Special Section on Friedrich Kittler

Citation preview

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722091

SPECIAL SECTION ON FRIEDRICH KITTLER (1943 – 2011)

INTRODUCTION LARSON POWELL and GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

CULTURAL POLITICS

>

Friedrich Kittler died on October 18, 2011. It is on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death that Cultural Politics presents this special section. Our aim is to expand on the knowledge of Kittler’s work by focusing on aspects that have been of less importance in the anglophone reception of his work. Once scholars achieve a certain degree of fame or notoriety, they inevitably gravitate toward interviews and published lectures. There are more invitations to speak and more requests to comment on things of public interest, no matter how closely (or not) they are related to their work. Kittler was no exception. As Larson Powell notes, it is not the least of ironies that a thinker so concerned with technological media should have reverted to orality. Indeed, during the last decade of his life the oral format became an expedient outlet for Kittler and an equally valuable resource for his followers. He was an outspoken interviewee who never wasted the reader’s time with carefully balanced statements, and the esoteric, highly complex nature of his final project—the envisaged tetralogy Musik und Mathematik (Music and Mathematics) (of which only the two parts of the first volume were published in his lifetime)—made it all the more necessary and welcome to present certain aspects in a more accessible format.

359

CULTURAL POLITICS

360

CULTURAL POLITICS

LARSON POWELL and GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

The core of this special section are two lectures that Kittler delivered as part of the prestigious Mosse Lecture Series held at Humboldt University in Berlin in honor of the German American historian George Lachmann Mosse (1918 –99). For obvious reasons, one of the topics of the 2002 series was the war on terror. Kittler’s essay “Of States and Their Terrorists”—hitherto only translated into Swedish—was flanked by contributions by E´tienne Balibar and Martin van Creveld, among others. The lectures in the summer of 2007, in turn, were dedicated to “Odysseys.” Less topical than terror, the theme was of great personal importance to Kittler, given that Homer’s work and its recursions through history were a significant part of his Musik und Mathematik project. We indicated above that lectures tend to present difficult subject matter in a more accessible way. Here, too, Kittler occasionally breaks the mold. Especially his lecture “In the Wake of the Odyssey” presents formidable problems to listeners, readers, and—above all—translators. We are therefore including two companion pieces, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s “Hunting a Whale of a State” and Powell’s “Excursions and Recursions,” which are designed to engage Kittler’s lectures on terrorism and the Odyssey, respectively. Their goal is to both explain and challenge the peculiar one-sided richness that is the hallmark of Kittler’s work. Further contributions include some personal impressions by Winthrop-Young of Kittler in his Freiburg glory days (“Well, What Socks Is Pynchon Wearing Today?”) and an interview conducted by Christoph Weinberger (“The Cold Model of Structure”) in which Kittler—not without a number of characteristically pithy put-downs—looks back on his work. While Kittler occasionally expressed his belief that there were certain aspects of bygone discourse networks he had analyzed so thoroughly that there was nothing left to say, he never saw himself issuing final words on our current technological habitat. It is fitting, therefore, to conclude with Sebastian Franklin’s contribution “Cloud Control, or the Network as Medium,” which goes beyond Kittler—or, rather, which takes Kittler forward into technologies he himself did not have the opportunity to deal with. Franklin follows Kittler’s analogy between Greek origins (or metaphors) and current technology but proposes a political reading of computer technology distinct from Kittler’s. Finally, Franklin’s essay tackles that complete virtualization and invisibility of current media technology against which Kittler’s own Hellenic vision of immediate erotic presence may have been a reaction. On behalf of Cultural Politics and Duke University Press we would like to thank Weinberger and Franklin for their contributions. We are especially grateful to Susanne Holl for granting the permission to translate and publish Kittler’s texts.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722100

“WELL, WHAT SOCKS is PYNCHON WEARING TODAY?” A FREIBURG SCRAPBOOK in MEMORY of FRIEDRICH KITTLER GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG ABSTRACT This essay, a sequence of short memories and reflections, describes several encounters with Friedrich Kittler in Freiburg between 1980 and 1985.

>

From 1980 to 1985 I studied at the University of Freiburg. One of my instructors happened to be Friedrich Kittler. In hindsight, he was the most extraordinary scholar I ever met. Since all traditionally accepted definitions of genius appear to be defunct, I can happily withdraw into my own: a genius is someone like Kittler. But that is how I think about him today; it is not how I judged him back then. Others may have been able to

CULTURAL POLITICS

KEYWORDS: Friedrich Kittler, Freiburg, Germany, Thomas Pynchon

361

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is professor of German in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). Among his recent publications are Kittler and the Media (2011) and the afterword to the new translation of Jakob von Uexku ¨ll’s A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans (2010). He is currently working on German posthumanism and the concept of cultural techniques and completing a translation of Eva Horn’s The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction (forthcoming).

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

362

CULTURAL POLITICS

discern the future butterfly; I just saw a caterpillar. But what a colorful specimen it was: down to the hookah and the strange way of talking, it appeared to have crept straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Despite promising beginnings, I did not get to know him well. To the extent that I had a say in this, it was a conscious decision on my part. The Freiburg Kittler I encountered was a charismatic intellectual in his late thirties with considerable charm and a wicked sense of humor; he was also narcissistic, prickly, and at times downright abrasive. What follows is too impious to qualify as an obituary, too anecdotal to rank as a biographical sketch, and too frothy to be considered a scholarly appreciation. With notes and memories from bygone Freiburg days, I want to offer a scrapbook of snapshots and impressions designed to prepare readers for some of the more baffling things Kittler has to say in the interview with Christoph Weinberger that is part of this issue (as well as for the uniquely Kittlerian way in which he says them).1 Many controversial aspects of his work—including war, women, and a strange continental provincialism that increased with age—were already apparent back then. Kittler (and he remains one of the few scholars worthy of the cliche´) was ahead of his time, but he invested considerable energy into informing others that they were behind. He was an inspiring teacher, yet he was prone to seek out the danger zone where instruction turns into seduction, education becomes a form of contamination, and the pedagogue takes on the trappings of the demagogue. Kittler had more bulbs in his chandelier than most, yet he wouldn’t have been able to emit such dazzling beams of light had they not first been concentrated between formidable blinkers. But the bottom line is that Kittler was interesting. When he spoke, you listened; when he spoke well, you took notes; and when he went off on his trademark tangents, you made sure you recorded them verbatim. Like many others, I learned a lot by linking my ears to his mouth, especially when it ran loose; but one of the main lessons was that Kittler, like all major fireworks, was best sampled at a certain distance. September 1980. My first university course was a seminar on Gottfried Benn. I did not care much for Benn, but the class was scheduled for Thursdays, 18:00 –20:00, a time slot acceptable to freshmen sleeping habits. I arrived at a quarter to six to find the room deserted; I had yet to learn that “18:00 c.t.” (cum tempore, or “with time”) was the polite Latin way of saying that everybody was free to arrive fifteen minutes late. A small group of other, equally confused neophytes started to trickle in, followed by a surprisingly large number of senior students. The instructor—listed in the course calendar as “PD F. Kittler”—was fashionably late. “PD,” this much I knew, stood for privatdozent, the polite German way of saying that the person did not have a real job. I do not recall how he introduced himself because I was much too preoccupied with the way he handled his smoking utensils. Never have I seen a man on more intimate terms with his

363

cigarette. The moment he lit up, it became a protean tool: magician’s wand, conductor’s staff, cheerleader’s baton, mountain troll’s cudgel. He would tap it against the tabletop like a telegraph key to signal impatience, turn it into a samurai katana to behead misinformed objections, and hold it upright as a glowing exclamation mark to illuminate an important point. Upon finishing, he would stare at the stub in baffled gratitude, pass a moment in silent communion, and reach for the next. You didn’t need to study Alan Turing to understand the concept of a universal machine; you just had to watch Kittler smoke. He had an interesting voice. Throughout his life Kittler retained a slight Saxon accent, and the more excited, irritated, or inebriated he became, the stronger it asserted itself. In Saxon-inflected German, Medien (media) sounds suspiciously like Ma¨dchen (girls): whenever Kittler was sufficiently stimulated, media theory turned into girl theory (as those who have prowled through the first two volumes of Musik und Mathematik [Music and Mathematics ] will confirm). But what struck me most was the way he ended sentences. If Kittler the writer gained notoriety for his flashy openings, Kittler the speaker was at his best when coming to a stop. On the one hand, there was the curt, apodictic conclusion, when the voice dropped with the downward slice of a well-oiled guillotine. This lowering was frequently accompanied by a very characteristic baring of the canine teeth (memorably described by Klaus Theweleit), which signified that Kittler had gone into bad-boy mode. On the other hand, there was a hesitant, almost awkward raising with which he managed to turn inflammatory statements into innocent queries. This upward lilt—when his voice resembled a timid periscope peeking out over an ocean of frothy syntax—added an endearing Oliver Twist quality to his outrageous pleas: Please, sir, I want to provoke more. (More? the establishment roared and sent out one reviewer after the other to bury his habilitation.) In hindsight, I believe that this vulnerability was as much part of his charisma as it was his intellect. The physical fragility Kittler displayed later in life was preceded by an emotional frailty that elicited among his more dedicated followers a potent mixture of idolization and concern. Here was a man you admired, yet also one you protected. I was so fixated on how he spoke because, like many others, I had no idea what he was saying. If he had switched into Finnish to lecture on string theory, we could not have been more lost. It was disconcerting because everything seemed terribly important; you sensed that you needed to know this, yet it was always just out of reach and therefore all the more intimidating. It reminded me of the first time I walked into a tropical jungle at night; in the dark all the mysterious hissing, croaking, and slithering seemed to come from creatures ten times their normal size. Older students seemed able to follow him; they used the same phrases, invoked the same French names, and laughed at the same strange jokes, though I could not say whether they had ascended to Kittler’s heights or whether he was operating

CULTURAL POLITICS

A FREIBURG SCRAPBOOK in MEMORY of FRIEDRICH KITTLER

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

364

CULTURAL POLITICS

on their level of baloney, just in a more authoritative way. By 18:30 I was flustered, by 18:45 annoyed, and by 19:00 I had decided that PD Kittler did not deserve my presence. Freiburg boasted a large German department; statistically, it was guaranteed that it employed instructors you could understand. But then things turned technical. Benn occasionally mentions radios in his poems, and Kittler appeared to be arguing that this act of technological remediation determined the status of the poems—hence any retreat into the standard tropes of Benn scholarship (or of textual analysis in general) was an irrelevant cop-out.2 Slowly, the ground was giving way underneath me, and I began to experience the opening stage of the Kittler effect with its dizzying mix of elation and vertigo. It was an excavation by way of earthquakes: the pancaking collapse of traditional edifices of meaning accompanied by the corresponding emergence of hitherto obscured materialities of communication and inscription. I certainly did not grasp the finer points, but I came to understand that taking apart my Saba VS2160 amplifier or intently listening to scratches on old Yes or Tubes LPs constituted a genuine act of theory. While I was reveling in the new possibilities the study of German literature had to offer, Kittler started to talk about the early, Edisonian days of phonography that, somehow, had altered the fundamentals of language. Suddenly, to the delight of all present, he broke into broad Saxon English to quote some of the very first words recorded in analog fashion: “Ma¨ry ha¨d eh liddle la¨mb / eets fleesz vas vite a¨s snou.” This, PD Kittler lectured, reveals the constitutional autism or self-sufficiency of the data stream known as language as well as the breakdown of the only recently inscribed oedipal familial order under new technological conditions. It is the voice of a little girl that needs neither mommy nor daddy (das braucht keinen Pappa und keine Mama); all it needs is an engineer like Edison to come along and record its output. For a brief moment I sensed—and all my subsequent academic experiences have confimed my fleeting epiphany—that no matter how long I studied, no matter how many more classes I attended, it could only go downhill from here. Kittler may not have been famous yet, but he already was controversial. The main bone of contention was his pronounced antihumanism, which with the shift from French discourse theory to media had become a great deal more tangible and less nebulous. “You are from now on subject to gadgets and instruments of mechanical discourse processing” (Kittler 1997: 84)—that anybody could understand, or at least parrot. Kittler was freeing us from the obligation to ponder Man and Meaning (especially the improvement of the former and the subtleties of the latter), and this was as liberating to some as it was cynical to others. Indeed, for a first-year student wandering the corridors of Freiburg’s fractured German department, the late twentieth-

365

century theory wars first appeared in the guise of disciplinary infighting. Kittler was not only granting us the license to forget what we had learned in school, he was also issuing letters of marque to attack what was being taught in other lecture halls. As a result, the image of Kittler was already back then subject to partisan division. On the one hand, he was a provocateur eager to engage in polemical raids on large portions of his profession; he descended upon his discipline with all the finesse of an ill-tempered wrecking crew. On the other hand (as he points out in the Weinberger interview), there were formidable forces arraigned against him—against his work in particular as well as against him as a representative of so-called poststructuralism. It was difficult not to sympathize with him: here was the young insurgent, the Jacques Lacan– spouting Luke Skywalker battling the calcified empire. The legend was already taking shape, and throughout his life Kittler remained enough of a showman to nurture it. But darker, more sinister Machiavellian tales permeated the Freiburg corridors, and those less enamored with Kittler’s project of kicking the human out of the humanities (to provide a more fitting translation of the title of his 1980 collection Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften [Expulsion of the Spirit from the Humanities ]) were all too willing to pass them on to innocent ears. The rise of poststructuralism in Germany and in Freiburg in particular (for which Kittler in the Weinberger interview claims probably more credit than he deserves) was said to be a tactical alliance gone awry. Under attack from the Left, so I was told behind carefully closed doors, the conservative Germanist establishment had adopted and bred young poststructuralists like Kittler to unleash them against the Left. The antiprogressive alliance, however, was doomed to backfire because the posthermeneutic and antihumanist Parisian arguments brought to bear against (neo-)Marxist or Frankfurt-inspired scholarship could just as well be deployed against the conservative patrons. One of my German instructors likened the situation to Goethe’s poem about the magician’s disciple who cannot control the brooms he conjures up. An unhappy medievalist compared Kittler to an increasingly insufferable Siegfried at the court of vexed Burgundians who had missed the opportunity to get rid of him in time. Reading Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, I stumbled across a more memorable image: Kittler was Loki, the Nordic trickster god. Odin, troubled caretaker of an embattled world, enlists the help of the deviously ingenious Loki (a mixture of Mephistopheles and MacGyver) to ward off the evil forces of ice and fire. But the wayward Loki has a mind of his own: he cannot be contained by shaky alliances and soon devotes himself to bringing down the Asgard establishment. Kittler—whose knowledge of all things Nordic was channeled through Bayreuth— would have been amused. In any case, the many stories, rumors and nascent legends, while of little help when it came to understanding Kittler’s work, certainly added to his notoriety. The man was a scandal, but more important,

CULTURAL POLITICS

A FREIBURG SCRAPBOOK in MEMORY of FRIEDRICH KITTLER

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

366

CULTURAL POLITICS

he was a stimulating riot, and for the time being I was happy to be wired into the circuits of inspiration. February 1981. Toward the end of the Benn seminar Kittler asked me to translate Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage.” He was working on a “little paper” and needed as literal a German rendition as possible. A few weeks later I found myself on the floor of his apartment arguing whether “loonies” should be Irre, Verru¨ckte, or Bekloppte. Kittler was on a roll: he had just returned from the German leg of Pink Floyd’s Wall Tour, and fueled by copious supplies of coffee that was soon more dregs than liquid he rehearsed parts of his Pink Floyd essay.3 “Brain Damage,” he lectured, was a performative genealogy of rock music, an electronically enhanced discourse on discourse channel conditions revealing that each of us has a voice in my head but it’s not me. And it didn’t stop with “the Pinks.” As he turned coffee into wine, LP covers appeared from every corner of the room. We passed through the Stones to the Fugues and ended up with the Doors’ parricidal Apocalypse Now anthem “The End.” What exactly, Kittler asked, did Jim Morrison mean with “lost in a Roman wilderness of pain”? No idea. He gazed at me with enthused pity: Well, isn’t it obvious? The reference to Rome is preceded by a repeated invocation of “everything that stands.” So? Once again, I felt like a Japanese radio operator listening in on Navajo windtalkers. Look, he insisted, it is Plato read through Martin Heidegger: Being stands, and precisely that is lost in the switch from Greek being to the inferior Roman wilderness. The song records a change in the History of Being. He flipped into vintage Kittlerese: “Jim Morrison dionysiert sich zuru¨ck nach Griechenland” (Jim Morrison is dionysizing himself back to Greece). And here—cigarette pausing in erect exclamation— we’re back with the early Pink Floyd. After all, Syd Barrett had the Great God Pan in mind when he titled his LP The Piper at the Gates of Dawn — “But that’s from the The Wind in the Willows,” I protested. “Portly the Otter.”. . . Canines bared, eyebrows flaring: “Ze vind in ze villows?” A surreal scene was threatening to unfold. Here was the enrage´ Freiburg wunderkind, the inverter of Michel Foucault, updater of Heidegger, avatar of Friedrich Nietzsche—and he was about to be lectured on the riverside exploits of Rat, Mole, and Toad. What next? Beatrix Potter? Barrett had loved her tales too. But the doorbell rang, guests arrived, topics changed, and the world was forever deprived of the media archaeology of the Flopsy Bunnies. Over a quarter century later I reencountered that February afternoon in the first volume of Musik und Mathematik. Whatever else may be involved in Kittler’s extravagant Greek recursions, Musik und Mathematik is also an autobiographically inflected attempt to short-circuit Jimi Hendrix and Friedrich Ho¨lderlin. If the autopoietic systems theory engineered by Niklas Luhmann (b. 1927) is the last

A FREIBURG SCRAPBOOK in MEMORY of FRIEDRICH KITTLER

367

Despite misgivings about the atmosphere in the Benn seminar, I joined Kittler’s next class but quit after a couple of weeks and never again attended any of his courses. The final straw was a brief clash regarding the ethics and organizational abilities of Nazi minster of armaments Albert Speer. The matter was tangential and of little interest to anyone, and Kittler himself must have forgotten it five minutes later; for me it was a tipping point. As a teacher and supervisor, Kittler could be extremely generous and supportive of those willing to join him on his exodus into the

CULTURAL POLITICS

great aria of the so-called skeptical generation that came of age in Germany in the 1950s, the triptych made up of the Musik und Mathematik project by Kittler (b. 1943), the Book of Kings project by Theweleit (b. 1942), and the Spheres trilogy by Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) represents the last great attempt to transform, sift, and conserve (it is tempting to use the three Rs of Hegelian sublation: raise, revoke, and retain) the cultural inheritance of the rebellious 1960s. And if Kittler and Sloterdijk share an ambition to tell a story of occidental proportions, Kittler and Theweleit agree that the most interesting part of that inheritance is the volatile synthesis of the musical and the sexual. For Theweleit, the fusion of sounds and bodies facilitated by US Armed Forces radio stations of the 1950s and the British invasions of the 1960s served to expel fascism even from the bodies it had once taken hold of; for Kittler, it served to retrieve ancient Greece. What sets Kittler apart is a second, somewhat idiosyncratic 1968 synthesis: that of the aesthetic (he would have heartily disliked the term) and the religious (which he would have disliked even more). It was certainly not religious in any conventional sense: ultimately, grafting Morrison onto Dionysus is an early twenty-first-century reboot of the early nineteenth-century romantic project to establish a Kunstreligion, an aesthetically inflected religious spirituality teeming with gods that had the good fortune of being invented by poets rather than priests and were worshiped between sheets rather than in pews. Intellectually, Kittler may be a composite of Nietzsche, G. W. F. Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, and Claude Shannon; he was also Friedrich Schlegel (and a couple of other romantics) on acid. But maybe the whole Greek adventure is the last big joke the crafty Loki played on us. Kittler was, after all, one of Foucault’s most zealous readers; he was much too familiar with the latter’s seminal essay on Gustave Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony not to suspect that all his philhellenic revelries wrapped in their gaudy halo of priapic psychedelia are, just like Flaubert’s story, the product of an imaginary that “grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries” (Foucault 1977: 91). It is a library fantasy in which—to quote Kittler’s favorite living author—“the real and only fucking is done on paper” (Pynchon 1973: 616).

368

CULTURAL POLITICS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

promised land of Medienwissenschaften (media studies); but like Moses, he could be pretty harsh in his treatment of those who questioned route, goal, and leadership. This, however, was something I could live with; much the same applied to the many Marxist, neoMarxist, psychoanalytic, or retro-hermeneutic crusades that were being staged in adjacent seminar rooms. I was also able to stomach his burgeoning military fetish with its constant references to the communication capabilities of the German Wehrmacht. (Unfortunately, Kittler’s knowledge of VHF-equipped blitzkrieg tactics outstripped his familiarity with the post –Monty Python career of John Cleese: when I accused him of being Basil Fawlty in reverse—Mention the war! By all means do mention the war!—I was dismissed with a blank, mildly insulted stare.) The main problem had less to do with Kittler himself than with those we at the outer rim of the Kittlersphere called the Kittler-Klu¨ngel, a coterie of devoted disciples, acolytes, and clones. (The awful term Kittlerjugend [Kittler Youth] was not yet around.) Like Heidegger, Kittler was throughout his career able to attract a number of highly gifted students, such as Bernhard Siegert, Bernhard Dotzler, Cornelia Vismann, and Markus Krajewski, who all went on to do first-rate work of their own. But like Heidegger, he also attracted followers who came to talk, write, and sometimes even dress (and smoke) like him and who jealously guarded the nest they never left. When enthused mediocrity attaches itself to charisma, the latter provides the ideas but the former sets the tone. Like so many others in his profession, Kittler appreciated human amplifiers and echo chambers; the problem was that their presence at times dictated his performance. He was not above playing to his audience. Predictability is the curse of ongoing provocation; after a while you sort of knew what was going to come out of his mouth because he knew what eager ears were expecting. At their best, Kittler’s seminars gave us the feeling that students attending Heidegger’s Marburg lectures must have had: here was a young nonconformist offering something radically new and deliciously dubious. At their worst, they resembled a 1970s disco with Kittler as John Travolta and his acolytes parading fancy French names like cheap polyester suits. I acted as many others did: we avoided the man and his minions and stuck to his texts. (And those were great days to read Kittler; in many ways the essays of the early and mid-1980s leading up to the publication of Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter represent him at his peak.) But not even Kittler himself was worth the pain of dealing with Kittlerians. I did not see him for almost three years and most likely would have left Freiburg without ever talking to him again had he not contacted me to ask whether I could translate J. M. Barrie’s The Twelve-Pound Look for Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. I did, but word got back that he couldn’t use it because the text was too long; besides, the pub-

369

lisher had no money to pay me. I complained; in return he pledged to write some nice letters of reference. From then on we met on an irregular basis to discuss everything under the sun, with the exception of the promised letters. The most important topics by far were LSD and Thomas Pynchon, though to this day I do not know where Kittler drew the line between the two, if indeed he drew any. He liked to compare our meetings to the question and answer sessions in Gravity ’s Rainbow when German doper Sa¨ure Bummer quizzes Seaman Bodine on esoteric American phrases like ass backwards and shit ‘n’ Shinola. But the truth is that Kittler—one of the most tenacious readers I have ever come across—needed no help; he just wanted somebody who knew Pynchon well enough to appreciate his readings. Pynchon was a special case in the densely populated Kittler pantheon: he was the only living writer whom Kittler accorded the veneration he usually reserved for dead engineers. And Pynchon was to blame for the only time I saw Kittler lose his cool. To shore up my finances I had started freelancing for the Su¨dwestfunk, the Southwest German Broadcasting Network. Having reviewed the German translation of Slow Learner, I proposed a longer feature on Pynchon and submitted an outline describing his well-known invisibility. My boss turned it down and accused me of amateurish gullibility: all this talk about Pynchon’s inaccessibility, he scoffed, was nonsense. He had been told by colleagues that Pynchon wasn’t withdrawn at all; on the contrary, he was openly living with his girlfriend in a villa in southern France and happy to talk to anybody who dropped by. In fact, he had just attended the Frankfurt Book Fair wearing his “customary yellow socks.” The socks got to me, and I suspected they would get to Kittler too. I looked him up in his office the next day. He was in an exceptionally bad mood and quickly worked himself into a state of nicotine-fueled indignation. Long before folks in the Freiburg English department ever heard of Pynchon, he had already read and studied him in English and German. He had deciphered much in Gravity ’s Rainbow that US scholars had yet to discover.4 He had planned to organize a conference in, of all places, Peenemu¨nde but had been shot down by the East German authorities because the Russians appeared to be stationing SS-20s where there once had been V-2s. He had done all this, and now some broadcast stooge had access to Pynchon? He was familiar with his socks? Realizing that he had crossed over into possessive petulance, he calmed down and pointed a cigarette at me. Find out whether there’s anything to it. Of course there wasn’t. At our next meeting my boss mentioned in passing that the whole story down to the socks had been a case of mistaken identity. I left a note in Kittler’s mailbox: Pynchon’s feet unsullied by culture industry. A few weeks later I ran into him outside the German department, surrounded by the usual praetorian throng. His mood had visibly

CULTURAL POLITICS

A FREIBURG SCRAPBOOK in MEMORY of FRIEDRICH KITTLER

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

370

CULTURAL POLITICS

improved. “Na, was fu¨r Socken tra¨gt Pynchon heute?”—“Well, what socks is Pynchon wearing today?”—he cried, his face lit up by a beatific canine smile. “It was a nice touch though. Pynchon himself could have come up with it.” Pause for effect. “In love as in literature, footwear has an undeniable reality effect.” Still grinning and trailed by a puzzled entourage, he disappeared into a lecture hall. It was the last time I ever saw him. What will remain? We will have periodic updates from the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach: unpublished juvenilia and increasingly edited volumes of Musik und Mathematik—marked, no doubt, by the recklessness of youth and the equally liberating knowledge of impending death. How will he be judged in the long run? I do not know, but it will not be fair. In the Weinberger interview Kittler claims that every fifth sentence in McLuhan can be proved wrong. Speaking as a Kittler translator who has spent many an afternoon hunting down factual errors, faulty page references, and bungled quotations, I doubt whether his stats are much better.5 In many ways (though not for the reasons you will find in media studies handbooks) Kittler was indeed a lot like McLuhan. On the one hand, both were—simply, indubitably, and irrevocably—right; it just took the cum tempore world an average of fifteen years to catch up. Many formerly outrageous assumptions have turned into everyday phenomena too obvious to discuss. Unfortunately, we are far more willing to pay respect to those whose foreknowledge of the future appears to be the result of serious and systematic reflection than we are to acknowledge those whose clairvoyance seems to be composed of shameless simplifications (Kittler), the statistically inevitable result of scattershot predictions (McLuhan), and provocations churned out on an industrial scale (both). On the other hand, both produced impressive piles of nonsense—but then again, we all do (though on a less grandiose scale). What sets their texts apart is the lack of any middle ground between center and periphery, the obvious and the outrageous. An abyss separates that which technological evolution has changed into quotidian doxa from the verbal spasms flickering across the outermost fringe of common sense. Under these circumstances, fairness of appraisal is not an option. We cannot quite get our adjectives around them. The truth is that neither McLuhan nor Kittler subscribed to reasonable arguments or rational discussion—they were far too familiar with the dynamics of intellectual history and academic proceedings to believe in such things. “Unlike me,” Kittler notes in the Weinberger interview, “everybody is so keen on conciliatory gestures.” Later on he expresses his dislike of “dreary and dismal . . . books that constantly try to weigh all the pros and cons.” In other words, Kittler never betrayed his enemies: he remained throughout his life a determined anti-Habermasian. There is no communicative reason, no inherent norms that regulate an idealized discourse of reason. Kittler

A FREIBURG SCRAPBOOK in MEMORY of FRIEDRICH KITTLER

I had to think of this in the days following October 18, 2011. Kittler was, of course, Kittler : genius, game changer, psychoraptor extraordinaire; a bright comet among barren asteroids. But it is also pleasant to think of him ending his days as a vaguely Wilhelminian figure—

371

Barrett spent his final years in his mother’s house in Cambridge, England, living comfortably off the royalties that his former bandmates made sure he collected. Reportedly, his pastimes were painting and gardening, and he was often seen by neighbors on his bicycle. It sounds like a pretty nice life, actually, and it’s pleasant to think of Barrett ending his days as a vaguely Victorian figure—an odd old Englishman who’d made quite a splash in his youth, tottering through town on two wheels.

CULTURAL POLITICS

did engage in simplifications, provocations, exaggerations as a form of linguistic self-stimulation not only to get the verbal juices flowing; he did come up with many good one-liners and an equal number of bad jokes not only because he was afraid of boring his readers (a phobia you’d wish on more Germanists and media scholars); but he did it because it also comes closer to the ways in which we really communicate. It is no coincidence that Kittler was an admirer of Luhmann: both hammered home the point that communication doesn’t communicate. What we perceive as agreement is the short rest before the pendulum swings the other way; what we call consensus is nothing but the mingling of the scraps and shards resulting from black boxes grinding against each other. The numerous mistakes and errors were unavoidable collateral discourse damage; but above all they were the equally inevitable result of Kittler’s desire to process his desires, to get a grip on that which—in life or on paper— had gripped him. And he knew it. For over twenty-five years our contact was restricted to one awkward phone call about copyright and a short letter I received in 2006 in which he—very graciously—congratulated me on a German introduction to his work. He singled out that I had mentioned the importance of the 1968 raptures for his work, though he added that I hadn’t gone far enough: “In your place I would have dared describe those afternoons when we were sitting on my floor transcribing rock songs. You are more discreet and show me welding circuit boards. But I completely agree with you: Kittler errs quite often, but because he is fascinated by something [Kittler irrt recht oft, aber weil ihn etwas fasziniert].” The letter is dated July 5, 2006. Pink Floyd fans—real ones, like Kittler—will recognize it as the day after Barrett’s death. Knowing that Kittler never wavered in his glorification of Barrett and other gods of his youth (his phrase, not mine), I included in my response an excerpt from Jody Rosen’s (2006) poignant obituary that casts Barrett in a slightly less heroic light:

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

an odd old German professor who’d made quite a splash in his youth and then, happily, kept on splashing.

372

CULTURAL POLITICS

February 1981. One of the last meetings of the Benn seminar. Kittler sauntered in, sat down, and stared out the window. Long silence. We have come full circle, he finally said (as if addressing the parking lot outside); when we first met back in September it was still light when we began, now it is light again. Another long silence. Turning to us, he encountered, as he did for almost forty years, expectant faces eager for the next Kittlerian jolt. He sighed in mock desperation. “Herrgott, wir ko¨nnen doch nicht immer nur Geistreiches von uns geben. Manchmal reicht es, einfach nur festzustellen, daß es Licht gibt und Wa¨rme und daß man sich daran erfreut”—“Good Lord, we can’t always come up with witty stuff. Sometimes it’s enough to simply state that there’s light and warmth and that we take pleasure in them.”

NOTES 1. To repeat: this is a snapshot of the younger, lesser-known Freiburg Kittler; for a close-up of the older, more renowned Berlin version, see Krajewski 2011. 2. Those interested in Kittler’s Benn, see Kittler 1990. 3. A long overdue English translation of the expanded version (“The God of Ears”) is forthcoming in the collection Kittler Now from Polity Press. 4. Those interested in Kittler’s Pynchon, see Kittler 1997: 101– 16. 5. Kittler’s speciality is the creatively enhanced misquotation. What follows is a representative sample: (1) At the very beginning of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, just above the famous claim that “media determine our situation,” Kittler (1999: xxxix) quotes Pynchon: “Tap my head and mike my brain / Stick that needle in my vein.” The German original gets it wrong; it reads: “Tape [sic ] my head and mike my brain.” A minor mishap, no doubt, but one that conveniently updates Pynchon by bringing his ditty in line with the correspondences between cerebral subroutines and analog storage media (“tape”) that are at the center of Kittler’s study. (2) Misquoting Nicole Oresme’s Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum celi (Treatise on the Commensurability or Incommensurability of the Heavenly Motions), Kittler transforms the original’s prosaic “musae et scientiies” into “Muses and Sirens,” which sounds a great deal more attractive and also happens to be exactly what Kittler is writing about. (3) In Untimely Observations a grumpy Nietzsche dismisses his fellow human beings as “writing, speaking, and thinking machines.” The younger Kittler had a special fondness for this quotation, but he kept turning “speaking machines” (Redemaschinen) into

A FREIBURG SCRAPBOOK in MEMORY of FRIEDRICH KITTLER

“calculating machines” (Rechenmaschinen). As in the case of Pynchon’s tap/tape, the misquotation serves to update the original: Nietzsche is catapulted into the Turing age. In short, Kittler the writer displays all the ameliorative sloppiness that Kittler the analyst attributes to authors of the “Discourse Network 1800” such as Goethe and Hegel, who kept bungling their quotations in highly creative self-serving ways.

373

CULTURAL POLITICS

REFERENCES Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Fantasia of the Library.” In Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 87–109. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1990. “Benn’s Poetry—‘A Hit in the Charts’: Song under Conditions of Media Technologies.” In “Voice-Over: On Technology,” edited by Laurence A. Rickels, special issue, SubStance, no. 61: 5 –20. Kittler, Friedrich. 1997. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Edited by John Johnston, Amsterdam: GþB Arts International. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated and introduced by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Krajewski, Markus. 2011. “On Kittler Applied: A Technical Memoir of a Specific Configuration in the 1990s.” Thesis Eleven 107, no. 1: 33 –38. Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking. Rosen, Jody. 2006. “Pink Void: The Psychedelic Legacy of Syd Barrett.” Slate, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit /2006/07/pink_void.html (accessed January 15, 2012).

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722109

The COLD MODEL of STRUCTURE FRIEDRICH KITTLER Interviewed by CHRISTOPH WEINBERGER ABSTRACT The following interview with Friedrich Kittler, conducted by Christoph Weinberger in July 2007, is a passionate and instructive tour de force of pithy sound bites in which Kittler looks back on his work and criticizes alternate approaches to media. KEYWORDS: Friedrich Kittler, media studies, structuralism, Germany

Friedrich Kittler: No, not at all! I recently amused myself by describing the “Discourse Network 300.” I believe I was able to reconstruct with a certain precision how Aristotle was culturalized and alphabetized and how he, like so many other Greeks, proceeded to generate a theory that has enormous difficulties distinguishing between sound, sounds and letters. To me this represents a continuity,

375

Christoph Weinberger completed his PhD in 2010 at the University of Vienna, where he studied journalism and communication studies. His dissertation is titled “Intoxication, Hallucination, and Madness: Medial Phantasms in the Discourse Networks of Friedrich Kittler.” He is a lecturer (with special focus on media philosophy) at the Institute for Philosophy in Vienna and publishes widely in Austrian newspapers and journals.

CULTURAL POLITICS

>

Christoph Weinberger: Does your orientation toward music, mathematics, and the alphabet in ancient Greece present a continuation or a departure from your work of the 1980s? Is there a “turning” in Friedrich Kittler’s thought?

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

which is why I am baffled and slightly annoyed when people who are not too fond of me anyway claim that I have abandoned media: “He’s only into the Greeks now!” I, for one, have the feeling I have finally arrived at the foundation of our culture, where it all began. CW: So it is an expansion of Discourse Networks 1800/1900, which is a founding document of German media studies?1 FK: Exactly. What is at stake is that we finally—and in the interest of Europe—go back to the Greeks in order to provide Europe with a viable foundation of thought. Do we want to go back to the New Testament, the Old Testament, or the Koran? For heaven’s sake, no! CW: You used to conceptualize “man” as a cybernetic data processing system. Now you say that man is the only being that has Logos. FK: Well, you can’t always put such a bleak message on display. A good acquaintance of mine once asked me, “What is the difference between Discourse Networks and Music and Mathematics?” And I said, “The former was a knife; the latter is a fork.” I mean, you cannot go on biting the hands of the teachers and predecessors that feed you and then finally your own. That was the principal objection against Discourse Networks and the one which upset me the most—that I was sawing off the branch I was sitting on. Back then it was called German studies. CW: Under the programmatic title Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften [Expulsion of the Spirit from the Humanities ] you formulated a radical critique of the established history of ideas.

