacle for us, as do the images. Susan Sontag argues that “the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives” (Susan Sontag, “The Photos Are Us,” Guardian, May 24, 2004). In many wars, soldiers took photographs of atrocities they committed; what is unusual is for the soldiers to pose with the victims. Sontag points out that one of the few examples of this is in the photographs we have of the black victims of lynching in the United States from the 1880s to the 1930s. In those photographs, perpetrators posed grinning with victims. What both cases have in common is that in both cases, in Sontag’s words, “the photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done.” She proceeds to argue that that photographs nowadays are seen less as objects to be saved and more as “messages” to be disseminated and shared. Her conclusions

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about the “messages” have to do with the way that, in America today, “the fantasies and the practice of violence are, increasingly, seen as good entertainment, fun.” She also argues that the torture is “[A] direct consequence of the doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to fundamentally change the domestic and foreign policy of the US. The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war—for the ‘war on terror’ is nothing less than that” (Susan Sontag, “The Photos Are Us,” Guardian, May 24, 2004). Sontag’s second conclusion is more significant and useful than her first, which might explain why the soldiers smiled, but not why they tortured. However, it is not clear from what she writes what the connections between torture, the resurgence of neoconservative foreign policy (with its new post-cold-war enemy), and the “pseudo-religiosity” of the “war on terror” might be. I will draw on two other writers, Ariel Dorfman and Ursula Le Guin, to explain how one might make those connections. General Taguba concluded in his report that Military Police guards were directed to “set the conditions” for interrogation (Seymour Hersh, May 10, 2004). That is, as well as holding the enlisted personnel personally responsible for their “sadistic and criminal behavior,” Taguba held that officers had “directed” that these pre-interrogation procedures be set up. In particular, he blamed Military Intelligence’s Colonel Thomas Pappas; Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, former head of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center; and two civilian contractors, Steven Stephanovicz and John Israel. The army reserve Brigadier General, Janis Karpinski, in charge of all the prisons in Iraq, was the most senior of the persons criticized. She lost her job, but is not facing trial. As a reservist, she is a business consultant in civilian life; she had no previous experience of running prisons. At present, Major General Geoffrey Miller is in charge of Abu Ghraib; he was formerly in charge of Guantánamo Bay. Karpinski claims in a tearful BBC interview (Panorama, May 19, 2004), that she was sickened when she saw the photographs. She said that she “knows her MPs, and they wouldn’t do this without some kind of pressure.” She claimed that higher-ups were involved: “I don’t know how far up it goes.” Karpinski seems loyal to her MPs and to the Military Police mission, seen as to confine and police prisoners, not to interrogate them. In contrast, Major General Miller sees his task as “to detain enemy combatants so as to accomplish his mission . . . against the war against terror” (Panorama, BBC, May 19, 2004, Miller speaking

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of Guantánamo Bay, sentence slightly edited for clarity). Miller goes on to say he sees his mission at Abu Ghraib in the same terms, focusing on how “to enhance the strategic interrogation of prisoners.” In the same Panorama interview Karpinski argues that she protested to Miller about his methods, which combined the roles of Military Intelligence and the Military Police. Miller’s reply was “we can do it my way or we can do it the difficult way.” It is hard to know how self-serving a junior general is in reporting that she protested to her senior general, or how selfserving enlisted personnel are when reporting that they too informed their superiors. However, it is clear that the new policy of merging confinement and interrogation, making both of these aims for the Military Guards, was key. It is also clear that the new British and American policy of using civilian contractors instead of permanent military personnel is deeply significant. The costs, (appearing in another column of the accounts) are huge. A single private-security man, or mercenary, can earn U.S. $1000 per day, or up to U.S. $115,000 a year, according to David Leigh, “Who Commands the Private Soldiers,” Guardian, May 17, 2004). “One 2002 memo from the secretary of the army, Thomas White, suggests that as much as a third of its budget is going on private contractors,” Leigh’s article noted. If qualified the civilian employees are often former Special Forces personnel, experienced in “psych-ops,” “torture-lite” tactics. They are also—crucially—not bound by British or American military regulations. A case for abuse against a civilian employee has been dropped because neither the American military nor the Iraqi judiciary had jurisdiction. Intelligence vetting of these personnel seems to have been almost non-existent. “According to [Steven Stefanowicz’s] fellow interrogator Torin Nelson, CACI hired interrogators over the phone, without even meeting them” (Leigh, May 17, 2004). In Iraq, the civilian contractors often wore U.S. military desert camouflage, rather than their own uniform. This led to certain ambiguities: in the investigations of Military Police who took part in torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, some MPs reported that when taking orders they did not always know, that those giving the orders were contractors, not American military. Some of the civilian contractors* argued that they were, though not in the chain of command, interpreting the aim of those in the chain of command, intelligence gathering: “Nelson said some * Unlike the British constitution, the American constitution forbids the use of mercenaries, and so, although the British personnel are sometimes referred to in print as mercenaries, the Americans are not.

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of his colleagues went around in desert camouflage uniform. ‘We contractors were often able to establish our own method of actually implementing the chain of command’s intent, which was to glean information for intelligence purposes’ ” (Leigh, May 17, 2004). In the accounts, the term “tension” comes up, repeatedly, sometimes describing personal conflict, sometimes describing conflicting concepts or approaches. The earlier internal army report—the Ryder report—in contrast to Taguba’s report, did not find that the pre-interrogation procedures were “directed.” Nevertheless, Ryder found that there was a “tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them.” (Hersh, May 10, 2004) Brigadier General Rick Baccus, the commander of Guantánamo Bay before Miller, said he faced constant tension from military interrogators trying to extract information from inmates (Suzanne Goldenberg, “Former Guantánamo Chief Clashed with Army Interrogators,” Guardian, May 19, 2004). According to the Guardian, he was sacked “apparently after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal time for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates.” He argues that in his time “the interrogations never treated anyone inhumanely.” Both Ryder and Baccus (reported in indirect speech) use the term “tension” to describe the relation between MI and MP in the prisons and camps. The word “tension” here, used by both Baccus and Ryder, is revealing: pressure by MI, an awkwardly fitting new structural relationship between MI and MP, and the unhappiness felt by some. General Miller instituted a “72-point matrix for stress and duress,” which, the Guardian reports, was said by the Washington Post to “[S]et out a guide for the levels of force that could be applied to detainees [at Guantánamo Bay]. These included hooding or keeping prisoners naked for more than 30 days, threatening by dogs, shackling detainees in positions designed to cause pain, and extreme temperatures” (Goldenberg, May 19, 2004). General Miller is not the only person who moved from Guantánamo Bay to Iraq. Investigations have already identified a Captain Carolyn Wood of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion as the person in charge of interrogation at Bagram who was later redeployed to Abu Ghraib and who set up similar procedures there (Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg, “Inside America’s Secret Afghan Gulag,” Guardian, June 23, 2004). Lawyers for the soldiers charged argue that responsibility must also lie further up

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the chain of command: a captain could not have decided such a policy on her own. Guantánamo Bay was deliberately set up outside U.S. territory, so that the detainees would not have the rights guaranteed in the U.S. The prisoners were not granted prisoner-of-war status, so that it could be argued (I would say, falsely) that they were outside the scope of the Geneva Convention. The 72-point matrix for stress and duress Miller authorized for use at Guantánamo Bay from 2002 clearly contravenes rights guaranteed under the Geneva Convention. Thus responsibility for abuse of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay goes beyond the individuals who personally mistreated prisoners to the captains and other officers who commanded and authorized these actions, to the generals in charge, and to those who drew up the manual. Responsibility for torture goes beyond guards and interrogators to generals and then, beyond that, to politicians. The torture has been dreadfully widespread. We have evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; at the U.S. maintained prisons at Baghdad airport, Iraq; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; Diego Garcia airbase; and Kandahar and Bagram air bases in Afghanistan. We have equally well supported reports of torture at allied maintained prisons in Rabat, Morocco; Cairo, Egypt; Damascus, Syria; Amman, Jordan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; an unknown base in Thailand; and in Baku, Ajerbaijan (Jason Burke, “Global Web of Secret US Prisons,” Observer, June 13, 2004. For a detailed discussion of conditions at Bagram and the nineteen other U.S. detention centers and “fire bases” in Afghanistan, see Duncan Cambell and Suzanne Goldenberg, “Inside America’s Secret Afghan Gulag,” Guardian, June 23, 2004). “We have evidence that the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, personally authorized the expansion of a special programme which ultimately led to the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison . . . The operation, which encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation to obtain intelligence, was known to president George Bush and fewer than 200 operatives. It was approved by the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, according to the report. The programme was governed by the rules: ‘Grab who you must. Do what you want,’ a former intelligence officer told the [New Yorker] magazine” (Gary Younge and Luke Harding, “Rumsfeld Accused on Abuse,” Guardian, May 17, 2004). The May 17th revelations are the first confirmation that the abuses were part of a policy approved by Rumsfeld (as head of the Pentagon) and Rice (as National Security Advisor), and known about by Bush. The policy represents a huge shift away from traditional international law: “The Bush administration routinely

