Symbolism 2020: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 9783110716962, 9783110716719

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Heinz Antor ‧ Susan Bassnett ‧ Daniela Carpi ‧ Marc Chénetier ‧ Cristina Giorcelli Yasmine Gooneratne ‧ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ‧ María Herrera-Sobek Linda Hutcheon ‧ Eva-Marie Kroeller ‧ Francisco A. Lomelí ‧ Susana Onega Frédéric Regard ‧ Kiernan Ryan ‧ Ronald Shusterman ‧ Stefanos Stefanides Toshiyuki Takamiya ‧ Richard H. Weisberg ‧ Walther Chr. Zimmerli

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 20 Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer Assistant Editor Marlena Tronicke

ISBN 978-3-11-071671-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-071696-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-071705-1 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943605 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors The present volume marks the twentieth anniversary of Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics. Since its inaugural issue in 2000, the annual has made a distinguished contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on symbolic practices of signification across the arts and beyond. From 2005 onwards, each volume has had, at its core, a special thematic focus on specific symbols as well as forms and functions of symbolic signification. For the present anniversary, the editors had arranged for a celebratory conference at the University of Bayreuth, where the contributors to this volume and others were to present and debate papers on ‘symbols of the future’ and ‘the future of symbolism’. It was our wish to enter into Symbolism’s third decade in a spirit of conviviality and with a vigorous sense for the relevance of its key concern. Invitees included long-standing members of the editorial board and past contributors as well as colleagues whose research across various fields, both in the humanities and beyond, explores the efficacy of symbolic practices in culture and the study of nature. The symposium, scheduled for late March 2020, had to be canceled owing to the then incipient coronavirus pandemic, which still holds the world in its grip as we pen these lines six months later. We take comfort from being able to convene at least in print, as this volume collects some of the papers intended for the Bayreuth symposium. Their shared tenor, we believe, is testimony that symbolism and symbolic practice continue to be central to all forms of human life, and that their study affords abundant insight into salient specificities of human societies, artistic and academic practice, and conceptions of time and the world at large. As they gauge the theoretical and practical implications of symbols and symbolism of, and in, the future, the essays in this volume provide a more than sound basis for Symbolism’s next decade. The editors would like to offer their special thanks to all contributors who delivered their manuscripts under particularly trying circumstances. The publisher, de Gruyter, facilitated our endeavor to produce this anniversary volume on the future as closely in touch with the present as possible, and we gratefully acknowledge, as in past years, the support of Stella Diedrich in particular. Likewise, as for several years now, Marlena Tronicke has been a reliably conscientious and efficient assistant editor. Finally, we thank Charlotte Adenau and Elisabeth Scholz, who assisted in copyediting, as did Benedikt Wittenberg, who also expertly compiled the index. Rüdiger Ahrens University of Würzburg

Florian Klaeger University of Bayreuth

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-202

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

Contents Foreword from the Editors

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Special Focus: Symbols of the Future. The Future of Symbolism Corresponding editors: Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer Introduction: Symbols of the Future. The Future of Symbolism

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Reinold Schmücker Symbol’s Risks: A Note on the Interrelationship of Art and the Use of Symbols 19 Jan B. Gordon ‘Symbolic Futures’ as Investment

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Michael Hauhs and Holger Lange On the Future Role of Symbols in Environmental Modelling

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Susana Onega The Symbolization of the Female Body in Western Culture from Ancient Greece to the Transmodern Period 69 Ivo Ritzer Genre and Utopia, or 48 Hrs. for the Future: Perspectives in Media Aesthetics 89 Patrick Gill The Past Is Immutable: Technology’s Symbolism and the Future in Black Mirror 111 Nicholas Shrimpton “Players and Painted Stage”: Symbolizing the Future in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah 123

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Axel Stähler Herzlian Matrix: Theme Parks, Promised Lands, and Simulacra

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Nilufer E. Bharucha Reading the Future through the Past: Symbolism in Amitav Ghosh’s Anthropogenic Fiction 167 Daniela Carpi The Cyborg, Symbol of the Evolution of the Human, or The Human of the Future 191 Janet M. Wilson “An ocean of thought”: AI, Robots, and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and People Like You (2019) 205

Book Reviews Ina Batzke Sarah C. Bishop. Undocumented Storytellers: Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement 223 Denise Burkhard Sandra Dinter. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

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Stefanie Mueller Johannes Riquet. The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics 235 Jesper Reddig Lyndsey Stonebridge. Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees 241 List of Contributors Index

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Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer

Introduction: Symbols of the Future. The Future of Symbolism At the beginning of Ali Smith’s Winter (2017), the second instalment in the recently finished ‘Seasonal quartet,’ nature blogger Art plays a search engine game: “He is typing random words into Google to see if they come up automatically in frequent search as dead or not. Most of them do, and if they don’t immediately come up as dead they pretty much always will if you type [word] plus is plus the letter d.”1 This produces the novel’s hibernal opening sequence: God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. [This list goes on for a while. Then:] Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. (W, 3–4, original emphasis)

It later emerges that this is foreshadowing. The flower-ghost in question is the impression left on a page from Cymbeline in a certain copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio (the eponymous ‘Rosebud’ in Toronto’s Thomas Fisher library): It’s the bud of a rose. Well. It’s the mark left on the page by what was once the bud of a rose, the shape of the rosebud on its long neck. And it’s nothing but a mark, a mark made on words by a flower. Who knows by whom. Who knows when. It looks like nothing. It looks like maybe someone made a stain

The work in this volume evolved in the context of the projects “Literary Modelling and Energy Transition (LMET)”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in its programme “Off the Trodden Paths”, and “Cosmopoetic form-knowledge: astronomy, poetics, and ideology in England, 1500–1800”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 429827737. The editors gratefully acknowledge this support. 1 Ali Smith, Winter (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017): 47, emphasis in the original. Further references in the text, abbreviated as W. The quartet’s final instalment, Summer, was published in August 2020, after this volume went to press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-001

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with water, like an oily smudge. Until you look properly at it. Then there’s the line of the neck and the rosebud shape at the end of it. (W, 212, original emphasis)

In western culture, the rose is one of the most common symbols of love. This symbol undergoes several transformations in Winter: the rose in question is young, a mere bud. It is pressed between the pages of a book for preservation – which also means it was never allowed to bloom. Its book-sarcophagus happens to be one that is also preserved, against the odds, for centuries. The impression strikes Lux, a diasporic from former Yugoslavia, as “the most beautiful thing I have ever seen” (W, 212). Art, looking at a digital reproduction of the image later, sees “the ghost of a flower not yet open on its stem, the real thing long gone, but look, still there, the mark of the life of it reaching across the words on the page for all the world like a footpath that leads to the lit tip of candle” (W, 319). It is a trace, there and not there, life in death and death in life, without known origin or destination; free from intention or fixity of meaning. And yet, amongst “the furious winter’s rages” (Cymbeline, 4.2) it represents the hope of change: a ‘past future,’ unrealized yet preserved (and also, perhaps, unrealizable because preserved), which haunts the present with intimations of what might have been, and might still be. Symbols fly thick; rose/flower, book/words, footpath/road, candle/fire create a matrix between the ephemeral and the attempt to capture its essence, if only through the symbols themselves. In a novel that also features visions, by Art’s mother Sophia, of an (as yet) inexplicable floating child’s head that haunts her around Christmas-time, Smith’s point is clear: it is impossible for us not to see symbols, but it can also be very difficult to determine their meaning. In bed and literally depressed by the head’s weight, Sophia contemplates the faces of saints in medieval paintings and sculptures razed by Reformation zealots “in whatever self-righteousness of fury, whatever intolerant ideology of the day” (W, 109). She concludes that such literal defacement was meant as a warning. Take a look at what your saints are truly made of. It was the demonstration that everything symbolic will be revealed as a lie, everything you revere nothing but burnt matter, broken stone, as soon as it meets whatever shape time’s contemporary cudgel takes. But it worked the other way round too. They looked, those vandalized saints and statues, more like statements of survival than of destruction. They were proof of a new state of endurance, mysterious, headless, faceless, anonymous. (W, 110; original emphasis)