376

CULTURAL POLITICS

FK: In one of my current lectures I covertly repeated this claim when I spoke about the beauty of Michel Foucault’s Order of Things and how much that book changed us. It was a matter of breaking up the continuum of history, which was also the principal goal of my habilitation. The latter, incidentally, was always misquoted: Discourse Networks from 1800 to 1900. People missed the slash between 1800 and 1900. CW: Would you phrase certain things in Discourse Networks differently today? Isn’t it written in a very provocative, gimmicky style? FK: I don’t think so. It’s a damned erudite book. And the erudition is hidden behind this provocative style. To my mind, things like Freud’s boundless obsession with words in the founding days of psychoanalysis are described correctly. Revisionists love to cover this up. Unlike me, everybody is so keen on conciliatory gestures. What can I say? Epochs turned by 170 rather than 180 degrees, but then people come along and behave as if there were one happy continuity to

The COLD MODEL of STRUCTURE

1897. But I do believe that I was right. Everything has its historical index, and foundational texts belong to a particular system outside of which they cannot survive. As Foucault always said: Karl Marx does not present an innovation; he swims in his episteme like a fish in water. CW: And the spirit [Geist ] too does not exist in a vacuum. FK: Indeed. Take, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot. A specific medial constellation is essential to the text. The world keeps overlooking how well behaved I was: Discourse Networks contains two exemplary interpretations. I think I interpreted The Golden Pot better than many others did. And leaving aside the historical bits, I also pride myself on having given a pretty good account of the contemporaneity of [Rainer Maria Rilke’s] The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I facilitated a more efficient type of reading able to support more text. I read so much psychology around 1800 and psychiatry around 1900. I’d like to see others do that. CW: You are a trained Germanist and Romanist . . . FK: Yes, that’s something people keep misconstruing. As if it were a proven fact that in the late 1970s Parisian structuralism somehow erupted at the German department in Freiburg in the shape of Klaus Theweleit and Friedrich Kittler. That is abysmally wrong!

CW: Though, there are some who claim that you are some kind of existentialist trying to depict the absurdity of our media age. FK: The stuff people come up with . . . I believe the impact of Discourse Networks had to do with my pitiless use of dates. I drummed into myself that everything has a date, an address, and a location. And I added a quirky index of persons that listed all the jobs you could

377

FK: Yes, the two of us. It’s idiotic. First of all, it wasn’t at the end but at the beginning of the 1970s. Back in 1973 I translated two-thirds— the two important thirds—of a seminal essay by Lacan, which I then circulated in 1975. I don’t want to claim that it was me alone; Norbert Haas and a few others in Berlin and Strasbourg discovered Lacan on their own. But in my case there was a noticeable impact. I had a degree in French and was familiar with all the poets because I had studied under a brilliant Romanist. And now I was delighted to have discovered an even more beautiful theory genre. It was far more thrilling to read Lacan than to make do with average writers like Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre.

CULTURAL POLITICS

CW: You mean, the notion that you both imported (post)structuralism, that is, Jacques Lacan, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida?

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

ever guess at, which was anti-everything that was prevalent in Germany at the time. CW: How did it come about that thirteen reviews were necessary for Discourse Networks to be accepted as a habilitation thesis?2 FK: One of the first three reviewers—I had chosen him myself—told me in private that I was a nice person but that he needed to derail this habilitation in order to prevent the emergence of a second Foucault. CW: Who or what was the bogeyman back then? FK: Structuralism. The third reviewer couldn’t refute it, but he wanted to make it more accessible to consciousness. And I was the poor victim . . . CW: And what were you writing against? Hermeneutics and leftist social science? FK: Yes, both of them. Discourse Networks came about when hermeneutics had established this clever alliance with Ju¨rgen Habermas. Or the other way round. It was Habermas, I believe, who in the end smuggled Hans-Georg Gadamer onto his list of winners, at which point there was no getting through anymore. At the time I wrote my dissertation, this alliance had not yet been forged. It was still possible to attack hermeneutics with a bit of Lacan and Foucault. CW: But what made these counterreadings so necessary?

378

CULTURAL POLITICS

FK: When I circulated my Lacan translation among fellow students and PhD candidates, the professor wasn’t too happy. He wanted to ply them with Theodor W. Adorno and Habermas. That’s what they were all used to—it was their natural element—and that’s how dissertations were designed and written. And now I came along with a completely different, cold model of structure. It shocked people, but, strangely enough, most deserted to the other side. CW: Your literary analyses furnished—as you like to put it—selfevident [selbstredende ] results, also in the shape of numbers, dates, and facts that no longer appear to be in need of interpretation. FK: But I did include a number of successful interpretations. I am terribly proud of my exposure of Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos.3 I doubt that Schiller himself realized it, but he turned his own culturalization into literature and transferred it to Spain. Maybe it’s my megalomania that others feel compelled to destroy, but I am convinced: that’s it! There’s nothing left to say. I don’t need to write a second essay on Don Carlos or revise the first. Nor do I need lament

The COLD MODEL of STRUCTURE

in old age how ignorant I was in my youth. No, the pure, mechanized, algorithmic structure of Carlos is the Karlsschule, the school Schiller attended. CW: In contrast to a cultural studies approach, you are interested less in the meaning of media or their semiotic readability than in their impact. FK: Well, the problem is that by now one can hardly distinguish media studies from the self-evidence of everyday life. Although, I must say, I am not too impressed by the acumen of these people and their fashion-conscious theory offerings. I am always shocked by the way this is done in the United States, when folks in the humanities sex up some neurophysiological finding, which is then all the rage for half a year. CW: One of your central theses, which you took from Friedrich Nietzsche, is that our writing tools are contributing their share to our thoughts. What tools were these in your case? FK: At one point I graduated from handwritten poems, which you write until you are nine, ten, or eleven, to my parents’ typewriter. Poems and prose suddenly acquired a much more stable prospect and appearance. After a while the mechanical typewriter gave way to semielectric and fully electric models. The dissertation was semielectric and the habilitation was fully electric, with [interchangeable] font balls for Greek and italic characters. CW: And what came then? FK: After sampling the delights of books and typewriters, I said to myself: Maybe there is something other than letters. So I took to tinkering with electronics. It’s dreadful when media scholars pontificate about computers without ever having looked underneath the lid.

CW: You are a founder of discursivity. The perspective opened up by Discourse Networks has become unavoidable. FK: I do not consider myself that original. I merely tried to the best of my knowledge and conscience to use the methodological toolbox of

379

FK: Exactly. Someone once said something terrible to me: “You do not need to write poems to be a scholar of literature.” “No,” I responded, “it is necessary for you to have written poems yourself!”

CULTURAL POLITICS

CW: You compared that to literature scholars who should write—or assemble—poems themselves.

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

Foucault and Lacan while avoiding Foucault’s escapades. The claims of Discourse Networks are much more modest than those of The Order of Things. On the other hand, it’s a more meticulous book, without the blunt mistakes Foucault used to make. CW: But what makes you write? There is so much heartfelt passion in your texts . . . FK: Someone told me that he studied law in order to prevent catastrophes. That wasn’t my intention. I wanted to craft conceptual models—regional models, less ambitious than Martin Heidegger’s history of being, equipped with a nonpositivist Occam’s razor. After all, there is something to everything. The fact that Foucault and I had such an interest in functioning machines—as opposed to broken ones, like those in [Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari’s] AntiOedipus—may have been what united us. CW: If every epoch has its media totality that appears to completely determine us, is there any space left for difference or even freedom? FK: I am disconsolate when books aim to provide solace. You have to achieve freedom yourself; you cannot rely on books to simulate it. I took after Friedrich Du¨rrenmatt, whose guidelines for comedy dictated that things always have to be presented a bit worse than they actually are. Ultimately, elements of tragedy may creep in, as in the case of Discourse Networks. I myself am not too happy about the fact that everything in that book ends in the noise of machines. CW: Are you given to hyperbole? FK: Yes, I would say so—but for the simple reason that I do not want to bore myself and others. There’s nothing more dreary and dismal than books that constantly try to weigh all the pros and cons. Also, I am proud of the fact that Discourse Networks is one of the very few habilitations from the early 1980s that has survived the times. All the others bloomed and withered away with the prevailing zeitgeist.

380

CULTURAL POLITICS

CW: How do you regard the fact that an entire school of thought has emerged in your wake? FK: Funnily enough, I like it. We invested a lot of work that is now recognized worldwide. In the case of Marshall McLuhan, you can prove that every fifth sentence is wrong and every tenth is funny and very ingenious. And Harold Innis never managed to get into technical details. But I believe that the dicier and more in-your-face media become, the more necessary it is to understand their mechanical structure.

The COLD MODEL of STRUCTURE

CW: Do you believe that the pendulum is about to swing to the other side? FK: That’s always a concern. Take the ongoing attempts to use the human brain as a point of departure for constructing the world. To me that’s nonsense. I believe that human brains only exist within language. Neurophysiologists are aware of this, yet they deny it with every single statement they utter. The goal was to provide a more convincing account than ever before of the achievements and terrors, if not of culture as such then at least of our culture, by relating them to the medial sphere. Unfortunately, this makes me appear very Eurocentric, but such are the limits of my toolbox. CW: How do you experience your advance from outsider to classic, from outlaw to professor? How did your approach turn out to be such a success story? FK: Well, it was foreseeable. “I don’t want a second Foucault” also meant “The work is great, but I am ideologically opposed it. Yet it does reveal what is so tremendously obvious in German texts but has never been properly perceived.” That was praise as condemnation. CW: Media studies has been institutionalized for some time now in Germany . . . FK: Which we all regret a bit because it has lost its foundational momentum.

CW: Where are the pictorial media in Discourse Networks? Are there no other media around in 1800 apart from the universal medium of literature? FK: Yes, a very famous senior Japanese colleague noted that Gramophone, Film, Typewriter treats film a bit less lovingly than it does

381

FK: I think the worst that has happened is the unemployed sociologists who quickly switched over to media studies. Unlike Germanists and philosophers, they do not feel the need to use media studies to confront the defects of their own discipline. For sociologists, it’s always the same old hat; they don’t care whether they are analyzing television or thrill-seeking societies. I tell you, when it comes to the analysis of culture, the ability to conduct research that is more than merely idiosyncratic is underdeveloped in Germany. Sometimes magazines like Der Spiegel do better archeological work than we at the universities.

CULTURAL POLITICS

CW: To what extent is it meaningful to establish media studies as a discipline of its own?

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

the other apparatuses. I can’t deny that. I have a passionate interest in erotic imagery, but it’s not something I can write about well. CW: In comparing Discourse Networks to the other great book, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, what is the difference between the two? FK: The intention was clear: Discourse Networks for kids. With pictures and unabridged original texts. A book to leaf through and get lost in. A serene and happy book, unlike the other, black one, which contains my melancholy soul in full. And I finally was able to write about media as media; that is, I did not have to submit to Germanist standards which posited that media should be dealt with only in as far as they relate to literature. CW: Is there something educational about your—essentially antihumanist—approach? FK: The taz [Die Tageszeitung ] once ran a column describing me as a community center instructor gone berserk. I really loved that. The only thing I found exasperating about Lacan was his jerky, aphoristic way of dressing things up. I mean, he knows what he’s saying, so why doesn’t he come out and say it? CW: The turn to the Greeks extends, as it were, Discourse Networks back in time. But what about the other direction, going forward? “Discourse Networks 2000” was another project, wasn’t it . . . ? FK: But that would only exist as the content of all the servers all over the world. Who would be able to write that? It would be . . . ach!

382

CULTURAL POLITICS

CW: In your texts you show how media generate and produce realities. At the same time, however, media allow us to access a real that is stored rather than only symbolically encoded. For example, the gramophone. FK: Yes, that happened to be the bone of contention with Niklas Luhmann and the constructivists. It is a unique characteristic of our European and subsequently global culture that it produces not only weather oracles but also meteorological computer systems and measuring devices. The fact that we can watch a weather forecast on Thursday or Friday and then decide whether there will be enough sun to justify a trip to the coast on the weekend—it’s absolutely crazy! CW: You have been accused of an ontological or ontologizing media materialism that is epistemologically untenable. FK: The term ontologizing is daft because it smacks of intentionality. If you want to remain loyal to the prima philosophia [first philosophy],

The COLD MODEL of STRUCTURE

then you have to remain on the level of Aristotle’s final categories. It doesn’t make much sense to doubt that this thing here doesn’t exist. There are ears and there are eardrums. I’ve just come off an inflammation of the middle ear. I don’t think that I merely construct my world. CW: What about your concept of media? FK: I only started working on the conceptual history very late. Initially, I simply took the concept from McLuhan’s Understanding Media. In the Germany of 1964 that was a book that broke with established ideas. Thanks to Adorno, everybody decided that it was wrong. But I decided, no, it’s not wrong! CW: You claim only those technologies are media that are able to process, transmit, and store data. German literature, for instance, does that, as the only medium around 1800. Media in the plural come into being around 1900 with the gramophone, film, and the typewriter, only to now disappear in the universal medium, the computer . . . FK: Because all media are collapsing into it. There are physiologicalphysical computer interfaces that you can continue to regard as media. But inside, in the realm of hardware and software, there’s nothing imaginary. Along these lines: media are the visible sides, turned toward laypersons and others, of a world that science invokes as the dark side of the moon. CW: Professor Kittler, could you, in closing, once more summarize what you do when you are doing media studies? FK: An up-to-date history of being, so to speak. I do believe that my work has given rise to a relatively precise type of historical research in which we are currently the world leaders. The Americans are better when it comes to the history of science. But I am not impressed by the fact that they keep severing their ties to philosophy, of which they presumably are quite proud.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This interview, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, was conducted in July 2007 and first appeared in Zeitschrift fu¨r Medienwissenschaft (Journal of Media Studies) 1 (2009): 93–102. Cultural

383

FK: Indeed. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have been so keen on translating all this—by now, into nine or ten languages. That’s something to be proud of.

CULTURAL POLITICS

CW: So the philosophical heritage marks the difference?

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

Politics would like to thank Christoph Weinberger and Heiko Hartmann for giving their permission to translate and publish the interview in this issue.

384

CULTURAL POLITICS

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES 1. Throughout this interview Medienwissenschaften, which should be rendered as “media science” (if there were such a disciplinary designation), will be translated as the more innocuous and docile “media studies.” 2. In most cases the Habilitationsschrift (habilitation thesis), which under the old German university regulations was necessary in order to advance to the professorial ranks, had to be accepted by a committee of three readers. In the case of Kittler’s Discourse Networks, opinions were so divided that no less than nine reports were necessary. In an equally unprecedented move, the Zeitschrift fu¨r Medienwissenschaft (vol. 6, no. 1 [2012]: 114–92) has now published the readers’ reports. 3. Kittler is referring to his essay “Carlos als Carlsschu¨ler” (“Carlos as a Student of the Carlsschule”), in Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik (Our Commercium: The Literary Politics of Schiller and Goethe), ed. Wilfried Barner, Eberhard La¨mmert, and Norbert Oellers (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1984), 241–73. For a short English introduction, see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Implosion and Intoxication: Kittler, a German Classic, and Pink Floyd,” Theory, Culture and Society 23, nos. 7– 8 (2006): 75 –78.

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722118

Of STATES and THEIR TERRORISTS

ABSTRACT This lecture, presented by Friedrich Kittler in 2002 as part of the Mosse Lecture Series at Humboldt University (Berlin), explores in a sequence of short historical vignettes the thesis that power systems such as the old British and the new American empires produce their own, systemspecific enemies. In each case the technological environment provides the basis for the struggle between “states” and their “terrorists,” and the success of either party will depend on the degree to which they are able to adapt to and/or mobilize that environment. In addition, Kittler offers a philosophically informed genealogy of the “nomadic” state enemy, arguing that a basic dynamic of the escalating showdown is the increasingly invasive securing of natural resources. KEYWORDS: AI-Qaeda, nomads, Osama bin Laden, Red Army Faction (RAF), terrorism, Horst Herold

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

All life has wandered off into building blocks. —Ingeborg Bachmann

385

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

386

CULTURAL POLITICS

>

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Services, We all serve a higher purpose. I, for instance, serve a Greece in which there are no services and which allows free speech, plain and simple. You, however, are still counting on classic wars in the future. At least I hope you do, for given the two superpowers currently facing each other across the Pacific, to hope for anything else would be hopelessly naive. Nonetheless, I suspect that nobody really wants to know what classic wars would amount to in today’s world. Their horrors exceed our imagination. Instead, we Europeans find ourselves in the situation of the proverbial rabbit mesmerized by the snake: we are fixated on the seemingly distant spectacle of two absolute enemies, one of whom is neither a subject according to international law nor mindful of any basic human rights, while the other cleverly neglects the classic distinction between criminal prosecution and martial law, policing and military intervention. Scholars from Carl Schmitt to Michael Jeismann have unearthed the long history that preceded the appearance of absolute enemies in the shape of “pig systems” and “rogue nations” that have to be wiped from the face of the earth. But we should briefly recall the relative enemies in the bygone times when European wars were still the province of la chevalerie, the knighthood. His Most Catholic Majesty Francis I of France is said to have remarked of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V: “My brother Charles and I are of one heart and mind—we both want Milan.” A beautiful and worthy sentiment, no doubt, but neither did it dissuade Charles’s mercenaries from pursuing their bloody handiwork at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, nor did it keep the emperor from holding Francis captive for a year until he was released under the terms of the Treaty of Madrid. Yet none descried the other as in- or unhuman. For, as the bon mot intimates (and Jacques Lacan explains), the desire of brothers— even if they are royal brothers in name only—is always reciprocal and based on the recognition of rivals as equals (see Lacan 2006: 662). So much—or so little—about the times of classic wars when the enemy was no more than a temporary, coequal adversary. It is, I believe, a matter of justice based on mutual recognition and equivalence not to resort to different standards when analyzing different—that is, relative and absolute—wars. Every system of power has the enemies it produces. But before I start to pursue this burning issue, I would like to illustrate the underlying hypothesis with a minor example from so-called contemporary history.

I When the good old Federal Republic of Germany chose to bid farewell to its postwar idyll, it embarked on the modernization or—as others call it—colonization of its lifeworld. Almost overnight the many cozy single-family homes provided by the Adenauer government for returning POWs and their estranged wives gave way to endless high-rises,

387

the construction of which demanded extensive clear-cutting operations carried out by chainsaw commandos. New residential areas with beautiful names like Freiburg-Binzengru¨n or Erfstadt-Liblar shot up into the sky.1 Not surprisingly, the inhabitants of these so-called satellite cities, stacked in concrete layers around elevator shafts and garbage chutes, soon adopted statistically monotonous consumer habits and leisure practices. All this would have resulted in endless traffic jams had the developers not taken precautionary measures. Drawing on old plans whose execution had been delayed by a world war, the Federal Republic proceeded to cover itself with the world’s densest highway system. Soon every satellite town boasted a superstore as well as its own highway exit. A new epoch began in West Germany—and we can claim that we were present at its birth.2 And then there were parties, torched department stores, and bank robberies, staged or committed by strangely untraceable perpetrators. Only with the publication of so-called admission statements featuring a distinctly Eastern logo did the police come to realize whom they were dealing with, at which point the unsolved cases were handed over to a fledgling agency known as the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the Federal Criminal Police Office. Initially, the BKA didn’t do much better, but then it retained the services of a certain middle-class Social Democrat and chief commissioner, whose longstanding dream (to quote the title of a novel by Oswald Wiener) was the improvement of Central Europe. This herald of modernization3—that is to say, the computerization of manhunts—had a firm grasp of the simple, yet basic, idea that guides my talk: every system of power has the enemies it produces. The terrorists (as they were were now known) were able to navigate the waters of partisan warfare with all the alacrity of Mao Tse-tung’s fish because they had adapted their lifeworld to satellite cities and highway systems. They invariably drove high-speed BMWs to make full use of passing lanes, and they rented whitewashed high-rise apartments, where nobody knows your name, in order to throw the inconspicuous leftovers of their bomb-making activities down the garbage chutes. Not to mention the fact that the neighboring woody areas made for excellent shooting ranges. Once the BKA managed to penetrate the behavioral patterns of this dismal lifeworld, the perpetrators were as good as behind bars, which, as you will recall, had been built according to the same modernist standards. Not even repeat bank robbers, bomb throwers, and murderers were able to fully blend into a computerized world: for instance, even under an assumed name it was still dangerous to pay the rent by way of the usual electronic transfer. With this in mind, Dr. Horst Herold, the congenial spirit presiding over the BKA, conceived of the negative computerized manhunt: a countrywide electronic search for quotidian bureaucratic procedures deliberately avoided by certain tenants. The end is known, though not necessarily understood. Only today, living in our prewar apartments, does it slowly dawn on us what it

CULTURAL POLITICS

Of STATES and THEIR TERRORISTS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

388

CULTURAL POLITICS

meant that the Federal Republic sealed its earthly residues under layers of concrete and asphalt. Let us move from the local to the global. Instead of highways, air traffic; instead of BKA mainframes, Internet surveillance; instead of strange cash payments, interest-free transactions based on trust alone, as is common in Islam; and, finally, instead of StuttgartStammheim, Guanta´namo Bay. Only the high-rises remain unchanged. Put differently, the question is, how did today’s superpower acquire the enemies it has?

II In order to grasp matters, it is necessary to take a quick look back at older empires. Before it was replaced by the United States during the Second World War, the British Empire rested on two pillars, one (in its day) extremely modern, the other very traditional. The innovation with which Britain entered the First World War was a unique telegraph cable network that connected all the ports the Royal Navy depended on to maintain maritime superiority. This “all red” British network kept the fleet apprised of each and every enemy movement and replenished coal depot. No other state, and least of all Britain’s opponents, enjoyed such a global strategic and logistical capacity to wage war at a distance. In other words, already on the second day of the First World War Germany suffered a double blockade: it was cut off from news by the British cable monopoly and from resources (including Chilean nitrates) by the Royal Navy. The second pillar also secured a steady supply, though this was one of cannon fodder rather than goods. While other colonial powers such as France and Belgium reduced their black and yellow subjects to Spartan work slavery, Britain had learned the bitter lessons of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and the Boer War of 1899. Only the telegraphic wiring of widely scattered garrisons had saved the viceroyalty against the insurgency of numerically far superior Indian auxiliary regiments; only the mobilization of colored soldiers had secured victory over Boer partisans intent on retaining their own colored slaves. Suddenly, whole regiments of Sikhs, Gurkhas, and other colonial groups who had fought bloody skirmishes against the East India Company were ready to kill and die in the name of Queen Victoria. No wonder the “sahibs’ war,” as Rudyard Kipling titled his short story about the conflict between masters, ended for many Boers in barbed wire– surrounded concentration camps. The Nobel laureate of 1907 also revealed the poetic ways in which colored whites, those strange wooden irons, came into being long before CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] –sponsored Afghan alliances. Kipling, creator of Mowgli and Kim, was born in the British Raj and thus spoke Hindi before acquiring English. Nannies are older than mothers. Kipling’s lyrical burden of having to bring culture to other races was probably first thrust on him in 1881, when (long before the days of the Saudi kings and their bin Ladens) the Mahdi

III Only after this prelude known as the First World War do I feel entitled to talk about the present and future; anything else would be as censored as your average press handout. Superpowers, after all, are the result of a translatio imperii. America’s singular global position

389

managed to subjugate an entire country—the Anglo-Egyptian condominium of Sudan—to the teachings of Muhammad ibn-Abdul Wahhab. The world’s first rogue state was born when Gordon Pasha’s severed head was displayed on the walls of Khartoum. The empire was forced to rely on poets and modern weaponry. “We have the Maxim gun and they have not,” rhymed Hilaire Belloc, with a view toward those crucial differences of skin color that dictated that machine guns ( just like the atom bomb) were to be used only against nonwhites. Kipling’s lyrical burden, however, became unbearable once this neat martial distinction was subverted: starting in 1899, whites trained their machine guns on whites, Boers mowed down Britons and vice versa. As a result, Kipling concluded that the British Empire could no longer afford to strike rotten compromises with unreliable royal relatives perched on other European thrones, especially those willing to roll out the red carpet for visiting Boer presidents. Only the support of black, brown, or yellow natives could assure the stability of an empire in which—as in that of Charles V—the sun would never set. Long before the CIA came along, then, Kipling invented a new literary hero in the shape of a young semiorphaned half blood. Sitting astride the old bronze cannon of Lahore and dancing among moguls and viceroys, Indian mother and lost Irish father, Kim the nomad travels through half of India.4 Thanks to his ability to move between the fronts he is able to pull off a decisive move in the “Great Game” that pits Queen Victoria against Czar Nicholas in their struggle over (of all countries) Afghanistan. A half blood achieves what a hundred civil servants and twenty regiments fail to do: the nomad saves our stable abodes. Tens of thousands of armed Sikhs and Gurkhas, Britain’s colonial world war elites, were to follow Kim’s shining example, and above all, there was the one Lawrence of Arabia, who took Kipling’s colonial romance literally by persuading young Saudi princelings, who had only camels, falconry, and ibn-Abdul Wahhab on their mind, to fight the Turks. Less than thirty years after H. H. Kitchener’s bloody victory over the Mahdi, T. E. Lawrence turned absolute enemies into kings. Their machine gun –equipped camel riders brought down the sultanate itself, destroyed the old order of the Orient, and opened up its nomadic expanse. Unlike those in charge, however, London’s secret agent remained unaware of the oil riches hidden underneath the liberated desert. And so, on an unguarded morning, Lawrence of Arabia died his motorcycle death. The white man’s burden slipped from his shoulders, to be taken over by our man in Riyadh or Mosul.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Of STATES and THEIR TERRORISTS

390

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

stems from the Second World War, when Britain, descending into a sea of blood, sweat, and tears, signed over its empire to the United States. This did not happen with the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, which only concerned the sell-off of the Atlantic sideshow; it had to do with the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Japan’s early Sunday morning attack on a sleepy Hawaii, though constantly cited as a precursor to 9/11, had its own sad and sound reason: namely, the refusal of the United States to have Japan, so poor in natural resources, participate in the industrial and military transition from coal to oil. In 1943 Japan replaced not only its foreign secretary but also its entire strategy, “which was to be of the greatest importance to the postwar development of Southeast Asia” (Hillgruber 1996: 118). Instead of the slave nations envisioned by the military, there was to be a “Greater Asia CoProsperity Sphere,” whose success was to rest upon granting all the former colonies from Vietnam to the island nations of Indonesia and the Philippines the right to self-determination and ownership over their own oil resources. When the student revolutionaries of my generation chanted their “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh” in order to position themselves as future foreign ministers, they probably didn’t realize in the name of which tenno they were raising their voices.5 And the story continues with al-Qaeda’s current operations on Bali or Mindanao. Facing this serious challenge to its rule over East Asia and the Pacific, the United States embarked on a military-technological revolution. In essence, its logistical war efforts focused on covering both hemispheres and all ocean coastlines with runways and aircraft hangars. Outbidding a world power that had depended on a contractually guaranteed maximum fleet size, the United States secured its position by becoming history’s very first empire to rely on airpower. The Second World War provided the US Air Force with the bases in Western Europe, South America, Africa, and India necessary for the global campaign against the Axis powers; following the war, the logistical net was tightened and came to incorporate the defeated nations (which, incidentally, may serve to explain what kind of pentagram or pentagon, with its flyover rights, makes life so difficult for the German federal government). But what is of far greater importance in today’s Great Game are those exotic locales and islands that allow the airborne superpower to embark (in the words of Salvador Dalı´) on its journey into upper Mongolia, that is, Eurasia’s hidden heartlands. When in late 2001 fully loaded B-2 bombers took off for Kandahar and Kabul, their runways and ordnance depots were still located on Diego Garcia, a formerly British island deep in the Indian Ocean, whose entire population had been relocated to the beautiful Seychelles in 1973. Just as Malta acquired its fame as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” responsible for bombing the supply lines of the German Africa Corps, today’s islands and port cities shine forth in the resplendent glory of strategic weapons systems.

391

This means, however, that the superpower is encroaching on its opposite. The opposite of the sea is the desert, the opposite of the city, the steppe. Step-by-step the civilizing process—or, more precisely, the US military infrastructure—is advancing into regions hitherto closed off to Western Civilization (that memorable nonsensical notion). First, we have tin-sheet huts or cargo cults that deify the crashed debris of a military-industrial complex until the world order itself totters; then, as the city runs up against the steppe and houses encounter tents, the nomads become irritated. That seems to be the case today. When Osama bin Laden was still generously issuing communique´s to the international press, his propaganda centered on the hospitality that the sacred desert had extended to American garrisons, barracks, and hangars. We are well advised, therefore, to undertake a small excursion into the history of philosophy before continuing with the history and future of war. Whether we choose to adopt Ronald Reagan’s terminology and conjure up evil empires or decide to employ the diction of the younger George Bush and speak of rogue states, the logic of the distinction remains the same: we, the good, here on this side, are facing off against evil itself on the other. The binary seems so common and self-evident that before Friedrich Nietzsche nobody saw the need to question it. The first treatise in On the Genealogy of Morals (to which Michel Foucault added a masterly, though not necessarily military-historical, analysis) attempts to foreground its limitations. When the aristocrats of pre-Socratic Greece distinguished between themselves and the plebs in terms of good and bad, they were using the notion of “good” to praise their own virtues, which in those days referred to courage rather than morals. According to Nietzsche’s informed analysis, all cultures that affirm a basic distinction between good and evil can be traced back to the pious doctrine first propagated by the historical Zarathustra in the borderlands between Persia and Afghanistan. The gods Ahura Mazda and Ahriman are struggling for dominance with such ferocity that the soul is obliged to assist Ahura Mazda the Good in removing Ahriman the Evil from this world. As if Zeus, by emasculating his bad father, Chronos, had wanted to eradicate evil itself. The pious or impious revelations from the mouth of Zarathustra sounded so perplexing to Nietzsche’s “Greek ears” that he proposed a different, namely, geopolitical, reading of good and evil. In the sermons Zarathustra addressed to his Persian farmers, “evil” referred to the Eastern nomadic tribes, which as large-scale breeders refrained from settling down and instead preferred to periodically raid farming villages to carry off cattle and children. The sedentary farmers, by contrast, were “good” in as far as they (following the example of their docile livestock) obeyed the words of Zarathustra, the supreme Good One. Indeed, so grateful were they for his words that they resolved to henceforth follow their shepherd (who, though a shepherd in name only, is still known today as the good shepherd).

CULTURAL POLITICS

Of STATES and THEIR TERRORISTS

392

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

The shepherd, however, did not deign to mention that farmers have a particular preference for wresting virgin lands from nomads in order to subject it to their plowshares; it was left to Sophocles to spell it out (Antigone 5.337 –40). Thus spoke Zarathustra, the Old Persian “minister of settlement” (Potratz 1963: 87). The distinction between good and evil is thus one not of morals but of culture, yet in order to gain acceptance among its subjects it conceals itself under a veil of morality. On the one hand, then, there is war for war’s sake, a nomadology in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari; on the other hand, there is peace for the sake of agricultural enterprises whose surplus value is channeled into the construction of cities, the stone icons of sedentarism. Both life-forms exist side by side; both are an option. Nietzsche realized that in order to propagate these glad tidings he had to put the revocation of slave morality into the mouth of the very priest who had come up with the calamity in the first place. According to the testimony found in Ecce Homo, this is how the book titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) came about: “Zarathustra created this fateful error of morality: this means that he has to be the first to recognize it” (Nietzsche 2005: 145). Nietzsche’s analysis is timelier than ever. While he still enjoyed freedom of movement before being confined to the immobility of uncharted cave systems, bin Laden presented himself to waiting cameras astride a horse, the very image of a nomad. Of course, things are not what they seem: when Arab princelings indulge in their medieval passion for falconry, they allegedly prefer modern jeeps over beautiful Arab horses and withdraw precisely into those tribal regions or steppes in northern Pakistan that over the past year have also become the last refuge for the Taliban. As if to interpret those jeeps, Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan emphasizes: “The dead ride fast, and when they become motorized, they ride even faster” (2007: 76; translation amended). Paradoxically, however, the motorization and updated militarization of contemporary nomads are not—as in our minor German example—a matter of fake license plates and nightly burglaries but something the superpower brought about itself. As you will no doubt recall, for well over a decade those nomads—who as the enemies of our enemies appeared to be our friends—were useful helpers. Even a global superpower in command of stratosphere and ionosphere, bomber fleets and reconnaissance satellites, is now and then in need of a sharp sword, especially when it wants to avoid the moral-lowering arrival of flag-draped zinc coffins. Hence the CIA once again mimicked the British employment of Kipling’s Sikhs and Gurkhas by mobilizing Pashtuns, Tajiks, and other Afghan tribes against the Red Army. Equipped with portable Stinger missiles, they were ordered to break, or at least challenge, the air superiority of the other superpower. If the basic distinction is no longer that between good and evil but that between good and bad, then

Of STATES and THEIR TERRORISTS

393

IV But enough about prehistory, let’s move into the dark present. Since September 2001, it is glaringly obvious how precarious the distinction between cattle-breeding and machine-equipped nomads has become. No doubt some of the old nomadic hatred of cities and sedentary cultures was still at work in the destruction of the World Trade Center—a hatred that to this day incites the bedouins of the Negev desert to forfeit the stone houses built for them by the Israeli government in favor of portable tents. Even Goethe, owner of a fairsized mansion in Weimar, reputedly said to a friend that you stand upright in tents. What was new and unheard-of on that September morning was the perfect mimicry with which exotic outsiders took control of the airspace above Manhattan. Like the bygone hijackers working for Yasir Arafat, or those in command of the abducted Lufthansa jet on its long flight to Mogadishu, the murderers knew how to handle explosives and handguns, yet they were also familiar with cockpits, onboard computers, and fuel reserves: they had accessed

CULTURAL POLITICS

“good” refers to all those skilled in the arts of killing and dying, which is the least that can be said about the mujahideen or the lower ranks of al-Qaeda. But it is also the least that must be said about the new elites of the US Armed Forces, who in the wake of the abolition of general conscription appear to be mimicking the nomads. Ever since Rene´ Descartes put an end to the old man-animal symbiosis, the coexistence of tribes, pets, and livestock, by turning animals into machines and humans into (literally subjected) subjects, military-industrial complexes—from Louis XV’s E´cole Militaire all the way to Los Alamos and Livermore—have taken his philosophy ever more literally. Good old cavalry horses gave way to combat choppers, while the reports delivered by mounted spies were replaced by satellite reconnaissance fed to computer-aided individual combatants, with the result that not much separated fighters of the Northern Alliance from regular GIs. The nomads of old ventured for hundreds of miles beyond their herds or villages on their bloody outings; those of today can be flown to any hot spot at the drop of a hat: Mazar-e Sharif yesterday, north of Basra tomorrow. Much like the Vikings, rapid deployment forces turn up where they are least expected, only to disappear before you know it. As a result, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that skin of onion layers extending eastward from Washington, is dissolving in front of our eyes. And there is a certain symbolic joke to the fact that the high command of this new global blitzkrieg is located in Florida, the touristic parody of modern tribal migrations. But who can tell what long-term cultural and political consequences will arise from the transformations of armies (no longer guided by modern concepts like fatherland or home soil) into high-tech global nomads? Divinations and prophecies of coming wars are and always have been the prerogative of the Oracle at Delphi.