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bypassed or overruled Pentagon experts on international law and the Geneva Convention to construct a sweeping legal justification for harsh tactics in the war on terror” (Suzanne Goldenburg, “Bush Ignored Pentagon Lawyers Over Tactics in War on Terror,” Guardian, June 9, 2004, and Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian, June 23, 2004; the legal dimensions of the new policy are also discussed in Richard NortonTaylor, “A Torturer’s Charter,” Guardian, June 12, 2004). Bush’s military order of November 13, 2001 denied prisoner-of-war status to captives from Afghanistan and allowed their detention at Guantánamo Bay without charge or access to a lawyer. It was “issued without any consultation with Pentagon lawyers, a former Pentagon official said” (Goldenburg, June 9, 2004). According to the Guardian, officials were surprised by not being involved in the planning of the first such directive since the Second World War: “That came like a bolt from the blue. Neither I nor anyone I knew had any insight, any advance warning, or any opportunity to comment on the president’s military order” (Goldenburg, June 9, 2004). According to this same Guardian article, their sources “described frequent clashes of opinion since the 9/11 attacks, with career military lawyers disturbed by the efforts of political appointees to grant sweeping powers to the administration.” The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers have obtained copies of an April 2003 Pentagon report “which concluded that some methods of torture were legal, including sleep deprivation and so-called stress positions. The April 2003 report said Mr. Bush had the constitutional power to authorise torture—which is against US law—if American lives were in danger” (Goldenburg, June 9, 2004). The Washington Post has also obtained a Justice Department memo of August 1, 2002 that “said that torturing suspected Al Qaida members abroad ‘may be justified’ and that international laws against torture may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogation conducted against suspected terrorists” (Mike Allen and Dana Priest, “Memo on Torture Draws Focus to Bush,” Washington Post, June 9, 2004). This memo “provided legal guidance for the CIA,” which, referred to by the conventional expression “other agencies,” was involved in interrogation of suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, and Iraq. The suspects at the Allied-maintained prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and in Ajerbaijan (Jason Burke, “Global Web of Secret US Prisons,” Observer, June 13th, 2004) are questioned by Allied interrogators, and it has been argued the purpose of the transfer “into the custody of a state without due process,” is so that “they can be tortured to extract information,” notes Burke’s story. It has also

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been reported that CIA agents have been allowed to sit in on Allied interrogations in Saudi Arabia, Burke adds. While refusing to release documents at Senate committee hearings on June 8, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft replied in general terms, “This administration rejects torture,” and in categorical denials, “the president has issued no such order,” or “[I] reject the notion that anything the president has done or the justice department has done has directly resulted in the kind of atrocity which were cited [sic]” (Goldenburg, June 9, 2004). Ashcroft also refused until late June 2004 to make public the Justice Department memo, even though it is not classified (Allen and Priest, June 9, 2004). The new post-9/11 policy is thus the outcome of the attempt by neo-conservative political appointees to gain power and influence both within the Pentagon, vis-à-vis the career lawyers and military, and, as we will see in the second part of this chapter, ius ad bellum, in a power struggle with the CIA. As a result of the neo-conservative success in the power struggle within the Pentagon, with the CIA, and with the State department, the administration defined new confinement and interrogation practices, first denying prisoners from the war in Afghanistan prisonerof-war status, and setting up a 72-point matrix for “legitimate stresses” in Guantánamo Bay, and then applying similar methods in Iraq. The moral concept of responsibility is thus central to our analysis: senior persons in the U.S. government, as well as in the military, are morally culpable, and, by not accepting this, they are denying the full pertinence of moral discourse. A Pentagon spokesman said, “Assertions apparently being made in the latest New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib and the abuse of Iraqi detainees are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture” (Younge and Harding, May 17, 2004). Rather than applying a moral concept, this spokesperson applies another familiar part of American political discourse: conspiracy theories. The general effect of the spokesperson’s remarks is to reduce the serious claims about this horrific abuse to partypolitical and media infighting. In contrast, Ariel Dorfman clearly analyzes the torture at Abu Ghraib in moral terms. Like Levinas, to whom my analysis in terms of responsibility is indebted, Dorfman starts with Dostoyevsky: “The saintly Alyosha Karamazov is tempted by his brother Ivan, confronted with an unbearable choice. Let us suppose, Ivan says, that in order to bring men eternal happiness, it was essential and inevitable to torture to death one tiny creature, only one small child. Would you consent?” (Ariel Dorfman, “Are

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There Times When We Have to Accept Torture?” Guardian, May 8, 2004). Ivan’s question is also the basis of a well-known short story by Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in which, at the age of reason, each person is brought to understand the bargain in which the child suffers and the town flourishes. The story is postmodern, about writing, but straightforward and highly readable. The narrator, Le Guin herself, asks the reader if he or she finds the tale of an ideal town, with happy, fulfilled citizens, unlikely: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? . . . No?” (Le Guin 1975, 280). She introduces the twist that makes it more plausible: “In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. . . . In the room a child is sitting. . . . The people at the door never say anything, but the child who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks, ‘I will be good,’ it says. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs. . . . They all know it is there. . . . They all know that it has to be there. Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?” (Le Guin 1975, 281–82, ellipses added). In the end, Le Guin adds the final, reassuring detail, “There is one more thing to tell and this is quite incredible. At times one of the adolescent boys or girls . . . a man or woman . . . walks straight out” (Le Guin 1975, 282, ellipses added). Le Guin is arguing that it is “credible” to fall for Ivan’s temptation, incredible, but not that uncommon, to resist it. In what lies the credibility of complicity? Whence comes the strength to resist? Dorfman asks “Are we that scared? Are we so scared that we are willing to knowingly let others perpetuate, in the dark and in our name, acts of terror that will eternally corrode and corrupt us?” Dorfman moves from a psychological argument: we are acting because we are afraid, to a moral argument: our acts are as much acts of terror as are the actions we label terrorism. We bear responsibility for these acts done in our name. Dorfman argues that we are responsible for these, not just for the general Dostoyevskyan reason (what I earlier called the responsibility of the eldest child, responsible for more than my individual acts) but, taking the Dostoyevskyan argument further, because torture is part of a ethical discourse, that is, a discourse about values and principles: “Ivan’s words remind us that torture is justified by those who apply and perform it: this is the price, it is implied, that needs to be paid by the suffering few in order to guarantee happiness for the rest of society, the enormous majority given security and wellbeing by those horrors inflicted in some dark

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cellar, some faraway pit, some abominable police station. Make no mistake: every regime that tortures does so in the name of salvation, some superior goal, some promise of paradise” (Dorfman, May 8, 2004). Dorfman makes it clear that torture is not random acts of brutality: some of the torturers may be acting out of personal psychopathology in addition to their justification of torture, but all of the torturers justify what they do. The justifications are political or ideological: “this is the price . . . that needs to be paid . . . in order to guarantee happiness,” in particular, in the case of the so-called war on terror, to “give security.” Second, the responsibility lies with the “regime that tortures” as well as with the individual who acted. The regime’s justifications are, like the individual’s, made “in the name of salvation, some superior goal, some promise of paradise.” In addition, the victims of torture are dehumanized, not just in order to make it psychologically easier for a person to commit torture, but as part of a deliberate policy. In her story, Le Guin shows the dehumanization by consistently referring to the child as “it”; in Iraq, we see the full process— Iraqi men were dehumanized by sexual humiliation in order to “soften them up” for interrogation, with “security” the “superior goal.” Dorfman’s Dostoyevskan, Levinasesque argument gives us a useful way to analyze the moral issues relevant to the war in Iraq, and to analyze the ideological and principled claims made. People ranging from the individual soldiers on trial to President Bush have given awkward apologies, focusing on the distress they felt on seeing the photographs, and moving quickly to questions of American ideology, American “values.” Let us look at President Bush’s public apology for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, “I was sorry for the humiliation suffered for the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families. I told [King Abdullah of Jordan] I was equally sorry that people seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America” (Suzanne Goldenberg, Luke Harding, and Matthew Taylor, “Bush Says Sorry for Jail Torture,” Guardian, May 9, 2004). In the first sentence, rather than apologizing to the Iraqi prisoners and their families, Bush seems to be expressing his inner psychological state: I felt bad about their humiliation. In the second sentence, he is clearly expressing his psychological state: I felt bad that people didn’t understand what America is really like. In Bush’s fuller apology a few days later, he expressed himself similarly, “Americans like me didn’t appreciate what we saw.” The move to “American values,” “the true nature and heart” makes sense in terms of Dorfman’s point that a regime that tortures always justifies torture

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“in the name of salvation, some superior goal, some promise of paradise.” If we don’t bring in an idea such as this, the move seems random: why bring in American values at this point? Similarly, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, giving evidence at his courtmartial, said, “I would like to apologise. I have let everyone down. It isn’t me. I shouldn’t have photographed those detainees. I love the army. I love the flag. All I wanted was to be a US soldier” (Luke Harding, “I’m Sorry, It Just Isn’t Me,” Guardian, May 20, 2004). Sivits’ apology was more unequivocal than President Bush’s: “I would like to apologize,” rather than, “I was sorry.” However, the stress is on himself, rather than on those he tortured or whom he witnessed being tortured: “I have let everyone down. It isn’t me.” He feels that he expressed values other than his own, acting like someone else, someone who is not patriotic, who does not believe in what the flag symbolizes: “It isn’t me . . . I love the army. I love the flag.” Sivits, the first person tried for the torture at Abu Ghraib, was sentenced to one year. Two marines, privates Andrew Sting and Jeremiah Trefney, received prison sentences and bad-conduct discharges for assault with electric shocks at Mahmudiya prison south of Baghdad in April 2004 (Agencies, “US Marines Plead Guilty to Prisoner Abuse,” Guardian, June 3, 2004; Suzanne Goldenburg, “Bush Ignored Pentagon Lawyers over Tactics in War on Terror,” Guardian, June 9, 2004). The third May 24, 2004 New Yorker article, and other media comment on May 17, when the May 24 New Yorker became available, goes on to argue (based on interviews with serving and former intelligence officers) that torture was a matter of policy, not just a matter of individual, self-motivated actions by badly supervised persons. In line with this policy, a new program for confinement and interrogation, and even assassination, was set up: “Rumsfeld set up the secret access programme . . . a few months after September 11th . . . it sought to avoid legal barriers preventing intelligence agents from acting quickly in order to apprehend, interrogate, or kill suspects.” It “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation” (Younge and Harding, May 17, 2004); use of the latter is based on academic generalizations about Arab and Muslim cultures. The policy was applied in Afghanistan (a detention center at Bagram airbase staffed by Delta Force commandos is the most notorious); in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; in Iraq (investigations are going on into four prisons, of which Abu Ghraib is the best known); and at Diego Garcia. Only two hundred intelligence operatives were trained in these techniques, and so, in Iraq, they drafted in both reservist Military Police and private contractors. Testimony by Captain