The very assault on symbols – which here seem to signify not only signification as such, but signification of some real, numinous truth – only asserts their power. Symbols – once clear, definite, inspirational – acquire more, and new,

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symbolic force as they are broken. In a world haunted by the eternal return of destructive fury, the symbol remains a challenge to our faculty of making sense of things in the face of senseless violence and the ravages of time. In Winter’s sequel, Spring (2019), we encounter Florence, a twelve-yearold girl capable of effecting change against all odds. She charms train conductors into giving her free rides; she walks unfazed into immigration removal centers and shames their administrators into treating their charges more humanely; and she reminds the hard-nosed detention guard Brittany of what it means to live soulfully. As they compare their favorite seasons in a highly meta-referential passage, Florence opts for spring and Brittany (Brit for short, poignantly) for winter: You’d be the end of me, Brit said. You’d kill me off. No, you’d make me be possible, the girl [. . .] said.2

This exchange illustrates that even as time-worn symbols as the seasons3 are capable of ambiguity and re-definition. Symbolism facilitates communication across boundaries of age and ethnicity (otherwise rather entrenched in Spring, as in Winter and Autumn), but it also highlights differences in world-view. As such, it crystallizes the problem of the ‘burden of the past’ that hampers negotiations of futures at the same time as it enables them. Spring has more to say on the topic of symbolism. Florence also writes prose, and one of her pieces offers a version of the myth of the scapegoat4: in midwinter, a frightened community “decided that the only way to make life come back to the world was to choose a young woman from among the maidens and sacrifice her as a gift to the gods by making her dance herself to death” (S, 225–226). The chosen girl, however, refuses: I’m not a symbol, she said. The dance stopped.

2 Ali Smith, Spring (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019): 201. Further references in the text, abbreviated as S. 3 Cp. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1957): 160 and passim. 4 The symbolic act of scapegoating is familiar from Leviticus 16, and the classic exposition of its various anthropological functions is James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion IV: The Scapegoat, third ed. (London: Macmillan, 1920). According to Frazer, “the main object of the ceremony [. . .] is simply to effect a total clearance of all the ills that have been infesting a people” (224).

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The music stopped. The villagers gasped out loud. She said it louder. I’m not your symbol. Go and lose yourself or find yourself in some other story. Whatever you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it by making me or anyone like me do some dance for you. (S, 227)

Ritual – based, like symbolism, on repetition – relies on the acceptance of the symbolic function. To escape from repetition, to break the patterns of the past, here means to reject compartmentalization and prejudice. Another of Florence’s writings, quoted immediately preceding this one (S, 223–224), constitutes a collage of vulgar cyber-bullying against what is clearly a young woman or girl. It reminds readers immediately of the infamous online denunciations against Greta Thunberg, the highly symbolic figurehead of the Fridays for Future movement.5 Thus, the subsequent renunciation of symbolic function comments on the way symbolism works to limit and restrict meaning. As the chosen scapegoat-girl tells her elders, who ask her to “Tell us a bit about yourself”: As you well know, [. . .] that’d be the first step towards me vanishing altogether [. . .]. Because as soon as you all hear me say anything about myself, I’ll stop meaning me. I’ll start meaning you. [. . .] My mother told me, they’ll want you to tell them your story, the girl said. My mother said, don’t. You are not anyone’s story. (S, 229, original emphasis)

If the first three quarters of this quartet are anything to go by, symbolism is not dead. (As of May 2020, the Google autocomplete game agrees.) Against the copious cultural casualties of the present moment, Smith shores symbols from the past. They remind us of who we are and can be, of how we make sense of the world, of how we communicate and create shared meanings. They are not fixed in their meanings: they may transform into new things, “something rich and strange,” as the Shakespearean riff in the quartet’s first novel, Autumn, has it.6 Acceptance of some definite symbolic meaning is precisely not required any more to affirm

5 See, for instance, Suyin Haynes, “‘Now I Am Speaking to the Whole World’: How Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Got Everyone to Listen,” Time (May 16, 2019), (acc. 5 June 2020). 6 Ali Smith, Autumn (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016); further references in the text, abbreviated as A. Aptly, the phrase is never quoted properly, but always already transformed: in the misremembered “Into something rich and – [. . .] Rich and poor,” muddling Shakespeare’s Tempest with Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (198); and as “something new and strange” (A, 72, 184).

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membership in a community (as was the function of ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ symbolism7) – a new community may emerge from the very rejection of a traditional symbolic code. Indeed, the very rejection of symbolic function may be central to effecting change. Symbols may be dead in life, like the rosebud, and they may offer a vision of life in (social, moral, aesthetic) death. In this sense, Smith explores the seasons as both symbolic representations of change and of stability – and thus as the contested ground between the classical world-views of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The idea of some ideal past’s ‘return’ or restoration is at work in the very notion of a canon of fixed symbols (what was true once remains true always), and it is also at the heart of current, vague ideas of nostalgia described by Zygmunt Bauman as ‘retrotopian.’8 To effect a truly different future, on the other hand, requires the realization (and communication) that fundamental systemic change is required, as recent social movements such as Fridays for Future, Me Too and Black Lives Matter have made very plain. Smith renders these contrasting views of the future9 – between the “never been or ever been”10 – poignantly in the symbol of the seasons. Perhaps, she suggests, deep ideological divisions and systemic injustices such as those tearing apart the United Kingdom of the ‘Seasonal quartet’ can only be overcome by a revision of symbolic codes – a revision that appreciates the world-making power of symbolic representation,11 but that at the same time acknowledges that a certain rigidity inheres in all symbols that must, and can, be renegotiated. From this protean nature, symbols derive their potential for haunting: the symbol preserves the memory of its former meaning and allows readers to realize that they can realize meaning in a new way, too – signification can be actualized differently, but no less meaningfully. The symbol

7 For the terminology, cp. Austin Warren and René Wellek, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956): 189–190. Warren and Wellek suggest, like many others, the difference between “the ‘private symbolism’ of the modern poet and the widely intelligible symbolism of past poets” (189). The wide intelligibility of ‘traditional’ symbolism is rooted, of course, in the unity of the reception community, such as the one emerging from Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [1948], trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953). 8 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity P, 2017). Cp. also Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 9 Cp. Heike Paul, “Introduction,” in Critical Terms in Futures Studies, ed. id. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 1–4. 10 This phrase from Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia is used to describe the “outer poles” of “considerations of the future” in J. K. Barret, Untold Futures. Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 2016): 3. 11 Cp. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).

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provides a link between past, present, and future. It is open and polysemic, allowing for very different actualizations depending on the individual ‘reader.’ In this sense, symbols are key agents in “the three fundamental aspects of futures studies – the inter-connectedness of past, present and future, the plurality of options for the future, and the importance of the human input into [. . .] the creation of the future.”12 These aspects are rendered, in Smith’s quartet, in the character Daniel Gluck, connecting many of the plot-lines in Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Gluck is a centenarian German-English Jew escaped from Nazi persecution but detained in a British camp for ‘enemy aliens’ during the war, and a song-writer and pop-art aficionado who inspires an appreciation of life and beauty in the people he meets: his former neighbor and protégé, art historian Elisabeth Demand in Autumn; the haunted businesswoman Sophia Cleves in Winter, for whom he recreates Blake’s Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car (including the allegorical figure of Hope, or “Beautiful happy hope,” as he puts it [W, 262]); the screenwriter Patricia ‘Paddy’ Hardiman in Spring, who calls him “the most hopeful man I’ve ever met” (S, 59); and in Art (likely Daniel’s and Sophia’s son), whom he introduces, however unwittingly, to his future partner Elisabeth in Summer. Daniel represents an entire catastrophic century, and he inspires in the present, for the future. Those he meets realize that they can make more of their lives; and he reminds them of the importance of art for opening minds and hearts. Daniel – his name replete with associations of politics, semiotics, exile, and apocalypse in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions – is at once symbol and the opposite of symbolic for the plurality of his ‘meanings.’ In this function, he moves as easily between the individual novels as between the domains of the public and the private, art and politics, that form the central concern of the ‘Seasonal quartet’. It is the ambiguity and plurality of Daniel’s meanings, the richness of his experience, that creates hope for the future – the hope that in the face of negativity, there might be a human connection.13 Whatever sense people make of their encounters with him, they come away more hopeful. He is open to reading and re-reading.14 12 Jane Page, “Symbolizing the Future – Towards a Futures’ Iconography,” Futures 24.10 (1992): 1056–1063, 1056. 13 This is the gist of a letter Daniel retains from his lost sister, which situates their fate and all human relationships sub specie aeternitatis: “Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eye, that’s all” (A, 190 [italics removed]). 14 A similar effect to this personification can be observed in Autumn’s treatment of genre, which is also held up as a traditional, ossified form of knowledge with symbolic import that must be re-negotiated in the present to remain relevant, and indeed to produce the possibility