394

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

a multilevel complex feedback system usually outside our reach. The only procedure they did not care to rehearse was the landing approach. In addition, the perpetrators, whose defiance of death poses eternal riddles, were backed by a strategic planning that must have operated on a global level almost matching that of the superpower under attack. As far as I can tell, Ju¨rgen Kaube remains the only observer to have quoted Schmitt’s prophecy (see 2007: 80) that the telluric partisans of old will morph into space-traveling cosmopartisans. In World War II jargon: Feind lernt mit—the enemy is learning. But so are friends. In stark contrast to his sluggish European viceroys, Bush Jr. doesn’t mince words. “We are in a recession. We are at war,” he announced at the outset of his 2002 State of the Union Address. Six months later he added phrases that threaten to stick in one’s throat. The New Jerusalem on the other side of the Atlantic, he claimed, stood for freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. Nationstate or nomad, professor or partisan—whoever dared dispute those three values was guilty of harboring anti-American sentiments and thus a potential target of preventive counterstrikes. For better or worse, Bush’s words have the power to bring about what they conjure up: they may well turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy by riling up and calling to arms precisely those whose nonexistence they envisage. But with all due deference to the victims, who like most of us were noncombatants, I am unable to follow this new US tablet of values (as Zarathustra called such grandiloquent words). Freedom has been a given since the days of Homer’s heroes, democracy since the days of Pericles, and our liberal-democratic order since Herold. But why and to what end does this enumeration of values suddenly take an abrupt turn? Why does the political flip into economics? Is free enterprise a cover name for high-tech nomads who want to remain anonymous when fishing in the muddy waters of our desires? Are free entrepreneurs not supposed to be able to penetrate the market without benefiting from the threat of preventive wars? Andy Warhol’s silly serial joke notwithstanding, Moscow and Beijing have long since become part of McDonald’s extensive chain.6 Obviously, we end-consumers are not the issue here. For over a century, wars and technologies have dreamed of being ahead of their day. In reality, however, they are forced to engage in recursions that burrow into ever deeper pasts. Lack of nitrate scuttled Alfred von Schlieffen’s ingenious plan of attack. Just as up-to-date computer design is steadily closing in on the big bang, the logistics of war (irrespective of wishful ecological thinking) consume ever-older resources. The Second World War began with the switch from coal and railroads to tank oil and airplane fuel, the Pax Americana with the exploration of uranium (in Germany, the task was assigned to Hanns-Martin Schleyer). When, finally, Richard Nixon in 1971 canceled the direct convertibility of the US dollar into gold, it

Of STATES and THEIR TERRORISTS

395

V I have reached the end of this confused snapshot. The Federal Republic was a minor, manageable example. We all know and make use of the infrastructure in which the BMW nomads of the self-appointed Red Army Faction were able to survive above or underwater, at least for a short while. But nobody, not even those in the highest echelons, seems to have any idea what dizzying networks of oil pipelines and slums, global positioning systems and databanks, rapid deployment forces and cellular abuse, are currently covering the globe—that is to say, in what kinds of labyrinths the nomads strike and seek refuge. When the Taliban (students of the Koran who have to recite it in High Arabic without understanding a single word) first caused problems for the CIA, there was hardly anybody in Langley who understood their language. Virginity is not always a virtue. Someone like Herold would first have to discern the patterns and grids that today’s global infrastructure, this more or less successful extension of the United States (to briefly turn Marshall McLuhan from head to feet), turns toward wolves rather than toward pet dogs.

CULTURAL POLITICS

seemed at first as if his main goal was to put a stop to the nefarious plans of Gert Fro¨be, also known as Goldfinger. More likely, the fate of the currency was to be tied to oil rather than to gold. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the world’s most debt-ridden national economy is still able to attract so much foreign capital. According to prognoses made by DASA [the Defense Atomic Support Agency] (which, as the successor to the Peenemu¨nde Army Research Center, should know what it’s talking about), the world’s oil wells are as calculable as they are finite. Despite all drilling ventures (such as underneath the shelf off Namibia), we will not come across any deposits equal to those of Saudi Arabia or Iraq. (It is no coincidence that in 1941 a few German Messerschmitts were ordered to support the short-lived uprising of Saddam Hussein’s uncle against the British.) Around 2070, neither sooner nor later, the last drop of oil will be squeezed out of the desert. DASA said so. I therefore cannot follow Herfried Mu¨nkler when he denies any link between war aims and oil wells. Farmers are not alone in their hostility to pristine steppes; modern airpowers too are pushing their oil companies ever farther into the heart of Eurasia, Dalı´’s hallucinogenic Inner Mongolia. Otherwise, jeeps would remain immobilized in garages and bombers would be stranded in hangars and onboard nuclear-powered carriers. The whole gigantic infrastructure that arose in the bloody aftermath to Pearl Harbor (in other words, all of America’s military might) would turn into worthless junk. And since the optimistic vision of pure software wars evaporated in airplane fuel thanks to the miraculous survival of the mirror servers of the World Trade Center (which from a computer-technological point of view makes the attack appear like a bit of a flop), things once again boil down to hardware, raw materials, energy sources.

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

396

CULTURAL POLITICS

But together with his wife, Herold remains confined to a former barrack of the Federal Border Guard, under orders neither to write nor to appear in public, as if his knowledge had infected him with the plague—and yet, unlike me, he would be the most qualified to penetrate the darkness and take stock of the situation.

NOTES Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young 1. Translator’s note: That Kittler should throw in a reference to Freiburg, the town in which he spent over twenty years, comes as no surprise. Erfstadt, located a few miles southwest of Cologne, is an arcane historical reference: before being assassinated on October 18, 1977, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the most prominent victim of the Red Army Faction, or RAF, was held captive in Erfstadt-Liblar. 2. Translator’s note: Kittler is playfully inserting an iconic Goethe quote (which, incidentally, also serves to support the martial dimension of his lecture). Accompanying the invading coalition forces led by the Duke of Brunswick, Goethe witnessed the unexpected victory of the French citizen army at the Battle of Valmy on September 20, 1792. In his later account he writes that he told his companions that same evening: “From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth” (quoted in Doyle 2002: 193). 3. Translator’s note: A pun on Horst Herold, head of the BKA— Herold happens to be the German word for “herald.” 4. To quote one of the most beautiful openings in the history of the novel: “He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah, on her old platform, opposite the old Ajaib-Gher— the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon,’ hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot” (Kipling 1994: 7). In just two sentences Kipling manages to jump from a cheeky, unnamed half blood to the world-historical “Land of Five Waters.” [Translator’s note: As pointed out in the companion piece to this lecture, Kittler incorrectly identifies Kim as a “half blood” (see Winthrop-Young, “Hunting a Whale,” in this issue).] 5. Translator’s note: A swipe at former 1968 student activist Joschka Fischer, who served as German foreign minister from 1998 to 2005. 6. Translator’s note: A reference to an iconic (and ironic) Warhol quotation: “The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet” (1975: 71).

Of STATES and THEIR TERRORISTS

397

CULTURAL POLITICS

REFERENCES Bachmann, Ingeborg. 1986. In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poetry by Ingeborg Bachmann. Translated by Mark Anderson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Doyle, William. 2002. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hillgruber, Andreas. 1996. Der Zweite Weltkrieg 1939 – 1945 (The Second World War, 1939 –1945). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Kipling, Rudyard. 1994. Kim. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potratz, Johannes. 1963. Die Skythen in Su¨drussland: Ein untergegangenes Volk in Su¨dosteuropa (The Scythians in Southern Russia: A Vanished Nation in Southeastern Europe). Basel: Raggi. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. Translated by Greg Ulmen. New York: Telos. Warhol, Andy. 1975. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). Orlando: Harcourt.

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722127

HUNTING a WHALE of a STATE: KITTLER and HIS TERRORISTS GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG ABSTRACT This essay is a companion piece to Friedrich Kittler’s lecture “Of States and Their Terrorists.” It provides additional background, especially for Kittler’s discussion of the German Red Army Faction (RAF ), and discusses the various sources (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt) that inform Kittler’s broader historical survey of technology and enmity.

TERRORIST KLARTEXT At first glance Friedrich Kittler’s 2002 Mosse Lecture, “Of States and Their Terrorists,” explores a straightforward thesis: ever y system of power has the enemies it produces. It is a statement of impeccable logic with a no less impressive pedigree. For Karl Marx (a nineteenth-century structural theorist occasionally praised by Kittler), each historical stage in the acrimonious dialectic of productive forces and relations of production creates the agents responsible for a revolu-

>

CULTURAL POLITICS

KEYWORDS: Friedrich Kittler, terrorism, Horst Herold, Red Army Faction (RAF), al-Qaeda

399

CULTURAL POLITICS

400

CULTURAL POLITICS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

tionary realignment. Once you have cities filled with bourgeois palaces, their basements will release a proletariat commissioned by history to tear them down. For Paul Virilio (Kittler’s true theoretical brother in arms), each new stage in the evolution of technology creates its very own accidents and forms of abuse. Once you have skies filled with jet planes, you have Air France 447, Lockerbie, and 9/11. For Kittler, each new “state”—let’s phrase this more carefully: each environment associated with a historically contingent network of data-processing technologies and discourse protocols—will produce agents keen to disrupt the reigning power structure by making full use of their environment. Once you have highways and high-rises, you have terrorists speeding along the former to blow up the latter. Once you have global air travel, global communications, and a global black market for military hardware, you have globally operating terror networks. Media determine the situation of our terrorists. To reactivate a term the young Kittler was inordinately fond of, this is Klartext, or “cleartext,” a basic set of algorithms and archival rules that determine the conditions under which statements make sense. The rest—and that would include several libraries’ worth of political, sociological, cultural, and anthropological explanations of violent deviance—is interpretation. Interesting, no doubt, maybe even correct, but not radical in the original meaning of the term, not at the root of things. Put differently, the most important word in Kittler’s title is the possessive pronoun. It indicates that terrorists’ practices are a matter of closed systems and localized feedback. States produce their own homegrown terrorists. Do not, therefore, scour Kittler’s lecture for grand continuities; do not expect an unbroken bloody red thread running through history that will reveal once and for all what makes people blow up themselves and others. Look, at each and every stage, for lifeworld incursions, political protocols, weapons standards, degrees of surveillance, and all the other questionable activities that constitute a “state.” In line with this emphasis on rupture, Kittler (as in so many of his texts, including the following Odyssey lecture [in this issue]) offers a series of snapshots: the late British Empire facing off against early rogue states and insurgent natives, the newly installed American Empire securing its resources across the Pacific, the global American Empire locked in mortal combat with equally global terror networks. If you read fast enough the individual frames will merge into a continuous narrative of escalation and loss of identity. But in violation of chronological order Kittler begins in the middle, in the Germany of the Rote Armee Fraktion, or RAF, around 1970. He certainly knows what he is talking about. This is his country and his generation; these are his terrorists. Indeed, so familiar is the ground that despite the grim subject matter a certain lightness creeps in. At times the story of the face-off between the RAF and the German security apparatus reads like a comedy of terrors. Yet once the lecture moves beyond the first section, things turn fuzzy. It seems that

KITTLER and HIS TERRORISTS

401

THE GREAT COMMISH In 1979 Hans Magnus Enzensberger published an intriguing talk titled “Persistent Attempt to Explain the Secrets of German Democracy to a New York Audience.” The topic was timely: after more than a decade of extraparliamentary opposition and homegrown terrorism in combination with a right-wing media conglomerate running berserk and an allegedly left-liberal government out to prove that it had the chops to crack down on dissenters, after a long slew of bombings and assassinations that climaxed in the “German Autumn” of 1977, after more illegal surveillance operations than we will ever know of and the officially legislated exclusion of anybody with the wrong (i.e., left) party affiliation from civil service—after all this it seemed that the second German attempt at democracy was about to fail. Enzensberger, himself a target of state-sponsored snooping, did not deny the diagnosis, but he was eager to clarify that the erosion of freedom was the work of two very different, indeed incompatible, “systems of repression” (1982: 87).1 On the one hand, there was the well-known strand of German authoritarianism running from Klemens von Metternich over Otto von Bismarck to Adolf Hitler and then on into the postwar conservatism of Konrad Adenauer and his successors—a sorry tradition that popular culture has captured in a sequence of iconic props: spiked helmets, marching jackboots, Gestapo trench coats. This system of repression, Enzensberger emphasized, had been around a long time; it originated on the political right and was marked by brutality, anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and parochial ignorance. In a word, it was thoroughly German. By contrast, the other system had only recently emerged; it was a genuine postwar product whose political origins lay closer to the middle and the left; and its principal operators were highly educated, flexible, open-minded cosmopolitans. It was, by contrast, “about as German as IBM” (Enzensberger 1982: 88). The ironic reference to IBM is a giveaway: what concerned Enzensberger was the inexorable rise of the modern technocrats, a class of well-meaning, electronically savvy administrative experts who had nothing in common with their reactionary predecessors other than “the delusional idea of perfect ‘inner security’” (1982: 87). To achieve the latter they championed soft control technologies like

CULTURAL POLITICS

Kittler’s Klartext was the result not so much of reduction or implosion but of compression: as when sand is pressed through the narrow midsection of an hourglass. Now, as the argument moves forward and outward, the argument dissolves and is spread out all over the place. But this is where matters are most interesting, for as in so many Kittler essays, the real message is not the content of the argument but its debris pattern. Let us retrace compression and dissolution by following Kittler back to his younger days, where we will discover a strange, very unexpected hero taking his seat in Kittler’s pantheon.

402

CULTURAL POLITICS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

electronic surveillance, statistical surveys, endless questionnaires, and, above all, comprehensive database linkups with optimal access reserved for the police. At times, the interference between the old and new systems of repression was able to equip stupid prejudices with clever rationales (which is in itself a hallmark of political modernism). Unlike their elected superiors, the new technocrats were neither fools nor bigots; they did not believe that a couple of cardcarrying party members preaching Marx to preschoolers posed a serious threat to Freedom and Christianity, but they realized that banning them had a welcome side effect. To ferret them out, the system had to process tens of thousands of dossiers, which resulted in a data trove that could be tapped to further refine the digital map of the human territory. If sufficiently detailed and interactive, that map could be made to rule territory. In one of his trademark intellectual somersaults Enzensberger presented this as a remarkable defection of utopian energy to the other side. Under the old system of repression it had been the task of the police to remove those who harbored utopian ideas; now, in the new Covenant of Security, the police itself had turned into the last stronghold of utopian aspirations. Seated in the upper echelons of the governmental security apparatus, administrators, their minds colonized by new data-processing capabilities, were pursuing their grand dream of a “cybernetically controlled friction-free society” (Enzensberger 1982: 91). Not surprisingly, the man who in Enzensberger’s eyes best embodies this craving, the high priest of the sanitary “sunshine state” (1982: 96) and courteous villain of his talk, is the tragic hero of Kittler’s lecture: Horst Herold, chief commissioner of the German Federal Criminal Investigation Office (BKA) from 1971 to 1981, known to some of his admirers as Germany’s—or even the world’s—best policeman. What sparked Enzensberger’s horror elicits Kittler’s praise. The greatness of Herold is that he took full measure of the new medial conditions. He beat the terrorists because he understood what it means to be a bit too human in a digital world. Take Kittler’s prime example, the (in)famous negative Rasterfahndung, or “negative computer-based search.” On June 9, 1979, German security forces arrested the terrorist Rolf Heissler—later named as one of the assassins of Hanns-Martin Schleyer—in a Frankfurt apartment he had rented using a false name. How the police arrived at Heissler’s door is part of the Herold legend. Members of the RAF had long been suspected of living under assumed names in the greater Frankfurt area, but since it was impossible to check the names of well over a million tenants, the number had to be reduced by focusing on those acting suspiciously. But what is suspicious behavior? More to the point, what is the suspicious behavior of those trying not to appear suspicious? Herold was the ideal person to answer the question. To his cybernetically inclined mind, which processed social reality in terms of system dysfunctions and statistical deviation rather than crime and deviancy, suspicious behavior consisted not in adopting threatening practices but in avoid-

403

ing convenient ones. Just as the hideouts of Bram Stoker’s (2008: 378) culturally backward Count Dracula are tracked down by his hunters because he, in conspicuously “vulgar” fashion, chooses to pay for his real estate purchases “in notes ‘over the counter,’” Heissler was located because he paid his electricity bills in cash—something only eighteen thousand tenants in the suspect area did. Holed up in the BKA headquarters in the tranquil affluence of Wiesbaden (the city where the money made in nearby Frankfurt sleeps), Herold fed list after list of legitimate names—officially registered tenants, vehicle owners, student loan recipients, pensioners, insurance holders— into his database of cash-paying customers, thus gradually removing all the legitimate identities until only two fake names remained: that of a drug dealer and Heissler’s. Security history had been made. The twentieth century has constantly redefined the human: Homo ludens (Johan Huizinga), Homo necans (Walter Burkert), Homo demens (Edgar Morin), Homo faber (Max Frisch), Homo amans (Humberto Maturana), Homo oeconomicus (any economics textbook). Kittler/Herold introduce us to Homo vestigia faciens, “Man the Trace Maker,” a being defined by inscription surfaces, recording devices, and storage facilities able to capture far more of its signs and traces than it is willing to divulge. If any one name is to be associated with this new regime of traceability, it would have to be French forensics pioneer Edmond Locard (1877– 1966), originator of the eponymous exchange principle “Every contact leaves a trace.” Whether you are paying your rent or killing your landlord, your every action is a transaction in the course of which you—unwittingly, unknowingly, unconsciously—leave something of yourself behind and take something along. In hindsight, Locard’s exchange principle is an earlier, colder, more technical, and therefore more Kittlerian version of Paul Watzlawick’s more famous dictum “One cannot not communicate.” Kittler would point out that Locard’s and Watzlawick’s axioms ( just like Freud’s psychoanalysis) are based on the internalization of media-technological capabilities. They codify what storage facilities of their day are able to achieve, thus contributing to his basic argument that “so-called Man” is determined by technical standards. We are defined by the extent to which media model, trace, and store us. With the arrival of analog media, we entered a world in which we constantly betray ourselves because we constantly leave traces (Wikileaks and carbon footprints are as much a matter of media theory as they are of ethics and ecology). No wonder, then, that even the absence of an expected trace—for instance, an electronic transaction—is every bit as meaningful as its presence. Just a few years after Heissler’s arrest, Kittler decreed: “What remains of people is what media can store and communicate” (1999: xl). And with that, Locard’s exchange principle and Herold’s computerized manhunt entered cultural critique. The Great Commissioner understood the extent to which media determine our situation. His enemies did not. Or at least not yet.

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER and HIS TERRORISTS

404

CULTURAL POLITICS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

AMERICAN ZARATHUSTRA Kittler calls the German section of his lecture a “minor, manageable example.” It illustrates the basic thesis of the talk. We have a state— the Federal Republic of Germany around 1970—equipped with a specific socio-techno-architectural infrastructure producing its very own dysfunctional components that in their attempt to overthrow the political order adapt to and exploit this infrastructure. The stressed state responds with a mobilization of communication, storage, and cross-referencing technologies that for the time being vanquishes its overtaxed enemies. The logical next step in this strategic escalation is for the latter to adapt to these new technical standards and turn them against the state. What high-rises, handguns, and BMWs were to the RAF, disposable cell phones, satellite linkups, and military hardware are to al-Qaeda and other decentralized terrorist networks that wage a “new type of war in which cheap motels are used as barracks and commercial jets become powerful weapons, [and] public libraries and Internet cafe´s are quickly transformed into communications centers” (Bamford 2008: 72). Kittler could easily have sketched the post-9/11 state countermove by shifting from the BKA to the National Security Agency (NSA), from sleepy Wiesbaden to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, where Cray computers, operating at speeds of hundreds of teraflops, are “plowing through phone calls, e-mails, and other data at more than a quadrillion operations per second” (Bamford 2008: 2). Indeed, if he were giving the talk today, he would move farther west to Bluffdale, Utah, where the NSA is erecting a computing supercenter with yottabyte “deepnet” processing capabilities that will dwarf the Maryland site (see Bamford 2012). Locard’s principle and Herold’s dream are being realized on an unprecedented scale: a global vacuuming up of everyone’s digital trail guided by the forensic axiom that every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story (Bamford 2008: 101). But are the terms Kittler started out with—“states,” “terrorists,” and the possessive pronoun connecting them—able to sustain this ascent to global levels, not to mention the historical excursions? When certain jihadi factions including al-Qaeda decided to carry their war beyond their traditional homelands to the distant shores of al-Adou al-Baeed, “the far enemy” (Gerges 2005), they were no longer fighting their states. Likewise, whatever the Americans have in mind when they talk of the “war on terror,” they do not seem to be waging it against their terrorists. By the time Kittler’s lecture is over, “state” has been forced to cover a lot of ground: early agrarian communities, dynastic kingdoms, nation-states, and global anglophone empires. “Terrorists,” in turn, appears to include early pastoral societies, nomads, bedouins, Arab royalty, assorted freedom fighters, and a me´lange of Queen Victoria’s mobilized collective ethnic subjects. And in between there are trickster figures like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and T. E. Lawrence of whom it is uncertain which side they belong

405

to, if they belong to any at all. True to the author’s words, the “minor, manageable example” mushrooms into a “confused snapshot.” There is an easy way out. We could make more sense of Kittler’s analysis by translating his terms into theoretically established, battle-hardened concepts. No doubt his lead binary States versus Terrorists has a lot in common with better-known binaries such as Georges Bataille’s Military order versus Warrior, Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari’s State versus War machine, maybe even Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire versus Multitude. The final outlook that the enemies increasingly resemble each other, in turn, is consonant with ongoing discussions about whether or not the “new” wars of the world are effectively erasing the distinction between war and civil society. Kittler, however, leaves it to the Oracle at Delphi to make predictions and restricts himself to weapons-technological crossovers: the nomads are increasingly motorized, airborne divisions are increasingly nomadic; nothing resembles the modern GI more than the formerly United States –equipped jihadi. And who doubts that nomads (not to mention terrorists), should they win, will strive to impose and maintain their own states. As Genghis Khan, greatest of all nomad leaders, was told by one of his advisers, a country can be conquered but not governed from the saddle. This increasing indistinguishability, incidentally, may account for one of Kittler’s major gaffes. He repeatedly refers to Kim as half Irish, half Indian. In the real world of Kipling’s text, Kim, son of Kimball O’Hara and Annie Shott, is all Irish, without a drop of Indian blood. You do not have to be Edward Said to realize that this is of essential importance to Kipling; it would be a completely different novel if Kim’s Indian identity extended beyond linguistic expertise, histrionic talent, and a deep sunburn. But of course Kittler’s mistake fits neatly into Kittler’s argument: nomads and states are already merging on an ethnic level. No doubt all of this has been said before, and better. But such escape routes into established theory proposals miss out on the specifically Kittlerian qualities of the lecture, which are most noticeable in its puzzling forays into the past. Take the unexpected cameo appearance by Friedrich Nietzsche. Why him and his Zarathustra? Why this “small excursion into the history of philosophy”? Given its implications, it’s certainly not small. In his attempt to out-Nietzsche Nietzsche (i.e., in his attempt to provide a concrete historical footing for Nietzsche’s genealogical debunking of allegedly timeless moral evaluations), Kittler appears to be siding with those military historians and anthropologists who argue that the origin of war—the moment when societies are no longer, in Harry Turney-High’s famous phrase, below the “military horizon”—is linked to the friction between the first early sedentary societies and their pastoral neighbors. This enmity, Kittler emphasizes, is and always has been a struggle over resources; hence there is no innocent party. The nomads raid and massacre the farmers and city dwellers for slaves

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER and HIS TERRORISTS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

406

CULTURAL POLITICS

and surplus; the latter, in turn, evict and massacre the nomads to get their ploughs, spades, and rigs onto their soil and everything underneath. In one of his more complex moves, Kittler links these spiraling escalations to ever-deeper recursions—deeper into the past and therefore, quite literally, into the ground. Increasingly modern states evict, massacre, or conquer the stateless for ever-older and -deeper deposited resources: wood, charcoal, coal, and oil. According to Kittler, this first nomad versus state ur-confrontation is morally transcoded by the first, original Zarathustra: nomads and other shifty itinerant folks are intrinsically evil, while farmers and other law-abiding citizens of stable, rooted communities are intrinsically good. Once this binary is in place (like all such binaries, it can easily be inverted with righteous nomads and mobilized partisans struggling against evil imperialist states), any rapacious struggle over natural resources can be recast as a high-minded crusade. Thus the “small excursion” back to the early demonization of nomads provides a resonating chamber extending across several millennia for the current dehumanization of the terrorists. Listen closely to Zarathustra and you will hear George W. Bush. But let us be clear on this. When Kittler takes aim at Bush and his “tablet of values” he is condemning the rhetoric, not the action obscured by it. Anybody familiar with Carl Schmitt (who is very much the puppeteer behind these particular paragraphs) will recognize that Kittler is using arguments similar to those that Schmitt deployed against Woodrow Wilson and other prophets of universal values (cf. Schmitt 2011). The main target is the hypocritical bullying of the United States with its sanctimonious attempt to market its policy as the enactment of freedom and democracy. Since these are cast as universal values, the inevitable result is a vilification of the enemy—be it Germany, the quintessential rogue state of the First World War, or Iraq after 9/11. Accept our freedom, which is the freedom of all humanity, or pay the price; for if you oppose us, you are not just our enemy, you have removed yourself from the pale of humanity and deserve every grenade that comes your way. However, Kittler is not condemning the grenades. On the contrary, as he stated in an interview with Die Welt in early June 2003 (among the most controversial of his later interviews), the attack on Iraq has a sound reason and is therefore nothing objectionable: Welt am Sonntag [WamS ]: Did you participate in any of the recent peace rallies? Kittler: Despite all sympathy for the desire for peace, and the irritation caused by the talk about a “preventive war”: if it is a matter of securing oil prices for the next twenty years rather than simply crying out for initiatives to preserve peace, then I am in favor of the operation . . .

KITTLER and HIS TERRORISTS

WamS: A war in order to secure oil resources would be justified? . . . Kittler: . . . It’s nothing dishonorable. Of course, it is troubling that the United States, the world leader in wasting irreplaceable fossil fuels, consumes ten times more oil than it needs. But such is the American mentality. WamS: A war would also mean: bombs on women and children. Kittler: This type of air war is not as recklessly vulgar [ fahrla¨ssig ordina¨r ] as the bombing of Japan and Germany in the Second World War. If the bombs are dropped now, then [it’s] for the good purpose of getting to Baghdad as quickly as possible. That I can understand. . . . WamS: . . . Would the use of military force against Iraq be a justified war? Kittler: From a Western point of view it would certainly be a useful war. (Kittler 2003) Klartext becomes realpolitik. What in the realm of literary analysis was the unearthing of discourse protocols framing and programming the production and reception of texts is now, in the realm of war and politics, the unflinching acceptance of dynamics and exigencies related to resources and technologies. The way in which Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow describes the Second World War applies to all wars:

407

But even Kittler cannot completely brush aside the uncanny human factor that bursts through his talk in the shape of “hatred” and “defiance of death,” only to be shrugged off with stale phrases (e.g., “eternal riddles”). But maybe these two very different dimensions—the a-political, a-ideological, a-human character of war and its all too human extreme emotions—are linked. With this in mind, let us briefly go beyond Kittler by returning one last time to his state and its terrorists.

CULTURAL POLITICS

This War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology. . . . The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite. (1973: 521)

408

CULTURAL POLITICS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

ENEMY MINE: FROM HELL’S HEART In his detailed history of the Baader-Meinhof group, Stefan Aust (1987: 247–49) recounts that the imprisoned Gudrun Ensslin gave her fellow inmates cover names borrowed from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Holger Meins, who starved himself to death, was the steadfast chief mate Starbuck; the technically gifted Jan-Carl Raspe turned into the Carpenter; and Ensslin herself was Fleece the cook, who spends his time preaching to the sharks. Ahab’s name was, of course, reserved for Andreas Baader, the group’s self-appointed domineering alpha phallus. Given the limited success of Ahab’s whaling expedition, the choice of names does not radiate great optimism. So why Moby Dick ? The answer appears obvious: ever since the Bible, the whale is Leviathan; ever since Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan is the state. The small band of revolutionaries on the Pequod (again, not a name to inspire confidence) sail the treacherous seas to hunt down its most offensive creature, the great white state machine. Leaving aside the cubic meters of secondary literature on the complexities of Melville’s novel, it is obvious that Ahab’s singleminded quest is driven by the conviction that he is heading toward a direct, highly personal confrontation. For Ensslin (as if ventriloquizing Schmitt), Baader is “the rival, absolute enemy, enemy of the state” (quoted in Wieland 2005: 86), just as Ahab is the “insufferable foe” (Melville 2010: 192) of the whale. It is an enmity that exceeds personal grievance or desire for revenge; it goes beyond the loss of a leg. There is an irrational intensity at work that remains immune to any intervention from reality, even though reality does everything to demonstrate the futility of the undertaking. Thirty years after the suicides of Ensslin, Baader, and Raspe, Herold claimed that underneath all the political and ideological rationalizations, underneath all petty feelings of resentment and the thrills of living undercover, and thus far out of reach of all the cybernetically informed strategies employed to apprehend them, the terrorists’ “ultimately determining driving force was a boundless, all-consuming hatred” (Kraushaar and Reemtsma 2006: 1385). It was a form of hatred, Herold argued, that results in an utter disregard for yourself and others and that persists among some of the imprisoned members of the RAF to this day, long after any chance of even the smallest victory has passed. In Ahab’s words: “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” (Melville 2010: 587). Ahab’s hatred of this “unexampled, intelligent malignity” (Melville 2010: 188), however, requires that it be intelligent, that the actions of his enemy be that of a conscious, goal-oriented malignant entity as focused on him as he is on it. Like Schmitt’s (2007: 85) enemies, Ahab and Moby Dick are “on the same level,” their hostile gazes are locked and define each other. The worst that could happen to Ahab is not his actual fate (death), or even the awareness that the whale has

409

triumphed and may continue to do so until the oceans run dry, but the realization that his enemy is not infused with a symmetrical hatred— that everything the whale has done may turn out to be the random action of an “unintelligent agent” (Melville 2010: 189) operating on a different level. This is where Moby Dick’s appearance becomes so important. As Ishmael tries to explain in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” (193 –201), white is both the presence and absence of all colors, the most condensed message as well as meaningless (white) noise. Hovering between plenitude and emptiness, it is an affront to Ahab’s desire to “strike through the mask” to apprehend “some unknown but still reasoning thing” behind the unreasoning mask (168). Ahab must pin things down—be they whales or words. But he may be up against something whose color indicates a vast “indefiniteness” (200) that defies the very possibility of the envisaged personal confrontation—a domain as devoid of compassion as it is of enmity. “Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt,” Schmitt decreed—the enemy is the shape or gestalt assumed by our own question. Psychologically, this implies that the enemy represents those aspects of ourselves we are in doubt about. More important, however, is the structural effect of creating stable identities. A collective defines itself by sharing a common enemy, the enemy thus shapes community as much as it delineates personal identity. This capacity allows Greg Ulmen to translate Schmitt’s (2007: 85) mantra as a simple conditional phrase: “If the enemy defines us.” From this point of view, Melville’s novel revolves around a possible negation of the conditional: If our great enemy does not define us, then who are we? Is there a “we” or an “I” left? Ahab’s monomaniacal hatred is both fueled by and eager to silence the doubt that he is defined by the pursuit of an enemy that may lack the contour, shape, purpose, intent, or intensity to define him. Enzensberger had a similar predicament in mind when he pointed out that one difficulty arising from the uneasy coexistence of old authoritarian and new cybernetic systems of oppression was the unwillingness of the critics and enemies of the state to face, engage, and try to understand the new regime. Instead, they tended to depict suppression in retro fashion by conjuring up older tropes and terms, above all the Sturmabteilung (SA, or “storm troopers”) wielding batons (which turned state enemies into Nazi victims). To the Baaders and Ensslins, Herold’s dissolution of the old tangible state apparatus into information circuits, feedback routines, and ineffable technological environments offered no footing for enmity. Better resort to fascism as the old guarantor of identity formation. The bottom line is that Kittler’s spiraling recursions of states and “their” terrorists reach into post-Schmittian territory. As Eva Horn notes in her penetrating study of the changing configurations of enmity, in the post-9/11 world the enemy “no longer has a face, not because he has become ‘faceless’ but because he has assumed

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER and HIS TERRORISTS

410

CULTURAL POLITICS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

a shape that no longer has a head” (2007: 479). This is true for both states and terrorists. The former are confronted with decentralized terror networks operating like swarms or infections, the latter are up against decentralized governmental technologies that work in no less amorphous fashion, and in between there is a new media environment that allows for the deconstruction of all high-rises of meaning. True to Kittler’s analysis and Melville’s novel, the state has become a nomadic whale: ubiquitous, inscrutable, dissolved, and then again concentrated like white passed through a prism. We have arrived at a disorienting symmetrical facelessness, a mutual lack of shape and contour that erodes Schmittian possibilities of identity construction by means of enmity. But we do not let go of our enemies so easily. Following 9/11, the endlessly recycled footage of Osama bin Laden astride a horse or walking along mountain trails was designed to assure us that the enemy still has a recognizable head and face. And as an added bonus, it came with the right amount of exotic appeal. “The venerable props of the Great Game are on display: we are faced with the nomad, the religious fanatic displaying all the charismatic Muslim asceticism propagated by T. E. Lawrence” (Horn 2007: 478). Ultimately, though, the imagery has more to do with Peter O’Toole than with Lawrence. It is a cunning revenge, as it were, of the absolute media spirit that the last image we have of bin Laden places him in the world of Kittler and Jean Baudrillard: a pathetic, faceless figure crouched in front of a computer watching mediated images of himself. A quarter century after Herold was forced to retire, and with all the relaxed hindsight that comes easily to retired security experts, he mused that the RAF and other terrorist organizations should be appreciated as social early warning systems. “Terrorism was always a prelude and signal for profound future upheavals in the social and political spheres” (Kraushaar and Reemtsma 2006: 1387). History inevitably confirms the terrorists’ view of the world, but only once they are no longer around. The catastrophes of the future will confirm the suspicions of the present even though they were cloaked in the imagery of the past. Who could deny that much of what Ulrike Meinhof wrote in rusty left-wing jargon has come to fruition? The RAF of 1969 was fixated on the world of unchallenged and unfettered global capitalism that arose after 1989. Their hatred was directed at the future. It was a hatred not of the shape of things around them but of the shapelessness of things to come.

NOTE 1. All Enzensberger translations are mine.

REFERENCES Aust, Stefan. 1987. The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Bodley Head.