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Richard Shuck indicates that General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, “was present at some prisoner interrogations at the jail and witnessed some of the abuse” (Julian Borger, “Commander of Coalition Forces Witnessed Prisoner Abuse, Lawyer Claims,” Guardian, May 24, 2004). Newspapers have also obtained a copies of a memo in which General Sanchez had “explicitly given military intelligence interrogators control over the ‘lighting, heating . . . food, clothing and shelter’ of the detainees being questioned. It also called for military intelligence officials to work more closely with the military police guards at the prison to ‘manipulate an internee’s emotions and weaknesses’ ” (Julian Borger, “U.S. General Linked to Abu Ghraib Abuses,” Guardian, May 22, 2004). We thus have evidence that Miller’s policy of merging the roles of Military Police and Military Intelligence, and the use of MP guards to “soften up” prisoners, was ordered by Sanchez as part of a general policy. We also know that Sanchez witnessed some of the abuse, and knew how his orders were being interpreted in action. The torture was not spontaneous vicious action by pathological men and women, or action in excess of their orders by confused guards who didn’t know what was meant; it was part of policy. The torture being investigated at Abu Ghraib, in other prisons and detention centers in Iraq, and the confinement and interrogation regime in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, and at Guantánamo Bay were thus part of a new post-9/11 policy. We know that regimes that implemented this policy were ordered by Sanchez, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, and by Miller, commander of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and later of the prisons in Iraq. The policy was authorized by Rumsfeld and Rice, and known about by Bush, and applied in Afghanistan, Iraq, Diego Garcia, and at Guantánamo Bay; the aims of this policy were also met in transfer of prisoners to Allied control, especially if transfer was to countries with poor human rights records. It was only on June 9, 2004 that General Sanchez called for a more senior general to be put in charge of the inquiry into American prisons in Iraq. Until then, the investigation could not “expand up the chain of command,” and “no investigating authority has been given the specific task of assessing the roles of top authorities at Central Command and the Pentagon, or the involvement of the White House and intelligence agencies” (Bradley Graham, “Top Officer Seeks New Head of Iraq Inquiry,” Washington Post, June 10, 2004). The new policy is racist: based on the culturalist racist generalization that sexual humiliation is especially undermining for “the Arab mind.” Culturalist racism is, like biological racism,

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which saw biological race as fixed and essential, and the base for different moral treatment of different persons, an approach that sees cultures as similarly fixed and discrete, and which, similarly, connects cultures and identities, using this connection as the basis for a moral claim. As Al-Azmeh has argued (1993), culturalism is used in “philiac,” as well as “phobic” ways, by Islamist groups as well as by writers critical of Islam. American intelligence has often used what has, since World War II, been called “psych-ops”—psychological tactics aimed against the enemy. Intelligence operatives also are routinely trained in how to resist torture, and thus how to perpetuate torture themselves. What is new here is the decision to use extreme sexual humiliation as a “psych-ops” tactic against “Arab” or “Muslim” populations. As feminist critics have often argued about pornography, sexual and gender humiliation is dehumanizing. By treating a person as an object, and by emphasizing certain parts of the body rather than treating the body as a whole, it can profoundly disrupt or break up the victim’s sense of self. It is this sexualized fragmentation which can weaken the sense of a whole self in those subjected to it, on which the new “softening up” policy was based. Those who devised the policy drew upon a number of books which generalized about Arab or Muslim cultures and identities, characterizing them as a single unified culture and identity, and arguing that they were particularly vulnerable to sexual and gender humiliation, and thus that this particular torture technique would be particularly effective. Sources for this argument ranged from Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” (Huntington 1993, 1997) to the eponymous book on “the Arab mind” (2002) that was a source for the post-9/11 policy of Bush’s administration. However, these overgeneralized and often culturally racist texts are not the only academic sources available to us: for example, see Al-Azmeh (1993), Gregory (2004), Halliday (2002), Kepel (2003), and Ruthven (2002). Al-Azmeh’s book gives an excellent analysis of the intellectual history of Islamism, framing it as part of “modernity,” and analyzing Islamist theorists in terms of Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thought. His detailed analysis of these Islamist texts and their precise arguments about religious issues is in contrast to Halliday’s international relations approach. Halliday also sees political Islam as modern, but does not engage with the actual religious texts. Kepel and Ruthven give excellent accounts of both the history and philosophies, with Ruthven’s aim being to understand the historical context for 9/11, and Kepel giving a wider history of the rise of political Islam, each looking at countries and cultures in detail, contrasting i.e., Malaysia, Saudi Arabia,

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and Pakistan, rather than overgeneralizing. Gregory (2004) is an excellent imaginary geography of colonialism’s effect on the history of the present, focusing on Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. The evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is thus part of a general shift in American policy after September 11, based on culturalist ideas: American values and Arab minds. The torture was not an invention of overstretched reservists in Iraq; investigations are going on into more sites than Abu Ghraib, and the policy as a whole applies to all the American prisons and detention centers, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, and Guantánamo Bay. The aims also were met by interrogators in the Allied-maintained prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Ajerbaijan. The abuses at Abu Ghraib became public after an MP, Specialist Joseph Darby, slipped a CD under the door of the army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). The CD had been given to Darby by Charles Graner; Graner was later convicted of abuse. In Ursula Le Guin’s imaginary town, Omelas, the torture is kept private as each citizen who requests it is brought individually to the cell in which the child is confined. The narrator tells the story to her interlocutor, and thus to us, the reader, but the story remains one of individual choice. Some soldiers resisted in just the way Le Guin outlines in her story: Specialist Matthew Wisdom, according to the New Yorker, May 10, 2004, said “I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right.” Wisdom told his superiors, and assumed “the issue was taken care of.” Another soldier’s resistance seems effective against a bureaucracy. It was [Specialist Jason Kennel’s] view that if MI wanted him to do this, “they needed to give me paperwork.” The general policy for which we have documentation in the November 13, 2001 Pentagon memo; the August 1, 2002 Justice Department memo; the April 2003 Pentagon report; the “72 points” manual for Guantánamo Bay; and the “special access” program for Iraq make higher-ups, particularly Rumsfeld, Rice, and Bush, responsible. They are the founders of a real Omelas. It seems particularly strange that perpetuators should photograph and video torture, and that CDs should circulate among the soldiers so that one eventually would be leaked to the media, and so the Senate and House should question Rumsfeld and his generals in public. Publicity is key here. Sexual abuse is a dehumanization that violates integrity and violates privacy; documenting the abuse and disseminating the images makes this public. Formally speaking, making the private public, is transgression, as is any violation of the boundary between opposed terms. The transgression here is moral (as the transgression of

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pornography is to some viewers, but not to all), as well as formal. The photographs have a transgressive shock, like pornography, as well as evoking the horror of the dehumanization they document. The Senate and House committees are held in public and televised, so they have this “crossing boundaries” transgressive quality: washing dirty linen in public. The mingling of this transgression of the distinction between the public and the private with the spectacle of circulated images of torture, and the visual and aural spectacle of hearings and trials available on television (sometimes with highly mediated visual images, as when computer animation is used instead of video), radio, and in transcript tends, I would argue, to make the publicity of these images more likely to end up part of the “manufacturing of consent” rather than the beginning of a public discourse, a freer political debate, and a principled end to the use of torture. The first part of my discussion of America’s war against Iraq examined ius in bello, that is, conduct during war, focusing on American abuse of prisoners, and showing that the abuse was part of a wider post-9/11 policy. The next part of this chapter looks at ius ad bellum, the reasons for war.

Ius ad bellum: reasons for war In the first section of this chapter, I argued that the conduct of the war in Iraq can be analyzed in terms of American ideology: there were revelations of torture, torture is justified as part of a wider scheme of things, done for a higher purpose, in this case, the neo-conservative “mission” to bring democracy to the world. Neo-conservatism is a political philosophy which argues that conservatism should put foreign policy, not domestic policy, at its heart, and which argues that foreign policy should be based on principles, not just on self-interest. It was particularly influential during the cold war, when it saw its main ideological enemy as communism; figures like Jeanne Kirkpatrick argued for containment of the Soviet Union, but framed their argument in ideological terms, not the pragmatic terms of the realists. It also clearly differentiated itself from race-based, socially conservative, right wing philosophies. It redefined the right wing of the Republican Party, focusing not on race, as right-wing American parties often did in the years before World War II, but on foreign policy, and where domestic policy was concerned, on the economy, where they argued, like the later neo-liberals, for less government intervention in social policy, on the grounds of its

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expense, and because of a skepticism about its effectiveness— they argued, in communitarian terms, that welfare provision tended to make people less likely to take individual responsibility. The anti-welfare, anti-social provision aspects of their domestic policy were (given the deep racism of American society, and the economic effects of this racism) racial in effect if not necessarily in intent, and were sometimes presented in racial images in party-political advertising. The domestic policies were also strongly anti-union. As well as the highly publicized Reagan anti-union policies, such as the attack on the air traffic controllers union, Reagan’s administration saw a decisive shift of the center of the economy from the declining unionized, traditional manufacturing Northeast (the “rustbelt”), to the non-unionized, high-technology Midwest, West, and South (the “sunbelt”), and a transformation of the Republican Party, both in terms of influential elites within the party, and in terms of voters, which followed this. The economic policies, which combined low taxes and low social expenditure with high defense spending (which may well have bankrupted the Soviet Union), were famously referred to by George H. W. Bush as “voodoo economics.” In later years, when socially conservative right-wingers focused on sexual politics (anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and so forth), not racial politics, there was a coalition between neoconservatism and the Christian right, but many of the neoconservatives are Jewish, not Christian, and, although philosophically more communitarian than liberal, politically not illiberal in their social views. Neo-conservatives (most of them were associated with the Russia desk, not the China desk) saw the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States in ideological terms as an inevitable conflict between communism and capitalism, both seen as philosophies, and both seen as inherently expansionist. Capitalism was seen as the precondition of democracy: economic liberalism leading to political liberalism. However, they argued, liberalism was not enough on its own: freedom and democracy are values grounded in American history and culture, in particular America’s origins in small, agrarian, often religiously based communities. At present, the neo-conservatives’ main concern is the so-called war on terror, and they see this, too, in ideological and cultural terms, and as an inevitable war—what Sontag called “endless war.” In the first neo-conservative period, the main stress seemed to be on communism’s expansionist nature; now the emphasis seems to be on democracy’s expansionist nature. Much of their foreign policy seems to be based on a fear