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Western cultural history has gone through phases of a preoccupation with the past, such as the rediscovery of Greek and Roman antiquity in the late medieval and ‘Renaissance’ periods; with the historicist turn in the nineteenth century; or in the overwhelming historical burden generated by fascism, the holocaust and the atrocities of the Second World War for the second half of the twentieth century. Such preoccupations with the past did not exclude considerations of the future, sometimes in parallel or as counter-movements. This is instanced by utopian, future-oriented visions which could be religiously informed or secular constructs of a better society and a better life, such as the ongoing enlightenment project of various progress narratives, from technological advances to Hegelian and Marxist projections and the futurismo of Italian provenance. It is, however, only in recent years that a veritable “turn” towards the future in cultural and political discussions as well as in scholarly research can be identified. This apparent sea-change in overall orientation in many parts of the world is a veritable turn from looking to the past for insight into individual or group identities, of researching where we come from to find out who we are, to looking towards the future for dealing with the same questions: individuals, groups and whole nations now define themselves at least as much by who or what they want to become as they turn towards a glorious past and the “invention of traditions”.15 Now, the future seems to be the “foreign country” where “they do things differently”,16 and which is open to reinvention but, where it is seen as “empty”, it is, as Adam and Groves point out, also “there for the taking, open to commodification, colonization and control”17; in short, we come to the question of who owns the future. As the late John Urry summarizes in his magisterial study What Is the Future?: Thinking and anticipating the future are essential for almost all organisations and societies. Futures are on most contemporary agendas – many hold the future to be a better guide to what to do in the present than what happened in the past. States, corporations,

of new, more hopeful futures. See Florian Klaeger, “Harmonie ist eine Strategie: Gattungs- und Formwissen in Ali Smiths ‘Brexit-Roman’ Autumn (2016),” in Transformationen Europas in der Literatur und Ästhetik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts: Zur Ästhetik und Wissensgeschichte der interkulturellen Moderne, ed. Reto Rössler, Wolfgang Johann, Iulia Patrut (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019): 371–88. 15 See, seminally, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). 16 “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is the famous opening sentence of the “Prologue” in J.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953), much quoted by historians, as in David Lowenthal’s title The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985). 17 Barbara Adam and Chris Groves, Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 13.

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universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future; that foreign country is now everywhere.18

In academia, a flurry of research has started in various disciplines displaying a preoccupation with analyzing the future much as earlier generations had analyzed the past. Although the ‘Hayden White of the future’ is still to emerge, a host of studies have attempted to get a new grip on the concept of the ‘future’ in our current cultural context.19 The present volume aims to contribute to this ongoing research on concepts of the future from a specific angle. It focuses on symbols and how they have represented as much as informed and shaped concepts of the future. Symbolic practices are arguably the very basis of all human relations to the outside world. As Ernst Cassirer put it, “[h]uman knowledge is by its very nature symbolic knowledge”, and humans, as the animal symbolicum, are set apart from other signusing creatures through their symbolic practices.20 Across the humanities and also outside them, theorists have employed the concept of symbolism to great effect. Since ‘symbolism’ is understood differently across disciplines, it is worthwhile to reflect on the disciplinary ‘pasts’ or traditions informing scholarly attitudes towards symbolic practices. Etymologically, from the Greek root symballein, symbols signify a ‘putting or throwing together’ – however, the nature of what is understood to be joined in the symbolon (sign), and just how sign and signifier are linked, vary widely across disciplines. For instance, in mathematics and computer science, a symbol is simply any sign used to represent something else; in law, ‘symbolic’ delivery occurs when parties exchange some document of title to goods instead of the goods themselves. In literary studies, based on the terminology of ancient rhetoric, symbols are understood to be concrete, culture-specific signs referencing some absent meaning, with a relation to their signified that is dynamic and necessary and must be perpetually re-negotiated.21 All these

18 John Urry, What Is the Future? (Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity P, 2016), 2. 19 Apart from Urry, What is the Future?, and Adam and Groves, Future Matters, see also Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (London and New York: Verso, 2019); Peter J. Bowler, A History of the Future. Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man: With a New Afterword [1992] (New York: Free P, 2006); Nick Montfort, The Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2017); and Ziauddin Sardar, Future (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013). 20 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture [1944] (New Haven, C.T.: Yale UP, 1992): 57. 21 Cp. Klaus Semsch, “Symbol, Symbolismus,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2009), 9:298–313, 298–299.

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conventions, from the general to the specific, have an immediate relevance to the future in that symbols thus defined seek to ‘presence’ something that is absent. True, this is a fundamental semiotic process (hence the relevance of symbolic practices as such), but in contemplating the future, it is also inevitable, since the future is by definition unavailable in the present and can only be referenced symbolically. This highlights a crucial aspect of symbols of the future: they are creative and productive in that they ‘make the future.’ As Nick Montfort writes, the term ‘future-making,’ that is, “the act of imagining and consciously trying to contribute to [the future],” can help “distinguish a potentially productive perspective on the future (let’s build a better future) from a less productive one (let’s predict what will happen, for instance, so we can react quickly by anticipating it).”22 As environmental and social movements like those mentioned above garner global support, it is obvious that not only our future-making itself is profoundly relevant, but also the ways in which we talk and think: in other words, our symbols of the future. As discursive elements, they determine what is ‘say-able’ and ‘think-able’ about the future. As semiotic legacies of the past, they allow us to gauge ‘futures past’23 and to speculate about the ways our own conceptions of the future are rhetorically determined. Jane Page has poignantly described the functions of symbols for futures studies: First, symbols constitute significant indicators of the outlooks and aspirations of the cultures which generate them. By looking closely at them we can go some way to understanding past and present cultural attitudes and concerns and, in so doing, understand the origins of our own outlooks. Symbols have an important role to play in this regard. They can constitute a significant forum in which outlooks can be extended and explored, where alternative viewpoints can be developed and trialled, and where new or modified outlooks can be forged.24

The products of such discourse and explorations are, of course, multiple, resulting in a plethora of (un/desirable, im/plausible, im/possible) ‘futures’ of the present, rather than one foreclosed future in the singular. It in this sense that, according to Ziauddin Sardar, “futures studies are ‘futureless’”: since we can have no true knowledge of the future, the impact of all futures explorations can only be meaningfully assessed in the present. We can look back on predictions and

22 Montfort, The Future, 4. 23 For Koselleck, the central hypothesis of his Futures Past was “that in differentiating past and future, or (in anthropological terms) experience and expectation, it is possible to grasp something like historical time” (Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time [1989] [New York: Columbia UP, 2004]: 3). 24 Page, “Symbolizing the Future,” 1062–1063.