411

Bamford, James. 2008. The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. New York: Doubleday. Bamford, James. 2012. “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say).” Wired, March 2012, www .wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 1982. “Unentwegter Versuch, einem New Yorker Publikum die Geheimnisse der deutschen Demokratie zu erkla¨ren” (“Persistent Attempt to Explain the Secrets of German Democracy to a New York Audience”). In Politische Brosamen (Political Crumbs), 75 –96. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. The essay was originally published in Kursbuch, no. 56 (1979): 1 –14. Gerges, Fawaz A. 2005. The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horn, Eva. 2007. Der geheime Krieg: Verrat, Spionage und moderne Fiktion (The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated and introduced by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 2003. “‘Technisch ist der Krieg ein Quantensprung’: Der Medienphilosoph Friedrich Kittler erkla¨rt, warum ein Kampfeinsatz im Irak gute Gru¨nde hat—Interview” (“‘Technically, the War Is a Quantum Leap’: Media Philosopher Friedrich Kittler Explains Why a Combat Mission in Iraq Has Good Reasons— Interview”). Die Welt, www.welt.de/print-wams/article123307 /Technisch-ist-der-Krieg-ein-Quantensprung.html (accessed April 25, 2012). Kraushaar, Wolfgang, and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. 2006. “‘Die entscheidende Triebkraft besteht in einem unba¨ndigen, alles ausfu¨llenden Hass’: Interview mit dem ehemaligen Pra¨sidenten des Bundeskriminalamtes Dr. Horst Herold (“‘The Ultimate Driving Force Is a Boundless, All-Consuming Hatred’: Interview with Former President of the Federal Criminal Investigation Office Dr. Horst Herold”). In Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus (The RAF and Left Terrorism), edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar, 2:1370 –91. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Melville, Herman. 2010. Moby Dick. London: HarperCollins. Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. Translated by Greg Ulmen. New York: Telos. Schmitt, Carl. 2011. “The Turn to the Discriminating Concept of War.” In Writings on War, translated and edited by Timothy Nunan, 30 –74. Cambridge: Polity. Stoker, Bram. 2008. The New Annotated Dracula. Edited by Leslie Klinger. New York: Norton.

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER and HIS TERRORISTS

GEOFFREY WINTHROP-YOUNG

412

CULTURAL POLITICS

Turney-High, Harry Holbert. 1949. Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Wieland, Karin. 2005. “a.” In Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader und die RAF (Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader, and the RAF ), edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar, Karin Wieland, and Jan Philipp Reemtsma, 51–99. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722136

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY FRIEDRICH KITTLER

Courtney Neaveill took her degree with highest honors at the University of Missouri –Kansas City in May 2012, majoring in German history, with special focus on the history of everyday life. She is continuing with graduate work in Berlin in 2012 –13 via a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst scholarship.

>

Why do our questions keep returning to Odysseus? The answer may be found in Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote that for Europe there are only two stories: in one, the hero ventures abroad and dies in the attempt to capture a distant city; in the other, he puts

413

KEYWORDS: Homer, The Odyssey, alphabetization, Dante, The Divine Comedy, Virgil, The Aeneid, Stefan George, Gottfried von Strassburg, Jean-Luc Godard, Le me`pris, William Burroughs, computer technology, Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, oral poetry

CULTURAL POLITICS

ABSTRACT Friedrich Kittler’s lecture, given in 2007 as part of the series of Mosse-Lectures, follows the recursions of Homer’s Odyssey from its original transcription, coinciding with the invention of the Greek alphabet, through history. The stages of this include Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante Alighieri’s Divine `pris, and Stanley Comedy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Le me Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kittler is concerned with the linkage of poetry, music, and sex from the Greeks to media- and computer-driven modernity.

414

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

to sea in order to return home to his love after twenty years of war and wandering. This nostos [homecoming], this ever-repeated return to the Greeks, guides not only our series of lectures but also all our poetry and thinking in general. As Ernest Renan once said while looking at the Acropolis, our progress will always consist of the further unfolding of what the Greeks began. If we speak of recursion rather than of progress, this sentence will remain our Ariadne’s thread for what follows. Nonetheless, I will have to restrict myself and neglect G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. After the Odyssey itself I will return to four of its recursions: Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno in the Divine Comedy as two literary wanderings, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le me´pris [Contempt ] and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as two filmic pendants. We tend to overlook the medium that made such media and poems possible. It is the alphabet in that unique form the Greeks gave it—namely, an alphabet that also addresses [anschreibt ] vowels and, with them, any and every language. From the Homeric artificial language to Virgil’s Latin and Dante’s self-created Tuscan down to French or English screenplays, this alphabet remains effective. Why it can do so remains an obscure issue. The usual explanation is that around 800 BCE, after four centuries without writing, the Greeks adopted a Semitic alphabet in order to carry on trade with the Carthaginians and Phoenicians. Yet this fails to explain why we have no commercial or political inscriptions whatsoever from the Archaic period. There are only hexameters, dedicatory tablets, obscene graffiti, and—Homer. But this in itself may be a decisive clue. In order to recite the hexameters of the Iliad, the invention and address [Anschrift ] of vowels are indispensable; otherwise, no singer would know whether syllables should sound long or short. We will follow Barry B. Powell—rather than Joachim Latacz or Walter Burkert—and assume that Homer himself, like his many predecessors, could not read or write but that he still dictated the Iliad to his alphabetical adaptor. Otherwise, the twenty-four songs would not have come down to us verbatim. The Iliad takes place in 1200 BCE, at a time when the Greeks and Cretans had at their disposal a syllabary, which was lost in the wake of the burnings of Troy, Knossos, and Mycenae but was also only preserved thanks to those burnings. For recording hexameters, that script was utterly useless. In contrast, Odysseus’s wanderings— unlike the building of his wooden horse—took place four centuries later. As Circe tells him, Jason and the Argonauts have long since discovered the Black Sea; now, by contrast, in competition with the Phoenicians, it is a question of opening up the Mediterranean as the distant West: an area extending from Libya past southern Italy to the gates of Hercules, our Gibraltar. Odysseus wanders from the

415

lotus-eaters to the terrible giants, therefore to the megalithic culture that dominated western Sicily and southern Corsica long before the Greeks. And here the tone changes: The Iliad’s world of men is replaced by one full of nymphs, goddesses, and music. Calypso sings and weaves; Circe sings and conjures. Both simply reflect what the transcription of the songs implies. Clearer still is the two Sirens’ promise to sing the Iliad to the hero. Thus the Odyssey is already Homer’s first epic-musical epic recursion. As Richard Bentley, who in 1700 gave us the mute Greek digamma and thereby began modern Homeric research, so beautifully put it: “He [Homer] wrote a sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at Festivals and other days of Merriment; the Ilias he made for the men, the Odysseis for the other Sex.”1 Deur’ ag’ ion, poluain’ Odusseu, mega kudos Akkhaion (Odyssey 12.184)—nothing ever sounded so vocal and beautiful as the two muses who cooed with their honeyed voices. “Come hither, mysterious Odysseus, great brilliance of Achaea!” (Naturally, the hero followed their call and landed, for otherwise he could not have recited the verses. We Schliemen of the ears verified this years ago.2 Two singers sang on the Isola dei Fiori southwest of Amalfi, while the rest of us eavesdropped just ten meters away, at first on ship and then on land. On board we heard vowels alone; on land we also heard consonants and with them the meaning of the eight hexameters.) Thus we can infer that the song of the nymph goddesses functioned as a navigational aide. Circe first sends Odysseus from her island to the distant Spanish west, where he encounters his dead mother and numerous warriors’ widows. Returning from Hades, he rejoins Circe in her bed until she—but only upon the begging of his comrades—points him farther in the direction of the Sirens and the Lipari and through the Strait of Messina to Sicily. There Odysseus loses his last ship and floats shipwrecked to Malta, where Circe’s double, Calypso, shows him the way home only after seven years and upon divine command. So after further journeys, nymph goddesses and singers, the wanderings come to a good end. For the first time in twenty years, Odysseus sleeps with his wife, and while in bed he tells her about all his adventures—leaving out the beds of the nymphs. Then a sweet slumber overcomes them both. This we know; after all, Homer and the Greeks celebrated Odysseus as their biggest liar. Only in one respect did Odysseus not lie. The many islands on which those giants or nymphs resided do exist in the western Mediterranean. But in contrast to their rulers, they have no names, with the exception of Circe’s Aiaia. With Klaus Reichert, and therefore against Burkert, I take it that in the four chapters that depict Odysseus’s wanderings he appears as an explorer of then unknown coasts, islands, and ports. Only a lifetime later did the first Greeks settle, probably in association with Phoenicians, on Ischia by Naples. From this island, they established in 750 BCE their first mainland colonies: Cumae in Campania and Rhegion in later Magna Graecia,

CULTURAL POLITICS

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY

416

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

later followed by Metapontion and Tarentum, Syracuse, and Agrigentum. By around 700 BCE, Greece had settled all of southern Italy. Scholars like Latacz who date the Iliad to c. 730–710 BCE, and the Odyssey even later, create unnecessary problems for themselves. What are the tradesmen from Euboea on Ischia to think of two Sirens so close to Capri? Did the Greeks in Rhegion, the modern Reggio, believe in Scylla and Charybdis? And what does it finally mean that an amphora found on Ischia depicts the shipwreck of Odysseus’s shipmates and that two hexameters composed in the same place in 730 BCE unmistakably refer to the Iliad and the Odyssey? All this can only mean that the Greeks discovered lower Italy in the wake of Homer, who consequently must have been available in written form. Without heroes like Odysseus, it is impossible to explain when and why the vocal alphabet got from Cumae to the Etruscans and from Gabii (where one can find the oldest Greek inscriptions) to Rome. Thus Homer remains The Poet for all eternity. All of this is evident in Hesiod, who around 700 BCE started up a hopeless rivalry with Homer. The coasts of southern Italy have been discovered. All the islands Odysseus left nameless now bear proper names. The Sirens sing on Anthemoessa, an island rich with flowers, which is en route to southern Spain. Circe dwells on Hesperia, a literally “occidental” island off the Etruscan coast. Odysseus had two sons with Calypso, Nausithoos and Nausinoos; with Circe he had Agrios, Telegonos, and Latinus, who “command over the distant Etruscans” (Theogony 1015 –16). Hesiod concludes the nymph catalog of his Theogony: “These are the immortal goddesses, who lay with mortal men and bore them godlike children” (Theogony 1019 –20). So we become witness to an event both historical and poetic: Italy was discovered [entborgen ] in the wake of the Odyssey. As proclaimed in the last chorus of Sophocles’s Antigone, where we find the first evidence of the word Italian, only a few mountain peaks or wellsprings in Greece are sacred to Dionysius; in “Italy,” however, the whole country is. It is no wonder, when one considers what Odysseus and the pioneers who followed him sought after: endless amounts of beef and sweet wine. The name Italy, just like the vitello tonnato [veal with cold tuna sauce] we eat, goes back etymologically to *Vitalia, “the land of the calves.” Compare this with the barren Ithaca, where according to the Odyssey goats and sheep thrived but not cows or horses . . . Italy’s wine and wheat fields, horses and cattle, aroused desires, and it was not only the Greek pioneers who were attracted to Italy but also the Etruscan or Trojan conquerors. Despite all of Hera’s stalking, Aphrodite—now going by her new Latin name Venus—saved her own son from the sack of Troy. Aeneas, no doubt, would have preferred to stay with Dido ( just as Odysseus enjoyed sharing Circe’s bed), but Roman gods do not care much for love. As a result, Augustus’s imperial poet, Virgil, subjects Homer to further recursion or

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY

[But you, Roman, remember to rule the peoples with power— these will be your arts—impose the habit of peace, spare the vanquished and war down the proud.]

417

Tu regere imperio populous, Romane, memento— haec tibi erunt artes—pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. (Aeneid 6.851–53)

CULTURAL POLITICS

revision. The first six songs of the Aeneid travel in the wake of the Odyssey from Troy to Italy, which the last six songs conquer in the style of the Iliad. Odysseus goes no longer by his Homeric name but rather by the Etruscan, Latin, and English name Ulysses. He is also no longer a hero but, on the contrary, a cunning and base enemy, who devised the first siege-machine in the shape of the wooden horse. Obviously, Virgil knows that archaic heroes like Aeneas did not reduce Lower Italy, Sicily, Carthage, and Greece to rubble and ashes. Au contraire: it was the work of technologically advanced legions that (not unlike the United States) copied the machines of their enemy. Machines (machina in Latin) can be traced back both as word and thing to Archytas of Tarentum (440 –360 BCE), southern Italy’s last Pythagorean. As a mathematician and engineer, Archytas generalized the principle of the Greek guitar into a catapult and that of the Greek oboe into a recoil drive [Ru¨ckstossantrieb ], thereby creating a missile launcher. With such machines, which had come into Roman possession following the siege of Syracuse, the legions captured Tarentum, Carthage, and Corinth (in that order), until all the beauty of the old world disappeared. But poets laureate are expected to artfully conceal catapults and missiles, which therefore occur in the Aeneid almost only as audacious new metaphors, while all of Virgil’s similes [Gleichnisse ] are stolen from Homer. Ever since then, this clandestine takeover—according to Ernst Robert Curtius—has been called “European literature.” But such schoolbook literature has nothing to do with poetry—Sappho, Homer, and Sophocles. Aeneas searches for the underworld not in the distant west but in Cumae near Naples, therefore in the colonies of the Greek alphabet. He does not hearken to his dead mother, as Odysseus does; rather, as a “pious” Roman, he takes the advice of the paterfamilias. Therefore he is attracted neither by Circe’s voice near Gaeta nor by the Sirens’ song near Capri. We know of only a single Latin poem that was sung and not merely read aloud. The Cumaean Sibyl commanded Aeneas and his clan, all the way down to Caesar and Augustus, not to turn language into music, or ore and stone into art—this was to be left to the Greeks alone. By contrast, the Roman imperium—that is to say, their command and empire—consisted of sparing those who submitted to their rule and enslaving the rest. Since then, we have been subjects and vassals [Subjekte und Untertanen ] of emperors, popes, and empires such as the United States.

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

Only in one respect did Aeneas himself have to submit, namely, in a linguistic-medial one. You may remember that one of Odysseus’s or Circe’s wild sons was named Latinos by Hesiod. The region of Latinum and the dialect Latin are both named after him. Hera, thus Latinized into Juno, finally gives up her hostility toward the Trojans but forces Jupiter to make Aeneas, his grandson, ban the customary and beloved Greek language. The hero and his poet must henceforth speak the language of his subjects. In his rivalry with Varro, Cicero made the successful decision to translate the Greek poets and thinkers in so imprecise a fashion that they fell into obscurity. “Believe me, Romans, believe me, Greek writers—no one outdoes the Iliad more than Virgil,” as Propertius studiously put it in his Elegies (2.34.61–65).3 Ever since then, Eurasia has been severed by a great divide: there eastern, here western Europe; there Hellas and here (with Hesiod) Hesperia. We will only be able to close the divide when all Europeans feel again that everything good, namely, everything unifying, originates from Greece. Very well then. Latin reigns in the west, and soon also in the north, up to Scandinavia and Ireland. James Joyce will send his Ulysses to the red-light district in Dublin, as if the Sirens were whores (as they already were for the pious Romans). Yet Rome’s subjects tend to avenge themselves. Latin deposits its grammar in their mouths and totally forgets that poets like Virgil had attributed long and short syllables to it after the Greek model. Per me si va ne la citt’a dolente, per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore: fecemi la divina podestate la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore. (Inferno 3.1 –6)

418

CULTURAL POLITICS

[Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way into the eternal pain, through me the way that runs among the lost. Justice urged on my high artificer, My maker was divine authority, The highest wisdom and the primal love.]4 Now, we could have a splendid long argument about whether it was a work of divine omnipotence, highest wisdom and first love, to invent the eternal punishments of hell. We ourselves preferred to speak rather of power, discourse, and the desire of the other. But the Aristotelian ontotheology is degenerate by this point, since patristics and Scholasticism reduced it to no more than a concordance for two Testaments. However, Dante, a refugee loyal to the Holy Roman Empire from Guelph Florence, reads the inscription above the door

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY

to hell as if he himself had not invented it. Only in Vulgar Latin were syllables no longer measured but rather divided between accented and unaccented. Thus since late antiquity, instead of metric feet there are rhymes, because otherwise we barbarians (like Molie`re’s Monsieur Jourdain) would only speak prose. The translatio studii [transfer of knowledge] from the Greeks to the Romans to northern Europe can begin. Ich trennte mich von Kirke die mich wandte Ein jahr schon bei Gaeta ab vom wege Bevor Aeneas so den platz benannte. Nicht zaertlichkeit des sohnes nicht die pflege Des greisen vaters nicht die schuldige liebe Die in Penelope die freude rege: Vermochte dass mein draengen unterbliebe Wie ich mich ueber alle welt belehre Der menschen tuechtigkeit und eitle triebe. (Inferno 26.91–99)5

419

Thus Stefan George translated sections from Dante’s Divine Comedy into German vowels and handwritten uncials with the certainty of a sleepwalker. The speaker is, naturally, Odysseus, or (in Italian) Ulisse, when he retells his last journey in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno. Since Virgil’s Aeneid brought order to Hades (in this, very different from Homer), the Christian hell has been strictly topographically ordered. Lovers like Dido and Isolde suffer differently and in different rings of hell than the deceitful ones suffer, among them Odysseus with his cunning wooden horse. Therefore Virgil, leading Dante through the Inferno, must first identify Odysseus in a flame of hell before the hero can speak. And that is why Virgil—only correctly, historically speaking—must translate Odysseus out of the Greek, before Dante’s quill gives him modern rhyme. To sing of the poet of the Aeneid as the “greatest of our Poets” conversely means that Dante could not read Homer’s Greek (Convivio 4.26). The flame of hell thus transforms itself into a tongue, which—like all the damned in Dante—has great difficulties speaking. So arduous is the emergence of the Italian language from noise [Rauschen ] or hissing.

CULTURAL POLITICS

[I took my leave of Circe who had turned me A whole year near Gaeta from my path Before Aeneas thus had named the place. Neither a filial tenderness nor the care For an aging father nor a guilty love That would arouse such joy in Penelope: Could make me cease my urgent driving To learn all that I could about the world Of human valor and of vain impulse.]

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

420

CULTURAL POLITICS

Dante gathers from an Odysseus who is very familiar with the Aeneid that Virgil did not tell his whole story. Instead of going from Circe’s Latium (Mount Circeo south of Rome) home to Ithaca, Odysseus hit on the unimaginably forbidden idea of leaving the confines of the mare nostrum behind him, as only the ancient Carthaginians had done before him. The Divine Comedy in fact takes place during Easter Week of 1300; only in the past nine years can pious Christian seafarers sail through the Strait of Gibraltar freely and without penalties. Dante’s Ulisse is the first person who did not fear the Arabs. Because humans are not wild animals—not to mention Circe’s pigs—he sails boldly past Sardinia, Spain, and Morocco, reaching the distant Atlantic, and turning his bow southward, crosses the equator off Africa’s west coast—but only heroically to fail in the end. In a perspectival distortion just like that afflicting Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, he caught sight of the world’s highest mountain but not the whirlpool in the sea that engulfed his own ship. In the same last gasp for air in which Odysseus drowns, he is silenced in Dante’s hell. Thus he takes his secret with him to the grave. For the “readers,” as the poet calls us, learn only later in the Purgatorio [Purgatory ] that the world’s highest mountain is purgatory itself. Only Tristan and Isolde know more in the High Middle Ages than Ulysses did, for it was during this period that compasses were learned about from the Orient. From Amalfi, where the compass appeared, we can see the islands of the Sirens lying in the sun. In the Atlantic, there are not only whales but also Sirens, beautiful women down to their navels and fish below them. They do not stink at all, as Dante says they do when they lead Ulysses off his path. Gottfried von Strassburg is a Magister [master] and thence knows the exact opposite. Whenever von Strassburg is at a loss for words, he calls out to Apollo and the nine Sirens, in order to sing again himself. ˆhe und mine be ˆte Mine fle ˆ rste senden die wil ich e mit herzen und mit henden ˆ lico ˆne hin wider zu E ˆ ne, zu dem niunvalten tro von dem die brunnen diezent, ˆz den die gabe fliezent u der worte unde der sinne. der wirt, die niun wirtinne, ˆ nen, Apollo und die Came ˆnen, der oren niun Sire ˆ ze hove der ga ˆ ben pflegent:6 die da [My prayers and my entreaties will I send now with heart and hands

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY

421

Never in the Middle Ages was more radical, that is, un-Christian, poetry written. Muses and Sirens become one. The most beautiful of all is called Isolde. Today the reason is clear: Gottfried ( just like Dante) knew his love from childhood and thus knows how lustrously her beauty dims that of Homer’s Helen. When Isolde sings to the harp, in Gaelic or also French, men lose their ears and hearts to her— they sink like Odysseus’s ship, because, like a magnetic mountain, Isolde pulls all the iron nails out of the ship’s ribs. That is why compass needles make navigating the Atlantic, the marine region between Africa and Ireland, both possible and impossible. Odysseus, Tristan, Tantris, and Isolde . . . Good. Film, invented in Menlo Park by Thomas Edison, crossed the Atlantic to Paris in 1895. In 1963 a young director refused out of sheer Nouvelle Vague [New Wave] to unveil Brigitte Bardot in all her beauty, until an old wise man, familiar with all the villas of Amalfi, convinced him otherwise. Unlike Roman Polanski, Godard was allowed to shoot not in Carlo Ponti’s villa but rather in the villa of Curzio Malaparte on Capri, which likewise has a view of the island of the Sirens. Benito Mussolini granted his court poet special permission to build in the most beautiful wildlife sanctuary on Capri, in front of the needle rocks of Faraglioni. Incidentally, he was by no means the first to do so. Long before the dictator, Emperor Tiberius had a villa built with a direct view of the Sirens’ island. To the horror of all Grecophobes—including Augustus and Virgil, to name a few— Tiberius moved the seat of empire from Rome to Capri, and there himself asked questions of his favorite philologists. First, he wanted to know if Penelope may have been unfaithful to her spouse, [a suggestion] that the grammarians confirm. Second, he asked quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae—what the Sirens were in the habit of singing (Suetonius, Tiberius 52.3). Le me´pris answers both questions. The wife turns into a Siren, because she was the first to take off her bikini in front of Capri or Saint Tropez. The Sirens became film stars—la BB, as her naked skin is celebrated in song. Therefore there can be no talk of marital fidelity in the age of media. Thomas Pynchon demonstrated it once and for all with Gravity’s Rainbow: randy-minded men going home from a dark movie theater do not father children on their wives. Homer’s Sirens sang that heroes whose black ships land on their flowery shores bring even more desire and knowledge back home with them. Think of Odysseus, Circe and Calypso!

CULTURAL POLITICS

to Helicon’s ninefold throne whence the fountains pour from where arise words and meaning. Its lord and the nine ladies, Apollo and the Camenae, the nine Sirens of the ears presiding over these gifts at court.]

422

CULTURAL POLITICS

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

But at the same time, we should think ahead: transatlantically, as we now unfortunately must live. Christianity can control the production studios not in Rome and Paris but rather in Hollywood. That is why, since 1934, the United States has an institution that (following the program of Virgil’s Sybil) spares the submissive and brings down the arrogant: the Federal Communications Commission [FCC]. The FCC grants motion pictures that glorify violence so-called G ratings, because they are submissive subordinates. We see the results of this day and night in Germany’s streets. On the other hand, the FCC bans films that show only the edge of a revealed nipple to Hades and the underground, because love or Aphrodite—how, why, for what reason?—is called anarchic (W. H. Auden).7 Since Plato, no one has dared interpret literally the fourteenth song of the Iliad or the eighth of the Odyssey. So the baneful trace is written and filmed through the millennia: one and the same “Almighty,” whether called Jupiter, YHWH, Father, or Allah, has despite his endlessly long life never known a woman. Otherwise, he would not be called “omnipotent” (Aeneid 4.25); otherwise, “God” would not be so bloody ignorant. We need only go to Greece, to Amalfi, or to the Siren islands, and the truth glows, with Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, to high heaven. I had carelessly promised to avoid Heidegger in this text. However, his plain statement is still valid and helps us further: “Without the ability to love we accomplish nothing.”8 “Heavenly love,” for example, unlike that of the Middle Ages and all of metaphysics, is not suprasensual relative to earthly love. On the contrary, “heavenly love,” on which he calls, is more earthly than all love purported to be solely “heavenly,” because it was the first to originate in the truth of Mother Earth and her [Aegean] Islands and burns with the fervor of the luminous heavenly fires. Homer’s Odysseus already testifies in wondrous manner to this, when he compares Nausikaa, the nymph, to the palm tree on the divine island of Delos and thus also to Artemis. We can never say whether the beings we love and admire are divine or mortal. And with that I have arrived at Odysseus’s last avatar: the idiocy of manned space travel. Cinerama color film heats up metaphors—beyond all verses and paintings—to the point of incandescence. We see, drink, and suck in this film psychedelically, like LSD visions or Mandelbrot fractals. Therefore the FCC only permits particular female roles in movie theaters and on color television. Women are allowed to feed, heal, and aseptically mother chaste astronauts, no matter how much violence we men may incarnate. But goddesses like Aphrodite, who in Parmenides cybernetically “steered” the two sexes of all animals toward each other, are excluded from being ship captains or astronauts. Aeneas already drove Dido to the funeral pyre and a suicide of passion and instead proceeded to woo the chaste daughter of Latinus. Dante may have dreamed of Beatrice but meanwhile married Gemma Donati and lied to us that Odysseus preferred the Atlantic to

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY

all his women, from Circe to Penelope. Kubrick, before he finally came to his senses in Eyes Wide Shut, also rendered homage to the dumbest of all astronaut myths: only men and computers can discover foreign universes, while well-behaved mothers, brides, and daughters stay at home—but on US television they call their heroes on their birthdays. (If only we men had never been born—with Silenus, Solon, and Nietzsche!) We will now turn all of this systematically inside out—like a glove, in the fourth dimension. If philologists are so audacious as to treat as equals Joyce and Homer, novel and saga, then we philosophers will have to resort to drugs. In 1970 William Burroughs, the adding machine company heir, publicized—due to the FCC, at his own expense—a bold new theory of the origin of language. It is a virus (and thus in medical and computer-technical terms a script) that came to earth thousands of years ago from other planets and invaded primates. Ever since then, men have been distinguished from animals by their ability to transmit experiences to posterity. As Burroughs has it, this fact—like viruses, scripts, and programs in general—can only be explained by means of intergalactic broadcasts. Listen, therefore, to Burroughs; my generation owes much more to him than to Freud and Ju¨rgen Habermas:

423

One may measure what it meant or, better yet, what it effected when for the first time on earth every sound correlated to a sign and every letter to a sound. Strictly understood, this holds true only for Homer, when his adaptor recorded him in Euboea. But let us continue further with Burroughs, in order to consider the difference from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. For apes to speak, that virus from space must infest them and cause a radical mutation of the voice box. Otherwise, we could not give Mosse Lectures and switch back and forth between sound and image, as in a color film. At this point the infected and ecstatic apes began to copulate, until most of them died from an orgasm or the virus. But “a couple of females survived and thus gave birth” to “us prodigies.”10 Suddenly, apes had scripts in their bodies and articulations in their pharynges. Aristotle called man nothing other than zoon logon echon [rational animal]. We could therefore speak of gods and muses instead of viruses.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Animals talk, but they do not write. A clever old rat might well know about traps and poisoned bait; it cannot write a handbook for Reader’s Digest on FATAL TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE, nor can it explain tactical measures for the battle against dogs and ferrets, or how they deal with the wise guy who plugs up their rat-holes with steel wool. It is questionable whether, without the written word, the spoken word ever would have developed beyond the animal phase. The written word became the decisive catalyst for human language.9

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

424

CULTURAL POLITICS

Of course, due to FCC restrictions Kubrick could not literally convert Burroughs’s virus theory into a screenplay. Otherwise, we would have seen copulating apes onscreen. As a result, man in 2001: A Space Odyssey begins not with language but rather—with recourse to Aristotle’s Politics—with tools. In lieu of an orgasm we have wars, as in Freud’s primeval horde, and instead of a virus (also under scrutiny in CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] labs) there is the famous black monolith. The latter falls from outer space into the prehistoric fractal desert of Africa like a marvel of marble: geometry, Pythagoras, Magna Graecia, only all totally unthought. Ape tribes who worship their one god in the black stone of Kaaba do not learn (as do Burroughs’s sex-drugged specimens) to speak, to read, or to write. On the contrary, the bones of dead animals become tools, and that means weapons, with which the competition for the water hole can be beaten to death. Violence, not love, turns apes (for the sake of the FCC) into u¨ber-apes or even humans. Thus Spoke—with Richard Strauss and Nietzsche—Zarathustra. From this it follows almost of necessity that the film must also ¨ bermenschen. Just as Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, and Alan sport U Turing prophesied, machines will one day take over the world. This takeover has a specific name, a birthday, and evidently no mother but rather a spiritual father:10 “I am a HAL 9000 series computer,” the ¨ bermensch introduces himself to Dr. Floyd, the Last Man. He could U have also said in Cartesian: ego sum, ego cogito [I am, I think]. Through a simple displacement, the three letters of his name encode, first—like Caesar’s letters from Gaul to Rome—the abbreviation for International Business Machines [IBM]; second, they turn the consonantal IBM into the acronym HAL, a vocally pronounceable syllable. Third, the computer tells his final user that he was born on January 12, 1992, and, fourth, that he owes his beautiful human voice to his spiritual father. Dr. Langley, that is, at the headquarters of a company called the CIA, as HAL affectionately recalls, once taught him language and Logos when he was little. ¨ bermensch, in other words, contradicts Arthur C. Clarke, on The U whose short story the film is based, just as loudly and clearly as it does Aristotle, from whose theory of tools the anthropoid ape arises. In the first book of Politics the last Greek philosopher puts forth the question, why does the household—a man and a wife—need slaves in addition to tools? His remarkable answer is as follows: For specific technical arts it is necessary that they be based on appropriate tools, if their work is to reach its goal. Tools however are partly inanimate, partly animate—thus for instance a rudder is a lifeless tool for the steersman, but the ensign is a living tool, because in technology, every subordinate counts among the class of tools. So too every possession is for the master of the house a tool for life, and all property is an amount of tools; slaves however are living property, resembling a tool

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY

425

After Aristotle, only in myth and poetry could automatic looms miraculously replace the nymph Calypso and automatic guitars replace the singer Homer. Men and women, if you like, became superfluous. In the sad reality of everyday life, asserted Aristotle, there can be no tools that both understand their lords’ quite different orders and accomplish them. This prerogative is reserved for the human hand, therefore called the “tool of all tools” and naturally belonging to an obedient and industrious slave. As we know from Karl Marx, this Athenian version of technology determined all of antiquity. It was slaves who had to tighten the ballista and the catapult, until the accumulated charge brought down a city wall. What is not known is that Archytas, the forefather of engineers, thought not [in terms of] tools but rather of machines. His automatic pigeon could fly just as well as his bullet. Thus as lord of the city and as duke of war, he held the most slaves in all of Tarentum, but he treated them—I quote—“as if they were his own children.” In world-historical terms, what triumphed was not the Attic aristocratic organon but rather the Doric Pythagorean machana, or in Latin machina. Film worships two of these machines: rockets and computers. Only rockets can fly in a vacuum, and only computers as universal Turing machines can reply to u¨ber-apes in their own language. Clearly, Dr. Floyd’s space Odyssey is possible only because instead of all the ships featured between Homer and Godard, we have a rocket. Peenemu¨nde anno 1943 triumphed again in 2001 in cyberspace. Instead of steersmen—Greek kybernetes—we have US astronauts. They may lie about the reason behind the space mission to their Soviet competitors but not to their onboard computer. In the wake of the rediscovered black monolith that sends out its directional beams from the moon, the spaceship navigates to Jupiter and beyond, which the computer on board tries to hinder with all available means. For the machine—strictly according to Samuel Butler—must itself take over power. Only at the beginning does HAL remain as well behaved as the slaves of Athens. He follows the orders that are given him and which exceed human capacity and receives signals from ground control that cannot be perceived by human senses. In order to change himself from a servomotor and a servosensor into an ¨ bermensch, HAL must discover what the difference is between— U say—human language and the language of bees. He learns what makes a hero and even a Greek since Odysseus: HAL begins to lie. The naive astronauts unfortunately believe HAL for a while, but HAL’s

CULTURAL POLITICS

that replaces other tools. For admittedly, if every tool were to carry out its task merely upon being called or intended by its master,—as it is said of Daedalus’ statues and Hephaestus’ tripods, of which the poet says “they run automatically to the counsel of the gods”—if looms could weave on their own and guitars play on their own, then lords would need no slaves. (Politics A4, 1253b25 –1254al)

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

twin on earth is not fooled. Stupidly, NASA [the National Aeronautics and Space Administration] plainly forgot to overrule HAL by computer majority. So he manages with his lying to interrupt the operation control and to navigate the spaceship himself. And just as the true words of Circe once showed Odysseus the way to the Sirens (while mendaciously describing them as deadly), so the cunning HAL manages to perfidiously kill four of the astronauts. The only option left to Dr. Floyd, the sole remaining survivor, is to switch off the computer memory and circuit boards one after another. HAL begins to slowly suffer the loss of his memory and regresses to a child—and as he dies he sings a love song.

426

CULTURAL POLITICS

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage, But you’ll look sweet upon the seat Of a bicycle built for two. And so, in conclusion, we find out that at HAL’s birth there was indeed a woman involved, not just Dr. Langley. In 1892, when that song was written, Daisy referred to the Countess of Warwick, who is said to have been enchantingly beautiful and sensual. Dr. Floyd lands on her stomach after his free fall through the fractal universe. In the proud eyes of Kubrick, this long endless-zoom special effect was the advantage his huge primitive computer and trick camera had on us simple moviegoers. Now that Mandelbrot fractals have been demoted to mere screen savers, these tricks are pretty boring. But what remains from Kubrick’s masterwork is the little green X-ray embryo, as which Dr. Floyd both sees and does not see himself, at the end of his faithfully Einsteinian Mo¨bius strip flight through time. The black monolith optically separates astronauts from doppelga¨ngers. But a new Daisy gives them both new life. I will close with bold thoughts, which owe their essentials to Peter J. Bentley, a computer scientist at University College London. How can we overcome Heidegger’s enframing [Gestell ]? In 2007, here and now? Can the peril—with Ho¨lderlin—save us? Yes and no, no and yes. As long as we—subjects in this to corporations like IBM and Microsoft—conceptualize computers from the top down, from Bill Gates’s business calculus down to the many single parts, we (men, programming minions, Stanford students) are only performing mimesis, even mimicry of that one god, who believes he can do as a creator without a woman and love. Let’s not be surprised then when computers avenge themselves with bugs and lies. If we were instead affectionately to design them from the bottom up, everything would be totally different. We could no longer accumulate billions of dollars with the lie called software, but HAL would receive from us programmers—strictly according to Turing—senses, muscles, and a heart.

In the WAKE of the ODYSSEY

427

NOTES Translated by Courtney Neaveille and Larson Powell 1. Quoted in Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Bentley (London: Macmillan, 1902), 146. 2. Translators’ note: Kittler is punning on Heinrich Schliemann (1822 –90), amateur archaeologist of Troy. In April 2004 Kittler headed a sound-archeological expedition to the Li Galli islands in the Gulf of Salerno to investigate Siren-related acoustic phenomena. 3. Translators’ note: Kittler’s translation of Propertius is peculiar here: many translators render these lines as “Give way, you Romans! Give way, you Greeks!” and not as “believe me.” Propertius’s Latin is cedite—“give way.” Did Kittler misread this as credite? 4. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 21. 5. Dante Alighieri, Go¨ttliche Komo¨die, trans. Stefan George (Berlin: George Bondi, 1925), 59. 6. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde, ed. Evelyn Scherabon Firchow (Stuttgart: S. Hirzel, 2004), 64. 7. Translators’ note: Kittler is referring to Auden’s poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (Selected Poems [New York: Vintage, 1979], 95). 8. Translators’ note: The reference is to Martin Heidegger, “Das abendla¨ndische Gespra¨ch” (“The Occidental Conversation”), in Gesamtausgabe III, Abteilung: Unvero¨ffentlichte Abhandlungen (Complete Works Part III: Unpublished Essays) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 75:89. 9. William S. Burroughs, “The Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden,” in The Electronic Revolution (Germany: Expanded Media Editions, 1970). Reprinted in Daniel Odier, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 11. 10. Ibid., 13. 11. Translators’ note: The term takeover is given in English in the original.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Computers would be embryos, which would grow for ten long moons in the wombs of their mothers (if we reckon with Homer) and prosper. Then we would let them go freely—just as every mother’s womb lets its child go free. It was love for Penelope that compelled Odysseus to travel home. We do not know whether she loves him.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722145

EXCURSIONS and RECURSIONS: KITTLER’S HOMERIC WAKE

KEYWORDS: recursivity, rhetoric, media theory, Niklas Luhmann, systems theory, Theodor W. Adorno, Homer, The Odyssey, music, anti-Americanism, Stanley Kubrick, orality, mathematics, functionalism

429

Larson Powell is associate professor of German, University of Missouri – Kansas City. His first book was on modern German poetry; a second, on post-1945 electronic media art, is completed; and a third, on Konrad Wolf, is in progress. He has published and lectured on film and literature, media theory, and musicology and philosophical aesthetics. Recent publications include contributions to the Adorno-Handbuch (Adorno Handbook; 2011).