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that democracy will not prevail without their help: by war, if necessary. The foreign policy of the Clinton administration and of the George W. Bush administration may seem very different, but when a Marxist historical and economic analysis is applied, neoconservatism can be seen to follow clearly from the Clinton period. Because the neo-conservatives see marketization as a prerequisite for democracy, there is a great deal of historical continuity between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, despite the many differences between the Clinton administration and the George W. Bush administration. David Harvey’s (2003) account focuses on the way that neo-liberalism is a kind of “accumulation by dispossession,” and one which works either by “coercion by consent” (for example, a democratic government’s agreement to implement IMF conditions) or by force, up to and including war. The successes of neo-liberalism—the multicentered world economy, with the Asian “tiger” economies and Europe challenging American hegemony—led to neo-conservatives’ use of coercion—war, cynically seen as only an intensification by other means of “accumulation by dispossession.” In The New Imperialism, Harvey breaks his period down into “the rise of bourgeois imperialisms 1870–1945,” “post-war American hegemony 1945–1970,” and “neo-liberal hegemony 1970–2000,” followed by the early twenty-first century resurgence of the neo-conservatives, and the move from multilateralism to unilateralism. The last period, after George W. Bush’s election, and the return of neo-conservatism, could be seen as the end of neo-liberal hegemony, and the beginning of a new period of unilateral American dominance, with an increased use of military force. Or, I would argue, it could be seen as a consequence of what successes neo-liberalism has had: the increasing economic power of the Little Tigers of Southeast Asia, of China, and of Europe, and the vulnerability, from the 1980s onwards, of all these economies, as well as the U.S. economy, to economic fragility in other parts of the world. This has led the U.S. to try to regain hegemony by force as accumulation by dispossession has led to a more multicentered world. Just as in Harvey’s earlier work, the question of periodicization is key. He uses it to attack the sweeping, overgeneralized claims that are so much part of late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury intellectual life: are we in an age of postmodernity; are we in an age of globalization? He uses periodicization to shift to a historical narrative, using the narrative to make broader, more theoretical claims, keeping those claims sharp and analytical, not excessively universalized. He draws on a wide range

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of other analysts, from Luxemburg to Arendt, in his discussion of the “rise of bourgeois imperialisms 1870–1945,” a periodicization that brings together the classic age of Empire (Hobsbawm [1987], for example, covers from the 1870s to the First World War) with the world wars in which the empires began to be broken up. As Mike Davis points out (2001), it was in the 1870s that commodity production first became truly global, with India, for example, producing cotton for the world market during the American Civil War, and Indian cotton growers suffering dreadfully when cheap, high-quality American cotton again became available after the end of the war. As Davis argues, the catastrophic late-nineteenth-century Indian famines had many causes: world climate patterns and changes, global economic systems, and British colonial policy. It is Harvey’s use of Arendt that enables him to look explicitly at power: “A never-ending accumulation of property,” Arendt wrote, “must be based on a never-ending accumulation of power” (Arendt, in Harvey 2003, 34). If that is so, then imperialism tends to follow from capitalism, “[B]ourgeois history must be a history of hegemonies expressive of ever larger and continuously more expansive power. And this is what Arrighi records in his comparative history of shift from the Italian city-states through the Dutch, the British, and now the US phases of global hegemony” (Harvey 2003, 34). Harvey develops, drawing on Arrighi (1994) and Arendt (1968 edition), a methodology that moves between narrative history and analysis, and which ranges from social and economic history to intellectual history and social thought. Unlike Arrighi, he leaves out the age of Merchant Capital: Harvey tends to periodicize capitalism, dividing it by precise mode of production. Merchant capital, as a form of capital and thus a mode of production, is very different from the period from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century we are concerned with here. The next period then moves to decolonization and American hegemony after 1945. Harvey’s account combines two familiar histories, treating the cold war and U.S. foreign policy together with the history of decolonization. What is new here is that, by telling both histories at once and by drawing on Arendt, Harvey is able to make an important argument about the UN and antiracism. Arendt argued that it was not inevitable that imperialism should be accompanied by nationalism. The nationalisms that arose before and during the rise of imperialism could have died out and been replaced by a less malign system. In many ways nationalism and imperialism contradict each other. It is racism

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that reconciles the contradictions, which keeps the viciousness going. Racism is not a part of human nature, but a political response to do with power, arising historically because of historical contradictions. Thus, Harvey argues, “The later dismantling of European-based imperialisms also entailed the formal disavowal of the racism that had permitted the reconciliation of nationalism with imperialism. The UN Declaration of Human Rights and various UNESCO studies denied the validity of racism and sought to found a universalism of private property and of universal rights that would be appropriate for a second phase of bourgeois political rule” (Harvey 2003, 55). The United States took on cultural as well as political hegemony, and this “formal disavowal of racism” began to be applied less formally both within the U.S. in the Civil Rights movement and without: “The US was constructed as a beacon of freedom that had the exclusive power to entrain the rest of the world into an enduring civilization characterized by peace and prosperity” (Harvey 2003, 56). Harvey emphasizes the elements of the neoliberal period and postwar U.S. hegemony that led to the present neo-conservative period with its shift away from multilateral institutions but its continued reliance on highly rhetorical claims about “American values.” The later neo-liberal period features a “geographical dispersal of capitalistic class power” (Harvey 2003, 186) within which the “increasingly transnational capitalist class of financiers, CEOs, and rentiers, . . . look to the territorial hegemon to protect their interests and build the kind of institutional architecture within which they could gather the wealth of the world into themselves” (Harvey 2003, 187). Harvey argues (2003, 184) that the neo-liberal forms of imperialism we find after 1972; that is, the imposition, typically by the IMF, of open commodity and capital markets, privatization, and a general enclosing of the commons, can be seen as “accumulation by dispossession.” The heart of this economic liberalization was the financialization of the economy and, as the dot.com crashes of 1999 showed, this could not be sustained (Harvey 2003, 189–90). The economic changes after 1970, the “liberalization” or “financialization” of the economy, brought about by privatization, marketization, and so forth, meant that the capitalistic classes were no longer mostly American, and the political and economic power was spread far more widely between countries than it was in the post World War II days of American hegemony. The transnational elites, though, continued the postwar emphasis on multilateral institutions, particularly financial ones like the

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IMF. The U.S. was still “the territorial hegemon” but power was less one-sided. Privatization and neo-liberalism in general are actually a form of despoliation, what Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” and, by definition, involve coercion, either blatant or indirect, managed coercion, “coercion by consent.” It is thus quite possible that neo-conservatism, which involves force, more obviously, but consent in its ideology about democracy, is less different from neo-liberalism than it seems. To the extent that neo-liberalism was successful, it led to the rise of the Little Tiger economies of Southeast Asia, and of China, and to a situation in which the United States no longer was clearly dominant in the world economy. Each of these economies affected each other, not, as in the late nineteenth century, because of fluctuating commodity prices due to world events, both political and climatological (see Davis 2001 for a profoundly moving discussion of this), but because of investment, and speculation, in real estate, and in transnational corporations, as well as in finance itself. The new technology firms that lost their inflated value in the bursting of the 1980’s dot.com bubbles were paradigmatic transnational companies, which affected economies in more than one country. The drop of property values in California affected the investments of the Hong Kong Chinese who had been anxious to find a home for their money safe from the changes that handover to China would bring. The Japanese banking crisis affected the Little Tiger economies, many of which, in addition to their own finance, depended on Japanese investment in local companies. It is in this context, I would argue, that we should understand the resurgence of neo-conservatism in the George W. Bush administration. It is both a return to an ideologically based foreign policy, with the United States identifying a single, overarching “enemy,” and a turn to unilateralism, away from the multilateralism which was a central part of neo-liberalism. The unilateralism, I would argue, is as much a defensive, suspicious response to the multicentered world economy, as it is a hostile response to the political liberalism of the consensus after the Second World War, with its increasing adherence (in principle, if always less so in practice) to antiracism. What seems like a move away from the Proxy Wars of the containment period to wars the United States fought using its own troops, is less abrupt than it might seem. The Reagan administration’s wars in South America were both direct (as in Grenada) and illegal and indirect (as in the Iran/Contra scandal).