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forecasts and see how right or how far off the mark they were. But we cannot assess how right or wrong they actually are from the future itself. Thus the real relevance of futures studies lies in the present. All futures activities have a direct impact on the present: they can change peoples’ perceptions, make them aware of dangers and opportunities ahead, motivate them to do specific things [. . .].25

Thus, the way futures are ‘presenced’ through symbols does affect the horizon of possibilities, and so, it has a manifest effect on both the sense of the future (s) in the present and on whatever future may develop out of it. Given the cultural and historical variability and contingency of symbols, disciplinary practices and concepts, too, must be accounted for. By way of illustration, suffice it to point to the similarities and differences between two philosophical symbols: on the one hand, Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history,’ propelled ever further from Paradise on the winds of progress and unable to avert his gaze as the rubble of history piles up behind him; and on the other, the West African symbol of the Sankofa, a bird twisting its neck backwards as it carries forward (and carefully watches) an egg on its back. While both winged creatures move towards the future, their attitudes are vastly different: in its passive suffering, Benjamin’s angel puts the emphasis on the relationship between traumatic past and haunted present, with the future unknown and unknowable; while to the active Sankofa bird, the past also holds something precious to be salvaged and preserved for the future.26 Both are philosophical symbols highly pregnant in religious and mythological terms, and with great cultural currency. Clearly, the use of one rather than the other signals very different conceptions of the future. Or, to give another example, the very idea of ‘trauma studies’ suggests a ‘wound’ sustained by an individual or collective that constrains them in their options for future development. The underlying symbolic understanding, then, is that of a physical maiming – a concept that is also central to disciplines studying ‘crises’ of various kinds (e.g., of politics, markets, migration movements, academic disciplines, or the climate), as ‘crisis’ refers to a phase in medical treatment. However, in both cases, the integrity of the suffering body is highly contested – who, exactly, is suffering from a national trauma, and who from a discipline’s crisis of identity? More to the point, who is ‘in’ a refugee crisis, and what does that mean, specifically? While past and present are similarly conceptualized in a negative fashion as jeopardizing or

25 Sardar, Future, 51. 26 See Susan Arndt, “Dream*hoping Memory into FutureS: Reading Resistant Narratives about Maafa by Employing FutureS as a Category of Analysis,” Journal of the African Literature Association 11:1 (2017), 3–27, 7–10.

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even foreclosing the future, ‘crisis’ also implies an imminent decision that can (potentially) open up options.27 Both put the ‘patient’ body, whose ever it is, in a position marked by a lack of agency – an agency that is reserved for others who are more fortunate (the physically hale) and, perhaps, better educated (the physician administering the treatment). For the period most closely associated with the term ‘Symbolism,’ i.e., the era of modernism in the arts, the cultural specificity of concepts of the future is well-documented: avant-gardism, Dadaism, expressionism and surrealism were all concerned with making a new art to move beyond the constraints of the past and the present. This desire was expressed perhaps most strikingly in the movement of Futurism. It illustrates well how ‘futures past’ must be viewed as rooted in a very particular, and by no means self-evident, array of practices, objects, and concepts. Futurism produced a contingent ideological formation we have come to consider as characteristic of the period itself. One of its key symbols, the motorcar, united the Futurists’ obsession with technology, metropolitan life, youth, and progress. With its aggressive denigration of all things past, Futurism is now an inevitable part of the history of modern aesthetics, not least because its visions so spectacularly failed to manifest. A more recent phenomenon, but one that has generated a similarly vibrant body of research, is that of astrofuturism, a term that describes the decades following the Second World War, when “it was widely believed that the future was destined to play out in outer space.”28 This particular vision of the future, with the Saturn V rocket as its most abiding symbol, is often said to have come to an end with the publication of the Club of Rome’s report on The Limits to Growth (1972). However, it has recently received news coverage again in the context of the Apollo 11 Moon landing’s fiftieth anniversary. Revisiting the astrofuturist visions of an earlier generation and their central symbol prompted new questions for our own. Given that the rocket, in retrospect, seems less like a symbol of collective endeavor and scientific progress and more like one of reckless daring and a staggeringly blind trust in technology, it prompted questions about current experiments with Artificial Intelligence: in what sense, pundits were asking, is humanity still irreplaceable by technology? Are

27 Florian Klaeger, “Crisis / Krise.” Future Migration. Network for Cultural Diversity (2018). . 28 Alexander C. T. Geppert, “European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age,” in Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century, ed. Alexander C. T. Geppert. 2nd ed. (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 3–28, 16. On the concept, see Alexandra Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” in Critical Terms in Futures Studies, ed. Heike Paul (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 35–43.

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human beings more than flawed imitations of more perfect machines? What is the relative value of ‘creative heroism’ versus ‘reliable algorithms’?29 In this way, the astrofuturist vision and its key symbol underwent an ‘reoccupation’ (Umbesetzung) in the Blumenbergian sense that “different statements can be understood as answers to identical questions”30 – or more accurately, that identical statements can be understood as answers to different questions. Viewed in this light, symbols of the future emerge not only as historical and discursive ‘hauntings’ of the present, but also as abiding cultural phenomena capable of redefinition and revival.31 Symbols reveal fundamental, but otherwise unspoken assumptions about the future. As discursive products and agents, they are both symptoms and sources of conceptions of futures, historical and present. Especially with regard to the past, such symbols can be valuable indicators of cultural mind-sets. They can reveal how certain futures that did not manifest were imagined, and under what constraints such imagination occurred. In the field of history, the study of ‘losers’ and failed revolutionary movements has been highly productive. In literary history, utopian and dystopian narratives are obvious examples, with literary studies offering a specialized set of analytical tools for their study. A key concern of the history of science is to examine past visions of the future barred by scientific developments (or non-developments). Finally, the history of law provides ample evidence of visions of the future that societies aimed to enable (or prevent from happening) through legal regulation. All of these traditions may be seen as attempts at, or objects of, ‘archaeologies of the future.’32 As the work of Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin and many others has shown, the production of knowledge has a key social component, including the way scientists communicate with each other. Hence, the directions in which disciplines develop, just like the nature of their change, are determined not least by the way their futures are variously envisaged and articulated. This is a second central aspect of the volume. We hope

29 Cp. Sibylle Anderl, “Die Erde klein am Horizont: 50 Jahre Mondlandung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (20 July, 2019) . 30 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [1976], trans. Willard R. Trask (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985): 466. 31 Cp. Jaques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994); Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014). 32 Cp. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005).

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that from discussions of ‘symbols of the future’ across academic disciplines and domains of social discourse, fruitful stimuli may be garnered for future interdisciplinary work. Such symbols within given disciplines might be individuals (e.g., Nicolaus Copernicus; Marie Curie; Donald Trump); objects (e.g., the quantum computer; the e-reader; the blockchain); procedures (e.g., seeing/envisioning; speaking/foretelling; calculating/simulating); concepts (e.g., distant reading; artificial intelligence; virtual reality); or something else altogether. Indeed, the very occasion on which the papers collected here were to have been presented – a cancelled future, as it were – was a symposium to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Symbolism at the end of March 2020 in Bayreuth. The reason for its cancellation was the Coronavirus pandemic that engulfed the world and has since been embraced as a symbol of the future by pundits across the political spectrum, and has generated its own polysemic symbol, the face mask. Whether such symbols signify a good future or bad, they are products and producers of discursive change, facilitating communication and regulating it at the same time. We are convinced that reflecting on these conditions of discourse is salutary both from an intra- and interdisciplinary perspective. Quite consistent, then, with what has been argued above concerning Ali Smith’s ‘Seasonal quartet,’ symbolism emerges as a medium for negotiating ‘futures’ in the present, and as something to be overcome if a future that is truly different from the past and the present is ever to arrive. The essays that follow broach the topic from three main angles. In a first section, contributors explore the nature and function of symbols and symbolism for negotiations of the future. Reinold Schmücker offers a helpful discussion of the various meanings of ‘symbol’ as a concept in the history of philosophy. In a programmatic proposal for the use of the term ‘symbol’ in describing the nature of art, Schmücker details the ways in which symbolic reference may be distinguished from signification more generally and acquires more specific associations. The view of art as symbol becomes, in this account, a means of negotiating ‘what has ever been’ and ‘what has never been’ in the sense described above. To a similar purpose, and on the basis of theories of the symbol from Nietzsche and Frazer to Lévi-Strauss, Jan Gordon traces the yoking, by the symbol, of surface and depth. Conceiving of symbolization as a key strategy in the domains of literature, economics, and human society at large, and by reference to authors such as Trollope, Coleridge and Wilde, Gordon develops a theory of symbolization in terms of ‘enveloping’ and ‘in-vestment.’ In a bid for interdisciplinary dialogue, Michael Hauhs and Holger Lange offer observations from the domain of environmental modelling, examining approaches to modelling in terms of their symbolic description in a double sense: how, they ask, do computer models employ