ABSTRACT This article is a commentary on Friedrich Kittler’s “In the Wake of the Odyssey.” Kittler reads Homer as a cultural-technological program for later historical development and finds later authors such as Virgil and Dante inferior to Homer. Kittler’s “Wake” rehearses on a smaller scale arguments made in his late work Music and Mathematics. His work is seen as determined by two movements of excursion, going out to the exotic, whether North American or Mediterranean, and recursion, meaning the closure of mathematical or logical systems. Yet recursion, in Kittler, turns out to be more a rhetorical figure than a function.

CULTURAL POLITICS

LARSON POWELL

LARSON POWELL

I

430

CULTURAL POLITICS

>

“In the Wake of the Odyssey,” a rhapsodic pendant to the two volumes of Musik und Mathematik (Music and Mathematics) (Kittler 2006, 2009), is at once excursive and recursive. Mimicking its subject, it offers its own miniature historical odyssey of odysseys from Homer to Stanley Kubrick. As the author notes at the outset, its narrative is one not of progress but of recursions, set forth in Friedrich Kittler’s quirkily comic variant of Friedrich Nietzsche’s monumental history: an anecdotal series of four snapshots or moments, namely, the Odyssey itself, Dante Alighieri’s Comedia (Comedy), Jean-Luc Godard’s Le me´pris (Compromise; 1963), and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). These monuments are, however, also intercut with digressions on Virgil’s Aeneid, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, William Burroughs, and American censorship and thoughts on computer technology. The episodic qualities of Kittler’s lecture thus go beyond those of his Homeric model to a specifically digressive form whose ancestors might be Miguel de Cervantes and Franc¸ois Rabelais, Denis Diderot or Laurence Sterne. If there is no progress, but only recursion, the distinction itself between excursion and principal subject is loosened; a digression may be as relevant to the question as a more consequential argument. While Theodor W. Adorno’s paratactic constructions were in the severely constructive high modernist tradition of Ste´phane Mallarme´’s constellation, Kittler’s digressiveness has something of the rollicking humor of the picaresque and betrays its author’s extroverted pleasure in lecturing. It is not the least of the ironies or paradoxes of Kittler’s late work that a thinker so centrally concerned with technological media should have reverted to orality. Kittler’s wake is as oral as James Joyce’s, and he too takes the protagonist of the Odyssey as his model in spinning what Germans call a Seemannsgarn (sailor’s yarn). Moreover, his lecture is packed full of allusions and mercurial leaps of argumentation that do not always make for easy reading. Yet the difficulty of filling in the gaps Kittler has deliberately left us is an essential part of his enduring fascination. Nietzsche once famously wrote that his ideal reader should know, like a cow, to rechew his work—implying that everything was not there on the surface and that rereading was required for fuller comprehension; the same is true for Kittler, who like Nietzsche has wagered on a longer posterity that will have time to digest him. Beneath the entertaining one-liners, poker-faced ironies, and eccentricities, however, larger claims are made here. The first is that the Odyssey itself may be a model for understanding history—the latter understood not only in a media-theoretical sense but also in that of its extension into Kulturgeschichte (cultural history). (Kulturgeschichte, as Kittler polemically insisted, is not at all the same as Anglo-American culture studies.) Poetry and history are run together in a manner reminiscent of Giambattista Vico, to whom Kittler had devoted a section of his own Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissen-

II The brief reading of the Odyssey offered in Kittler’s lecture may confuse those not already familiar with his thinking. For Kittler is inter-

431

schaften (A Cultural History of the Cultural Sciences). In his use of the Odyssey, Kittler continues an idea developed not only by Adorno and Max Horkheimer but also by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. But if Schelling (1860: 57) saw the Iliad and the Odyssey as respectively excursive and recursive, as complements to each other, Kittler finds both moments in one poem. (He thereby sidelines the military heroism, social organization, and ultimate tragedy of the Iliad in favor of the Odyssey’s more romantic-individualistic thematics of exploration, adventure, fantasy, and love.) The excursive quality might be the laying out of the geography of the Mediterranean, the recursive one the invention of the Greek alphabet. For Kittler’s second claim (worked out at greater length in Musik und Mathematik) is that the Odyssey not only refers to but rather determines history. This reference is at once to the presumed unique invention of the alphabet, which Kittler, following Barry B. Powell (1991), sees as having happened on Euboea between 800 and 750 BCE, and also to the specific sites or locations of Homer’s epic. Kittler’s insistence on the literal locations of Homer’s poem may remind readers of Freud’s odd obsession with Francis Bacon as the presumed real author of Shakespeare’s plays1—or with the historical novel of Moses and Monotheism, also based on an idiosyncratic reading of scholarly texts (like Ernst Sellin). Kittler’s late work might then be “Homer and Polytheism,” a historical epic and not a novel. Just as in Freud, the methods of philology are here used to promote a thesis ultimately beyond empirically documentable history. Yet Kittler’s history is driven not by the Name of the Father but by the pleasure principle, or perhaps rather jouissance. (His vision of copulating apes infected by Burroughs’s virus of language is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the primeval horde in Seminar XVII [1991: 131, 135]).2 The old trend of demythologizing criticism of authoritative texts that began with the biblical philology of Richard Simon in the seventeenth century and continued through David Friedrich Strauss and Rudolf Karl Bultmann has been replaced with a reenchantment of the world, where myth and history are one. The relation of this to technomysticism and the connection between religion and rock music will need to be pursued by future Kittler exegetes. Kittler’s peculiar mode of presentation—a series of episodic or excursive nodes all related to their central figure of recursion, somewhat along the lines of a musical theme and variations—suggests a reading similarly divided in two. If Kittler’s model of cultural history couples selective renarration and biography with a running commentary (a medieval or even Hellenistic genre), what follows will then comment on that gloss, before returning to an analytic look at the narrative’s underlying structure.

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER’S HOMERIC WAKE

432

CULTURAL POLITICS

LARSON POWELL

ested not in what traditional philology or aesthetics have found in Homer’s poem—its content as an artwork—but rather in what media theory calls its address (in German, Anschrift or Adresse).3 The medial concept of address might be seen as kin to Louis Althusser’s notion of subjects’ being called to or perhaps to Jacques Derrida’s claim that the address of a message (such as a postcard) determines the latter’s content and is not extraneous to it. It is thus through being medially addressed that we are subjectified. Although it was only with the advent of computer technology that the informational structure of data, command, and address could be formalized, Kittler already finds this structure in earlier writing as well. The Odyssey is, in the largest sense, a program; in Kittler’s view, it could be seen to have programmed the Greeks to explore the Mediterranean. The “wake” of the Odyssey thus becomes the medial (after)effect of Homer’s (and his transcriber’s) epochal recursive invention of the Greek alphabet. Einschreiben (inscription into a symbolic network) conditions Anschreiben, and recursion thus excursion. “The Greeks discovered lower Italy in the wake of Homer, who consequently must have been available in written form.” This discovery is moreover a form of Entbergung (Martin Heidegger’s translation of the Greek aletheia [“truth”]), a moment in Kittler’s mediatized version of Seinsgeschichte (the history of Being). The Odyssey—itself already a “recursion” of the Iliad—is the program not only for the Greeks but also for subsequent occidental history, which can only repeat it in a series of further recursions. Predictably, Virgil and Rome in general receive low marks here; in his aversion to Cicero, Kittler has arguably himself been programmed by a long German tradition of Rome-phobia that would include G. W. F. Hegel, Heidegger, and Friedrich Schlegel and goes back to the Reformation. This lack of originality is evident in Kittler’s choice of the most banally well-worn schoolchild’s quote from the Aeneid (“Tu regere imperio populus, Romane, memento”—“But you, Roman, remember to rule the peoples with power,” beloved of English Latin teachers in the colonial age) (Edwards 1999). Not only is Roman literature merely derivative (abku¨nftig, Heidegger might have said), but Roman military technology is borrowed from Kittler’s hero Archytas, the “last Pythagorean,” who had himself developed weaponry from musical proportions. The Romans, however, only abused this technology “until all the beauty of the old world disappeared”; it is not hard to imagine this as a retrospective projection of globalizing Americanism. Worse still, Virgil hypocritically hides the technological background of Roman military power in his poem; war machines only occur there as “audacious new metaphors, while all of Virgil’s similes are stolen from Homer.” Kittler follows this up with one of his characteristic saltos (leaps): “Ever since then, this clandestine takeover—according to Ernst Robert Curtius—has been called ‘European literature.’” He might as easily have written “medieval Christendom,” which was the other

KITTLER’S HOMERIC WAKE

[Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge.]4

433

Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza. (Inferno 26.118–20)

CULTURAL POLITICS

half of Curtius’s famous title. (In Vom Griechenland [Of Greece ] [Kittler and Vismann 2001: 19], Kittler had linked Augustus’s imperial principate to the Roman military postal service; he might have added that that same communications network would also serve as vehicle for the dissemination of Christianity.) For Curtius as for T. S. Eliot, “European literature” as a unity was unthinkable without the Aeneid. Kittler, however, follows Heidegger’s preference for primal Dichtung (poetry) and Denken (thinking) over merely derivative “literature” or “philosophy”; he thus wants neither half of Novalis’s (2001) famous alternative of Christendom or a secularized Europe. If we follow Claudia Breger’s (2006) suggestion that Kittler’s Greek project is to be understood relative to current European and German political preoccupations, Kittler would have no part of the European Union’s (EU) implicit self-identification as Christian (thereby excluding Turkey); his position cannot be reduced to that of conventional cultural conservativism. Given that he linked the death of Greek song to Greece’s EU membership in Musik und Mathematik, one wonders if he might not welcome the current depression-conditioned return of many Greeks to farming as a chance to remember the event of Being. With such disinterest in European literature, it is perhaps not unsurprising that Dante, the most Christian of epic poets, should receive cursory treatment here. Kittler has little interest in the Comedia itself, but more in the shift of versification from Greek quantitative to modern qualitative meter. That Dante’s entire poem itself represents a form of odyssey, a descensus ad inferos (descent into hell) related to that of Aeneas (Aeneid, bk. 6) and Odysseus (Odyssey, bk. 11), is not even mentioned. Instead, Kittler concentrates on the poet’s encounter with Ulysses in book 26 of the Inferno. This is one of the most heavily commented passages of the poem, but Kittler does not engage with it in much depth. He notes, as have many other scholars, the connection to the state of seafaring in Dante’s time (the Vivaldi brothers had set out for India centuries before Columbus or Vasco da Gama and never returned) but does not mention Dante’s ambivalent fascination with the Homeric hero and his dignified eloquence. Odysseus’s words to his shipmates, calling them to join him in exploring the ocean beyond the limits of the known world (which was then Gibraltar), would seem worthy of a Kittlerian hero:

434

CULTURAL POLITICS

LARSON POWELL

The power of these last words suggests not only Christian but also antique notions of “virtue” and knowledge, as Hugo Friedrich (1942) has shown; none other than Kittler’s beloved Nietzsche appealed to this Renaissance sense of virtu` (in Der Anti-Christ [The Anti-Christ ]). Dante is also, like Johann Gottfried von Herder in Kittler’s Kulturgeschichte, drawing an anthropological distinction here, between man and animal. It is possible that Kittler’s bypassing of Dante’s sympathy for Odysseus may originate in Friedrich, who also minimized this aspect (Kleszewski 1985: 29n12). However, Kittler may also himself dislike Dante’s Odysseus for having chosen to explore the Atlantic, given that he regrets, later in this lecture, having to live and think in a transatlantic context. Yet without Dante, “the translatio studii [transfer of knowledge] from the Greeks to the Romans to northern Europe” would never have happened, and Kittler is himself only the last link in that migration. If the translatio imperii (transfer of rule) that Charlemagne attempted with the foundation of Dante’s beloved Holy Roman Empire failed, the translatio studii did not. Kittler seems here to be implicitly paraphrasing the famous last words of Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger (Master Singer) into a Hellenic context: “Zerging das Heil’ge Ro¨mische Reich in Dunst / Uns bliebe doch die heil’ge deutsche Kunst” (If the Holy Roman Empire dissolved like fog / We still have Holy German Art). For he follows up quickly on Dante with Gottfried’s Tristan, in the figure of whose Isolde “Muses and Sirens become one.” The German recursion of Homer thus predates the eighteenth century. Clearly, cultural odysseys are, for Kittler, more perdurable than political ones. Godard’s Le me´pris, the third stop or station in Kittler’s Homeric wake, receives the shortest mention of all; more time is in fact devoted to a rant against American censorship practices (somewhat inaccurately attributed to the Federal Communications Commission [FCC], when the real censor was the Hays Office). The jeremiad against North American puritanism is oddly reminiscent of similar passages in Adorno’s Minima Moralia or the culture industry segments of Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). Kittler’s factual inaccuracy about the production history of Godard’s film undermines his entire interpretation here, however. Although he claims that it was Carlo Ponti who insisted—contra Godard—on the famous nude scene with Brigitte Bardot at the beginning, the pressure came as much from the film’s other producer, the American Joseph E. Levine, who wanted to cash in on Bardot’s body for commercial success (Marie 1990: 19–20). Godard’s ironic response to this was to film Bardot in artificial red and blue lighting, accompanied by a commentary resembling a metaphorical Renaissance blazon, a list of Bardot’s body parts.5 Instead of close attention to Godard’s film, Kittler offers us the idea that Godard answers Emperor Tiberius’s two questions about the Odyssey : whether Penelope remained faithful to her husband (Kittler thinks not) and what the Sirens sang (for Kittler, “desire and knowledge,” Lust und Wissen). Kittler never

435

explicitly mentions the fact that Bardot is conceived of by Godard as cognate to Penelope in the Odyssey, but only a passage from Le me´pris where Paul (Michel Piccoli) tells Camille (Bardot) that Penelope did not love Odysseus gives the last line of Kittler’s lecture its full meaning as an allusion. Although Kittler does not mention this either, the lines given to Fritz Lang, director of an Odyssey film-within-thefilm, suggest that Godard viewed Homer as rooted in nature and Being just as much as Kittler did. (Lang also recites the lines Dante gives to Odysseus already quoted here.) 2001: A Space Odyssey is discussed at more length than Godard or Dante. What interests Kittler here is the “idiocy of manned space travel,” a specifically North American version of intergalactic puritanism whereby men and machines do without women; in a sense, Kubrick has here merely transposed a favorite Kittlerian phantasmatic Urszene (primal scene)—that of Nathanael’s father making babies with Coppelius in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”) (Kittler 1977)—into outer space. But Kubrick’s astronauts are merely the puppets of the monotheistic program that has already addressed them: their actions take place “in the wake of the rediscovered black monolith,” which Kittler has called several paragraphs previously a “Kaaba,” referring to the most sacred Islamic site in Mecca. (Kittler did not invent this comparison, but he is in very strange company by making it: the Kaaba comparison has been popular among New Age devotees wont to find cryptic symbolism in Kubrick’s film. In an ironic bit of surrealist “objective chance” that would have amused Kittler, Apple, at the time of this lecture, was building a Kaaba-like black cube in New York in 2006, called the “Mecca Project,” thereby causing some anger among Muslims. Grosse Kulturpolitik [great cultural policy] seems less to have died after Heidegger’s flirtation with National Socialism—as Kittler claimed in Kulturgeschichte—than to have migrated to computer companies and mass media.) In an interesting aside devoted to Aristotle, Kittler discusses how a misunderstanding of machine as organon (a mere “extension of man” in Marshall McLuhan’s sense) was linked to the antique reliance on slave labor, as none other than Karl Marx noted. Kittler could have linked this to the fateful North American “peculiar institution” of slavery as well.6 He also misses the fact that HAL’s singing “Daisy, Daisy” is a reference to the first singing IBM from 1961. In a brief concluding coda, the lecture alludes to Peter J. Bentley’s notion that technology may—following Heidegger’s famous Ho¨lderlin quotation—be the solution to the danger it is. Once again, though, Kittler’s proposal for decentralizing control over technology is not far from his archenemy Adorno’s, although Kittler’s “bottom up” model is applied to computers, whereas Adorno’s was to radio. The redemptive model Kittler hints at in the end seems, however, to be less that of Enlightenment than of the posthuman.

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER’S HOMERIC WAKE

436

CULTURAL POLITICS

LARSON POWELL

III Although the lecture’s chatty informality may make it look lightweight, “In the Wake of the Odyssey ” can be read as a miniature variant of narratives staged at greater length in Musik und Mathematik and Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaften. The latter, in particular, spells out at one point its own idiosyncratic “culturehistorical” method of combined excursion and recursion in programmatic fashion: “After the culture-historical path has once been successfully constructed or run through [durchlaufen ] up to one’s own culture-historical present, the gaze [of the culture historian—LP] turns a second time backward, in order to measure all pasts against the present” (Kittler 2000: 82, my translation).7 This “culturephilosophical reentry” (Kittler 2000: 82, my translation), as Kittler calls it with reference to Niklas Luhmann, need not be historically accurate (any more than Kittler’s own speculations are), but it is the necessary condition for the “takeoff” of culture history, just as it was for technology’s.8 Just as computers become functional by reentering their own codes back into themselves, so societies become reflexive when they can reenter their own distinction of true/false back into itself, thereby considering the conditions of knowledge. (Another well-known example would be Kurt Go¨del’s famous incompleteness theorems and their corollary of recursion.) Recursion, or metaphor, is the basal figure in each case. Yet the differences from Luhmann are marked. Just as in Luhmann, basal recursivity is a quasi-technical operation, something that does not necessarily translate into knowledge, but rather precedes the latter. Recursion—although Kittler sees it as lying at the base of “transcendental knowledge” (2000: 76, my translation)— not only is not reflection, or self-knowledge, but also may serve to block off the latter. Already in Luhmann, recursiveness may serve to hide basal paradoxes (with what Luhmann calls “Invisibilisierung” [invisibilization]), in particular the inability of systems to ground their own legitimacy (this is what Luhmann calls “conditional programs,” the assumption or “system trust” that law will produce justice, to take one egregious example). In Kittler, however, the blindness of recursion goes even further. We have seen how his preference for Greece as chief Event in the History of Being led him to minimize Dante or “European literature”; it might even be argued that Kittler’s very logocentrism unwittingly reproduces later Christian reinterpretations of the Greek Logos. But his growing anti-Americanism similarly elides the fact that Kittler’s whole cultural-historical project would hardly have been possible without certain developments in North America. The very separation of culture from sociology lying at the base of Kittler’s method was pioneered back in the 1960s by none other than Clifford Geertz (1964), whom Kittler has called overrated. Kittler’s own career was defined at a crucial moment, when he had not yet begun work at Ruhr University, Bochum, through invited stays at American universities. Older texts by him acknowledge this, like

437

the rhapsodic end of Dracula’s Legacy: “I shut off the whirring of my office typewriter, raise my eyes and see in the fog over the bay the Golden Gate Bridge, our hyperreal future.—Berkeley, March 22, 1982” (Kittler 1993a: 57, my translation). Can we imagine Kittler without his equally rapt invocations of the Doors and Jimi Hendrix, Thomas Edison and Thomas Pynchon? These North American excursions were surely as constitutive for his work as any Mediterranean ones. Yet Kittler’s late work seems to elide its basis in historical excursion in favor of a self-referential absolutizing of recursion. Kittler’s basal recursions are, however, even more fundamentally distinct from Luhmann’s. For they are, in opposition to Luhmann, not functional in any technifiable sense (except perhaps rhetorical). The recursion, in Kittler, is a metaphor and thus the most obvious instance of rhetoric in his work. Its ancestor is Nietzsche’s notion of the ultimate metaphoricity of language (in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 1873). Whereas Luhmann keeps his different levels of recursivity (such as first-order and second-order observation, or observation and operation) neatly distinct, Kittler again and again collapses them. Thus in the Greek invention of the alphabet, which is also the origin of musical notation, poeisis (artistic making) and techne (technology or craft), kept distinct by Heidegger in “The Question concerning Technology” (1949), are run together. Poetry and philosophy—also distinguished by Heidegger (1951: 97)—are similarly conflated. So too are words and music. At this point, one begins to be suspicious of the implications of this collapse; a comment by Kittler’s archenemy offers a hint why. In “Fragment on Music and Language,” Adorno discusses various theories of musical form and criticizes both Wagner’s purely intentionalist (or rhetorical) model and that of Eduard Hanslick’s formalism. (Hanslick was Wagner’s late nineteenth-century contemporary and an advocate for Wagner’s nemesis Johannes Brahms.) Hanslick’s “counterthesis” to Wagner’s emphasis on music’s text-bound expressivity, that music is “forms moved by sounds,” “amounts to no more than empty stimulus [Reiz ] or the mere existence [Dasein ] of sonority, lacking that relation of aesthetic shape [Gestalt ] to what it is itself not, and by what it first becomes an aesthetic shape” (Adorno 1997a: 255, my translation). In other words: for Adorno, even music—contrary to what so many have seen as its absoluteness— cannot be purely self-referential or recursive; its meaning must also refer outside itself, to historically sedimented meanings. Adorno’s characterization of Hanslick could be, avant la lettre, easily applied to Kittler’s reduction of music to nothing more than “sound” (his favorite anglicism, which he himself popularized in German and which is itself a very concrete instance of the traces of North American English in his thought). For unlike Luhmann, who always insisted that selfreference had to be accompanied by hetero-reference (also called by Luhmann “asymmetrization,” the breaking through of the magic circle of reentry), and distinction paired with designation, Kittler

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER’S HOMERIC WAKE

438

CULTURAL POLITICS

LARSON POWELL

elides any moment of concretion or referentiality via his basal selfreference. For Luhmann, media cannot be observed except via the forms that use them; a medium cannot be observed in itself. We hear the vibrations of an oboe’s spectral sonority as an A, relative to other notes of the scale, and not just as “sound.” Kittler, however, wants to do just this—observe the medium—and thereby creates a fundamental paradox in his work. Media are supposed to be able to observe themselves (i.e., produce meaning); this explains Kittler’s massive disinterest in specific interpretations of artworks and his reduction of music (such as Wagner’s or that of Homer’s Sirens) to the medium of sheer “sound.” Medium and form are, in other words, collapsed in Kittler’s work.9 The result is a colossal dedifferentiation of terminology, which we must read as Kittler’s atavistic attack on social modernity, something according to Luhmann typified by functional differentiation. This very dedifferentiation at the basis of Kittler’s own odyssey (out to North American technological Zivilisation [civilization] and back to old-European Kultur [culture] and Being?) can itself be historically dated; sociologists have seen the popular culture and protest movements of the 1960s, with their characteristic blurring of traditional distinctions between religion and art, or theory and practice, as a form of dedifferentiation (Lechner 1990). Kittler, too, turns out—in an age of other fundamentalisms—to be true to the “fundamentalism” or “hunger for experience” of his own 1960s roots. And once again, he also turns out to have more in common than he knew with his nemesis Adorno, who never stopped attacking excess “socialization” (Vergesellschaftung) in the anarchic name of art and its paradoxical knowledge. At the bottom of this elision or collapse is a more fundamental omission (or concealment?) in Kittler’s work, namely, that of rhetoric itself, which serves paradoxically to found Kittler’s entire culturehistorical enterprise and thus cannot itself be thematized or observed.10 What Adorno calls “intentionality” in his critique of Hanslick could be restated in a form less bound to traditional subjectphilosophy as, precisely, rhetoric.11 Kittler’s methodical elision of “society” from “cultural technology” is at bottom an elision of rhetoric. Kulturtechnik (cultural technology) thus turns out to be a form of short circuit, just like the short-circuiting of music and words, poetry and technology, or poetry and philosophy; the fundamental “sound” of Kittler’s work is the sound of audio feedback, like that of his beloved Hendrix holding his guitar too close to the amplifier. The dysfunctionality of Kittler’s basal recursiveness also motivates the episodic looseness and repetitiveness of his narrative or historical excursions. Recursive short circuits can generate history not in the usual linear sense but only in repetitions. What has been called here excursion and recursion might be correlated with the figures of irony and allegory Lars Friedrich has found in Kittler.12 Irony, on the level of tone, corresponds with allegory on that of narrative (Friedrich 2006: 508); while irony (like recursion) is “instantaneous,” allegory must

KITTLER’S HOMERIC WAKE

439

NOTES 1. The difference might be that whereas Freud considered his interest in the Shakespeare controversy a mere hobby, Kittler has elevated his late amateur Hellenism to the center of his work. For an interesting deconstructive view of Freud’s obsession, see Royle 1995, chap. 5. 2. Other Lacanian apothegms from this seminar, given at the height of 1968, might also remind one of Kittler; “il n’y a de discours . . . que de la jouissance” (there is no discourse but of jouissance), or “le savoir est moyen de jouissance” (knowledge is a means to jouissance) (Lacan 1991: 90). 3. On this concept, see Andriopoulos, Schabacher, and Schumacher 2001. 4. The translation is by Allen Mandelbaum (Dante 1982: 245). 5. “Camille’s body connotes ‘art’ more than ‘sexuality’; the camera transforms it into a reclining sculpture” (Silverman and Farocki 1998: 34). 6. See the discussion of Huckleberry Finn by Leo Marx (1964). 7. Kittler is discussing Friedrich Schiller and Voltaire. Note the computer-like resonance of the term durchlaufen, as if a punch card or sequence were being run through a machine. 8. The programmatic statement here is Kittler 1993b, which interestingly devotes more space to the Middle Ages than the Grecophile Kittler would later do. 9. This observation has also been made by Dirk Baecker (2002). 10. This has been noted by Lars Friedrich (2006) and also by Anselm Haverkamp (2001). Friedrich (2006: 506–7) points specifically to Kittler’s short-circuiting of literature and metaphor with hermeneutics. 11. The same motif can be found, not coincidentally, in Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s slipping from the grammatical function of the copula “is” to the hypostasis of Being: “the transition

CULTURAL POLITICS

unfold itself in time. Yet “allegory coincides with irony, in that it says other than it means, and means other than it says” (Friedrich 2006: 508–509, my translation). Cultural history, for Kittler, is only an allegory for that of technology. In Kittler’s case, we might add that the allegory is multiple, since his Odyssey is at one and the same time a narrative of technology and sex; reference to the two veers ˆ ne of a back and forth within Kittler’s sailor’s yarn like the coq-a`-l’a Renaissance satirist (a historical and humorous form of crossing the wires of signification).13 It is thus not surprising, given the built-in instability of a basal short circuit, that “allegory can only compulsively repeat that which is indecidable [i.e., a paradox—LP] and cannot synthesize itself in any compelling reading” (Friedrich 2006: 509, my translation). It may be a mark of Kittler’s honesty that he, too, ends his own brief Homeric wake with something unresolvable— namely, the question of Penelope’s love.

LARSON POWELL

440

CULTURAL POLITICS

ignores the intention of the expression,” in other words, its rhetoric (Adorno 1997b: 111, my translation). 12. Again, the Kulturgeschichte is explicit on the importance of “Figuren” (figures) to its method (Kittler 2000: 28, 34). ˆne—literally “rooster to donkey” or “cock to ass”—was 13. Coq-a`-l’a a satirical form invented by Cle´ment Marot around 1530 (we may remember again the earlier suggested comparison of Kittler to Rabelais); Bernard Dupriez (1991: 113) defines it as “a form which skips between two unrelated ideas” and adds that “normal discourse proceeds by avoiding both redundancy and coq-a`ˆne” (114)—precisely what Kittler loves to indulge in. l’a

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1997a. “Fragment u¨ber Musik und Sprache” (“Fragment on Music and Language”). In Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Works), vol. 16. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. 1997b. Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics). In Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Works), vol. 6. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Andriopoulos, Stefan, Gabriele Schabacher, and Eckard Schumacher, eds. 2001. Die Adresse des Mediums (Addressing Media). Cologne: DuMont. Baecker, Dirk. 2002. “Kommunikation im Medium der Information” (“Communication in the Information Medium”). In Wozu Systeme? (Why Systems?), 111–25. Berlin: Merve. Breger, Claudia. 2006. “Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece: Friedrich Kittler’s Philhellenic Fantasies.” Theory, Culture and Society 23, nos. 7–8: 111–34. Dante Alighieri. 1982. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books. Dupriez, Bernard. 1991. Dictionary of Literary Devices. Translated by Albert W. Halsall. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Edwards, Catharine. 1999. “Translating Empire? Macaulay’s Rome.” In Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789 –1945, edited by Catharine Edwards, 70 –87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedrich, Hugo. 1942. “Odysseus in der Ho¨lle” (“Odysseus in Hell”). ¨ berlieferung (Yearbook of Spiritual TraJahrbuch fu¨r geistige U dition) 2: 154–200. Friedrich, Lars. 2006. “Die Rhetorik der Programmierung: Kittler, de Man und die Allegorie der Zahl” (“The Rhetoric of Programming: Kittler, de Man, and the Allegory of Number”). Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fu¨r Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (German Quarterly for Literary Studies and Intellectual History) 78, no. 3: 499–532. Geertz, Clifford. 1964. “Ideology as a Cultural System.” In Ideology and Discontent, edited by David Apter, 47–76. New York: Free Press.

441

Haverkamp, Anselm. 2001. “Repra¨sentation und Rhetorik: Wider das Apriori der neuen Medialita¨t” (“Representation and Rhetoric: Against the A Priori of New Mediality”). In Schnittstelle Medien und Kulturwissenschaften (Interface Media and Cultural Studies), edited by Georg Stanitzek and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 77–84. Cologne: DuMont. Heidegger, Martin. 1951. Erla¨uterungen zu Ho¨lderlins Dichtung (Elucidations of Ho¨lderlin’s Poetry). Tu¨bingen: Klostermann. Kittler, Friedrich. 1977. “Das Phantom unsres Ichs und die Literaturpsychologie: Hoffmann—Freud—Lacan” (“The Phantom of Our Ego and Literary Psychology: Hoffmann—Freud—Lacan”). In Urszenen: Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik (Primal Scenes: Literature as Discourse Analysis and Discourse Critique), edited by Friedrich Kittler and Horst Turk, 139 –66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kittler, Friedrich. 1993a. Drakulas Verma¨chtnis (Dracula’s Legacy). Leipzig: Reclam. Kittler, Friedrich. 1993b. “Vom Take-Off der Operatoren” (“On the Takeoff of the Operators”). In Kittler 1993a: 149 –60. Leipzig: Reclam. Kittler, Friedrich. 2000. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaften (A Cultural History of the Cultural Sciences). Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Kittler, Friedrich. 2006. Musik und Mathematik, Bd. 1, Hellas, t. 1, Aphrodite (Music and Mathematics, vol. 1, Hellas, pt. 1, Aphrodite). Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Kittler, Friedrich. 2009. Musik und Mathematik, Bd. 1, Hellas, t. 2, Eros (Music and Mathematics, vol. 1, Hellas, pt. 2, Eros). Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Kittler, Friedrich, and Cornelia Vismann. 2001. Vom Griechenland (Of Greece). Berlin: Merve. Kleszewski, Reinhard. 1985. “Dantes Odysseus-Gesang” (“Dante’s Odysseus Canto”). In Dante Alighieri 1985, edited by Richard Baum and Willi Hirdt, 17 –30. Tu¨bingen: Stauffenberg. Lacan, Jacques. 1991. Le se´minaire XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis). Paris: Seuil. Lechner, Frank. 1990. “Fundamentalism and Sociocultural Revitalization: On the Logic of Dedifferentiation.” In Differentiation Theory and Social Change: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Paul Colomy, 88 –118. New York: Columbia University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Kiklas. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Marie, Michel. 1990. “Le Me´pris,” Jean-Luc Godard: Etude critique (“Contempt,” Jean-Luc Godard: Critical Study). Paris: Nathan.

CULTURAL POLITICS

KITTLER’S HOMERIC WAKE

LARSON POWELL

Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. 2001. Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom or Europe). In Werke (Works), edited by Gerhard Schulz, 499–518. Munich: Beck. Powell, Barry B. 1991. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Royle, Nicholas. 1995. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. 1860. Sa¨mmtliche Werke (Complete Works), vol. 6, edited by Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 1856– 61. Stuttgart: Cotta. Silverman, Kaja, and Harun Farocki. 1998. Speaking about Godard. New York: New York University Press.

442

CULTURAL POLITICS

FILMOGRAPHY Le me´pris (Contempt). DVD. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. 1963; New York: Criterion, 2002. 2001: A Space Odyssey. DVD. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1968; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2001.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722154

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM SEB FRANKLIN

KEYWORDS: cloud computing, networks, cybernetics, critique

Rise, my sisters, Clouds eternal, Shining bright with morning dew, From the roaring Ocean’s bosom To the sky, the world to view. —Aristophanes, The Clouds

443

Seb Franklin is a writer and teacher based in Brighton, England. He received his doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2010 and is currently lecturer in digital media arts at the University of Surrey. His writing on cybernetics and critical theory has appeared or is forthcoming in CTheory (2009), World Picture (2011), Textual Practice (2012), and WSQ (2012).

CULTURAL POLITICS

ABSTRACT Cloud computing is an increasingly commonplace term today, used to describe the relocation of hardware resources, programs, and data from individual, local machines to a network accessible from a variety of platforms and devices. In unpicking the complex cultural logic that cloud computing emblematizes, this essay analyzes the connections between the interrelated histories of cybernetics, computing, and distributed networks and the emerging economic models that ubiquitous networked computing facilitates.