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This chapter draws on Mike Davis’s recent work, as well as on the argument about the rise of neo-conservatism taken from Harvey. Rather than taking a substantive claim, I draw methodologically on Davis. This necessitates a brief discussion of his methodology, followed by a Davis-like short case study of Halliburton. Mike Davis consistently examines power in detail, building up a detailed microanalysis of who is in and who is out. Just as he includes detailed chapters on elites in the Republican and Democratic parties in California, focusing on individuals and their impact on policy and legislation (Davis 1990; 1998), so Davis 2003 focuses on “the private governments of San Diego,” tracing the history of individual politicians in the context of the militarization of the local economy. Davis’s philosophy of history is radical—he argues that history is about contingency: that which can be understood, but which could not have been predicted. He is particularly interested in the debates in the history of science between the catastrophists and the uniformitans. Just like Steven J. Gould in the field of history of science, he sees himself as a “neo-catastrophist.” However, Gould, arguing against Social Darwinism, both the present day versions and those of Darwin’s own time (Gould 1981; 2000), still believed in evolution, even if evolution by “punctuated equilibriums” rather than by an even progression of constant tiny changes (Gould 2000), Davis, in contrast, rejects not just the Whig notions of progress and the old-fashioned Marxist idea of a totality to history underlying the phenomena we observe, but any idea of underlying pattern. Davis’s radically contingent history is catastrophism—not a description of punctuated equilibrium but a narrative of the crucial, apocalyptic, punctum. Some examples of catastrophism in Davis (2001) and Davis (2002) are clearly to do with natural science, but using a discussion of the history of science to make a point about history in general, “Lyell’s vision of a uniformitarian Earth . . . effectively dehistoricized natural history by excluding the unique events—catastrophes—that gave it narrative directionality” (Davis 2002, 313). Here Davis uses his analysis of Lyell’s way of understanding the history of the geography of the planet Earth to make a claim about the centrality of narrative form—narrative directionality—to history as such. He claims that Lyell dehistoricizes his discipline by excluding unique events from it. In order to make natural history historical again, we ought to bring unique events back into it. We ought to look at catastrophes, which are by definition unique events. As a result, Davis (2001) and to some extent Davis (2002) contain a detailed, meticulous explanation of the science of climate change,

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showing how scientists have drawn on chaos mathematics to analyze the ENSO (El Niño, Southern Oscillation) cycle that produces the monsoons and trade winds, and which, if off balance for any one or more of many reasons, produces the El Niño and La Niña droughts and floods. Davis’s explanation of ENSO is excellent; he explains the science very well. Just as Davis sees narrative as central to history, he writes historical narrative extremely well indeed, both describing how the science of climate came to be understood, and describing in vivid, harrowing detail the famines of the late nineteenth century, showing how they were not an inevitable consequence of climate catastrophe. Famines occurred not just because of local crop failures, but because food which was stockpiled elsewhere was not supplied to the hungry. This was a matter of colonial policy, not colonial incompetence. As well as his focus on elites, Davis also focuses on resistance. Many of the examples of resistance also concern apocalypse, this time clearly in a religious context: the 1897 war of Canudos massacred the followers of Antonio Conselheiro, in response to “an attempt at peaceful withdrawal into millenarian autonomy” and “a premature experiment” in “a Christianity of the base” (Davis 2001, 192); and Father Cicero Romão’s intentional community in the city of Joãseiro was metaphorically “besieged by diverse enemies who equated its folk Catholicism (especially the growing numbers of apocalyptic beatos and beatas) with subversion in Bahia” (Davis 2001, 192). Romão’s community survived, as Davis says, by “reintegrating into traditional economic and political backwardness” and now has “shopping malls and slums” (Davis 2001, 192). The first essay in Dead Cities focuses on the Ghost Dance— both its history and its continued use and meaning in the present (Davis 2002, 23–31). Davis emphasizes the religious meaning of the term apocalypse: “[I]t is important to recall its precise meaning in the Abrahamic religions. An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as it becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days” (Davis 2002, 31). First of all, he is clear that the term is religious, and that, by his use of—and even, emphasis on—apocalypse, given the importance of it in his catastrophist, radically contingent history—his own work can be seen as sympathetic to religious and, in this case, Abrahamic, ways of thought. The reference to the “Abrahamic” religions groups together Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Davis’s catastrophism is a leftist sense of despair at the political situation in the United States, “the Last Days” as a metaphor, which moves on to a secular millennialism, similar to

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Christian millennialism in its sense that the radical transformations that the future might bring might be the end, rather than the turn of a new cycle. His reference to the Secret Histories, known only to the few (the initiates) is also a sign of sympathy with popular culture conspiracy theories, but shown in his work to be the actions of elites maneuvering for power. Davis proceeds to demonstrate that Wovoka’s Ghost Dance tradition was also a Messianic religion, preaching a moral code based on “unity, love, and the hope of renewal” (Davis 2002, 28), and focusing on an afterlife, “now we know we shall all be united again” (an unnamed Arapahoe, quoted in Davis 2002, 28), reached after a deep sleep brought about by the Ghost Dance, and imagined in ways that drew both on “the individual visions and specific histories of each Indian culture” and on Christian imagery (Davis 2002, 29). So, for example, the Arapahoe believed “the restored world would advance behind a wall of fire that would drive the whites back to Europe” while the Cheyenne “preferred a native version of the Rapture” (Davis 2002, 29). He then wistfully concludes that “It is through this black hole that the West will disappear into the singularity of catastrophe, only to reemerge, on the other side, with streams full of salmon and plains full of bison” (Davis 2002, 31). Davis’s catastrophism is thus not necessarily confined to any one religion but linked to the meaning of apocalypse in the Abrahamic traditions, and in traditions that can be shown to have been influenced by one of the three, or which also have messianic elements, or images of an afterlife or a restored world. It leads him to come up with some striking images, but I am not sure how fruitful it may be for political analysis. Instead, it is Davis’s stress on power and his close local analyses that are most useful. Harvey uses his arguments about American hegemony after World War II to discuss the United States’ reliance on oil and the importance of oil to American foreign policy as well as to the American economy. Harvey argues that, in addition to questions of undue influence that might be raised by the closeness of the Bush administration to the oil companies, there is a general, even more important issue. The United States, despite the strong environmental arguments for it, shows no sign of reducing its reliance on oil. The Little Tigers and China are increasing their use of oil. China, in particular, has a very poor environmental record, as do the former Soviet Union nations that are now neo-liberalized. The oil companies do not publish figures, but, nevertheless, it is clear that the reserves in the oil fields in the United States and North Sea are close to extinction, with

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the Middle East oil fields and those in the former Asian Soviet Republics above Afghanistan more and more important, as are the oil fields in Africa. The recent murders in Saudi Arabia of workers and their families in Western compounds, and of people from security personnel to journalists, show how unstable the security situation is there, so that Saudi oil becomes hard to rely on in the long term. One of the results of the war in Afghanistan was that the Americans based troops in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, and this formed a precedent for trade relations with the United States and the opening of oil fields there under American control. Similarly, British ambassadors were ordered to keep relations with the oil-rich region friendly, despite human rights abuses. One of the reasons for the war against Iraq was the oil in Iraq. The argument is long-term: securing the oil fields, which are extensive, and which have plenty of oil left. This argument is not unfamiliar to the Bush administration: The US energy department frightened politicians with a study in 2001 known as the Cheney report after the former head of Halliburton oil services group, now US vice-president, who wrote it. He predicted that imported oil would need to rise from 10.4 million barrels a day at present to 16.7 million barrels a day by 2020. The report spelled out US dependence on a stable energy market and the need for a foreign policy that would protect America’s energy supply.” (Terry Macalister, Ewan MacAskill, Rory McCarthy, and Nick Paton Walsh, “A Matter of Life, Death—and Oil,” Guardian, January 23, 2003)

It is Cheney, linked so closely to Halliburton, who pointed out to the Bush administration that oil supplies were limited, and that a new source must be found if America was not to reduce its reliance on oil. Cheney’s report also clearly made the point that this is not just a matter of economic policy, but of foreign policy. In addition to Cheney’s links with Halliburton, President George W. Bush himself is “an unsuccessful Texas oilman.” He is on the Board of Harken, an oil firm which bought his former failed company, Arbusto. It valued him for the connection this gave them with his father. Condoleezza Rice was on the Board of Chevron, which named an oil tanker after her. Don Evans, the commerce secretary at that time, was chairman of Tom Brown Inc., an oil and gas company, and TMBR/Sharp Drilling, an oiland gas-drilling operation; Gale Norton, the Interior Secretary with responsibility for the environment had as a lawyer represented Delta Petroleum, and ran an organization called Coalition

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of Republican Environmental Advocates, co-funded by BPAmoco (Martin Kettle, “Dick Cheney: The High-Flying Hawk,” Guardian, July 26, 2000). During the five years that Cheney ran Halliburton before he became vice president, he “used his White House experience to win substantial government contracts for Halliburton” (David Teather, “Cheney’s Old Skeletons Rattle Bush,” Guardian, July 31, 2002). In total, government banks loaned or insured $1.5 billion during Cheney’s five years as chief executive, as opposed to $100 million in the previous five years (Ed Vulliamy and Nick Paton Walsh, “Cheney Firm Won $3.8 Billion Contracts from Government,” Guardian, July 21, 2002). The government contracts and bank loans included one deal with a Russian firm “under investigation for mafia connections” (Vulliamy and Walsh, July 21, 2002). In May 2002, the United States financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began investigating Halliburton’s accounting practices (Teather, July 31, 2002). Halliburton agreed to pay $6 million to settle this claim (David Teather, “Halliburton Pays $6 Million Claim,” Guardian, June 2, 2003). In 2002 it “was forced to pay $2 million to settle fraud claims involving work at a military base, and was found in 1997 by the general audit office to be billing the army for questionable expenses” (David Teather, “Jobs for the Boys: The Reconstruction Billions,” Guardian, April 15, 2003). In February 2004, Halliburton was investigated for $180 million in bribes allegedly paid to Nigerian officials during the late 1990s, when Cheney was head of the company (David Teather, “Halliburton Faces Bribes Inquiry,” Guardian, February 5, 2004). In 2004 too, the U.S. treasury department reopened investigations into whether Halliburton had broken trade embargoes against Iran when Cheney was chief executive (David Teather, “Halliburton Faces Iran Inquiry,” Guardian, February 12, 2004). Despite Halliburton’s close links with the Bush administration, and despite Halliburton’s shabby record, both of which might have made a more responsible administration—one concerned with avoiding even the appearance of impropriety—less likely to award it contracts, Halliburton was awarded the lion’s share of contracts in Iraq. In January 2004, it repaid $6.3 million after disclosing that one or two of its employees may have taken kickbacks (Oliver Morgan, “Of Halliburton and the Misspent Millions,” Observer, February 22, 2004). These kickbacks were for “awarding sub-contracts in Iraq”; a Kuwaiti firm overcharged by “around $6 million” (David Teather, “Halliburton Staff Sacked ‘for Taking Bribes’,” Guardian, January 24, 2004). Halliburton agreed to repay more than $27 million it overcharged the US military for meal services