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symbols, and how do modelling practices from engineering and the natural sciences come to be symbolic of a certain kind of view on the human-environment relationship? Their discussion shows how symbols and symbolic reference to the future can have the most concrete of effects on the present and thus, on our possible futures. The second section consists of essays that examine specific forms or mechanisms of symbolism and their impact on negotiations of the future. Susana Onega focuses on the changing symbolization of the female body from ancient Greece until the present. She does so in terms of woman’s ‘definition’ and ‘subjectification’ – symbols are shown to assign and create identity, they restrict and confine, much as in the way illustrated above by reference to the ‘Seasonal quartet.’ In Onega’s reading, the symbolic renditions of the female body become an index of the cultural history of patriarchy. Ivo Ritzer focuses on genre as a symbolic form with a clear temporal dimension. In his discussion of the aesthetics and politics of Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs. and Another 48 Hrs., and in dialogue with theorists such as Richard Dyer, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Fredric Jameson, Ritzer analyzes the utopian potential of genre in popular culture, highlighting how genre itself acquires symbolic assets that may be put to creative use. In another study of symbolism in popular culture, Patrick Gill argues that Charlie Brooker’s anthology series Black Mirror does not, in spite of appearances, focus on the eponymous mirror (i.e., the screen of digital devices) as a symbol of the future, but instead uses it as a symbol of human shortcomings – the symbol is less the object of the dystopian fiction but its vehicle for a much more profound criticism. Finally, Nick Shrimpton considers how G. B. Shaw adopted and transformed the symbolic practice of W. B. Yeats for his own dramatic work. Shrimpton details Shaw’s use of symbols of the future of various kinds in Heartbreak House, the sequence Back to Metuselah, and finally, Saint Joan. In this discussion, Shaw’s use of Joan, for instance, emerges as a curious kind of personified ‘retrotopia.’ In the third section, contributors discuss the function of specific symbols of the future. It is no coincidence that in the context of the ‘Anthropocene,’ these stem, mostly, from the domain of nature. Axel Stähler’s reading of Theodor Herzl’s novel Old-New Land alongside Simon Louvish’s City of Blok and Doron Rabinovici and Natan Sznaider’s semi-fictional Herzl Relo@aded in terms of Baudrillardian simulation and simulacra takes both Herzl’s work and some of its content – specifically, its engagement with space – as symbolic of contested ideas of the Jewish state. Nilufer Bharucha, too, examines the fictional representation of the human impact on the environment. In her discussion of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island, she identifies an ‘Anthropogenic’ theme that runs through Ghosh’s fantastic symbolism, rendering his work an

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intervention in ongoing debates about the future of human-environment relations. Focusing more on the technological and cybernetic side of things, a pair of essays on artificial intelligence concludes this section. Tracing conceptions of the cyborg in recent theory, Daniela Carpi moves on to discuss the machine as the symbol of the future of mankind in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Carpi identifies the movie’s symbolic textures and elaborates how they contribute to a reconfiguration of what it means to be human. This is also the concern of Janet Wilson’s detailed reading of Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and People Like You. Her discussion complements Carpi’s in terms of how Artificial Intelligence has recently been conceived in health care and for social companionship. Wilson shows how the novel uses a range of symbolic devices to anatomize AI, and she discusses how McEwan shows AI to have become a symbol for human futures. Together, these essays illustrate the continued relevance of symbolism – its future, as it were. Not least, then, they are a testament (should it be needed) to the continued relevance of this annual. On the threshold to its third decade, Symbolism remains committed to exploring the complexities of symbolic practices across academic disciplines, all domains of cultural production, and all historical and geographical ranges.

Reinold Schmücker

Symbol’s Risks: A Note on the Interrelationship of Art and the Use of Symbols Abstract: In this note on the interrelationship between art and the use of symbols, it is argued that artworks can be best understood as media of a discontinuous communication, i.e. a form of interaction through symbols, i.e., media that are structurally not allowing for achieving an intersubjective agreement or mutual understanding. If symbols are characteristic, if not constitutive, of art, the question arises why we should communicate through works of art: Why should we accept the risks of the use of symbols, namely that the recipient of a work of art might not understand what an artist intended to let him understand, when it is possible to communicate in other, less risky ways? The question is answered by referring to different moments of the concept of symbol stated at the beginning. Firstly, communicative acts do not always serve to transmit information, and the joy of giving up puzzles and guessing and of grasping the peculiar brevity and conciseness of symbols can enrich and enliven our existence. A second reason as to why it may be worth accepting symbol’s risks is provided by that strand of modern symbol theory which attributes to symbols the ability to represent ‘higher’ contents. One should not exaggerate the criticism of this way of speaking, which reflects ideas of content hierarchy that may seem obsolete today. For it aims at a very essential point: Symbols can also represent contents that cannot be represented in everyday language at all. Therefore, even if we cannot grasp their contents with the same certainty as those of conventional signs, they give us an inkling that there are contents that cannot be translated into everyday language. Thus, for the price of accepting the risks of using symbols, one gets something that is not available at a lower one.

I Since ancient times, the term “symbol”1 has been associated with a desire for expression that someone realizes in an indirect way. Etymologically, the noun 1 I use the word “term” primarily to denote the corresponding English vocabulary and all its semantic equivalents in other natural languages. The term “symbol” can therefore be represented by the English word “symbol” as well as, for example, by the German word “Symbol” or the French word “symbole.” This view allows me to speak of the use of a term: Where I do https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-002

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“symbol” goes back to the Greek verb “symbállein” and “originally denotes the broken or cut up tokens (bone dice, rings, etc.) exchanged among people who had shown hospitality to or enjoyed the hospitality of the other, which, when put together, served as evidence of previous relationships and entitled to claim hospitality again.”2 By Aristotle’s time at the latest, however, the term is applied to the articulation of a mental event by means of spoken or written linguistic signs with a conventional meaning, which are called “symbols” or “signs.”3 Although in medieval and early modern theology there is evidence of uses that tie in with the original meaning of the Greek term “sýmbolon” and use the term “symbol” to denote a sign of recognition, in philosophy a broad concept of symbol, as already evident in Aristotle, has been preserved up to Hegel and contemporary analytical philosophy.4 For Hegel, too, the symbol is “prima facie a sign,”5 and Nelson Goodman uses “symbol” in his Approach to a Theory of Symbols published under the title Languages of Art explicitly “as a very general and colorless term”: “It covers letters, words, texts, pictures, diagrams, maps, models, and more, but carries no implication of the oblique or the occult. The most literal portrait and the most prosaic passage are as much symbols, and as ‘highly symbolic’, as the most fanciful and figurative.”6 Taking the term “symbol” in such a broad sense, “symbol” and “sign” tend to appear as synonyms.7 Throughout the history of the concept of symbol, however, many authors have attributed to it a meaning that makes it more than a mere synonym for the concept of the sign. If one wanted to venture a gross simplification, six

so, I am referring to the use of a natural language vocabulary representing the term in question. I use double quotation marks not only to identify words as such, but also to identify terms in that very sense as such. Furthermore, I also speak of a term where a term is associated with a particular understanding of what is being referred to. 2 Heinz Hamm, “Symbol,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, Friedrich Wolfzettel (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2010) 5:805–840, 808 (my translation). – The references to the history of the concept of symbol, which serve to prepare my argument here and in the following, are predominantly based on this excellent overview of the history of the concept and theory of symbol. 3 Aristotle, On Interpretation 1 & 2, 16a3–19. 4 Hamm, “Symbol.” 5 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, transl. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975) 1:304 (italics in original). 6 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (second ed., Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge: Hackett, 1976): xi. 7 This might explain why the reference work of today’s analytical philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/), does not include a lemma “symbol” at all.