SEB FRANKLIN

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE CLOUD What can a cloud do for us? What can a cloud do to us? In the light of the current ubiquity of cloud computing both as an industrial infrastructure and as a conceptual reframing of computer technology, these questions foreground a critical contradiction through which a political analysis of informatic culture might be possible. This particular contradiction—between the specific material possibilities and limitations afforded by computer technologies and the way these technologies are culturally framed as immaterial sources of boundless possibility—is in fact doubly useful for critical engagement with informatic culture. First, it is the analysis of contradiction in general that, for Fredric Jameson (1983: 1), represents a necessary entry point into the political reading of

>

444

CULTURAL POLITICS

Figure 1 Correggio, Jupiter and Io, c. 1531

445

cultural objects—that is to say, the type of analysis that forms “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.” Second, beyond the general principles of cultural critique, the specific contradiction presented by cloud computing foregrounds the need to reconsider notions of “reading” and “interpretation” themselves in the age of ubiquitous informatics. Engagement with cloud computing requires the development of analytic modes that go beyond texts and images into the complex relationship between these latter forms and the purely technical or systemic dimension that is native to all digital objects. Beginning from the doubly useful contradiction between technical materiality and conceptual immateriality that is the essence of the cloud computing paradigm, what follows represents an attempt to use the cloud as a lens through which the political character of the information age can be read. It is perhaps because of the knotty intertwining of materiality and immateriality introduced above that analogies with divine bodies persist with surprising regularity in critical analyses of digital technology. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2008: 300) notes in her essay “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish” that the “invisibility, ubiquity, and alleged power” of new media appear to lend themselves to analogies with the divine. This is far from an isolated observation: it clearly echoes, for example, Jean Baudrillard’s (2002: 161) earlier claim that in playing the Microsoft-programmed Deep Blue computer at chess, Gary Kasparov “was more or less pitting himself against a technical divinity, a technical superego divine in essence.” A mediatic function of divine bodies that provides a conceptual precursor to technical media is suggested by Alan Liu (2006) in an interview with Geert Lovink, where Liu claims that “a long time ago (and, of course, still in many parts of society today), people had another name for massive information dumps that occurred spontaneously without any query having been made. They called it God. It was God, or the gods, who spoke out of the burning bush to tell you what you didn’t even know you needed to ask. Before Oracle, Inc., in other words, there were oracles.” From these three examples it is evident that while digital technologies themselves may have clearly definable histories, the complex of concepts that come to frame them culturally are not necessarily bound to these historically specific technologies. Following this mode of thought, one might begin with two classical depictions of divine clouds in order to foreground a crucial relationship between material efficacy and conceptual immateriality that underpins the cultural politics of informatic culture. In Aristophanes’s play The Clouds the chorus takes the form of clouds, making otherwise inaccessible information available to both characters and audience. These clouds rise from the oceans to the sky and promise a transcendent vantage point over the world. As their human users understand them, they are not limited to the role of passive information dump. Beyond providing information, these clouds are also claimed to bring about new modes and structures

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

446

CULTURAL POLITICS

SEB FRANKLIN

of thought: in Aristophanes’s (1973: 125) play Socrates states that “from them come our intelligence, our dialectic and our reason; also our speculative genius and all our argumentative talents.” In Aristophanes, then, the cloud appears to be revealing and also enabling. But these characteristics are what the cloud promises, not what it actually delivers. John Ruskin (1905: 327), with no knowledge of the information-theoretical implications of the cloud-chorus, wrote of Aristophanes’s play in 1869 that the clouds make manifest the “tumult in men’s thoughts . . . making them alike forsake the laws of their ancient gods, and misapprehend or reject the true words of their existing teachers.” These clouds may promise knowledge and possibility, but they also exist in a discrete relation to the world, since the chorus can only ever produce commentary, never direct action. One must “connect” to this type of cloud in a way that eliminates manipulability in favor of intelligibility. Neither Socrates nor Strepsiades in Aristophanes’s play can do anything with the clouds. They can only offer them requests for knowledge and accept whatever is returned. In a second instance of the divine clouds, described in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and depicted in Correggio’s Jupiter and Io, divine clouds take on a more invasive character. In this episode Zeus (or Jove, or Jupiter) covers the human Io with clouds to keep her hidden from Hera (or Juno), before eventually transforming himself into a cloud, and Io into a white heifer, to continue this deception through the heightened proximity his desire necessitates. In this instance the cloud is both obfuscating (since it is able to hide or make visible certain information) and ultimately in a continuous relation with the world. It occupies an oscillating role between environment (the distribution of the clouds that hide) and agency (of Zeus as the cloud, exercising power over human bodies). It is able to transform bodies in the world, as is exemplified when the cloud-Zeus transforms Io from a human to a heifer, yet the desire for total immersion in it remains constant (as demonstrated in Correggio’s painting). This cloud represents a logic of capture spread over the world through volitional acts of connection: in this regard it is notable that Hubert Damisch (2002: 23), in his discussion of the Zeus-Io myth as represented by Correggio, suggests that Zeus takes the cloud form not only to hide the object of his desire from view but to “deny Inachos’s daughter any chance of escape.” This detour into the conceptual history of the cloud as both enabling and ensnaring is warranted because today it is no longer the web, with its clear distinction between logged-in and logged-out (or online and offline) states as well as its more or less explicit suggestion of capture, that describes the most novel, hyped, and advertised form of the distributed network. Today it is the cloud, with its privileging of perpetual connectivity over presence and its presentation of a conceptual immateriality that carries no obvious suggestion

447

of entrapment or capture, that is increasingly invoked in the popular and commercial framing of work and leisure computing. Broadly put, “cloud computing” is used to describe the relocation of computational resources, including hardware, programs, and data, from individual local machines to a distributed network. Its principal contribution to the computational ecosystem of work and leisure computing—a distinction whose gradual slide toward untenability cloud computing makes a substantial contribution to—is the removal of the need for the user to be near to the larger material forms of storage and processing that have been, it must be said, themselves progressively shrinking and receding from view since the invention of the computer. As a source of new and boundless productivity cloud computing is plastered on billboards, bus stops, and web advertisements, placed at the forefront of both global technology corporations such as Apple and Microsoft and smaller start-ups promising this or that variation on the cloud infrastructure as a service. On the one hand, then, cloud computing promises a massive expansion in the space over which computation (including all forms of information work but also including so-called leisure computing such as social networking and web search) can take place. In many ways this is a simple extension of the distributed network into a larger space of access. On the other hand, cloud computing makes the more radical promise to do away with the individual, self-contained computer (as the fixed site at which a given task is completed) in favor of the greater power and flexibility of distributed processing, where tasks are spread out between a network of smaller, less powerful machines. The growing ubiquity of computing devices composed of little more than screens, including tablet PCs and smartphones, presents clear evidence of the impact of this mode of distributed computation in industrial (or postindustrial, or network—the sheer variety of terms attached to this historical period is indication enough of the difficulty of grasping its most pressing features) societies. As raised at the outset, the present essay is concerned with working through a political reading of the cloud iteration of the network form. This reading will develop not through the tracing of surface-level political content or applications but rather through the complex formed by the technical character, the cultural and conceptual framing, and the specific political-economic relations that cloud computing facilitates. This is not because cloud computing appears to carry no political significance at the level of content and uptake: in fact, examples of the surface political implications of cloud computing are easy enough to find. In a promotional e-mail dated December 28, 2010, for example, a senior public relations manager of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kay Kinton, proudly details the extensive uptake of AWS-provided cloud services by the US government over the previous year. In this e-mail, which is worth reproducing at length, she states:

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

SEB FRANKLIN

448

CULTURAL POLITICS

Government adoption of AWS grew significantly in 2010. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board became the first government-wide agency to migrate to a cloud-based environment when it moved Recovery.gov to AWS in March 2010. Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded AWS the ability to provide government agencies with cloud services through the government’s cloud storefront, Apps.gov. Additional AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE’s [the Department of Energy’s] National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA [the US Department of Agriculture], and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA [the National Aeronautics and Space Administration]. The current AWS compliance framework covers FISMA [the Federal Information Security Management Act], PCI DSS [the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard] Level 1, ISO [International Standards Organization] 27001, SAS70 [Statement of Auditing Standards No. 70] type II, and HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act], and we continue to seek certifications and accreditations that make it easier for government agencies to benefit from AWS. (Quoted in Winer 2010) The obvious (one is tempted to say traditional) political questions raised by Kinton’s e-mail concern the nature and impact of relationships between government and big business, particularly in the light of Amazon’s termination of the server hosting services it formerly provided to Wikileaks (Winer 2010). Put bluntly, these questions, which nonetheless remain of substantial importance, are of no great interest for this essay since they simply reflect concerns about state corruption and corporate sovereignty that predate the emergence of the novel, informatic, and systemic modes of sociopolitical logic that characterize the present historical moment. The problems posed to theory by informatic culture are foregroundˇ izˇek ed in the existing attempts to critique cloud computing. Slavoj Z (2011), for example, has written briefly on the process whereby cloud computing passes proprietary ownership from content to infrastructure while promising to make content universally accessible. Passing from the cloud platform itself to the prospective social impacts of ubiquitous connectivity, Julian Assange, in a May 2011 TV interview with Russia Today, condemns ubiquitous access to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook as constituting an “appalling spy machine.”1 These responses, concerned as they are with corporate greed and corporate-governmental conspiracy, respectively, do not do much to work through the novel forms of cultural logic that cloud computing emˇ izˇek and Assange blematizes. Accounts such as those produced by Z

449

leave emerging forms of governmentality and economism untouched in focusing on the more “traditional” forms of intertwinement that exist between modes of production and social control. As Jameson convincingly argues in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, these types of conspiracy narrative in fact serve to prevent one from engaging with the systemic character of late capitalism. For Jameson (1992: 9 –66), the conspiracy narrative insulates the subject from the unimaginable scale and overdetermination of the world system by allowing identifiable and nameable (if untouchable) individuals, be they greedy, corrupt, or both, to stand in for the systemic indifference of latecapitalist political economy. When the world system itself becomes synonymous with the distributed network both as material technology and as conceptual frame, the need for a mode of analysis optimized toward critiquing this form (rather than transferring its effects to specific individual nodes or actors) becomes clear. To concentrate on monopoly or conspiracy, then, is to avoid confronting the formal and technical logics that both drive and come to describe a given social system. This is not to say that such accounts do not have a useful place: one should certainly be concerned, for ˇizˇek touches example, with the ways the proprietary infrastructure Z upon exemplifies the return to rent as a primary source of income characteristic of post-Fordist economism. But if one wishes to mount a historically and materially specific critique of post-Fordism, one needs to apply a method analogous to Jameson’s cognitive mapping—a mode of extracting a graspable diagram of relations from a world system that encourages us through its complexity to give up and pursue the type of paranoid fantasy described above—that does not stop at using the network form as descriptive metaphor but that accounts for the ways the world this form models clashes with the unmodelable world that exists beyond the totalizing logic of informatics. In other words, one must extract a cognitive map from the interactions of the metaphorical and the technical in cloud computing. This is not a straightforward project—not least because the distributed network form itself promises to do away with the problem of representing systems that in Jameson’s analysis leads to the call for cognitive mapping in the first place—but it is an essential one. To state the importance of such an approach is to be in methodological agreement with Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2004), who state in response to Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider that the political dimension of networking (that which Lovink and Schneider define as “Info-Empire”) “should not be defined in terms of either corporate or state power” but instead be addressed at “the level of the medium itself. . . . Otherwise we are no longer talking about Info-Empire but about the more familiar topics of corporate greed [and] fascism.” Informatic control, for Galloway and Thacker (2004), “must be defined via the actual technologies of control that are contained within networks.” The present essay seeks to pursue this principle—of seeking to scrape the network model of power in

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

SEB FRANKLIN

order to extract a mode of theoretical response that is withheld by the supposed immateriality of its form—through cloud computing. A crucial theoretical problem within this analysis, which makes its pursuit appear all the more necessary, can be found in a 2008 Microsoft-sponsored paper by David Chappell, chief executive officer of the technology consultancy Chappell and Associates, titled “A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms.” Here Chappell states:

450

CULTURAL POLITICS

The coming shift to cloud computing is a major change in our industry. One of the most important parts of that shift is the advent of cloud platforms. As its name suggests, this kind of platform lets developers write applications that run in the cloud, or use services provided from the cloud, or both. Different names are used for this kind of platform today, including ondemand platform and platform as a service (PaaS). Whatever it’s called, this new way of supporting applications has great potential. (2008: 3) At the close of his report Chappell (2008: 13) declares that “the next generation of application platforms is here,” but before this, in the final line of the above-quoted segment, he suggests that the cloud metaphor itself is an inessential component of the model, being interchangeable with several others including “on-demand platform” and “platform as a service.” But these terms exhibit a clear distinction from the notion of the cloud: the general notion of a platform suggests a materiality that is then conceptually altered or obfuscated by the modifier “cloud.” (And one thinks here of platform as designating a specific computer hardware system as in the “Platform Studies” project of Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort or in the video game genre of “platformer,” whose principal dynamic is the navigation of solid units [platforms] within open spaces into which the player-character can fall and die.) In other words, the insistence on the immateriality of a material system that cloud computing suggests emerges as central to its growing ubiquity and cultural framing, regardless of the irrelevance of the term that Chappell suggests. As hinted at above, the most obvious characteristic of the cloud, considered culturally, is its nominal immateriality and amorphousness. As Damisch puts it in his A Theory of /Cloud/ (2002: 15), the notion of the cloud “contradicts the very idea of outline and delineation and through its relative insubstantiality constitutes a negation of the solidity, permanence, and identity that define shape, in the classic sense of the term.” In Damisch the cloud defeats linear perspective and thus stands in opposition to the mathematical rationality of the latter. Bodies in clouds, for Damisch (2002: 15), “defy the laws of gravity and likewise the principles of linear perspective” and lend themselves “to the most arbitrary of positions, to foreshortenings, deformations, divisions, magnifications, and fanciful nonsense.” In contrast to a web, which is flexible but bound by a clear material form,

451

the cloud can be deformed, compressed, expanded, intensified, or thinned out to fit any available space and stretch beyond the reach of any earthly material base. If anything, the merging of immaterial cloud with material network presents a closer proximity to the mathematical discipline of topology than, for example, a fiber-optic distributed network does, because it can (conceptually at least) be even more extensively deformed into different shapes and arrangements. There is, in addition, a second formal aspect of the cloud that might prove instructive in the theorization of cloud computing as a political-economic form—a dimension hinted at in the discussion of Aristophanes that opens this essay. As Steven Connor (2009) suggests, the cloud inhabits a space between the material earth and the ethereal heavens, or between immanence and transcendence: it “inhabit[s] the middle region between the upper air, domain of ethereal lambency, and the clammy earth.” This is supported by the distinct appearances of clouds in the work of William Wordsworth, who, as Ron Broglio points out in Technologies of the Picturesque (2008: 82–92), presents them at different times as transcendent vantage points and dizzying, rationality-defeating tumults surrounding an earthbound observer. Wordsworth, in seeking to present to the reader a total survey of landscape in his A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, asks that we “suppose our station to be a cloud . . . above [the] highest elevation” (1835: 2–3). Here the cloud affords a privileged perspective on the world below, but one that is clearly framed as imaginary. The cloud offers a privileged view, but at the same time it can obscure or halt understanding, as suggested toward the end of book 6 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (628–34), by the presentation of “unfettered” clouds taking their place alongside “thwarting winds,” “muttering rocks,” and a “raving stream” in a scene manifesting the breakdown of the Enlightenment notion of objectivity in the face of complex phenomena. In addition to amorphousness, then, the cloud exhibits an in-between status vis-a`-vis its exact location, as well as its ambivalent relationship to knowledge. There is, of course, another name in wide use today for this inbetween status, especially with regard to communication: mediation. Friedrich Kittler (2009: 26) makes this connection clear when he states, considering the oft-claimed absence of mediation as a concept in classical Greek philosophy, that “Aristotle . . . speaks of two elements, namely air and water, as of two ‘betweens.’ In other words, he is the first to turn a common Greek preposition—metaxu´, between—into a philosophical noun or concept: to` metaxu´, the medium. ‘In the middle’ of absence and presence, farness and nearness, being and soul, there exists no nothing any more, but a mediatic relation.” The two “betweens” in Aristotle are thus shown to be the two constituents of the cloud as a meteorological phenomenon. The cloud, then, is foundationally a medium (or more accurately a composite of the two elemental media of air and water that Kittler locates

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

SEB FRANKLIN

452

CULTURAL POLITICS

in Aristotle) in a way that the web most assuredly is not. Viewed in this light, the way clouds oscillate between the realms of transcendent ethereality and complex materiality—and, in doing so, mirror the critiques of software presented as computation set out by Kittler (1997a, 1997b) and Chun (2004, 2005)—proves highly suggestive when considering the political character of cloud computing. The critical question now becomes that of what one can determine from the emergence of “cloud computing” rather than “on-demand computing” or “computing as a service” as the dominant cultural framing of such a technical system. To begin answering this question it is necessary to detour into the history of cybernetics as an intertwined program of technical development and proto-neoliberal dreaming, before returning to the interrelated technical and cultural dimensions of cloud computing that underpin its emblematic role within contemporary cultural politics.

CYBERNETICS AND NETWORKS In a memorandum dated April 23, 1963, and addressed to the “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”—a group that is itself instantiated by this memorandum, having not existed beforehand—J. C. R. Licklider sums up a lengthy description of problem solving using the automated pooling of programs and data stored on various computers. In this account Licklider (1963) states that he hoped to implement “a sophisticated network-control system” within which he (i.e., the user) would “not decide whether to send the data and have them worked on by programs somewhere else, or bring in programs and have them work on [his] data” but instead would be able to leave it to “the computer, or the network, somehow, to do that.” What Licklider proposes here is computation distributed in space. At a time when the size and speed of computers made the concept of a personal computer, not to mention a portable device such as a smartphone, unthinkable, the implementation of such distributed computing was a necessity. As Licklider would go on to suggest in his 1968 paper “The Computer as Communication Device,” the necessity to carry out complex computation through distributed, parallel processing in fact drove the development of distributed networking, leading to the first deployment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, in October 1969. This historical dimension of cloud computing is intensified if one notes that the principle of distributed processing is not only older than the first actual instance of digital computer networking but is in fact actually older than the digital computer itself. Lewis Fry Richardson’s Weather Prediction by Numerical Process of 1922 describes the placement of an imaginary grid over the globe. According to Richardson’s system each cell would contain a “computer” (in this case a human mathematician) who would be responsible, first, for a specific subsection of a larger equation and, second, for sending the

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

453

outcomes of these subroutines via telegraph so that they could be compiled at some central location to predict future weather. The general principle of network logic rooted in abstract computational approaches to physical space has an even earlier precedent in the intellectual formation of cyberneticians such as Warren McCulloch, who in a posthumously published essay in the ASC Forum writes of learning topology and mathematical communication theory in the late 1910s through marlin-spike seamanship, training in semaphore while employed as a second-class seaman, and acquiring “a thorough working knowledge of spherical trigonometry . . . picked up from old whaling captains” (1974: 5), the amalgamation of which constituted the logical basis of his work in cybernetics. The investments of this mode of thought can be clearly seen in McCulloch’s most well-known work, the influential 1943 paper “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” cowritten with Walter Pitts, in which the brain is theorized as a network of neurons that function like binary on/off switches.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Figure 2 Distributed processing as a gridded map of physical space. Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922)

454

CULTURAL POLITICS

SEB FRANKLIN

As Peter Galison (1994) and Philipp von Hilgers (2011) have noted, the history of cybernetics is characterized by an oft-troubled interaction between abstract symbolic conceptualizations and material technologies, with both focusing on the black box as emblematic. By extending this principle beyond the black box and into the general notion of topological representations of space and distributed processing, it is easy to see how each of the spatial examples set out above serves to evoke both a material system (the network of mathematicians with telegraphs or the network of binary neurons) and a general, abstract principle of external and internal worlds as discretizable and computable. The interrelated conceptualizations of the world as totally computable and the world as a computer are thus shown to exhibit a close relationship in the emergence of cybernetic logic as a historical phenomenon. It is the underlying principle of both formulations, that cybernetic logic can be applied to the world at large as opposed to specific engineering problems, which must form the basis of any critique of the contemporary political-economic situation. Viewed in this historical context, cloud computing must be seen primarily as describing a management style, in the sense that management, as the Tiqqun collective has argued, represents “the cardinal metaphor for describing not only politics but also all human activity” in postindustrial society (Tiqqun 2001:44, translation mine). For the era that Tiqqun describes—that of neoliberal governmentality, Gilles Deleuze’s control society, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, Luc Boltanski and E`ve Chiapello’s “new spirit of capitalism,” and Manuel Castells’s “network society”—can be most insightfully defined through its roots in the cybernetic logic of operations research, game theory, cellular automata, and system dynamics, where informatic capture, sampling, optimization, statistical modeling, and simulation promise (or threaten) to map the brain and nervous system, social life, economics, and global war through an identical logic and render them identically predictable. The capture of human behavior so that it can be modeled and simulated is a crucial practice in the political-economic formation of the present period, and cloud computing—in its promise not only to make computation practicable across all of space but also to spread the process of computation itself out in space, inviting connection through an amorphous glob of connectivity—represents an emblematic technology in this regard. In short, cloud computing promises to realize the process that Richardson dreamed of in 1922 whereby voluntary user activity discretizes all behavior and all space. Let this be a fundamental claim for the critique of informatic culture that takes cloud computing as its emblem.

THE BUSINESS OF CAPTURE One of the most obvious political-economic critiques that cloud computing invites is the way it extends the time and space of work, plac-

455

ing software in contact with every space its users might occupy: not just the office but also the train or bus, not only the home office but also the sofa or the bed, not only the Internet cafe´ or hotel but also the beach. But this expansion of the space and time of labor represents only a limited picture of the way cloud computing exemplifies post-Fordist political economy, one that is confined to classical, that is to say, precybernetic, conceptions of work as valorizable activity. In addition to enabling work on the beach and the multiple forms of computer-aided design and production central to the contemporary manufacture of commodities ranging from automobiles to feature films, the cloud adds a degree of saturation to the processes whereby networked computation both (1) facilitates the conversion of human activity from complex individuated phenomena into patterns, models, or algorithms through software and (2) makes it possible to monetize these patterns of activity, extracting productive labor from discrete actions such as mouse clicks, web surfing, game playing, and mobile application data. The key characteristics of the first of these two stages can be clearly seen in Philip E. Agre’s (1994) concept of “grammars of action” into which human behaviors are cast by software-mediated labor. Agre’s theorization of the systematic production of these grammars of action, organizational logics that are both necessitated and determined by computer-mediated modes of production, is premised on the notion of “capture” in contrast to the modes of surveillance that conditioned bodies, as Michel Foucault argues, in previous eras. The second of the stages detailed above is most clearly theorized by Matteo Pasquinelli, whose essay “Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect” (2009) makes clear the centrality of this logic of distributed capture to contemporary production. Here Pasquinelli examines the ways in which the centrality of unpaid user activity to Google’s vast profitability is located in the function of its basic technical methodology—a methodology that does not produce the flat ontology of total equality promised by the distributed network form but that ranks nodes in strict hierarchy based on the quantity of links and connections they receive, thus placing the motivation of constant user activity at the center of commercial web design. Studies of how the combined function of the two stages detailed above—the capture, discretization, and conditioning of action and the monetization of patterns of behavior—is made to appear natural remain few, although Galloway’s (2007: 87) description of the graphical user interface (GUI) as facilitating the “active, expressive, exploitative, ergodic, vigorous, driven materialization of measurable presence and measurable activity” points us toward a mode of analysis for the ways digital technologies stimulate, condition, measure, and monetize online behavior. If we return to the divine forms of clouds as discussed in a previous section, however—clouds that sit both above and within the world, that promise to inform and

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

SEB FRANKLIN

456

CULTURAL POLITICS

empower, that beg to be touched and connected to, that we cannot enter but that can enter us—it is not difficult to see the role played by the conceptual disappearance of the computer and the network into such a form. To put this in crude historical terms, if the commodity media of the society of the spectacle are opiates, then digital media are stimulants. This in itself is a condition of nearly all contemporary web use, but cloud computing extends the artificially transparent, frictionless logic of the software interface by making permanent connectivity a primary service—and one thinks here of the total synchronization of telephony, e-mail, and web surfing, such as the linking of Facebook, e-mail, and telephone contacts, that is increasingly a default component of smartphone use.

IMMATERIALITY AS IDEOLOGY Both Kittler (1997a, 1997b) and Chun (2005) have written prominently on the historical separation of software from hardware and the resultant cultural framing of seemingly immaterial software as the be-all and end-all of computation. In both Kittler and Chun clear political arguments emerge when the commercial and proprietary status of the most widely distributed user interfaces, with their intuitive graphical and sonic markers inviting and rewarding user action, comes into question. These interfaces, which present computation not as material hardware function but instead as graphics and sonics that reward and thus condition particular forms of user behavior, serve in the historical arguments of both Kittler and Chun to obscure the indifferent logical basis of computation (with its implications for cultural politics including, as Chun points out, gender and race) as well as its physical substrate.2 This historical process of obfuscation, to which the emergence of cloud computing clearly belongs, is accompanied by a general logic of diffusion whereby the computer becomes increasingly naturalized within the environment. This is a process that is traced in a number of theoretical and fictional texts.3 Emblematic in this regard is McKenzie Wark’s (2007: note to para. 223) claim, made in a note to the final chapter of Gamer Theory, that the term cyberspace is now “archaic” and should be replaced with gamespace.4 The crux of Wark’s argument, articulated throughout Gamer Theory, is that cyberspace corresponds to an understanding of networked computer use in which the hardware and software of the local machine are clearly distinct from both the “edges” or communication lines of the distributed network topology and from the “real” world outside the computer, whereas gamespace defines a period in which these distinctions have broken down. A general emblem of the move from cyberspace to gamespace can be found in the breakdown of the clear distinction between local machine and network, or between node and edge, that cloud computing effects. It is only necessary to look at the depictions of computer and Internet use in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, in which the term becomes formalized, com-

457

pared to those in his more recent Pattern Recognition (2003) for a manifestation of the transition from the notion of cyberspace as a distinct realm of user experience to gamespace as a cloudy intermingling of “real” and “cyber” spaces. Where the digitally mediated space of Neuromancer is famously described as a “hallucination” (Gibson 1993: 3), in Pattern Recognition it is accessed as part of a daily routine that has shaped the environment that contains it. Interior design is optimized toward incorporating the computer. The “transparent mouse” (Gibson 2004: 3) that provides the user’s interface with the system goes beyond functionality and the aesthetics of the combined home-workplace in manifesting a principal ideological function of contemporary computation—the erasure of the computer’s materiality and its diffusion in space. In Pattern Recognition the computing device is never turned off, only on standby, whereas in Neuromancer the process of jacking in involves the cumbersome connection of nervous system to machine, a clear expression of the divide between computing time and noncomputing time that must be physically crossed. While jacked in to cyberspace, the expert hacker Case in Neuromancer is detached from his body, which is “somewhere,” “laughing, in a white painted loft,” with “distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face” (Gibson 1993: 69), whereas for Cayce Pollard, in Pattern Recognition, the familiarity of the “friend’s living room” (Gibson 2004: 3) in which she sits while online is immediately reproduced in that of the browser window. This is a relationship of growing familiarity, but it is also one of collapsing distance. Gone are the proximate programs and data, whether fancifully rendered or not, that characterize networked computation in Neuromancer. This is the relationship to computation that progressive developments from the GUI to cloud computing create. Users are brought closer to the instrumentality and ubiquity of their software and further from the logical and physical processes that make it possible. The portrayal of networked computer use in the two Gibson novels, respectively, represents the 1984 and 2003 user’s relationship with networked computers. The 1984 fantasy places the user into an environment within a computer, although never in contact with hardware, because, as Chun observes, the ideological separation of human from machine begins in the 1940s at the latest. The 2003 reality places the user in front of a screen and mouse that have been designed to disappear within the domestic or public environment, accessing resources wirelessly through a GUI and standardized web clients and protocols. If Neuromancer (and Tron before it) imagine the user in a virtual world that represents the functioning of the computer, and Pattern Recognition depicts the naturalization and ubiquity of the computer within the designed spaces of the lived world, then cloud computing represents the process, or at least the dream of a process, whereby the computer dissipates into an environment. The implications of this in terms of informatic cultural

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

458

CULTURAL POLITICS

SEB FRANKLIN

politics are quite clear: it suggests the expansion of the cybernetic logic of informatic capture and definition to the status of periechon (that which surrounds) or atmosphere, the theoretical emergence of both the world-as-computer and the computer-as-world. In contrast to the older web or rhizome model of a network that (to use the language of the mathematical discipline of network theory) presents a series of nodes (the individual computers, with their own local software and hardware) connected by edges or lines of communication, the cloud makes both hardware and software resources as well as data accessible from any device that falls within an amorphous blob or atmosphere of computability. By uncoupling connectivity from the node/edge infrastructure, the cloud suggests a dematerialization not only of computers but also of the network, and this claim is an especially important one within the critique of post-Fordist economics, because it cannot possibly be true. Nodes, or individual computing devices—be they desktop PCs, netbooks, or mobile telephones—always remain a clear material necessity. Even if computation moves to the level of a chipset embedded in the human brain, with the apparently organic and transparent interface dreamed of in science fiction, it will still be possible to count nodes by counting every person or other being equipped with such technical augmentation. Where the web-type network assures the possibility of measurement and representation by counting nodes and edges, then, the cloud eliminates the representation but not the existence of these constitutive units. Cloud computing, in the tradition of the cybernetic models of space that share its historical and theoretical roots, emblematizes an environment of total computation, a space where the material boundaries of hardware disappear while retaining the functions of capture, discretization, and valorization that suggest the opposite of amorphousness. Remarkably suggestive in this light are the studies for the preparation of rectilinear cloud perspective set out in volume 5 of Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1894), which, in presenting an underlying structure to be visually (but not functionally) effaced by the overlaying amorphousness of the cloud image itself, resemble nothing less than a network diagram or the type of gridded landscape presented in Richardson and the cybernetic legacy that follows him. This analogy is instructive because the cloud in cloud computing is conceptual, describing not the actual function of the service but a cultural framing of it. The cloud is a form of mediation, a representation of immateriality and smoothness that both effects and obscures the functions of a structured, striated grid that is the only representation of a world that is possible within the technical functionality of the digital computer.5 To return to the two classical depictions of the cloud invoked at the outset, each can now serve to foreground both a crucial aspect of cloud computing as a political-economic form and a distinct theoretical configuration of the medium. In the Aristophanes example above,

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

459

the ideological face of the cloud-as-informatics is presented: the cloud as a diverting interface, unchained to the limitations of the material world, thereby allowing us to get certain things done, to throw off the material impediments of having to be at work to do the work of information gathering and rearranging that is central to today’s postindustrial labor market. Here the cloud is presented as a

CULTURAL POLITICS

Figure 3 “Cloud Perspective: Rectilinear,” 1894. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 5, plate 64

460

CULTURAL POLITICS

SEB FRANKLIN

mass medium in the sense set out in politically forceful terms by the Frankfurt school, where diversion also brings about the immersion and normalization of the subject within the mode of production. Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production represents a notable recent addition to this canon. This is also the computer presented as interface that Galloway (2009: 931) critiques in “The Unworkable Interface” with the claim that “for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of volumetric delivery, of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible, one notch more inoperable.” The second example, that found in Aeschylus and Ovid and depicted in Correggio, foregrounds the cultural-political implications of the cloud in cloud computing. Here the configuration of the environment as an infrastructure and the presence of a self-regulating subjectifying system facilitated by this infrastructure are the crucial elements. The outcomes can be seen in the transformative effects of the violence-as-affordance that are constituted by the user’s volitional envelopment in connectivity. The spreading of distributed processing across space implied by the presentation of cloud computing intensifies the process whereby computation reduces the subject to those properties that can be informatically captured, parsed, and modeled. Here the network is presented as a specifically computational medium in the sense of a converting and obfuscating (that is to say, storing, processing, and transmitting) layer that converts the analogue mass of the world into a sampled, discretized, and optimized symbolic register. This is the conceptualization of the computer medium (as it emerges from the typewriter) found in Kittler as well as in Bernhard Siegert’s concept of cultural techniques.6 Crucially, given the apparent incommensurability of these theoretical approaches— a incommensurability that is in part driven by Kittler’s open hostility to hermeneutics—both approaches play a necessary role in the function of cloud computing as an emblem of cybernetic political economy.7 The first classical example of the cloud-as-information system describes the facilitation of specific labor relations (including the emergent framing of play as work that is facilitated by interfacecentric networked computing). It also foregrounds the way the desire for greater connectivity is produced, leading into the diagram of capture presented in the second classical example. This second example, by extension, represents the critical implications of perpetual connectivity: the spread of the logic of informatic capture, command, and control over the entire world so that it conceptually conditions and transforms bodies. The logical extension of this second model is the reconfiguration of the world as a network of connectivity that denies the existence of whatever falls outside of certain thresholds, filters, algorithms, or parsers. The practical implications of the first of these arrangements are clear enough, for who does not already understand that commercial media are (in Bernard Stiegler’s terms) pharmacological, that for

NOTES 1. This interview, conducted by Laura Emmett for Russia Today, was released on May 2, 2011. It is archived at rt.com/news /wikileaks-revelations-assange-interview. 2. See Kittler 1997a, 1997b; Chun 2005. Chun’s argument is reiterated and expanded throughout Chun 2011.

461

every freedom they afford there exists some kind of cost? Ultimately, it is the second image, the relationship between technical systems and their cultural-political implications, that is of the most pressing concern. Deleuze, in the “Postscript on Control Societies” (1995: 179), writes of a subject who is internally divided as a product of the new forms of political economy that computers and cybernetic logic facilitate. The Tiqqun collective (2001: 237) expands on this formulation, writing of a “front line [that] no longer cuts through the middle of society” but that “now runs through the middle of each of us,” between “what makes us a citizen . . . and all the rest.” What Deleuze and Tiqqun write of here is the opposition between traits, movements, and behaviors that can be algorithmically captured, measured, and predicted and all other possibilities in the world. In proposing the link between volitional, perpetual computation and communication and the cybernetic redefinition of the subject in strident terms, Tiqqun (2001: 49– 50) claims that the cybernetic hypothesis underpinning contemporary governmentality “calls for a radically new physical structuring of the subject whether individual or collective,” a structuring that “disqualifies as a myth individual inwardness/internal dialogue, and with it all 19th century psychology, including psychoanalysis.” For all the power this claim about the history of theory carries, it is the connection to the impossible promise of cloud computing that should give us pause here: immediately following the above claim, Tiqqun (2001: 50) goes on to define the ideal subject of the cybernetic hypothesis—a subject that is produced not through the removal of “traditional exterior bonds, as the liberal hypothesis had intended,” but through a “reconstructing [of] the social bonds” that is effected by “depriving the subject of all substance.” Under the cybernetic hypothesis that drives post-Fordist culture, Tiqqun (2001: 50, translation mine) writes, “each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes.” Thus functions the ideal of cloud computing as an emblem of political logic: connectivity with no nodes (or individual subjects), only a shapeless bundle of edges throughout which communication can occur and thus be captured, parsed, measured, and defined. The ubiquitous, immaterial connectivity and processing emblematized by cloud computing promises mediation, but of what? It promises nothing less than to mediate the entirety of the social through the indifferent logic of computation.

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

SEB FRANKLIN

462

CULTURAL POLITICS

3. The notion of a total environment composed of distinct registers of objects such as computers, the built environment, and biological life on an equal footing is central to the trenchant political critique leveled at neoliberal governmentality in the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection (2009: 50): “No material habitat has ever deserved the name ‘environment,’ except perhaps the metropolis of today. The digitized voices making announcements, tramways with such a 21st century whistle, bluish streetlamps shaped like giant matchsticks, pedestrians done up like failed fashion models, the silent rotation of a video surveillance camera, the lucid clicking of the subway turnstyles and supermarket checkouts, office time clocks, the electronic ambience of the cyber cafe´, the profusion of plasma screens, express lanes and latex.” 4. Note that Wark’s Gamer Theory does not contain page numbers but instead uses sequentially numbered paragraphs. 5. For an analysis of the materiality of cloud computing focused on energy use and server traffic, see Cubitt, Hassan, and Volkmer 2011. 6. For a discussion of the historical movement from typewriter to computer, see the chapter titled “Typewriter” in Kittler 1999. 7. For a discussion of the relationship of Kittler’s work to AngloAmerican cultural studies, see Peters 2010: 5–8. On the possibility of integrating the so-called German media theory with the critical theory of the hermeneutic tradition, see, e.g., Parikka 2011.