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at four camps (Oliver Morgan, “Of Halliburton and the Misspent Millions,” Observer, February 22, 2004)—the Pentagon had investigated a $67 million overestimate for mess halls (Mark Tran, “Pentagon Launches Halliburton Inquiry,” Guardian, December 12, 2003). It also is “facing allegations that it overcharged for importing fuel to Iraq . . . by more than $61 million” (Teather, January 24, 2004). Halliburton, the oil company that the Bush administration is clearly linked with, has profited from the war in Iraq both by legal means and by crookedness, as the stream of investigations shows. At the very least, Halliburton’s involvement is an appearance of impropriety; at most, the Bush administration itself is tainted. Even if the decision to go to war were not improperly influenced by the oil companies, the choice to go to war was part of a framing of foreign policy with oil in mind, as Cheney urged the administration in his 2001 report, written for the energy department in his days as Halliburton’s chief executive. Oil is key, both in the long term and in the short term, that is, as part of a policy change with, as Cheney argued, America’s oil needs becoming key to the United States foreign policy, and with war leading to reconstruction (in which firms like Halliburton could take part) and a chance to develop underutilized oil fields. The privatization of the military and of reconstruction extends to many levels. Rather than using military managers for oversight, auditing, and to manage the awarding of contracts, the Pentagon has awarded a $22 million contract to AECOM technology group to: “[H]elp the Pentagon buy goods and services, plan projects and administer contracts in Iraq related to reconstruction work. The firm will also monitor other contractors who are overseeing billions of dollars worth of electrical, water and communications projects” (Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Ellen McCarthy, “Private Sector Has Firm Role at the Pentagon,” Washington Post, June 9, 2004). Long- and short-term oil interests were only one reason for war. Both President Bush and Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, argued that Iraq posed a regional threat. During the Iran/ Iraq war, the United States had supported Iraq and had seen Iran, a country that had recently undergone a Shiite religious revolution, as the regional threat (Kepel 2003). Now it was Iraq that was seen as the regional threat. Ten years of sanctions after the previous war between an American-led coalition and Iraq in 1991 had weakened any regional threat that Iraq might pose. In the discussion at the time, the borders of the relevant region seemed to be quite moveable. One implication was that Iraq posed a threat to Israel—geographically at the limit of the effective range

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of Iraqi missiles—but after the sanctions, and after a decade of interrupted UN inspections, it was unlikely that this continued to be true. Britain suggested that Iraq posed a regional threat to Cyprus, in which Britain had military bases. A dossier used to make the British case for war claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons able to fire in “forty-five minutes” (Blix 2004, 233). At the time that action against Iraq was being called for the newspapers interpreted this as meaning that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction able to be loaded in long-range missiles that could reach Cyprus. The same dossier also alleged that Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger (Blix 2004), and both the United States and the British dossiers alleged that Iraq had imported aluminum tubes to make nuclear weapons (Blix 2004, 230). The documents from Niger turned out to be obvious forgeries; an investigation is going on into the leaking of the name of the intelligence agent married to the diplomat who uncovered this. This leak could endanger the agent’s life and thus is illegal. The aluminum tubes are the wrong kind for weapons manufacture, and the weapons that could be fired in forty-five minutes are battlefield weapons, not strategic weapons capable of reaching Cyprus, or being used against a large target like a city. However, a few chemical shells from the early 1990s have been found. The United States made even more use of the argument about weapons of mass destruction than did Britain. It argued that Saddam Hussein, despite being a secular leader, was likely to give support to al-Qaida and other Islamist groups, and, therefore this justified America’s invasion of Iraq in the name of the “war on terror.” At present, according to International Law, war is only justified in individual or collective self-defense, or after authorization by the Security Council in order to restore international peace and security and after failure to comply with UN resolutions. The neoconservative case, however, was framed in terms of “preemption.” They argued that the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Charter were out of date, and ought to be replaced with more sweeping powers, in which one nation had the right to declare invasive war in response to potential threat, defined by themselves alone. Preemption is a much broader and more nebulous category than individual or collective self-defense. Apart from the philosophical, moral, and legal arguments about preemption, the policy simply hasn’t worked: the Iraq war has led to a huge increase in terrorism and loss of life, both in Iraq itself and in countries including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Spain, Indonesia, Chechnya, Morocco, and Turkey. In addition, the claim that it is necessary (or even useful) to preempt a threat rests on intelligence claims that may or may

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not be well-founded. Investigations in both the U.S. and the U.K. concluded that there were major problems with both the quality of the intelligence on Iraq and the ways in which the intelligence was used. The U.S. Senate strongly criticized the CIA for “a broken corporate culture and poor management” that led to a “global intelligence failure.” Senator Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the panel, said the administration had “used bad information to bolster its case for war, and we in Congress would not have authorized that war . . . if we knew then what we know now” (Jonathan Freedman, “An Elegant Box of Sharpened Knives,” Guardian, July 15, 2004). In Britain, the Butler report concluded that intelligence was “seriously flawed,” based on only five agents, three of whom were later discredited. The Joint Intelligence Committee assessments and CX reports contained caveats and qualifications that were omitted in the dossier in which the case for war was made. This editing process was deeply significant, especially given the paucity of intelligence on which the conclusions relied, so that material that was “thin,” “unclear,” and “uncertain” in the end was used to claim “beyond doubt” that Iraq posed an immediate threat (Michael White, Richard Norton-Taylor, and Ewen MacAskill, “A Litany of Failure—But No One to Blame”; Ewen MacAskill, “The Devil for Blair Remains in the Detail,” Guardian, July 15, 2004). The American commissions into 9/11 have found that there was no link between al-Qaida and Iraq. George Tenet, the head of the CIA under Bush and Clinton, has been the first to resign. In Britain, Sir John Scarlett, who presided over the committee which approved the “dodgy dossier” in which the “forty-fiveminute claim” was made, has just been made head of Britain’s intelligence services. The Butler report blamed the British intelligence failures on reliance on only five agents in Iraq, and on an absence of vetting those agents. Butler did not find that Iraqi defectors and exiles had a major impact on British intelligence. However, it is now clear that American intelligence was strongly affected by Iraqi defectors and exiles. Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, and his security chief, Aras Karim Habib, “were the channels for much of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case for war” (“US Intelligence Fears Iran Duped Hawks into Iraq War,” Julian Borger, Guardian, May 25, 2004). Investigations are now going on to determine whether Chalabi invented the intelligence on his own, or whether Iran, with whom he has been linked, might have been responsible (Julian Borger, May 25, 2004; Brian Whitaker, “Friend of US and Iran Has Too Many Enemies,” Guardian, May 25, 2004; James Moore, “How Chalabi and the White House Held the Front Page,” May

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29, 2004). This would have been in Iran’s interest, if they wanted to make Iraq unstable and open to a Shiite revolution or a Shiitedominated government. The New York Times has apologized (Gary Younge, “New York Times Admits Failures in Run-Up to War,” Guardian, May 27, 2004; Moore, May 29, 2004) for being taken in; the United States government has not. The New York Times discussion makes it clear that Judith Miller, their journalist, turned to neo-conservatives in the Pentagon for collaboration of what she had heard from Adnan Ihsan Saeed, an Iraqi defector to whom Miller was introduced by Chalabi. We may therefore link this intelligence issue to the earlier discussion of the power struggle in the Pentagon and to the struggle between the CIA and the new intelligence analysis service set up under Rumsfeld and Cheney, the Office of Special Plans (OSP). In this period of “aftermath” of war, of insurgency, the OSP has disbanded as a formal organization, but its members are still employed in the administration. The analysts for the OSP were not drawn from the professional intelligence community, Defense Department, or State Department, but were political appointees of a neo-conservative persuasion. The White House: [C]reated a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency. The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war. (Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” Guardian, July 17, 2003)

The neo-conservatives in the OSP promoted the dodgy intelligence from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles. They used this intelligence as a case for war, and in their power struggle with the established intelligence agencies. Struggles for power within an organization and struggles to define the objectives of that organization, both in terms of abstract principles and in terms of policy, thus played a part in the origins of the Iraq war. In addition, oil, and the refusal to turn towards more environmentally sound alternatives, had a significant role. Neo-conservative principles, as well as the neo-conservatives’ success in power struggles within the Administration, affected both the origins of

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the war, being used as reasons for the war, and the conduct of the war, defining the values and ideology of the United States as proselytizing virtues, bringing “democracy” to the world, and justifying torture as the necessary price that must be paid. However, like Ivan Karamazov, we may still ask ourselves whether such a bargain can ever be justified. It is the proselytizing nature of neo-conservatism that is at fault, and the way this proselytizing is through violence, not, which might be bad enough, through peaceful means. We should always be cautious of those with a mission. Democracy and freedom are important values, but they cannot be brought about by invasive means, especially invasive war; instead, we must turn to multilateral institutions like the International Criminal Court, however slowly they might work. In addition to these classic liberal practices and institutions, more radical leftist practices also give rise to hope: despite the escalating police violence at the anti-globalist demonstrations from the Genoa WTO meetings onwards, and the location of the WTO at increasingly remote sites, there is still a flourishing leftist international civil society, now holding its own major conferences at Porto Alegre, Brazil, as well as the counterdemonstrations at the G8 summits. War is a particularly horrific “spatial fix.” The addictive connotations of the phrase are suggestive: war leads to war, and terror. The suggestion of a temporary repair, or a botched job, is also useful conceptually: war often has economic causes, both longterm and short-term, as we have seen above, but these are only a temporary remedy. However, a material analysis of war cannot address all its aspects; we need a material-semiotic analysis. This enables us to bring in the moral aspects, and to discuss questions of responsibility and guilt, making it clear that responsibility lies with the leaders of the United States, not just with the reservists and ordinary soldiers who committed acts of torture and abuse. It becomes clear that issues of responsibility do not exist in isolation: they are closely related to the changing ideology and values of America. It is not just individual soldiers who should feel shame; witness the man who felt—most belatedly—that he had betrayed that which his flag stood for, and the braver man who refused to serve in a military which commits such acts: the principles the war upholds are not values of which Americans should be proud. As Levinas said, our responsibility to the other binds us, whether we accept or deny it, and however the other might behave to us. We cannot abrogate responsibility to the other, and so, our conduct in, and in the aftermath of, this war, shames us all.