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characteristics could be identified which are widely regarded as specific moments of the meaning of the concept of symbol. Firstly, the concept of symbol is associated with the idea of a medium of interaction. This is true for the use of symbols from the very beginning. For even where the symbol, as in Greek antiquity, is still an identifying mark that has the function of an identity card, it already has this function in the context of the interaction of at least two people. And where it is used as a representative of something different from itself, this is usually done with regard to a listener, reader, observer or other recipient, to whom the symbol communicates something. Secondly, the concept of symbol is associated with the manifestation of a meaning (or, in Frege’s terminology, a reference) in a sensuously perceptible object. This is also true for the use of symbols from the very beginning. For those symbols by which the host was able to identify himself were nothing but sensory things which showed themselves to be meaningful. Ernst Cassirer has even claimed this aspect to be the essential characteristic of the symbolic. In his eyes, the concept of the symbol encompasses all those “phenomena in which the sensuous is in any way filled with meaning, in which a sensuous content, while preserving the mode of its existence and facticity, represents a particularization and embodiment, a manifestation and incarnation of a meaning.”8 That Kant ascribed the function of representing the supersensible to such a sensuous embodiment as the symbol was taken to be, could thus only appear logical: for (only) the non-sensuous, unlike the sensuous, is inaccessible to the human senses without such a representation. The second aspect of the meaning of the concept of symbol is therefore closely related to a third: For thirdly, the concept of symbol is often associated with the notion of a sign whose denotative function is not limited to facts, but can also extend to the elusive, abstract or transcendent. Herder has succinctly described this function of symbols to represent the non-sensuous, transcendent, which is also echoed in Kant’s understanding of the symbol as a means for “mak[ing] supersensible characteristics comprehensible”9: “Every characteristic to recognize each other by was originally called a symbol [. . .] but since the Pythagoreans already used this word to designate a secret higher sense, it retained this narrower meaning in philosophy. In particular, in art it denoted the expression of general terms by means of assumed significant markers. Justice,

8 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, transl. Ralph Manheim, vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1957): 93. 9 Immanuel Kant, “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. & transl. Allen W. Wood & George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998): 31–192, 83.

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for example, which cannot be represented in abstracto, appeared as a figure with a sword and a pair of scales, by which the general term was recognized.”10 Herder here at the same time points out a fourth characteristic that is often associated with the concept of symbol: Symbols are signs that are characteristic, if not constitutive, of art. It is for this reason that for many symbol theorists since Romanticism, works of art are almost paradigmatic symbols. The current relevance of the concept of symbol in hermeneutical art studies is thus closely related to the revaluation of the arts, which were previously regarded as functional and representative, and which have been understood in Western culture since the eighteenth century as varieties of a special kind of art, which was initially called “fine art” and is now called “aesthetic art” or usually simply “art.” The fact that art could generally be understood as symbolic was extremely beneficial to this revaluation. For art could thus not only be understood as a medium which, as will become even clearer in a moment, makes it possible to make the non-sensuous and transcendent, which could not be articulated as such, objects of communication. The function that the visual arts in particular have always had – i.e., making religious content accessible to the senses – could thus be saved for the new period of aesthetic modernity.11 Furthermore, a general ‘higher’, even extraordinary relevance could be claimed for art in general, which is to be understood as a symbol. This understanding of art as a form of symbolization may have contributed to a revaluation of both the fine arts and fine literature. For if visual art is understood as a symbol, it is not merely a depiction or representation of the visible, but primarily the articulation of an intellectual content. Literature, on the other hand, which by its very nature is not accessible at a glance, is, when understood as a symbol, attributed a conciseness that enables it to rise to the rank of an art in the full sense of modern aesthetics. A fifth aspect of the meaning of the concept of symbol is primarily related to the second. If one assumes that a symbol is a signifier that is capable of referring to the abstract, the elusive, and even the transcendent, then this has a 10 Johann Gottfried Herder, Kalligone. 1800 [= Sämmtliche Werke. Zur Philosophie und Geschichte, vol. 15] (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1819): 406 (my translation) [“Jedes Merkmal, woran man sich erkannte, hieß ursprünglich Symbol [. . .] da aber schon von den Pythagoräern dies Wort zur Bezeichnung eines geheimen höheren Sinnes gebraucht ward, so behielt es in der Philosophie diese engere Bedeutung. Besonders bezeichnete es in der Kunst den Ausdruck allgemeiner Begriffe durch angenommene bedeutende Merkzeichen. Die Gerechtigkeit z. B., die in abstracto nicht dargestellt werden kann, trat als eine Figur mit Schwerdt und Waage daher, an der man den allgemeinen Begriff erkannte,” italics in original]. 11 Cp., for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss & Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999): 14.

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far-reaching consequence: because the elusive cannot be indicated with the same clarity as a very specific fact, the meaning of a symbol may not be determined with the same distinctness as that of a conventional sign in everyday language that refers to a fact. This is especially true when – unlike in the context of ancient Greek or early Christian cults of the late classical period – the group of those who see themselves as addressees of a symbolization and seek to grasp the meaning of a symbol is no longer limited to an exclusive circle of initiates: if the restriction to a specific group of addressees is dropped, it can no longer be assumed that the grasping of the meaning of a symbol that goes beyond the realm of sensory experience can be guaranteed by specific contexts of use. Because they “transcend all boundaries,” symbols become “enigmatic in floating indeterminacy” precisely because of this.12 This need not be a disadvantage. For puzzles enjoy great popularity – the pleasure of solving problems and riddles is obviously an inherent part of the human condition. And above all, this development has an invaluable advantage for art understood as symbolic in aesthetic modernity: if art as such is symbolic, then a work of art can be understood as a sign that may remain a puzzle regarding its meaning13 – of which one can even assume that it cannot be adequately grasped by hermeneutic efforts, but only by empathy. A sixth aspect is also important. Symbols are apparently characterized by the fact that they take up little space compared to other signs and that it takes relatively little time to perceive a symbol in its entirety. It is therefore economical to use symbols as media of interaction: This saves space, time, or at least words – the more of which you have to use if you want to communicate verbally without symbols. It also makes it possible to express something that is meant in a way

12 Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen. In Vorträgen und Entwürfen, vol. 1 (Leipzig and Darmstadt: Leske, 1810): 73 (my translation): “Entweder folget das Symbol seinem natürlichen Hang, der auf das Unendliche gerichtet ist, und sucht, einzig bemühet, diesen zu befriedigen, vor Allem nur recht bedeutsam zu sein. In dieser Bestrebung genügt es ihm nicht Viel zu sagen, es will Alles sagen. [. . .] Diese Ungenügsamkeit folget einzig dem dunklen Triebe des namenlosen Ahnens und Glaubens, und, keiner Naturgesetze achtend, schweift sie über alle Gränzen aus, muss aber eben dadurch in schwebender Unbestimmtheit räthselhaft werden.” 13 See, e.g., Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno & Rolf Tiedemann, transl. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997): 124. Adorno writes: “[. . .] all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content.” Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno & Rolf Tiedemann (second ed., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972): 189 [“(. . .) alle Kunstwerke sind Schriften, nicht erst die, die als solche auftreten, und zwar hieroglyphenhafte, zu denen der Code verloren ward und zu deren Gehalt nicht zuletzt beiträgt, daß er fehlt”].