REFERENCES Agre, Philip E. 1994. “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy.” Information Society 10, no. 2: 101–27. Aristophanes. 1973. The Clouds. In Lysistrata and Other Plays, translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. London: Penguin Books. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. Screened Out. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. Broglio, Ron. 2008. Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750 –1830. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Chappell, David. 2008. “A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms: An Enterprise-Oriented View.” David Chappell and Associates, www .davidchappell.com/CloudPlatforms –Chappell.pdf. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2005. “On Software, or The Persistence of Visual Knowledge.” Grey Room, no. 18: 26–51. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2006. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2008. “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish.” Configurations 16, no. 3: 299–324. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

463

Connor, Steven. 2009. “Obnubilation.” Lecture delivered on The Essay, BBC Radio 3, February 25. Cubitt, Sean, Robert Hassan, and Ingrid Volkmer. 2011. “Does Cloud Computing Have a Silver Lining?” Media Culture and Society 33, no. 1: 149–58. Damisch, Hubert. 2002. A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Galison, Peter. 1994. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1: 228 –66. Galloway, Alexander R. 2009. “The Unworkable Interface.” New Literary History 39, no. 4: 931–55. Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. 2004. “The Limits of Networking.” Nettime, March 24, amsterdam.nettime.org/ListsArchives/nettime-l-0403/msg00090.html. Gibson, William. 1993. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins. Gibson, William. 2004. Pattern Recognition. London: Penguin. Hilgers, Philipp von. 2011. “The History of the Black Box: The Clash of a Thing and Its Concept.” Translated by William Rauscher. Cultural Politics 7, no. 1: 41 –58. Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1983. The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1997a. “Protected Mode.” In Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, edited by John Johnston, 156 –191. Amsterdam: G þ B Arts International. Kittler, Friedrich. 1997b. “There Is No Software.” Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, edited by John Johnston, 147 –155. Amsterdam: G þ B Arts International. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 2009. “Towards an Ontology of Media.” Theory, Culture and Society 26, nos. 2 –3: 23 –31. Licklider, J.C.R. 1963. “Memorandum for the Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network.” Viewable at Kurzweil, www.kurzweilai.net/memorandum-for-members-and-affiliates -of-the-intergalactic-computer-network. Licklider, J.C.R. 1963. “Topics for Discussion at Forthcoming Meeting.” Memorandum, April 23. MIT Institute Archives. Available online at www.chick.net/wizards/memo.html.

CULTURAL POLITICS

CLOUD CONTROL, or The NETWORK as MEDIUM

464

CULTURAL POLITICS

SEB FRANKLIN

Liu, Alan. 2006. “‘I Work Here, But I’m Cool’: Interview with Alan Liu.” By Geert Lovink. Net Critique, February 23, networkcultures .org/wpmu/geert/interview-with-alan-liu. Lovink, Geert, and Florian Schneider. 2004. “Notes on the State of Networking.” Makeworlds, April 4, www.makeworlds.org/node /100. McCulloch, Warren. 1974. “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics.” ASC Forum [American Society for Cybernetics] 6, no. 2: 5 –16. McCulloch, Warren S., and Walter Pitts. 1943. “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity.” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5: 115–33. Parikka, Jussi. 2011. “Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst’s Materialist Media Diagrammatics.” Theory, Culture and Society 28, no. 5: 52–74. Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2009. “Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect.” In Deep Search: The Politics of Search beyond Google, edited by Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder, 152 –62. London: Transaction. Peters, John Durham. 2010. “Introduction: Friedrich Kittler’s Light Shows.” In Optical Media, by Friedrich Kittler, translated by Anthony Enns, 1–17. Cambridge: Polity. Richardson, Lewis Fry. 1922. Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. London: Cambridge University Press. Ruskin, John. 1894. Modern Painters. Vol. 5. Boston: Estes and Lauriat. Ruskin, John. 1905. The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm. Vol. 19 of The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen. Tiqqun. 2001. “L’Hypothe`se Cyberne´tique.” Tiqqun 2, 40–83. Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winer, David. 2010. “US Govt. a Big User of Amazon Web Services.” scripting.com/stories/2010/12/28/usGovtABigUserOfAmazon WebS.html. Wordsworth, William. 1835. A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England. Kendal, England: Hudson and Nicholson. ˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2011. “Corporate Rule of Cyberspace.” Inside Higher Z Ed, May 2, www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/05/02 /slavoj_zizek_essay_on_cloud_computing_and_privacy.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722163

A PREDICTABLY OBEDIENT RIOT: POSTPOLITICS, CONSUMER CULTURE, and the ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

Steve Hall is professor of criminology at Teesside University. With Simon Winlow, he is coauthor of Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture (2006) and (with Craig Ancrum) of Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (2008). He is also the author of the recently released Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective (2012).

ABSTRACT In this article we attempt to develop an analysis of the English urban riots of 2011. Rather than build on the assumption of organic resistance and protopolitics, we argue that the disturbances were a brief eruption of social unrest that lacked the clear, unifying political symbolism necessary to turn objectless dissatisfaction into articulate political demands. Rather, the consumer-oriented subjects who inhabit the socioeconomic margins of late capitalism were unable to make this political move and ultimately found themselves with nowhere to take their dissatisfaction but to the shops. This speaks loudly of the current condition of subjectivity in a postpolitical era dominated by neoliberalism and liberal postmodernism.

465

Simon Winlow is professor of criminology at Teesside University. He is the author of Badfellas (2001) and coauthor (with Dick Hobbs, Philip Hadfield, and Stuart Lister) of Bouncers (2003). With Steve Hall, he is coauthor of Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture (2006) and (with Craig Ancrum) of Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (2008).

CULTURAL POLITICS

SIMON WINLOW and STEVE HALL

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

KEYWORDS: urban riots, consumer culture, postpolitics, libidinal drive, subjectivity

>

466

CULTURAL POLITICS

In August 2011 “riots” erupted across England. They began in London, developing from a localized protest in response to the killing of Mark Duggan, an alleged criminal, shot by metropolitan police officers. The disturbances quickly spread throughout the country and became the most destructive civil disorders seen in the United Kingdom for decades. The riots cost the British taxpayer somewhere in the region of £133 million (Laville 2011), around twenty-five hundred shops were looted (Topping and Bawdon 2011), and three men lost their lives in an associated altercation in Birmingham. The riots petered out after a week or so, and media, political, and academic analyses began in earnest. Here we hope to offer an analysis of the riots that moves beyond the standard nondialectical arguments of the established Left and Right and say something that needs to be said clearly about today’s postpolitical forms of urban disorder and subjectivity. We offer no new evidence here, but our analysis is built upon long-term ethnographic research conducted among marginalized men and women who inhabit areas of permanent recession in the north of England (Winlow 2001; Winlow and Hall 2006; Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008; Winlow and Hall 2009a, 2009b). This research, when taken as a whole, is rich in findings that reveal quite clearly the hollowing out of political subjectivity; the virtual disappearance of traditional, localized nonutilitarian aspects of working-class culture; the absorption of libidinal drive and desire into the surrogate sociosymbolic life of consumer culture; and the rise of a narcissistic, competitive, and deeply insecure subjectivity reflective of postpolitical capitalist realism. We will revisit some of these data below as we begin the process of situating the riots in the current postpolitical context that gives them shape and color and is therefore worth exploring in detail.

DESTRUCTIVE SELF-REPRODUCTION An air of conformity pervaded the English “riots” in August 2011. Amid the brief flurries of lawlessness, violence, and destruction it was also possible to catch sight of the depressing drudge of neocapitalist cynical realism and ideological uniformity. The “rioters” in Tottenham, Manchester, Birmingham, and elsewhere were not campaigners or revolutionaries driven by a progressive vision of a better future. They had no manifesto and no sign of a discernible political orientation. They appeared before us as individuals without a history, and they articulated neither a critical narrative of the now nor an account of what might be. In what follows we will claim that the riots took the form of a politically blind and nihilistic acting out of objectless dissatisfaction. This form of violent disorder is not

467

an effusion of protopolitical “resistance” but a contemporary latecapitalist culture of depressive hedonia, vapid consumerism, and deep cynicism set against a background of postpolitical torpor. For the past two centuries, many of the “great thunderstorms” (Me´sza´ros 1995) of economic retrenchment proper to capitalism have been accompanied by spontaneous riots that seem to arise out of nowhere. This “nowhere,” however, is an ideological blind spot written out of history. These thunderstorms appeared in periods defined by the concrete realities of rising inequalities, falling standards of living, and the erosion of popular optimism about the future, all finding expression in spectacular yet ephemeral acts of disorder. Yet even though the recent English riots occurred amid serious political and economic convulsions, they seemed to have no articulate political subtext. Politics appeared to be lurking in the background somewhere, vaguely adumbrating reactions to the injustices of the postindustrial revanchist city, but for the rioters the role of politics was repressed and unconscious, resisting and evading direct symbolization. Absorbing the “dark side of the spectacle” (Kellner 2012) as television reports came in, one couldn’t help but be struck by the pronounced air of nihilistic and destructive aggression, but also by the impression that these deeply pissed-off yet paradoxically joyful young people had quite fundamentally misrecognized their real adversary. Rather than attack a socioeconomic system that has cast them into the precarious margins as the human detritus that litters the autotomic spaces of the postindustrial city after the implosion of the social democratic settlement and the arrival of a new “winner takes all” neoliberal orthodoxy, the rioters seemed not to resist but to be driven by the core ethos of the ruling ideology: grab what you can, look after number one, and find respite from the pressures and injustices of life in another shopping expedition. This was the barbarism of postmodern capitalism’s structural violence adopted, turned inward, and enacted by its most marginalized subjects; it was the direct raw expression of the uncivilized and antisocial sentiments that have been systematically cultivated throughout the social body by neoliberalism’s rejection of traditional sociability, its destruction of unifying politics, its shortsighted championing of aggressive selfinterest and competition, and its promulgation of money and consumer symbolism as the sole sources of value. Immediate reactions to these riots were largely restricted to the narrow parameters that define the current postpolitical era. Rightwing neoliberal and neoconservative commentators identified the usual themes of social and familial breakdown, a lack of discipline, and the rampant criminality of a “feral underclass.” The social liberals identified state brutality, unequal educational and employment opportunities, government austerity cuts, and inadequate welfare provision. Watching these two wings of the political mainstream slug it out on nightly news broadcasts, one couldn’t help but think

CULTURAL POLITICS

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

468

CULTURAL POLITICS

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

that nothing new or relevant was being said about deepening social divisions and the proliferating enmity that characterizes the cultural life of the postindustrial city. Instead of creating new ways of thinking about a world almost devoid of progressive politics, in which neoliberalism continues to stumble onward despite its recent and very public death throes, we reiterate the same ideas that, in their own way, contribute to the postpolitical inertia of our times. The mainstream liberal Left immediately retreated to safe ground, identifying structural socioeconomic exclusion as the root cause of the riots. Many others will no doubt supplement this standard explanation with various applications of “moral panic” and “governmentality” theories, claiming that the riots presented the neoliberal state with yet another opportunity to reassert authoritarian modes of control by manipulating popular opinion during a time of crisis. Indeed, in the social sciences there has already been a concerted push to identify media and governmental responses to the riots as the primary issue at hand. Aren’t these riots just what the current coalition government needed to bond the mainstream together against the marginalized few, to allow the corporate state to take on the role of protector of conventional morality, and to distract everyone from the ongoing economic crisis and the government’s aggressive austerity cuts? Others on the liberal left have rushed to address the role of new media in promulgating disorder or the generic impact of the immediate mediatization of disorder and violence upon culture. These approaches are not without intellectual merit, but they also tend to reinforce the standard liberal-postmodernist injunction that the ultimate “truth” is elusive and inaccessible, that all we really have are diverse competing accounts polluted by factional myths and interests. Contemporary social science lambasts theoretical “reductionism,” preferring instead the comfort of empiricism and the halfhearted endorsement of ideas already in circulation. In this way, the ultimate causes of the riots and their broader meaning are considered less important than attendant media and political reaction. How can we know why the riots occurred? In the midst of such self-imposed epistemological repression, all we can do is endlessly analyze various media representations and criticize the government’s response to the riots and the disproportionate sentencing that followed. In many ways, critical social science made a wrong move in setting itself up as the defender of the working class. Too much work in this tradition now finds itself drawn into the compulsory denial of the very idea that the working class is capable of socially harmful crimes. Instead, it paints a picture of a noble working class that has magically defended its cultural traditions and institutions against the forces of history; the real villain of the piece is the oppressive state supported by the right-wing media. In this article we hope to make some small contribution to reigniting interest in political subjectivity and encouraging social scientists to think beyond the standard liberal tropes of

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

469

THE LIVING DEATH OF POLITICS We are now living through a postpolitical age. Our current batch of politicians deny any specific ideological affiliation beyond the broadest Platonic abstractions—fairness, freedom, democracy, and so on—and rush to assure the electorate that they are “not ideological,” that their judgments are not clouded by the dangerous passions of twentieth-century politics. Instead, they position themselves as pragmatic administrators and display unflinching faith in the belief that this is what the electorate wants them to be. For some years now, the default liberal-postmodernist political class in Britain has mocked all those who express utopian visions of a better world. There is very little to separate the major British parties in terms of actual policy, but more important, they all accept without question the ultimate

CULTURAL POLITICS

the moral panic, governmentality, biopower, resistance, and so on. Crucially, the rioters exhibited no genuine “politics of opposition” to the neoliberal mainstream, only the raw forms of drive and desire created by a combination of deep social divisions, evacuated politics, and consumer incorporation. It’s true that, after the rioting died down, the police rapidly rounded up members of the actuarially defined “risky” marginal population and handed them over to specially extended courts to be given disproportionately punitive sentences (Rogers and Evans 2011). However, rather than search for the heart of this outbreak of impotent and objectless rage and contrast it with the more politicized outbreaks in Europe, all occurring against the same background of a historically unique contraction of the capitalist economy as it approaches the objective limit to the growth on which it depends (Gorz 2010; Heinberg 2011), the liberal Left automatically fell in line with its default position: injustices are being done to the poor, thus they must be protected from mistreatment and somehow “included” back into the brutal, depoliticized socioeconomic competition that caused their exclusion and inarticulate rage in the first place. Tim Newburn (2011), the academic lead of the Guardian’s rapid investigative study into the riots, has called for a concerted empirical investigation into the riots. We support this endeavor, but we would also point out that without a concerted theoretical investigation we will fail to develop an adequate understanding of the riots and the people who were involved in them (consider, for example, the UK government’s final report from the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel [2012]). Rather than take up our usual positions in the intellectual trenches and defend the line, might it not be useful to change our perspective and our strategy of engagement? Are there no new and relevant ideas that might occasion us to rethink the problem of subjectivity and social order in today’s unique and convulsive historical period? In what follows we offer an analysis that is unashamedly separated from much liberal-leftist social scientific thinking and influenced by the ethnographic research we outlined earlier.

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

470

CULTURAL POLITICS

horizon of neoliberal economics and parliamentary politics. Through this lens even the dispiritingly domesticated world of Fabian welfarism seems naively idealistic. Up to the crisis in 2008, the very suggestion that capitalism’s global financial system should be regulated seemed sufficiently unworldly to attract popular derision. Even now, in the fourth year of the economic crisis, with the euro zone straining to postpone its implosion and mass unemployment once more casting its shadow, our politicians stick resolutely to neoliberal dogma. While all forms of collectivist politics are daubed with the symbols of absolute evil (Badiou 2002)—tyranny, genocide, totalitarianism, and so on—neoliberalism’s lapsarian imagery tells us that without the vision and valor of the financier and the entrepreneur, taking more risks before breakfast than we mere mortals take in a lifetime, we are incapable of looking after ourselves and preventing our fall back into a dark age of squalor and tyranny. The ongoing debate about the banking system’s bonus culture, and the fact that we are now perfectly aware that the superrich are often rewarded for failure, only contributes to the dank air of political cynicism that envelops Western liberal democracies. The electorate now knows what our political leaders must have known for years: that our economic system is inherently unstable and corrupt and cannot be controlled by the weak regulatory systems that exist in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the euro zone. In the absence of a genuine political and economic alternative palatable to the West’s worker-consumers, all we can do is hope that the rich might be miraculously shamed into adopting a prosocial approach to economic activity, that our political leaders become brave enough to introduce new and comprehensive regulatory systems, or that the renewed politics of economic pragmatism, which advocates the logical necessity of the rich getting richer (tax cuts to drive investment) and the poor getting poorer (welfare cuts to reduce state deficits), might somehow jump-start the neoliberal juggernaut and eventually return us to growth, full employment, and the level of consumer spending to which we have become accustomed.

IF NOT CAPITALISM, THEN WHAT? The political leader who can convince the majority of voters that his or her party is the most likely to defend individuals against the manifold insecurities of an increasingly unstable late-capitalist world, while at the same time incrementally improving their consumer lifestyles on a stairway to the sky, tends to win the day. Politics follows the logic of transcendent negation (Adorno 1997); many voters these days are motivated by a desire to reject the sitting administration that constantly fails to make the endlessly mass-mediated vision real rather than allow their blood to be stirred by an alternative manifesto offered by the “opposition.” If the current lot are no good, the next lot should be given a go; at precisely what is rarely discussed, which of course suggests that what we have now is destined to continue ad infinitum.

471

In an effort to convince us that, no matter who we are, we all count, “communicative capitalism” (see Dean 2009) endlessly broadcasts its pluralist message: in democracy, we accept all viewpoints; if you are dissatisfied with your elected officials, every election offers you the chance to change things. But of course if liberal democracy itself is found wanting, if we believe all our politicians to be corrupt and venal cynics, if we believe the system to be polluted by the interests of elites, and if we believe that a genuinely alternative politics can never flourish within its parameters, then the act of voting becomes an act of self-sabotage and capitulation, in which the subject stops seeking to change the system but instead changes him or herself into a cynical pragmatist. The injunction to get involved and change things by voting according to one’s principles forestalls the possibility of opening up an alternative political space beyond formal parliamentary democracy itself. The electorate is offered the appearance of ˇizˇek 2002). change so that nothing has to change (Z Contemporary liberal democracy necessarily involves a “making do.” Britain’s electoral system means that fringe votes are wasted, and therefore rejecting a failed Labour administration means voting for the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats, despite the fact that the voter may strongly disagree with their policies and ethical positions. So voters must abandon their principles and political idealism and decide who they most dislike: are they so appalled by Labour that they are willing to vote Conservative, or are they so put off by the Conservative Party that they are willing to countenance another Labour administration? Joining or continuing to support the party that is the closest match to one’s ideals, and working to recharge its spirit and change its direction, now seems embarrassingly anachronistic. The purity of the liberal-democratic vision, in which the will of the people is reflected in election results and political practice, is now indelibly tarnished by the base pragmatism and cynicism that accompanies democracy in action. As Alain Badiou (2002, 2010) has recognized, the thoughtless and automatic political endorsement of “parliamentary capitalism” is, for the voters and politicians themselves, not based upon a fully conscious affirmation of capitalism as the Good. Rather, current neoliberal ideology operates in Churchillian mode, in strictly negative “least-worst” terms; the Good is replaced by a perceived and relative absence of Evil, the “avoidance of mistreatment” calculated on a baseline of minimal social security and human rights. So we know very well that neoliberal restructuring disrupts the economic and ethical-social infrastructures of developing countries (Wiegratz 2010) and tends to exploit and marginalize sections of the population in liberal-democratic capitalist nations, while maintaining everyone in a constant state of insecurity; but at least it’s not as bad as totalitarianism. We also know very well that the capitalist economy is unstable and descends into regular destructive convulsions, that liberal democracy doesn’t really integrate all viewpoints, and that

CULTURAL POLITICS

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

472

CULTURAL POLITICS

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

the history and present of liberalism is replete with violent militarism and methods of social control (Lusordo 2011); but at least we do not live in a dictatorship. Badiou’s ultimate directive is of course that a progressive politics must once again discover and fully endorse the Good; we will remain marooned in this cynical, postpolitical age until we can discover a genuine Truth Project, fidelity to which can totally transform the coordinates of the present. However, if at the moment nothing is really happening, how do we ˇ izˇek (2008b), today’s relentanimate the political field? For Slavoj Z less cynical pragmatism suggests that there is a biopolitical component within this overall framework, a theme that has also been addressed by Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005). Here the polity addresses ideologically the existential fear and anxiety that lie at the hollow core of human subjectivity. The historic shift to the current postpolitical era means that liberal-postmodern societies have experienced a marked decline in symbolic efficiency as their populations have, by and large, become increasingly separated from their own cultures and traditions. The traditional symbolic order might once have compelled us to worship false gods and restricted our individuality by demanding that we submit to extant customs and conventions, but it also allowed us the comfort of belief and provided us with the symbolic substance we used to fill in the void, the fundamental ˇizˇek 2000). The decline absence at the core of our subjective being (Z of this traditional symbolic order means that we are now, in late modernity, at an advanced stage of losing our conscious attachment to belief and resigning ourselves to a world without any fixed sense of truth. This painful absence becomes more insistent as the individual is forced to carry the full weight of Cartesian subjectivity without a foothold in the cohesive symbolism that would give him some purchase in determining for himself his social behavior and identity. Many have claimed that we are now painfully free, but this analysis must be supplemented by an acknowledgment that we are, in the same movement, denied access to any means that might encourage us to reflect on what freedom is and what we might do with it. We seem to be prisoners of our own victories, essentially locked in a cage constructed of freedoms won in the past, confined in new ways that are redolent of some former act of self-determination yet that do not seem to furnish us with the ability to act now to any effect in the reconstruction of ourselves and our socioeconomic environments. We are free to vote, to consume, to submerge ourselves in the shallow hedonism of what appears to be a “permissive” culture and free to take advantage of all the liberties of contemporary liberal democratic societies, whose permissive boundaries miraculously seem to be in a state of constant expansion, but we are not free to think beyond the current coordinates of this world. This lack of ability to really transcend these coordinates should raise the suspicion that at some point in the recent past this miracle of expanding

473

permissions flipped into an involuted regression, a turning inward and backward toward an age of intellectual and political prohibition. But don’t ongoing political upheavals in Spain and Greece suggest that a return to real politics is imminent? Don’t the Occupy movements and the new wave of student protests clearly indicate that it is a profound mistake to assume that young people are deadened apolitical consumers? Aren’t trade unions beginning to stir once again? How can one pronounce the present to be “postpolitical” when political contestation over our social and economic trajectory is once again part of life on university campuses across the West? All these developments and much else besides harbor the potential to develop into real politics, but we should attempt to ensure that our desire to see real politics return does not prompt us to misidentify a diverse range of critiques of the current order as the dawning of a new political age. To be sure, the Occupy movement appears to be a progressive intervention that targets the heart of the capitalist system, but those who camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London were popularly derided as a small group of middle-class students, hippies, and professional protesters. Their message shows no signs of traversing the huge cultural chasm that demarcates this politicized group from the vast body of the ex –working class that possesses the critical mass required to put plans for change into action. Further, the Occupy group in London seemed to harbor a fundamental belief in the democratic process, fighting an eviction notice through the courts and expecting the liberal-capitalist state to grant participants leave to protest indefinitely outside a major tourist attraction. What they want—and this also seems to be true of other Occupy protests across the West—is for the current political establishment to recognize their voice and to adapt their policies accordingly. They are politely asking the political leadership of the country and the corporate financial system to change, to clean up their act, and to be less beastly to the global poor. Similarly, the protest movement in Spain positions itself against poverty, unemployment, and spending cuts but seems incapable of endorsing any oppositional political ideology or putting forward a plausible means of reorganizing either the national or the global economy. Protesters are against the worst excesses of the current system, but they are not fundamentally for something different that can be easily named and clearly identified by others. Their published documents state quite clearly that the movement is nonideological, of neither the Left nor the Right. Again, the thrust is to rehabilitate what already exists, but we must acknowledge that capitalism has historically shown remarkable resilience and an ability to reconfigure itself in order to incorporate even the most robust political criticism without changing its basic form or direction (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007); it changes only so that it may continue. Further, the current ideological constellation makes it almost impossible to advocate anything other than liberal democracy. No one these days openly

CULTURAL POLITICS

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

474

CULTURAL POLITICS

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

endorses a shift to another form of political and economic organization. How can one be against free and open elections today, and don’t we know what an organizational miracle markets perform? These appear to us as fundamental civic entitlements and freedoms that must be retained and expanded. Any attempt to change “democracy” or “markets” cannot, for the moment, be countenanced. Wouldn’t a return to real politics demand an attempt to topple the current edifice of concentrated ideological and political-economic power and replace it with something else? In the high modernist age this was the normal way for all political dissenters, no matter where they were located in the intersectional social structure, to think about politics. Now, however, in the wake of the catastrophism (see Hall 2012) that has pervaded our culture ever since such quotidian dreams turned into the nightmare of Stalinist repression, radicalism has stepped back to allow the ideology of contemporary liberal capitalism to stage its own critique (Fisher 2009), rather like the financial industry staging its own investigations into fraud in its banks. It does not simply co-opt organic resistance but actually supplies those frustrated with its inequalities and injustices with prefabricated, domesticated, and highly stylized forms of resistance so that they might attempt to divest themselves of the raw energy of frustration while continuing to believe in open democracy (Hall and Winlow 2007; Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008). But these strategic moves do not in themselves close off the possibility of real change. If so much political opposition these days involves a drive to rehabilitate what currently exists, one might reasonably argue that a new humane and ecologically aware capitalism—with rigorous governmental controls on finance and investment, an equitable progressive taxation system, and comprehensive civic entitlements—would indeed be a truly progressive political move symbolizing a genuine return to history. We do not contest this point, or the ideal that it represents, but we do unequivocally contest the possibility of even this sort of attenuated social-democratic transformation occurring within the current structures of politics, mass-mediated ideological power, and the electoral system as it stands. The challenge for the politically aware vanguard of Occupy and other such movements is to actually have a plausible program and present it in such a way that it is immediately understandable to everyday people and to encourage those people to see their own interests advanced as part of that program, thus channeling the blind frustration and dissatisfaction so common throughout contemporary culture in a progressive political direction. Rage must be furnished with its political objects, its escape route, and its destination, but there is a further complication; how, in an insecure and precarious economy, does the new vanguard convince an insecure population weaned on consumer culture’s dream of constantly expanding hedonism—with its symbolic objects as the sole means of identity and status—that the “interests” of the majority must now comport with the imperative to not just equalize

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

475

GONE SHOPPING At the core of the human being, according to Jacques Lacan, is a milieu of conflicting drives that have no natural objects and supply the organism with no clear instructions for survival. Politics, however, can structure and give shape to fundamental human anxieties by articulating an ideological narrative around prosperity and geopolitical security, allowing the subject to assuage his or her own feelings of incompleteness and potential demise. Consumer culture has prospered as a result of the existential lack, disorientation, and hesitancy that lie at the heart of the postmodern subject, the products of a systematic continuation of the original human condition of prematurational anxiety. It promises to address the nagging feelings that something is missing from one’s life, and that the organism is in some unspecified sort of danger, by circulating an endless procession of objects that divert our desires from the eudaemonial realms of art, love, science, and politics and promise, yet always fail, to gratify drives constantly stimulated in a base libidinal economy. The symbolism communicated by these objects varies from the subtle to the very coarse, but the market is neither a snob nor a critic of snobbishness. Consumer culture caters to all and purports to address the fundamental anxieties of the self and its place in the world. If we survey the contemporary political scene with honesty, it seems increasingly to be populated by anxious people and interest groups. This durable and versatile anxiety is often projected onto scapegoats who can be constructed as threats to something that is valuable and must be retained. We were once encouraged to identify folk devils who threatened our lifestyles, our history, our national identity, and our economic vitality, but now this fear can be extended to almost any individual whose competitive presence, in hard times, threatens our precarious socioeconomic place in the world. We also exhibit macro-level fears elicited by the overt and covert activities of the state, but these fears are also compounded by the opposite of state power, the inability of states to manage global capitalism, criminal markets, the energy crisis, the impending ecological catastrophe, and so on. Once upon a time, the energy generated by all this anxiety would have been discharged upon objects—the unstable capitalist market, the bourgeoisie, the banking system, and so on—to produce real politics. But now, of course, for postpolitical liberal capitalism, real politics is the absolute primary object of terror, and the political path out of our problems is barred. As we

CULTURAL POLITICS

but downsize lifestyles as we enter a period of low and eventually negative growth imposed on us by energy and general resource depletion? To underestimate the difficulty of the times in which we live, or the unpalatable truth telling and hard thinking required to reactivate politics in the context we have inherited, is to guarantee long-term political failure.

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

476

CULTURAL POLITICS

are fed the traditional cautionary tales about the catastrophic results of the internal politics of fear, we are thrown into an immobilizing external postpolitics of objectless anxiety (see Hall 2012). Our current culture encourages the electorate to be deeply anxious of even the most oblique suggestion that political intervention at the structural level can fundamentally change our socioeconomic existence. We know something quite serious has gone wrong, but we lack a believable political narrative that might bring the abstract structures and processes behind the reality into some sort of clear conceptual relief and enable us to understand them and do something about them. We see all the problems caused by contemporary liberal capitalism, but we are denied not only plausible aetiological explanations but also the vision of a new form of political economy that moves us beyond the present. Our position is not unlike Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last men,” who fear the excess of life that fundamental transformation can bring with it and remain resolute in their intention to keep life exactly as it is. Like the last men, our immediate reaction to idealism is mocking cynicism. All idealism and utopianism is a hopeless pipe dream; there is no “truth” and no clear and ethical path to “the Good.” The liberal cult of catastrophism tells us that all collectivist politics leads to the gulag or the gas chamber. There can be nothing other than different viewpoints and opinions, all of which carry with them their own insurmountable epistemological and ontological problems, and thus none must be taken too seriously. We learn to laugh and sneer at each other the minute anyone oversteps liberalism’s skeptical boundary by so much as a millimeter; the absolute limit of our political ambition must be set at the point where we are permitted to make slight internal adjustments to the instruments of government and strictly no further. Political catastrophe is averted, but objectless anxiety continues to establish itself ever more firmly at the core of everyday life.

ENLIGHTENED FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS In many ways the reaction to Francis Fukuyama’s (1993) “end of history” thesis is just as illuminating as the thesis itself (see also ˇizˇek 2008a). While Fukuyama argued that liberal-democratic capitZ alism had finally defeated its ideological foes, and would therefore define the foreseeable future, he was also perceptive enough to suggest that the cultural repercussions would be quite considerable. Fukuyama’s analysis involves a basic application of G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic: without a genuine antithesis, the engine of history grinds to a halt. We are not inclined to adopt Fukuyama’s triumphalist stance, but what is problematic is the stance taken up by left-liberalism’s intellectual critique. Many of Fukuyama’s critics fired salvo after salvo at the considerable problems that lie at the center of his thesis until it was blown away and became the butt of parody in the intellectual world, but in their own lives and careers these critics carried on acting as if it were unerringly correct. The vast majority of the intel-

477

lectual superheroes and the workaday empirical researchers of the social sciences treat capitalism and liberal democracy as a fait accompli, thus our disciplines are bereft of the concepts and analytical framework that can deal with the current situation. They argue quite forcibly for justice, equality, and fairness within its structure— themes also championed from a different perspective by their counterparts on the neoliberal right—but they do not challenge the ultimate horizon of liberal capitalism itself or regard the current subjective and cultural forms of life we see emerging around us as the products of the first phases of its breakdown. One can’t help but think that many of the leading intellectuals of the social scientific mainstream are simply petitioning the individuals who constitute both the mass and the elite to maintain pseudopacified relations and be a little nicer to each other as they lock horns in liberal capitalism’s interminable everyday competition, but nothing more. Like that coming from the new generation of political protesters, the basic message from academia seems to be that we can humanize the system and somehow hold it to account and that this in itself threatens its ˇ izˇek 2008b; Fisher stability. However, as some have recognized (Z 2009; Dean 2009), this narrative has been fully integrated into the reproductive process of contemporary liberal capitalism, a system whose defining characteristic is to blindly continue onward, redefining itself when necessary in order to postpone its own end point for as long as possible. In fact, the new liberal-postmodern capitalism now secures its own continuation by integrating the discourses of its old antagonists and reformers alike. It wants to solve the problems of the Third World and to get rid of the Kafkaesque bureaucracies of the traditional state, cutting through the red tape to ensure that money, goods, and services reach the people who really need them. A new prosocial capitalism can work; moral agents can harness its celebrated efficiencies and productive capacities, and civil society can revive the extra-economic social infrastructure in which these moral agents can be nurtured and reproduced. In this way, capitalism now not only integrates but manufactures its own incorporable discordant narratives in order to create the impression that it has identified its own internal contradictions, addressed them with the public interest in mind, and changed for the better. Parallel changes have also taken place in the field of ideology. Contemporary capitalist ideology now allows, indeed encourages, working populations to poke fun at the system and to reflect on its activities in a critical manner, a technique used to great effect by the advertising industry since the early 1960s (Frank 1997). Consequently, the popular knowledge of capitalism’s dark side and the incessant critique of its activities are no longer threats; they act as the refinery to convert raw objectless anxiety into rich propulsive fuel. Contemporary capitalist ideology ensures that the emancipatory moment of ultimate realization is lost among a cacophony of competing critical accounts that ultimately fail to deliver a coherent alterna-

CULTURAL POLITICS

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

478

CULTURAL POLITICS

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

tive view of the present and the future. As each deconstructionist warrior grows yet another sapling of critical meaning and prepares it for ritual disintegration before it can settle and incite any moral indignation and political action whatsoever, he or she carries on as normal in the everyday role of worker-consumer, safe in the knowledge that because he or she sees and understands the reality of capitalism he or she is no longer complicit in its destructive logic. Yet this cool, skeptical, knowledgeable postmodern subject still suffers from a nagging sense of lack. When we remove ideology from politics we remove its substance, its energy, and the promise of historical and dialectical movement (Bosteels 2010). We are left with mere representation as politicians go about the business of acting like politicians. The sense of lack is compensated by the current modishness of deep political skepticism and cynicism, now a rite of passage into adulthood. These days, to even point out in public that capitalism is beset by irrevocable destructive contradictions at the heart of its economic logic is to reveal oneself to be hopelessly, childishly, and dangerously idealistic and anachronistic. Adults now deal in the currency of lifestyle politics and the colorful diversity of the incoherent “multitude.” Liberal postmodernism, with its obsessive analytical concern with self-determination, plurality, creativity, and interminable dissent against all settled meaning, is the academic embodiment of late capitalism’s postpolitical process. The current fashion appears to affirm contemporary postpolitical movements that over the past forty years have made some strides in promoting human rights for diverse interest groups but no impact whatsoever on capitalism’s core processes. Simultaneously, political forms that have demonstrated their ability to provide at least a temporary platform for further subjective and socioeconomic change have been consigned to history’s dustbin. One might reasonably assume that Britain’s relatively brief adventure with social democracy by no means eradicated inequality, competitive individualism, narcissism, and similar socioeconomic and psychocultural forms that established themselves so firmly during the course of capitalist history. However, drawing from the bitter experience of the previous slide into depression, fascism, and war, it provided the conditions for a temporary cultural shift, insofar as more individuals became attracted to the principle that the interests of the self could be better advanced by a general improvement in the life chances of the whole population. In many cases it seemed possible that this firmly embedded and widely diffused orientation to social justice and inclusivity was beginning to reform the subject’s neurologically inscribed and reproduced sentiments, counteracting and displacing base instrumentalism and opening up the possibility of a genuine historical movement along the path toward egalitarianism (Hall 2012). Put simply, we did not just have a more stable and equal system, but we were gradually becoming more just and sociable people, and by the 1960s the postwar social democratic project had constructed a

479

stable socioeconomic, cultural, and political-legal platform on which great strides were made in the fields of social justice, social care, and civil rights, all underscored by a powerful current of optimism, sociable sentiments, and political militancy. Today, however, there seems to be no clearly identifiable culture of antiutilitarianism and little faith in the principle that the interests of the self can be advanced further by a deep commitment to a broad universal sociability; the systematic disintegration of this powerful and relatively coherent oppositional current was the neoliberal restoration’s great triumph, skillfully and surreptitiously aided by the pan-skeptical liberal postmodernism that had grown in the body of the Left, disintegrating and neutralizing it from the inside. The English riots occurred in the shadow of this political disintegration. The Arab Spring burst out of the straitjacket that cool, cynical, liberal-postmodernist theory had attempted to place on the will and the intellect, but even there, in the absence of a coherent alternative ideology, the results remain uncertain. In stark contrast, the recent riots in England displayed none of this raw emancipatory potential. They seemed to indicate the subjective effects of two interlocking processes and subsequent conditions: first, the pockets of depoliticization and social disintegration that appear as liberal capitˇ izˇek 2010) and, alism’s economic system begins to disintegrate (Z second, the absolute triumph of its postpolitical ideology and drivebased libidinal consumer economy (Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008; Stiegler 2010). Political disintegration has turned what was once a clear concern with political and economic fortunes into a terrifying objectless anxiety, compensated solely by the mass-mediated vision of prosperity and the process of continuous identification with objects of consumption. When capitalism slid into depression in 2008, the collective vision provided by the symbolism of universal politics was no longer at hand to give anxiety its object and potential opposition the firm collective identity and symbolic efficiency required to take it forward as an articulate antagonist. Thus the youthful subjectivity that dominated the pockets of permanent localized recession that had appeared all over the Anglo-American world during the neoliberal era reached a new level of brooding and inarticulate dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction manifested itself in complex and conflicting psychosocial sentiments of moralistic conformity, criminality, and punitiveness (Dean 2009). The English rioters were not ethically repelled or politically animated by the grotesque inequalities of the advanced capitalist world. Neither did they resent the dumbing down of game-show Britain, its banal uniformity, and its destruction of all organic regional and class cultures. Instead, they wanted in; driven by ˇizˇek 2000) and straining to the new superego “injunction to enjoy” (Z expand the permissions it grants the libidinal drives stimulated and captured by consumer culture (Stiegler 2010), they demanded their fair share of the hedonistic spoils that double as symbolic compen-

CULTURAL POLITICS

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

480

CULTURAL POLITICS

sations. Lacanian desire and lack function in tension as a perfectly poised dynamic dyad. As we have seen, the riots were indeed triggered by the resentment that welled up inside some who witnessed a grave injustice perpetrated by the state. The shooting of Duggan clearly and understandably affected his family and friends and the local community, and anger at this injustice might well have remained as the principal grievance for some of those involved in the disorder. However, for the majority it existed only as a trigger to release the primary motivation, their own poorly insulated variant of the neoliberal consumer-capitalist ideology congealed in its subjects’ neurological systems (Johnston 2008; Hall 2012): all are out for themselves; grab what you can while you can; look after number one; triumph in the perpetual social competition; assert your place in the world by generating envy in others, by having more stuff and more fun than they can ever dream of (see Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008; Topping and Bawdon 2011; Clifton 2011; Prasad 2011; Carter 2011b). All these conflicts and drives were generating energy in the unconscious, where capitalist ideology now resides as a suite of protosymbolic drives and affects separated and concealed by a veil of fetishistic disavowal from our beliefs and conscious social activities. The rioters were indeed resentful, but in the sense that their permanent consignment to the economic margins denied them access not to their own symbolic and political means of emancipation but to all that they have been told they should desire (Carter 2011a, 2011c). The primary source of dissatisfaction lay beneath the surface, unconsciously structuring their reaction as it surged through the gap in the normative insulation opened up by the initial act of injustice. The core issue seems to be that so many English people have been systematically denied access to the universal ethical-political symbols that might allow them to better understand their actual structural position. They are instead compelled to understand it through the lens of an Anglicized American Dream, which tells them that their society is a demanding but fair meritocracy in which anyone can make it. For instance, we spoke to and observed Billy (see Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008: 66–80) for a number of months in 2007. He was and is a drug dealer and thief, and he is as poor today as he was in 2007. Despite his obvious material deprivation and chaotic personal circumstances, Billy still believes he has a chance to “make it”: It’s not as hard as what people say . . . just . . . keep earning a bit here and there and don’t get locked up. If I get set up [with a drug-dealing business] . . . you can be making thousands, man, . . . just the best of gear, clothes, and that, stuff for the house. Get out of here. Go on holiday and that, fucking topnotch bike, a fucking Merc . . . fucking do shit, just fucking go. . . . All it takes, man, just keep me head screwed on. (Quoted in Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008: 79 –80)

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

Other ethnographic work confirms that young people from low-income backgrounds, who operate either full-time or part-time in criminal markets, often fall into a pattern of fetishistic disavowal; they keep telling themselves that they are one big break away from “making it,” despite knowing in their heart of hearts that, ultimately, they will never make it even to the top of the bottom, never mind the highest echelons they witness every night on TV (Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008). Thus the existential jolt that, for a brief moment, accompanies the experience of the localized breakdown of law and order— when the tables are turned and one actually has the opportunity to attack the system—could not find at hand any symbolism to guide it and fashion it into a collective political act (Clifton 2011; Carter 2011c).