Afterword I began Social and Virtual Space by looking at Emmanuel Levinas’s notion that Ethics ought to be the First Philosophy grounding and securing all our arguments. My analysis of both the hegemonic, consensus-politics derived conceptual separation of our society at the very end of the twentieth century into economic, political, social, and cultural realms, and the attempts by both the new social movements and the rightwing movements that have also formulated themselves anew to articulate connections between the realms that had been separated, is thus informed and grounded by an ethics and a belief in Social Justice. This ethics is expressed throughout Social and Virtual Space by the ways in which I sketch the “decisions of writing,” in Derrida’s phrase, that texts and social texts open up for us. Political movements interpret and shape the social world while acting in it; complementing this, texts, the fictional as well as the nonfictional, are also actions. The writing practices and reading protocols of SF can be understood as a response—complacent or anguished—to the systems of domination and the violences of our society. If SF is about the construction of imagined worlds, then, as a genre, SF is active and agent-like. The readers and fans, in this formalist way of understanding SF, are not necessarily passive; they, as well as the writers, are agents in the SF process. Reading an SF text may thus call us, as agents and as ethical beings, to responsibility. The next move in the argument is more contentious, resting, as Donna Haraway and David Harvey in their different ways make clear, on a strong interpretation of constructivism and on anti-positivist ways of understanding history, geography, and the social sciences. The “real world” is also imagined, and theoretical and substantive texts may be read like SF. Thus my discussion of historical geography also calls the writers and readers of those texts to the different responsibilities that, as members of a political community, we share. As Bernice Johnson Reagon says, we must work through our fears and dislikes of one another, as well as through our feelings of comradeship, and, in a way, love, in order to build coalition. As David Harvey says, if we truly care about Social Justice, we must go out and act politically in the wider world, as well as writing, reading books, and engaging in the politics of our disciplines and institutions. As well as writing about texts, both historical and fictional, I have also written about recent history, applying the 190

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lessons I have learned from my readings of texts. Living history is both material and semiotic: we experience it and act in part through our intellectual understanding as well as our emotions and ethical principles, and our analysis must show that. Finally, in a way, this book has also been about freedom. It’s a hard concept to write about without sounding sentimental. Individual images of freedom become either nostalgia or heterotopia. Our formulations tend to reduce either to a vague liberal promise evoking a highly ideological image of an America that probably never existed, and, given human stubbornness and self-interest, most likely could never exist, or to a radical description of a society that the individual writer would love but which some of her or his readers would fear. Nevertheless, we must imagine the future. It is we who live in it.

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Index

9/11, 167, 171 Abu Ghraib, 159–63 accumulation, 47,124, 139, 148–51, 176, 178 action: and conflict, 164; as ethical action, 173, 190; and performativeness, 51–53, 56, 58, 61, 110, 119; and undecidability, 15–19 Afghanistan, 164–67, 170–74 agency: in Pat Cadigan, 105, 113–14, 120; in C. J. Cherryh,148; and determination, 18; as ethical and political, 190; in William Gibson, 66, 68; in material-semiotic practices, 57–58 agrarianism, 173 AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), 57, 60 allied maintained prisons, 165–66, 171 alterity, 16, 27, 67, 80–81, 87 American exceptionalism, 153, 178 Amnesty International, 160–61 antifoundationalism, 16, 106 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 99 appropriate technology, 118 Arendt, Hannah, 177 Aristotelianism, 35, 43 assassination, 170 Bader, Veit, 43–44 Ballard, J. G., 64 Balsamo, Anne, 105–7 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 108–9 Bhabha, Homi, 126–27 biomedical discourses, 101, 105–6 Blair, Tony, 33 Bretton Woods agreement, 48, 141 Burke, Kenneth, 57 Bush, George H. W., 175 Bush, George W., 159, 166, 176 Butler, Judith, 21, 44, 51, 79–80, 94, 104 Cadigan, Pat: and agency, 108, 115– 17; and IT, 105; and lesbian and gay sexuality, 106; and narrative

form, 108–11; and prelapsarianism, 106–7, 118; and science and ethics, 120; and technofeminism, 104–5; and technology, 111–17; and transcendentalism, 113, 117 Californian Pastoral, 117 carnival, 76, 118 censorship, 77 Cherryh, C. J.: and crisis, 151; and sexual difference, 149; and species difference, 150; and transnationalism, 148; and undecidability, 150 CIA, 159, 166–67 Civic Republicans, 35–36, 43 civilian contractors, 163–64 class: as capital and labor, 122; and climate change, 181; and Mike Davis, 152–56; and Samuel Delany, 62–97; and David Harvey, 120–24, 143; as identity, 41, 49; ; and Fredric Jameson, 126–27, 130; as material-semiotic practices, 56, 61, 100; as movements, 32; and violence, 71 Clinton, William, 176 coalition, 124, 126, 136–37, 145 coercion, 160–67, 170, 176 colonialism, 78, 96, 126–27, 173; as colonial discourse, 79 Combahee River Collective, 98 communism, 174 communitarianism, 35–36, 39–43, 175 community, 30, 43–44, 60, 126, 132–34 confinement, 159–74 passim Congress, U.S., 174, 187 consciousness, 50, 102, 137, 150 consensus and deviance, 30, 32–33, 36, 39–42, 45, 190 conservatism, 72, 174, also see neo-conservatism; New Right; religion conspiracy theory, 167, 182 containment, 174, 179 contingency, 56, 180–82

203

204

index

counterculture, 31–33, 113 creolization, 60 crisis: of accumulation, 151; apocalypse, 181–82; cataclysm, 90; catastrophe, 180–182 C3I, 89, 100–101 culture: as civilization, 149; critique of culturalism, 172–73; and education, 75; and material culture, 47, 53–58; vs. nature, 95, 147–48 cyberpunk, 65–68 cyberspace, 55, 65–68 cyborgs, 53–54, 68, 95, 102, 107, 120 Davis, Mike, 121, 138–47, 151–57, 180–82 death, 85, 116–117 deconstruction, 15–29 passim, 55, 62–97 passim, 72, 74–88, 123–24 dehumanization, 169 Delany, Samuel: on class, 88–92; on genre, 72–24; on history as forgetting, 74–76; on marginality, 80; on race, 77, 82, 86; on radical difference, 93–96; on sexuality, 76–78; on transnationalism in SF, 88–92; on undecidability, 81–87 Deleuze, Gilles, 48–61 passim democracy, radical, 43 Derrida, Jacques, 16–23, 72 desire, 71, 76–77, 85, 96 Diego Garcia, 165, 166, 171 difference: and coalition, 126; and Mike Davis, 156; in Samuel Delany 87, 93–97; in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 49, 51; in Donna Haraway, 56, 59, 101; in David Harvey 122–23 displacement, 74–75, 82–83, 88, 90–91, 123–24, 142 domination, 71–72, 81, 87, 190 Dorfman, Ariel, 167–69 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 159–60, 167–68 Dionne, E. J., 39–42 Disch, Thomas, 64 domination, 71–72 Dukakis, Mike, 39 Dworkin, Andrea, 76 Emotion, 116–17, 137–38, 168, 175–76, 169, 191 employment, 142, 154 Enlightenment, 55–56, 101, 172

environmentalism, 32, 104, 122 epistemology: and the cogito, 129; and relation with ethics, 16, 23; and judgment, 110; and moral discourses, 113; as process, 80; as scientific knowledges, 51, 56–59, 63, 104; and Slavery, 95; as standpoint epistemology, 16, 98; and prelapsarianism, 102 ethics: and antifoundationalism, 17, 23–24; and deconstruction, 86; ethical action, 112–14, 119–20; and fiction, 98 European Court of Human Rights, 159 Evans, Sara, 125 exclusion, 20–22, 67, 87, 100 expansionism, 175 extraordinary rendition, 165–66, 171 Feminism: and American feminists of color, 121; and feminist theory, 76– 77, 90, 98; and Radical Feminism, 145; and socialist-feminism, 100– 102, 121–57; and subsumption, 59 flows, 58, 60 Fordism, 139 foundationalism, 16, 80, 128–29 fragmentation, 137 Freud, Sigmund, 76 Foucault, Michel, 103 Gay and Lesbian movements, 32, 36, 60; critique of racism and sexism in, 125; and theory, 76–77, 90, 121; also see sexuality; queer theory Gender: agency and, 66; and Pat Cadigan, 105–6; and C.J. Cherryh, 148–51; construction, 112; and Mike Davis 154; in Samuel Delany, 62–97 passim, 92; and fragmentation of self, 172; and David Harvey, 121–24, 143–44, 146; and Donna Haraway, 147–48; identities, 49; ideology, 44–45; and juridical discourses, 110; material-semiotic practices, 56, 61; movements, women’s, 32; and norms, 90; and representation, 84; and science fiction, 71; U.S. policy and sexual politics, 175; and violence, 74

index Geneva Convention, 158–59, 165–67 genre, 62–71 passim, 68–70 passim, 73 globalization, 47, 60, 176; also see transnationalism Grewal, Inderpal, 48, 59–60 Grosz, Elizabeth, 49–50 Guantánamo Bay, 159, 165 Guattari, Felix, 48–61 Hall, Stuart, 31–32 Halliburton, 183–85 Haraway, Donna: and constructivism, 190; and cyborg identities, 95; and difference, 99–103; and New Science Studies, 47, 50, 56–61; and socialist-feminism, 147–48 Harvey, David: critique of groupbased politics, 130–31; and identity and difference, 121–22; and neo-liberalism, 158; and periodicization, 177–79; and Regulation School, 47–48; and social justice, 190; and spacialization, 138–47 Hegel, G. W. F., 49, 77 hegemony, 75, 88, 158, 176, 178, 190 Heinlein, Robert, 68 Hennessy, Rosemary, 46 hermeneutic code, 109–11 Hersh, Seymour, 160–61 historiography, 90–92, 132, 138, 147–48, 172, 177, 180, 191 home, 132–34, 136–37 homophobia, 95–97 hooks: bell, 98–99 Hooper, Barbara, 127–28 human, 105, 147–48, 150 hybridity, 102 Identity politics, 38, 50, 98–99, 102, 124, 127–28, 130 immune system discourse, 100 imperialism, 158, 177 infinity, 129 Information Technology, 88–92, 105–6 inscription, 71–72 intelligence, 187–189 intentionality, 18, 27–28, 50, 56 International Law, 158–59, 165–67, 186