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that allows you to literally grasp it at a glance. Friedrich Creuzer has described this peculiarity of symbols as their “brevity” and plausibly attributed it to the fact that they express an “overabundance of content”14 in a very condensed way: That awakening and sometimes shocking [nature of the symbol, R. S.] is connected with another characteristic, with brevity. It is like a suddenly appearing ghost, or like a flash of lightning that suddenly illuminates the dark night. It is a moment that occupies our whole being, a glimpse into a boundless distance from which our spirit returns enriched. For this moment is fertile for the receptive mind, and the mind, by dissolving into its constituent parts and gradually appropriating the many things that the concise moment of the picture reveals, feels a lively pleasure, and is satisfied by the fullness of this gain, which it gradually overlooks. [. . .] But only the concise brevity is emphatic. That stimulating significance is in proportion to the importance of the content. [. . .] To hide every light thought through the cover of the symbol would be to hide the meagerness through a precious garment; and the mind seeking instruction would only feel the reluctance of a deceived expectation that takes revenge through laughter. Therefore, only what is important can become important, and only what is important can come into harmony with the dignity of the symbol.15

II The career of the concept of symbol in the aesthetics of modernity is on the one hand an expression of an understanding of art that conceives a work of art as the reification of a content, and on the other hand has promoted such an

14 Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, 68. 15 Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, 69–71: “Jenes Erweckliche und zuweilen Erschütternde [des Symbols, R. S.] hängt mit einer andern Eigenschaft zusammen, mit der Kürze. Es ist wie ein plötzlich erscheinender Geist, oder wie ein Blitzstrahl, der auf Einmal die dunkele Nacht erleuchtet. Es ist ein Moment, der unser ganzes Wesen in Anspruch nimmt, ein Blick in eine schrankenlose Ferne, aus der unser Geist bereichert zurückkehrt. Denn dieses Momentane ist fruchtbar für das empfängliche Gemüth, und der Verstand, indem er sich das Viele, was der prägnante Moment des Bildes verschließt, in seine Bestandteile auflöset, und nach und nach zueignet, empfindet ein lebhaftes Vergnügen, und wird befriedigt durch die Fülle dieses Gewinns, den er allmählig übersiehet. [. . .] Aber nur die prägnante Kürze ist nachdrücklich. Jene anregende Bedeutsamkeit stehet in geradem Verhältniß mit der Wichtigkeit des Inhalts. Wer etwas Gemeines zu sagen hat, und es durch gesuchte Wortkargheit zum Ungemeinen zu stempeln sucht, verfehlet seinen Zweck, und wird lächerlich. So auch im Symbolischen. Einen jeden leichten Gedanken durch die Hülle des Symbols verbergen, hieße die Dürftigkeit durch ein kostbares Kleid verstecken; und der Belehrung suchende Verstand würde nur die Unlust einer getäuschten Erwartung empfinden, die sich durch Lachen rächt. Es kann mithin nur das Bedeutende bedeutsam werden, und nur das Wichtige mit der Würde des Symbols in Eintracht kommen.”

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understanding of art. If a work of art is a symbol and a symbol is a sensory thing standing for something different from itself, then art cannot be understood merely as a “Significant Form” (Clive Bell),16 but must be taken seriously as a medium for communicating a content. Johannes Volkelt therefore rightly stated as early as 1876: “It is the concept of symbol that helps the ‘content aesthetics’ to triumph over aesthetic formalism.”17 In what sense, however, can a work of art be understood as a symbol? And in what sense can we see it as a means of articulating and transmitting a content? My approach to answering this question also attempts to take into account the other aspects of the concept of symbol that I mentioned in the last section, namely (a) the medium character of a symbol; (b) the “indeterminate vastness of the idea to be expressed” (Friedrich Theodor Vischer),18 which is characteristic for symbols and which makes symbols also suitable for transmitting spiritual as well as elusive and transcendent contents; (c) the peculiarity of symbols of not revealing their meaning in a comparably unambiguous way, like the conventional signs of everyday language; (d) their peculiar “brevity” (Friedrich Creuzer). In short, my proposal is the following19: We should regard artworks as media of a communicative process sui generis. I suggest that we employ a concept of communication that is wider than Habermas’s.20 Let us regard any interrelationship between providing something that is to be understood and aiming at understanding as communication. Artworks can then be understood as media of a discontinuous communication. It seems plausible to me that the art status of an artefact expresses that we see it as a potential medium for a discontinuous process of communication. Discontinuous communication means a form of interaction through media that is structurally not intending to achieve an intersubjective agreement or mutual

16 “‘Significant Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art” (Clive Bell, Art [New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913]: 8). 17 Johannes Volkelt, Der Symbol-Begriff in der neuesten Aesthetik (Jena: Dufft, 1876): 1 (my translation). 18 Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen. Zum Gebrauch für Vorlesungen, ed. Robert Vischer, vol. 3: Die Kunstlehre (second ed., Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922): 236 (my translation) [“die unbestimmte Weite der auszudrückenden Idee [ist das] Wesentliche des Symbols”]. 19 For a much more detailed explanation of this approach see Reinold Schmücker, Was ist Kunst? Eine Grundlegung. Neuausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014): 271–289. 20 For a more specific concept of communication, which implies aiming at mutual understanding, see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, transl. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston, Mass.: Beacon P, 1984).

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understanding. In this form of communication, the medium does not cause the communicators to ‘meet’ in such a way that they understand each other. Rather, it separates the communicants (i.e., communicator and recipient) from one another, interposes itself as something between them, to which both those who are providing something to be understood and those who are trying to understand refer, but which does not lead to those who are trying to understand understanding what is given to understand. The connection between communicator and recipient, which is important for problem-free understanding in everyday life, is interrupted. However, this is not a defect in the communication process that would have to be avoided, but is characteristic of the form of communication at stake here. At first sight, it might seem strange to regard such a process as an instance of communication. Nevertheless, I think it is a fitting characterization of the process of communication works of art are the media of. It illustrates the interrelationship between the production and reception of art, which could not be grasped from the perspective of aesthetic theory alone, because the latter cannot sufficiently describe what the production of art is motivated by. It takes into account the fact that works of art are symbols, but avoids the implausible assimilation of art to everyday speech acts. Interpreting artworks as media of discontinuous processes of communication merely implies that artworks are symbols insofar as they are the result of providing something that is to be understood (the artistic production) and, at the same time, the object of aiming at understanding (the aesthetic experience). Artworks are hence symbols in a very specific sense: they do not represent, but communicate something in a peculiar way. The person towards whom the message is directed, because she aesthetically experiences the work, merely learns that there is a certain message, without being able to determine its content with certainty. This constitutes, to my mind, the specific symbolic nature of art. If this assumption is plausible, in making judgements about the art status of an artefact, we take a specific aspect into account: we decide whether it seems to us as if the artefact articulates a message that is addressed to anyone who perceives it in an aesthetic attitude – but nothing can be said about its content with certainty. A theory of art that describes artworks as media of such a communicative process sui generis is faced with at least two fundamental objections. The first objection denies that artworks are media of discontinuous communication. The second objection claims that communication always follows the model that is allegedly specific to art. The first objection comes from the theory of mutual understanding. The claim is that an artist could inform us about her message in everyday talk. She could

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thus provide us with every information we need to identify the message inherent to the work. As soon as the artist has explained the artwork, it is the symbolic medium of a communication that is not at all discontinuous. To begin with, this argument forces us to assume two classes of artworks: the ones explained by their producers, and the ones that are left unexplained. The argument does not show, however, that the non-explained works could also be accommodated within an art theory based on the paradigm of mutual understanding. The explanations of the meaning of an artwork by the artist in everyday language are also limited to the experiences that can be captured in everyday language. However, as we have seen above, the assumption that the meaning of every symbol could be captured in everyday language is implausible. It offers no explanation for why people express experiences through artworks in the first place. Hence we cannot assume that an artist’s explanation of the meaning of her work in everyday language would be exhaustive. There is no reason to believe that artworks become the media of processes of mutual understanding by such meta-artistic explanations and could not be subsumed under the model of discontinuous communication. For the sake of simplicity, I will call the second objection poststructuralist, because it is mostly based on Derrida’s criticism of speech act theory.21 The poststructuralist objection claims that the discontinuity of the communicative process – which I consider a specific feature of the use of symbols created by artists – is, in fact, a feature of any symbolic interaction. This objection is based on an assumption that is, at most, plausible in the context of an argumentation heavily relying on the theory of meaning and ignoring the common use of language. In everyday communication, we always take it for granted that our utterances can be understood by a competent speaker. There is no equivalent presupposition when it comes to art. If you deny the difference between the intelligibility of everyday speech acts in the context of a given speech community or culture and artworks, you seriously need to justify your claim. You need to explain why we are capable of acting cooperatively with relative ease in everyday communication, despite the alleged discontinuity. I would like to reply to the objection with someone who should seem inconspicuous even

21 For an overview of the debate, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London, Melbourne, Henley: Routledge & Paul, 1983): 110 seqq.; Manfred Frank, “Die Entropie der Sprache. Überlegungen zur Debatte Searle – Derrida,” in Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare. Studien zur deutsch-französischen Hermeneutik und Texttheorie. Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990): 491–560.