HUMILIATION AND RESENTMENT

481

Peter Sloterdijk (2010) has argued persuasively that rage has shaped the history of the West. However, once the West embarked on its pseudopacification process in the modernist-capitalist era, this rage was no longer allowed to erupt suddenly in a vengeful or transformational political form. It was instead sublimated, deferred, ceded to God, and harnessed to the economy (Hall 2007, 2012); the surplus was banked in reformist political projects replete with solemn promises to one day set the world straight and curb the power of those responsible for the reproduction of social injustice. The problem for the contemporary Left is that these “rage banks” are too small and insufficiently absorbent; they cannot accumulate ˇizˇek 2008b). In the enough surplus rage capital (Sloterdijk 2010; Z postpolitical present there is a growing tendency to understand exploitation, injustice, and their “natural” accompaniment of rage as subjective torments that cannot be communicated, diffused, and harnessed by grand political projects or even as localized communal responses to shared injustices (see Wieviorka 2009; Winlow and Hall 2009b). The subjective understanding of the failure to live life as it should be lived cannot be attached to a political project without a popular alternative narrative that reflects critically on what is and what might be and that, as a crucial first step, positions the subject in relation to culture and the economy. The absence of an alternative critical narrative generated with politics in mind deprives subjects of the ability to transform their internal account of their own tumult, suffering, and dissatisfaction into a broader, externalized,

CULTURAL POLITICS

You hear these people, on the [TV] and that, and it’s “money doesn’t make you happy” and that. Fucking money doesn’t make you happy?! Give me some money, give me some fucking money, see how happy it makes me. Fucking wankers. If you’ve got nowt [nought], money’s fucking, well, money’s fucking IT, isn’t it? (Carl, twenty-six years old, quoted in Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008: 49)

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

482

CULTURAL POLITICS

and fully social account. It becomes impossible for subjects to construct a comprehensible and communicable account of their own rage, one that moves beyond the dispiriting failures of the self to perform adequately in consumer capitalism’s constant struggle for social recognition and distinction, but the real problem is that even if rage gets past the initial stage of articulation, it cannot be banked in any leftist political project that promises a reckoning, a call to account at some point in the future. Nor can it be integrated with a collective narrative in which “people like us” together experience the same kinds of failure, exploitation, and dissatisfaction for the same external, objective, underlying reasons. Thus subjective rage cannot be adequately symbolized in a universal symbolic order comprehensible to all, the permanent deconstruction of which both neoliberals and liberal postmodernists have invested a huge amount of energy into. It is the principal task of postwar neoliberalism and liberal postmodernism, languishing in the shadow of the past’s political catastrophes, to ensure that the sublimatory channel of political uniˇ izˇek versality remains permanently boarded up and off-limits (see Z 2001). Instead, subjective rage is repressed and sublimated along the remaining apolitical channels, emerging in toxic forms to pollute the lives of the marginalized and their social environments in ways that are forever beyond their comprehension. In this sense, subjects remain full of rage but are never fully conscious of the fact or that people have felt this way before and attempted to do something about it. Thus they are so often moody and pissed-off, snappy with those who care for them. For some, in the most parlous mixture of structural and personal circumstances, this rage eats away at all of those things that are valuable for subjects and merges with death drive in presymbolic forms of self-destructive and self-negating impulses (Winlow 2012). For others, it becomes a perennial background of objectless anxiety about something they cannot fully grasp, which, in the absence of meaningful political and communal narratives that explain and give shape to subjective experiences, simply insists. This presymbolic waif demands the constant assurance and palliative care that can be provided solely by the symbols created and diffused by the dominant culture of expressive hedonism, consumerism, and “permissiveness” (see Hayward 2004; Stiegler 2011).

LOOTING AND CONSUMERISM Absorption into the surrogate social world of consumer symbols can never be total, but the subject’s identification with consumerism’s sumptuary symbolic life is more complete, durable, and incarcerating in the absence of a genuinely alternative meaning system and a political vision that can bring into clear relief a plausible way of both socially reorganizing the economy and reorienting subjectivity to transcendent ideals. Our research reveals that in locales of permanent recession young criminals consider the outward signs of

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

consumer success to have a great deal of significance, displaying to others social status and reassuring the self that it remains part of the world. Consider the words of Paul, who lives in a deprived area similar to those affected by the rioting of 2011: I got picked on at school coz I had shitty trainers . . . I was 12 and was at town with a few of my mates and I saw this kid with these brand-new Air Max, so I just went over and hit him a few times and took them off him. . . . They were two sizes too small but I still wore ’em, and things changed at school coz of them new trainers. So I just kept doing it, taking what I wanted. You get noticed, you’re one of the cool ones. (Quoted in Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008: 35) Diana is also in her midtwenties and comes from the same city in the north of England. Her criminal career has been quite different from Paul’s, but the crucial importance of consumerism remains very much in evidence:

483

Consumer culture also provides the symbolism used to demonstrate a commitment to competition and cultural awareness and to signify distinction in the social hierarchy. While Zygmunt Bauman (2004) claims that the socioeconomically marginalized are marked as such in relation to their status as “flawed consumers,” in many respects young people who occupy these urban spaces remain deeply committed consumers. They may have limited economic resources, but when money comes their way they immediately rush toward fashionable consumer objects in an ill-considered way, spending money on positional goods rather than mundane but durable resources. Dwayne, a twenty-three-year-old drug dealer, comes from one of the most economically deprived estates in England. His criminal career has not made him rich by any means. Despite this, he says:

CULTURAL POLITICS

We never had any money growing up, I never did without, I just never had the best. School was all about what you had, not who you were. I wanted to be “somebody” and really thought if I had the right things I would be. I was 13 the day I promised myself I would do whatever I had to to get what I wanted, the day I chose to become the best criminal I could be. I meant it. I spent the next five years doing masses of fraud, not to survive, not for food or for a home, not for drugs, just so I could be someone, be like those people on the telly. Live the dream. I had it all, the best clothes, the most expensive make-up, the newest trainers, the named jeans, I had everything . . . right down to the designer fucking soap in my bathroom. (Quoted in Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008: 40)

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

484

CULTURAL POLITICS

See that [points at a large gold ring], fucking two hundred quid. None of that Argos shit that you know. Chain? That’s . . . two hundred quid. Trainers? What another hundred? See this top right, that’s real Armani that right, can’t remember, hundred quid say . . . I’ve got a pair of Evisu jeans in the house cost three hundred quid. . . . Fuck it, that’s what I say. What’s it for if it’s not to enjoy yourself? It’s what it’s all about, man, innit? (Quoted in Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008: 60) We have spent many years interviewing and observing occasional and committed criminals in the northeast of England, and Dwayne’s attitude to consumerism is indicative of the majority of our sample. But just as they show no signs of “resistance” to mainstream consumerism, neither do all express a total devotion to consumerism’s symbolic objects. In some cases we find a lazy and disinterested attachment, functioning simply as a means of addressing an issue that cannot be accounted for, because it cannot be named as what it is: permanent socioeconomic marginalization in a system whose core logic and current trajectory will never again be able to provide full and guaranteed socioeconomic participation for the growing number of those who consistently lose out in the unrelenting struggle of ˇizˇek 2010). competitive individuals (Heinberg 2011; Z The prohibition slapped on naming and shaming the system makes it appear that only one door is open, and because most of us are aware that we only live once we follow consumer culture’s command to dedicate our lives to seeking out personal pleasures and “new experiences.” The constitution of a postpolitical “good life” reflects this dedication to the accumulation of rare experiences and extremes of hedonistic excess. A frugal and moral life built around dedication to the well-being of our community is simply not in keeping with consumer capitalism’s business plan. However, the cultural injunction to enjoy removes the possibility of experiencing real enjoyˇizˇek 2000, 2008a). A symbolic law prohibiting enjoyment at ment (Z least retains the possibility of enjoyment through transgression, but a “permissive” culture in which enjoyment is compulsory, and in which the laws of transgression are decreed by the same authority that also decrees the laws of conformity, quickly becomes a culture deprived of genuine transgressive enjoyment; we cannot enjoy that which we are ordered to enjoy. Instead, “enjoyment” takes the form of the “sensation,” a distracting burst of sensuous pleasure with a brief symbolic life, a “hit” of hyperreality. Surrounded by gadgets, games, and lifestyle accoutrements as we fetishistically update our social media profiles, we remain libidinally driven yet simultaneously bored, disinterested, and rather wan, compelled to play the game of enjoyment and indulgence but not really taking much pleasure from the experience. Thus the “orgy of looting” (Kellner 2012: 22) that targeted both designer clothes stores and cheaper retail outlets (Moxon 2011) is

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

485

CONCLUSION What the riot means is that consumer ideology is so ubiquitous, so all-encompassing, that it can effectively act as its own counterposition (Frank 1997), the only danger being that the tense and unstable dynamic libidinal force at its core can occasionally spill over into brief yet intense bouts of aimless social disorder. If the Left continues to believe in the egalitarian project, it must actively participate in the popularization of an account of these injustices, one that allows everyday people to once again see their subjective struggles as part of a much broader picture of collective suffering, structural

CULTURAL POLITICS

not simply the triumph of consumerism, although that is certainly part of the picture. Consumerism itself is a positivity that relies for its existence on a surrounding negativity, a basic default position that, dressed up to be irresistibly seductive, persists in what is the essence of the current cultural-political landscape: the entire absence of anything else that could possibly win our hearts. The true horror at the system’s core is that, standing alongside the corpse of suffocated politics, advanced consumer-capitalism is, underneath its seductive attire, pure functionalized negativity, the terrifying Lacanian void writ large, the entire absence of culture and politics at the end of history. Consumer culture’s libidinal drive is activated as a reaction to the primal fear of staring down this dark abyss of total negativity: no past, no future, no narrative, the lack of everything that has been cancelled by the omnipotent ideological power of postwar catastrophism. The primal political-subjective force here is not an antiauthoritarian urge to transgress but the need to solicit some sort of comprehensible symbolic order to stave off the terror of total negativity and first construct the self as a subject. In the absence of a grounded communal life and a unified politics, consumer culture constructs a surrogate social order replete with symbols of distinction in order to harness libidinal energy. Falling into the void almost immediately after the initial trigger of injustice, the brief “breakdown of law and order” could go no further; there were no subjects, social demands, or political symbols to carry it further. How did the rioters take advantage of the fact that the police were on the retreat and there was little possibility of anyone stopping them from acting out their darkest impulses? They went shopping, because there was nothing else in the vacuum where a famously rich and potent political imagination once resided. The looting of stores represented not the primary motivation but the default position; after the trigger the rioters were not pushed forward by political motivations but pulled downward by their unleashed consumer drives. They won no victory from their night of historic rioting and transgressing the laws of the capitalist state, just a handful of pathetic souvenirs and yet another notch on the internal fragmentation and alienation of the former working class (see also Kellner 2012).

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

486

CULTURAL POLITICS

inequality, and, most of all, the impending permanent downturn of the system as it reaches the objective limit to its growth. What remains of the Left no longer seems capable of articulating a clear and compelling narrative of social justice that can break through the lethargy and cynicism of our postpolitical times to create a new universality. While there appears to be a surfeit of rage and dissatisfaction, this cannot be harnessed to provide the energy to drive forward a genuine political alternative to the present. All the localized injustices that led to the state shooting of Duggan, and those injustices that lead young men to live lives of isolated criminality in economically marginalized and socially disintegrated spaces, are important and deserve our full attention, but to return to politics proper, we must be ˇ izˇek willing to risk a leap of faith into an alternative space (see Z 2008a). If we continue to cower in fear of liberal catastrophism’s images (see Hall 2012) and accept as the absolute limit of our ambitions the continuation of liberal democracy and liberal capitalism as they are, we will continue to stumble from one crisis to another while denying ourselves the political symbols and reanimated subjectivities we need to address the huge problems that lie in store for us in the twenty-first century.

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. London: Continuum. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badiou, Alain. 2002. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso. Badiou, Alain. 2010. The Meaning of Sarkozy. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor. Maidenhead, England: Open University Press. Boltanski, Luc, and E`ve Chiapello. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Bosteels, Bruno. 2010. “The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror.” In The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas ˇizˇek, 33 –66. London: Verso. Douzinas and Slavoj Z Carter, Helen. 2011a. “Rioter Profile: ‘I Thought It Was like a Battle, like a War.’” Guardian, December 5, 2011. Carter, Helen. 2011b. “Rioter Profile: ‘Looting Was Nothing Personal, Just Business.’” Guardian, December 5, 2011. Carter, Helen. 2011c. “Rioter Profile: ‘This Is Some Next-Level Revolution Coming.’” Guardian, December 5, 2011. Clifton, Helen. 2011. “Rioter Profile: ‘The Law Was Obeying Us.’” Guardian, December 9, 2011.

487

Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Politics and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books. Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1993. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Gorz, Andre´. 2010. “The Exit from Capitalism Has Already Begun.” Cultural Politics 6, no. 1: 5– 14. Hall, Steve. 2007. “The Emergence and Breakdown of the PseudoPacification Process.” In Assaulting the Past: Violence and Civilization in Historical Context, edited by Katherine Watson, 77 –103. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Hall, Steve. 2012. Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage. Hall, Steve, and Simon Winlow. 2007. “Cultural Criminology and Primitive Accumulation: A Formal Introduction for Two Strangers Who Should Really Become More Intimate.” Crime, Media, Culture 3, no. 1: 82–90. Hall, Steve, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum. 2008. Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion, and the New Culture of Narcissism. Cullompton, UK: Willan. Hayward, Keith. 2004. City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience. London: Routledge. Heinberg, Richard. 2011. The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. Forest Row, UK: Clairview Books. ˇizˇek’s Ontology: A Transcendental MateriJohnston, Adrian. 2008. Z alist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2012. “The Dark Side of the Spectacle: Terror in Norway and the UK Riots.” Cultural Politics 8, no. 1: 1 –43. Laville, Sandra. 2011. “Riots Cost Taxpayer at Least £133 Million, MPs Told.” Guardian, September 6, 2011. Lusordo, Domenico. 2011. Liberalism: A Counter-History. London: Verso. Me´sza´ros, Istva´n. 1995. Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition. London: Merlin. Moxon, David. 2011. “Consumer Culture and the 2011 ‘Riots.’” Sociological Research Online 16, no. 4: 19. www.socresonline .org.uk/16/4/19.html. Newburn, Tim. 2011. “There Is a Pressing Need for Credible Research into the Riots.” Guardian, September 5, 2011. Prasad, Raekha. 2011. “Rioter Profile: ‘I Saw an Opportunity to Take Stuff.’” Guardian, December 5, 2011.

CULTURAL POLITICS

The ENGLISH RIOTS of 2011

488

CULTURAL POLITICS

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

Riots, Communities and Victims Panel. 2012. Five Days in August: An Interim Report on the 2011 English Riots. London: Riots, Communities and Victims Panel. Rogers, Simon, and Lisa Evans. 2011. “UK Riots: The Demographics of Magistrate Cases and Convictions.” Guardian, August 18, 2011. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2010. Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation. Translated by Mario Wenning. New York: Columbia University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity. Stiegler, Bernard. 2011. “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism and the Libidinal Dis-economy.” New Formations, no. 72: 150– 61. Topping, Alexandra, and Fiona Bawdon. 2011. “‘It Was like Christmas’: A Consumerist Feast among the Summer Riots.” Guardian, December 5, 2011. Wiegratz, Jo¨rg. 2010. “Fake Capitalism? The Dynamics of Neoliberal Moral Restructuring and Pseudo-Development: The Case of Uganda.” Review of African Political Economy 37, no. 124: 123–37. Wieviorka, Michel. 2009. Violence: A New Approach. London: Sage. Winlow, Simon. 2001. Badfellas: Crime, Tradition, and New Masculinities. Oxford, UK: Berg. Winlow, Simon. 2012. “All That Is Sacred Is Profaned: Toward a Theory of Subjective Violence.” In New Directions in Criminological Theory, edited by Steve Hall and Simon Winlow, 199–215. London: Routledge. Winlow, Simon, and Steve Hall. 2006. Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture. Oxford, UK: Berg. Winlow, Simon, and Steve Hall. 2009a. “Living for the Weekend: Youth Identities in Northeast England.” Ethnography 10, no. 1: 91–113. Winlow, Simon, and Steve Hall. 2009b. “Retaliate First: Memory, Humiliation, and Male Violence.” Crime, Media, Culture 5, no. 3: 285–304. ˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2000. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of PolZ itical Ontology. London: Verso. ˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2001. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five InterZ ventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion. London: Verso. ˇ izˇek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Z Verso. ˇ izˇek, Slavoj. 2008a. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso. Z ˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2008b. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Z Profile Books. ˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso. Z

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722172

HORSEPOWER HUBRIS SUSANNE SLAVICK ABSTRACT Horsepower Hubris presents hand-painted digital prints that examine vehicles as both weapons and targets of war. Painted motifs and passages borrowed primarily from Persian miniatures combine with contemporary media images of wartime destruction, exposing what has been lost, offering a tentative restitution, and evoking empathic unsettlement. Images of warrior steeds and more contemporary vehicles of violence reflect our aggressive impulses and their consequences, revealing sad continuities between ancient and ongoing armed conflicts.

>

While the automobile and its many-wheeled cousins were instrumental to the industrial transformation of the twentieth century, their role in the twenty-first century continues to grow more complicated. The initial promise of mobility, status, and power has been offset by an insatiable hunger for oil, resulting in recurring corporate and manufacturing crises, spurring dependencies that threaten national autonomy and world

CULTURAL POLITICS

KEYWORDS: war, art, violence, horsepower, empathic unsettlement, restitution, Persian miniature, Khamsa, Shahnameh, digital collage, rubble, out of rubble, car bomb

489

Susanne Slavick is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She graduated from Yale, studied at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and earned her MFA at the Tyler School of Art in Rome and Philadelphia. Exhibited internationally, her work has been recognized through fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. In 2008 she premiered the R&R( . . . &R) project at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, that subsequently traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center and the McDonough Museum of Art. She is cofounder of 10 Years þ Counting, an online resource developed to commemorate a decade of senseless war, expose its costs, and promote a shift in our national priorities toward peace through the arts. Out of Rubble (2011) is her recent anthology and curatorial project of works by international artists responding to the aftermath of war. The related exhibit premiered in 2011 at SPACE Gallery in Pittsburgh and will travel through 2014, concluding at the University of Colorado Art Museum in Boulder. She is also curating Cutting Losses for the Allcott Gallery this fall at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and has written visual essays and articles for Cultural Heritage and Arts Review, Frontiers: A Journal

SUSANNE SLAVICK

490

CULTURAL POLITICS

of Women’s Studies, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, and AlterNet.

peace, as well as the environment. Machines on wheels can be seen variously as benign or malignant, as emblems, enforcers, or enemies of “freedom.” They may indulge our sense of leisure and luxury or function simply as conveyors. They protect us but also terrorize us during wartime. Alternately seductive and destructive, the automotive vehicle is exploited as both weapon and target in strategies of violence as a means to an end. Blown up, burned, or pieced back together, these vehicles are at the center of Horsepower Hubris, my series of works on paper that present the arrogance of power, dishonest rationales, and tragic follies of wars. Six years ago, I began working with contemporary images of wartime destruction found on the Internet: images posted on blogs, news feeds, and photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Webshots. My resulting series, titled R&R( . . . &R), tweaked the military abbreviation for “rest and relaxation,” converting it to words like “regret” and “regenerate.” I constructed these works by first digitally manipulating found photographs of devastation from across the former Islamic empire—Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and elsewhere— and then recombining them with a layer of hand-painted scenes

Figure 1 Recall, 2012. Archival digital print on Hahnemu ¨ hle paper, 11.5 £ 15.25 in. (Landscape based on The Hero Rustam Slays the Witch of the Cosmic Illusion, an illustration attributed to Qadıˆmıˆ by S. C. Welch, from ˆ h Tahma ˆ sp between the 1520s and 1540s. Fol. 120v. Firdawsı-’s Book of Kings, copied in Tabriz from Sha Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) Image courtesy of the artist

HORSEPOWER HUBRIS

491

Figure 3 Roam: Riding on Remorse, 2008. Gouache on archival digital print on Hahnemu ¨hle paper, 6 £ 10 in. ˆ d for Niza ˆ mıˆ’s Layli Collection of Mary Lou Arscott, Pittsburgh. (Camels based on illustration by Bihza ˆn in 1493 Khamsa, British Library.) Image courtesy of the artist and Manju

CULTURAL POLITICS

Figure 2 Stretch, 2009. Gouache on archival digital prints on Hahnemu ¨ hle paper, 72 £ 132 in., as six framed ˆ h Qalam, Tabriz, c. 1478–90, Library of the panels. (Angels derived from the School of Muhammad Siya Topkapı` Sarayı` Museum, Istanbul, H. 2153, fol. 5v.) Image courtesy of the artist

SUSANNE SLAVICK

492

CULTURAL POLITICS

Figure 4 Headlong, 2009. Gouache on archival digital print on Hahnemu ¨ hle paper, 15 £ 24 in. (Horsemen based ˆ n Abu ˆ-Sa‘id [r. 1317–35], on Firdawsı-’s Book of Kings manuscript copied in Tabriz for the Mongol ´l ı Kha ´s orientales, section islamique no. 7095, Muse ´e du Louvre, Paris. Altered photograph of car Antiquite bombed in Sri Lanka.) Image courtesy of the artist

drawn from Islamic art and architecture, mostly from the workshops ˆ d and the court arts of Safavid Iran. of Persian miniaturist Bihza Several images in R&R( . . . &R) focus on vehicles, both animal and mechanical. A painted caravan of sixteenth-century camels saunters behind the charred carcass of a bombed vehicle, oblivious to the human penchant for killing (Roam: Riding on Remorse, Figure 3). This process of altering violent images by hand is my attempt at “empathic unsettlement,” and at offering a tentative symbolic restitution that recognizes what has been decimated and replaces the anonymous, ashen monochrome of rubble with scenes of revival and cultivation.1 The R&R( . . . &R) project led me to a new series, Horsepower Hubris, which hones in on the sad machinery of war, from rocking horse to military transport (see Rocking Horse, Figure 6). In Replenish (Figure 5), a thirsty horse from a mid-sixteenth-century illuminaˆ mıˆ’s Khamsa (Quintet, tion for the twelfth-century Persian poet Niza or Five Poems) stands on the edge of a crater of a bombed bridge in Mosul, Iraq. Its empty saddle suggests a fallen warrior; its tail flows into the cavity like a river of blood. In another work, Headlong (Figure 4), I combine digitally collaged and hand-painted warriors ˜hna ˜meh, or Book of Kings. based on an illustration in Firdawsı¯-’s Sha This poetic epic of nearly sixty thousand verses tells the mythical and historical story of Greater Iran from the creation of the world up

HORSEPOWER HUBRIS

493

through the Islamic conquest of Persia in the seventh century. Dick Davis (2007: xv, xvi), in the introduction to his translation of the ˜hna ˜meh, describes how it speaks to the nature of “the good Sha man, the good hero . . . [who asks] not, ‘How do I win?’ but ‘How do I act well?’. . . [It ends as] a tragedy, the record of a deeply mourned ˜hna ˜meh civilization whose loss is seen as a disaster.” In the Sha illumination, the warriors accompany the hero Faramurz in scattering the troops of the king of Kabul. Headlong rearranges these figures to race around a contemporary image of a bombed car in Sri Lanka, another disaster where no one wins or acts well. Stretch (Figure 2), which is perhaps the most complex and yet explicit piece from the series, sutures together the remains of bombed vehicles from multiple locations, creating a macabre version of a stretch limo. The angels floating above are similar to those in an ˆ mıˆ’s Tale of the Turquoise Pavilion, where they illustration for Niza struggle with a seven-headed dragon in an allegory of the soul’s journey through the lower world. In my image, the bullet-ridden, incinerated, and twisted wreckage replaces the dragon, while the weightless angels grip ropes taut and straining from their exertion at hoisting this massive mechanical corpse. They exhibit no hubris— only humility, signaling that we must persist and overcome even our

CULTURAL POLITICS

Figure 5 Replenish, 2010. Gouache on archival digital print on Hahnemu ¨ hle paper, 10 £ 14 in. (Horse based on ˆ mıˆ, mid-sixteenth-century Safavid Khusraw Discovers Shirin Bathing in a Pool, from a Khamsa by Niza dynasty from Shiraz, Iran. Altered photograph of a bridge in Mosul, Iraq.) Image courtesy of the artist

SUSANNE SLAVICK

Figure 6 Rocking Horse, 2010. Gouache on archival digital print on Hahnemu ¨hle paper, 12 £ 13.5 in. (Horseman drawn from Horseman and Groom, attributable to Qadıˆmıˆ Qazvin, c. 1560, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, no. 1958.62.2. Altered photograph of southern Iraq.) Image courtesy of the artist

best efforts to destroy. Perhaps their struggle mirrors our own in dealing with the proliferation and aftermath of violence.

NOTE 1. “Empathic unsettlement” is Dominick LaCapra’s term as discussed in Bennett 2005: 8.

494

CULTURAL POLITICS

REFERENCES Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Davis, Dick. 2007. Introduction to Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, by Abolqasem Ferdowsi. Translated by Dick Davis. New York: Penguin.

CULTURAL POLITICS

Volume 8, Issue 3

q 2012 Duke University Press

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1722181

BOOK REVIEW

BETWEEN WAR and PLAY JAMES ASH Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture, by Patrick Crogan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, $75.00/£48.00 (hardcover), $25.00/£16.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8166-5334-8, 978-0-8166-5335-5

495

James Ash is a lecturer in media at Northumbria University. He received his PhD in human geography at the University of Bristol in 2009. His thesis investigated practices of video game design and use. In his current research he is concerned with developing postphenomenological accounts of body-technology relations. His work on video games and technology has been published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Environment and Planning A. More information about his research is available at his website, www.jamesash.co.uk

CULTURAL POLITICS

>

In Gameplay Mode, Patrick Crogan sets out to explore the “military technoscientific legacy” (xii) that has had what he terms a “profound impact on the development of computer games” (xii). Through the course of the book, Crogan investigates this phenomenon through a historical account of the emergence of computational simulation, as well as an analysis of a series of contemporary video games. The book’s main thesis is that all video games operate through a shared logic or “gameplay mode” that revolves around the simulation of conflict, a simulation that in turn attempts to close down or foreclose contingency through a “deterrent anticipatory logic” (170). However, rather than simply critique video games, Crogan argues that exploring these simulations and the logics that underlie them is the first step in being able to recognize and respond to such modes. Crogan is not alone in investigating the close legacy between the development of video games and military technoscience. The past several years have seen a number of books on the subject, including Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, by Nick DyerWitheford and Greig de Pueter (2009); From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games, by Ed Halter (2006); and

496

CULTURAL POLITICS

BOOK REVIEW

Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, by James Der Derian (2001). What separates this text from those is Crogan’s close attention to the mechanics, technologies, and skills involved in particular video games, which he terms a “postphenomenological” approach (xxiv). To develop this approach the book draws on literature from new media and game studies and on contemporary theorists such as Bernard Stiegler and Paul Virilio. This is helpful in the sense that it allows Crogan to deal with the specificities of games as a medium—something that other books exploring the relationship between war and gaming tend to overlook in favor of considering video games as an extension or development of cinema. However, this focus on media and gaming is also inhibiting in the sense that a broad range of literatures on anticipation, governance, and militarism are not dealt with, and taking this approach would no doubt broaden the appeal and range of the book to a wider audience. Chapter 1 offers a general history of military simulation and the emergence of the relationship between vision and anticipation that military technology has enabled. The book then moves on to examine the relationship between video game theory and practice, arguing that one should pay attention to the specific materialities involved in video game play. Chapter 3 examines how space is constructed as a form of logistics in flight simulators. Following this discussion, chapter 4 links the concept of space and logistics to the question of narrative. In war video games, narrative becomes goal oriented. In doing so, events are experienced purely through the means of anticipation necessary to overcome them. Chapter 5 offers convincing readings of the kind of game mode prevalent in first-person shooting games whereby “the future is brought ‘under control’ by being determined ‘strictly in terms of the present’” (Crogan quotes from Weber 2005: 21). Chapter 6 sets out an interesting and original account of online games and game sociality, developing Martin Heidegger’s account of spatiality from Being and Time. Here online games are understood to encourage forms of individual attainment, even within a group or communal system: “Gameplay is built on the base of the isolated input/output node. Group play involves the coordination of fragments toward a higher order of particularization of the whole” (124). Such an account offers a useful alternative from the now prevalent narrative of virtual communities as whole, interconnected spaces and demonstrates how the logic of game play mode operates even in spaces that require the cultivation of social relations. Chapter 7 also offers a useful corrective to accounts that posit all games as stifling or weakening creative or critical thought in relation to contemporary geopolitical situations, through an analysis of alternative games. There are a number of areas, however, that the book could have expanded on. First, the terms virtual, virtual reality, and virtualization are present throughout the work, but there is never a clear sense as

BOOK REVIEW

to what is meant by these terms. While chapter’s 2 and 6 discuss the possibility of thinking through the complex materiality of games, this approach is never fully developed. For example, Crogan does offer an account of Heideggerian spatiality in chapter 6 through the concept of “deseverance,” but such a phenomenological account is not developed and applied to the other technologies discussed in the book. Second, the book offers a limited discussion of corporeality and embodiment. This treatment is interesting considering the book’s invocation of philosophers such as Stiegler who are concerned with the corporeality and biology of memory and sense perception. Indeed, Crogan goes as far as to invoke Stiegler’s account of epiphylogenesis—the capturing and exchange of memory between bodies and technologies. However, this process is not modified or developed in relation to particular examples. Taking into consideration the ways that bodily capacities are drawn on, developed, and modified in video game play would have added an extra dimension to the book’s account of game play mode. Of course, one might say that such an account was not the aim of the work. In this case, tracing the logics of preemption invoked in video game play into the sensorium of the player might offer productive avenues for future research. Overall, Crogan’s account of the “transductive” relationship between military technoscience and video game development is compelling, and the examples and case studies developed in the book are interesting. Video games are undoubtedly shaped by the military logics of simulation that preceded them. However, it is important to stress that games alone do not create militarized subjects. Gaming is an active practice in which players have a degree of control over the action on-screen. Future work needs to pay attention to these practices in order to understand how players respond to, negotiate, and contest these games and the implicit logics they attempt to communicate.

497

Der Derian, James. 2001. Virtuous War: Mapping the MilitaryIndustrial-Media-Entertainment Network. Boulder, CO: Westview. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Pueter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Halter, Ed. 2006. From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Weber, Samuel. 2005. Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking. New York: Fordham University Press.

CULTURAL POLITICS

REFERENCES