205

interpretation, 74, 78–79, 81, 86, 91, 163–64 interrogation, 159–74 passim Iraq, U. S.-led war in, 158–89 Islam, 172, 186 iterability, 22, 37, 80, 124 ius ad bellum 158–59, 174 ius in bello, 158–59 Jameson, Fredric, 126–30 judgment, 110 juridical discourse, 158–60 Justice Department, U. S., 160–61 just war, 158–59 Kaplan, Caren, 48, 59–60 Kornbluth, C. M., 69 Lacan, Jacques, 73, 84–85 Lack, 52, 137 Laclau, Ernesto, 43 Latour, Bruno, 48, 54–55 League of Nations, 158–59 Lefebvre, Henri, 8 Le Guin, Ursula, 168 Levinas, Emmanuel, 16–17, 23–29, 80, 129, 167, 190 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 79 liberalism: political, 34–37, 39–41, 43, 124, 148, 175, 189; economic, 43, 175 liminality, 110, 114 Livingstone, Ken, 33 localization, 47, 60, 91, 138–47, 158 Lorde, Audre, 99, 121, 133–34 lynching, 161 Machine, 53–54, 58, 105,147–48 MacKinnon, Catherine, 76 manufacturing of consent, 174 maquiladoras, 140–41 marginality, 72, 75, 80–81, 88 Martin, Biddy, 132–33 Marxism: and Samuel Delany, 89–90; and Donna Haraway, 148; and David Harvey, 138–47; and neo-Marxist geography, 124; and subsumption, 49, 59, 98; teleology in, 43; analysis of transnationalism, 47 material-semiotic practices, 46–61 passim, 91–92, 124, 147

206

index

material-semiotic analysis, 157, 159–60, 189, 160–74, 174–77, 179, 188–89 mestizaje, 102, 113–14 metatheory, 138, 156 mode of production, 177 modernity, 37, 57, 88, 124 Mohanty, Chandra, 132–33 Moraga, Cherrie, 99 Mouffe, Chantal, 35, 43 movement, 30, 34 multilateralism, 158, 176, 179 myth production, 59, 117 Narrative: and Pat Cadigan, 98, 106– 8, 110, 114; and Samuel Delany, 85, 89; and history, 180; and literary form, 64–65; and myth production 59 nationalism, 177 nativism, 152–53 nature, 95, 102, 104, 147–48 neo-conservatism: connecting sundered concepts, 190; history of, 144, 174–76, 179; and Iraq war, 186; power struggles, 167, 188–89; and spatial fix, 158; neo-liberalism, 144, 158, 174, 176 neo-pragmatism, 129–30 networks, 132 New Left, 31–32, 37 New Right, 34–40 passim, 46 New Science Studies, 48, 53–61 passim, 104, 148 New Social Movements: connecting sundered concepts, 190; and deviance spiral, 32–34; and David Harvey, 121–24; and histories of resistance, 132; and identity and difference, 102; and Fredric Jameson, 130; and the polity, 37, 39; and publishing, 70; as social and political, 46 New Wave, 63–64 norms, 39, 51, 68, 88, 104, 106 Northern Ireland, 159 Oil, 182–84 ontology, 103 optics, 74, 81 organicism, 53

Paraliterature, 62 parody, 79–80 particularity, 123, 156 Patton, Cindy, 33–37, 45 Pentagon, U. S., 167 performance, 79–80, 104 periodicization, 141–43, 155, 176–79 photography, 161, 174 platiality: as active, 15; and conflict, 131–38; and Mike Davis, 138–47; in David Harvey, 131; and limitation, 122; and Bernice Johnson Reagon, 134–37; in science fiction, 67, 70 Pohl, Frederik, 69 policy, 170–71, 173–75 polis, 35 political theory, 39, 42–45, 76 polyglossalia, 108–9 pornography, 76–77, 172 postcolonial theory, 77 post-Fordism, 139–47 postmodernism: in Samuel Delany, 72–73, 76; and hybridity, 102; and identity politics, 128; in New Science Studies, 45, 54–55; and politics, 37; in science fiction, 64; postmodernity: and Pat Cadigan, 114; and David Harvey, 121–24; 140–47, 176; and Information Technology, 88; Fredric Jameson’s analysis of, 111; and politics, 37; and technoscience, 88–90; as transnationalism,140; poststructuralism, 43, 54–55, 72–73, 88, 102, 139 Pratt, Minnie Bruce, 132–33 preemption, 186 primitivism, 81 psychoanalysis, 72 psychopathology, 169 psych-ops, 172 publicity, 173–74 Qaida, al, 186 Queer theory, 45–46, 76–77, 98, 102, 121 Race: and antiracist cultural theories, 76; and Civil Rights Movement, 32; and culturalism, 174; and Mike Davis, 121, 152–58; and Samuel Delany, 62–97, 92; and electoral politics, 36, 41; and

index William Gibson, 66–68; and David Harvey, 121–22, 144; as identities, 49; and imperialism, 177–78; and Fredric Jameson, 126–27; as material-semiotic practices, 56, 61; as movements, 32; and representation, 84, 86; and slavery, 71; and unionization, 145; and violence, 74 Rawls, John, 34–35 Reagan, Ronald, 175 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 134–37, 170 Red Cross, 159–61 region, 47, 56, 154, 175, 179, 182–83, 185–86 Regulation School, 47, 89, 139, 141–43, 150 religion: Christian, 150–60, 175; and community, 175; Islamic, 172; Judeo-Christian tropes, 56; Native American 182; and nativism, 153; and New Right, 36, 46; prelapsarianism, 103–20; and unionization, 145 representation, 81–82, 86, 88, 114, 122, 139, 156 Republican Party, 175 resistance: and antiglobalization movements, 189; and millennialism, 181; and antiracism, 77, 179 responsibility, 16–17, 24–26, 103–20 passim, 167–71, 173, 190 Sado-masochism, 71, 87 Sandoval, Chela, 50, 99 science, 104, 148 Science Fiction, 62–65, 112, 170 secret access program, 170 Sedgwick, Eve, 45 Seidman, Steven, 45 semiotics, 72, 83, 85, 91–93 Senate, U. S., 167 separatism, 135–37 services, 47–48 set theory, 80–81 sexual abuse, 160–67, 169–70, 172 sexuality: in C. J. Cherryh, 151; constructed as cultural issue, 44–45; deconstruction of, 77; in Samuel Delany, 62–97, 92; and domination, 71; and Michel Foucault, 103; and William Gibson,

207

66; and David Harvey, 121–24; and heterosexuality and normativity, 94, 100; as identities, 49; and juridical discourse, 110; and material-semiotic practices, 56, 61; movements, gay and lesbian, 32, 36, 60; and perversion, 76; and range of characters, 106; sexual politics and U.S. policy, 175; and violence, 74 slavery, 75, 77, 86, 90, 95 social justice: and alterity and infinity, 80; and David Harvey, 122; as ideal, 7–8, 190–91; lack of, 167, 173; and Mary Bruce Pratt, 132–33; preemption, 186; possibilities for, 174; and responsibility, 25, and undecidability, 19 Soja, Edward, 127–28 Sontag, Susan, 161–62 Soviet Union, 158, 174 space: and core/periphery model, 143; and Mike Davis, 152–56; and David Harvey, 138–47; and Henrì Lefebvre, 125–26; and Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, 132–33; and Mary Bruce Pratt, 132–33; and Bernice Johnson Reagon, 134–37; spatiality, 66, 70, 81, 89, 91; spatial fix, 47, 123–24, 140–44, 158, 184; spatial practices, 7, 36, 39–40, 152; and territoriality, 158; theocratic space, 36, 46; species difference, 96, 107, 117, 149–51 spectacle, 161, 174 Spinoza, Baruch, 52 Spivak, Gayatri, 79, 83 State, U.S. Department of, 167 Stone, Sandy, 55 story-telling, 75, 84–86, 102 street, 136 structuralism, 72, 88, 139 subaltern discourses, 101, 125 subjectivity, 78–79, 85, 126, 172 sublime, the, 111, 129 Supreme Court, U.S., 159 surveillance, 90 Technofeminism, 65, 102–20 passim technoscience, 47, 58, 61, 65, 104, 107, 111 temporal fix, 123–24, 140

208

index

terror, 159, 168, 186 time, 75, 79, 123–24 torture, 159–174 transcendentalism, 107, 112–13, 118 transgression, 76, 111, 174–75 transnationalism: in Pat Cadigan, 111; in C. J. Cherryh, 148–51; and coalition vs. fragmentation, 124–131; and C3I, 88–89; as material-semiotic, 60–61; and privatization, 178–79, 185; and region 178; and science fiction, 65; as spacial fix, 47, 140–47 tropes, 57, 59–60, 84, 133, 136 Turing, Alan, 113 Undecidability, 16–17, 69, 79, 81, 119 unionization, 144–45, 175 United Nations, 158–59, 177, 186 universalization, 105

Values, 39–42, 168–70, 173–75, 189, 191 violence, 74, 160–67, 190 virtuality, 7, 55 viruses, 57 Walzer, Michael, 39, 42–45 war: conduct in, 158–59; endless, 162, 175; reasons for, 158–58, 174, 185–89 weapons of mass destruction, 185–89 White, Hayden, 57, 59 Wolmark, Jenny, 105–7 women’s movements, 32, 125 worlds, imagined, 87–88, 118, 190 World Trade Organization (WTO), 31–32 writing, 76, 78, 87, 93, 98, 190 ˇ zek,Slavoj, Zi ˇ 21, 52, 79–80, 104 Zoline, Pamela, 64