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to poststructuralists: in his essay Critique et vérité, Roland Barthes stresses that everyday language possesses a certain “disposition” for ambiguity. However, the ambiguities of practical language are nothing compared with those of literary language. The former are in fact reducible by virtue of the situation in which they appear: something outside the most ambiguous sentence – a context, a gesture, a memory – tells us how to understand it if we want to make practical use of the information it has the task of conveying: circumstances create a clear meaning.22

If this is a conclusive explanation, we should acknowledge that artworks are symbols that differ from those signs we use in everyday life, because they are unable to provide a form of communication that guarantees that mutual understanding will actually occur. The concept of art that I have suggested takes this difference into account by characterizing artworks as media of discontinuous communication.

III The price for the use that art makes of symbols is therefore high: those who communicate by means of symbols run a considerable risk. For they risk that what they are giving to understand is not understood as it is meant. This is at least true if one does not take the concept of symbol so broadly that it coincides with the concept of sign, but assumes that symbols differ from other signs in the above-mentioned respects. “Symbol” cannot then mean every sign, because there are signs that indicate something (for example, an approaching thunderstorm), and there are signs that represent something different from them, but do not serve as media of interaction, but are, for example, mere markers or reminders for an individual. Most of all, however, there are signs that function as media of interaction but do so in a way that strongly limits the risk of misunderstanding inherent in the use of symbols. Our everyday speech acts usually belong to this last category of signs. They do not differ from symbols in that they use different vocabulary and other linguistic

22 Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman [London: Continuum, 2007]: 27. Cf. Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1966): 53 [“(. . .) les ambiguïtés du langage pratique ne sont rien à côté de celles de langage littéraire. Les premières sont en effet réductibles par la situation dans laquelle elles apparaissent: quelque chose hors de la phrase la plus ambiguë, un contexte, un geste, un souvenir, nous dit comment il faut la comprendre, si nous voulons utiliser pratiquement l’information qu’elle est chargée de nous transmettre: c’est la contingence que fait un sens clair” (italics in original)].

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expressions. For this is not necessarily the case. The written record of the formation of a particular football team on a particular day can, as we know, be both a sign representing a fact or a symbol that gives us much to think about.23 Often enough, it is only in the concrete situation in which we encounter a sensory thing – a picture, a sculpture, an (oral or written) text, for example – that we decide what is the one that confronts us as something that is not only itself but also stands for something else: (mere) sign or symbol – that is the question. Often it can only be answered in the situation in which we encounter such a sensory thing. For it is often only the situation that, as Barthes aptly says, “fait un sens clair.” Often it depends on the respective situation whether it seems appropriate to us to assign a conventional meaning to what we grasp with our senses and which we assume to stand for something else, or not.

IV Why accept the risks of using symbols when other, less risky ways of communicating can also be used? If symbols are characteristic, if not constitutive, of art, the question can be asked in another way: Why should one accept the risks of the production and reception of art, when it is possible to communicate in other, less risky ways? The question can be answered by referring to some of the aspects of the concept of symbol that we have noted at the beginning. Firstly, it is important to remember that even in everyday life, communicative acts do not always serve to ‘transmit information’ (as people like to say in the digital age). Often enough we communicate simply because we enjoy it. This gives us the first important clue that must be included in the answer to the question. Because the joy of giving up puzzles and guessing and the joy of grasping the peculiar brevity and conciseness of symbols can enrich and enliven our lives, and because communication is not necessarily for the sake of transmitting information, it is quite reasonable to accept the risks of using symbols. A second indication as to why it may be worth accepting symbol’s risks is provided by that strand of modern symbol theory which attributes to symbols the ability to represent ‘higher’ contents. One should not exaggerate the criticism of this way of speaking, which reflects ideas of content hierarchy that may seem obsolete today. For it aims at a very essential point: Symbols can also represent contents that cannot be represented in everyday language at all. Therefore, even if we cannot grasp their contents

23 See Peter Handke, “Die Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg vom 27.1.1968,” in Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969): 59.

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with the same certainty as those of conventional signs, they give us an inkling that there are contents that cannot be translated into everyday language. Thus, for the price of accepting the risks of using symbols, one gets something that is not available at a lower price. A theory of art that proceeds in a symbol-theoretical way therefore avoids underestimating the broad variety of types of content that an artwork can have. If we assume that artworks are the media of a communicative process without the inherent aim of intersubjective understanding, we do not have to presuppose – like Habermas – that the content of an artwork could be reformulated in everyday language. There is also no reason to think that an artwork represents a message that is as explicit as an everyday utterance. It is entirely conceivable that a work is based on a desire to articulate something without the artist being aware of this content as he would have been, had he expressed it in everyday language. Theories that assume a certain influence of the unconscious on the production of art are hence compatible with a symbol-theoretical approach. Furthermore, an art theory centered around the concept of symbols can explain why there is (still) art. A form of communication that is flawed with respect to its potential for intersubjective understanding might seem superfluous. However, art would only be obsolete if it had no other function than to transmit information and every message contained in an artwork could also be adequately articulated in everyday language (or some other conventional sign system). But if we take artworks to be media of discontinuous communication, we can avoid Habermas’s underestimation of the diversity of the types of contents that can be contained in art. For a symbol-theoretical approach enables us to acknowledge that artworks can also have contents that are difficult or impossible to communicate in everyday language or by means of other conventional signs. It therefore does not limit what artworks express to cognitive contents. Thus, it can explain why understanding art is, at the same time, both deficient and excessive: on the one hand, we necessarily fail to understand the message of the producer, for if we accidentally identify it we will do so without noticing. On the other hand, the meaning of a work is not limited by a mens auctoris. In addition, a symbol-theoretical approach is able to explain what Helmut Kuhn has called the timeless “presence of art”: the ability of many artworks to “find the expressive word for what presses us, as contemporaries, the most”24: if artworks are not mere media of mutual understanding but symbols, understanding art implies bringing the work in a relationship to one’s own horizon.

24 Helmut Kuhn, “Die Geschichtlichkeit der Kunst,” in Schriften zur Ästhetik, ed. Wolfhart Henckmann (Munich: Kösel, 1966): 197–217, 199.

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Understanding art is thus always “a meeting with oneself”25 and therefore reassuring and stabilizing as well as questioning our own identity. Symbols, however, do not only operate as mirrors that reflect the audience’s individual experiences, but also force it to dwell on the work itself as a symbol. Hence a symboltheoretical approach can also explain why, in the reception of art, the audience is focusing its attention on the medium – the artwork – and not the message. If artworks are symbols, they are not transparent media of interaction that step back behind what they aim to communicate. The interpretation of works of art as symbols has, however, inspired the dream, since Symbolism at the latest,26 that art can give us a foresight of the future and of future ways of living. Is this a plausible hope? In my opinion, the answer is yes and no. If symbols are representations of what is not sensuously tangible, they do not represent the present but the absent, and there is no question that the future is absent in the present. This could nourish the hope that one could get an impression of the future today by making use of the symbols of art. One must not forget, however, that symbols are characterized by the fact that their meanings may not be determined with the same distinctness as that of a conventional sign: they are and remain media of discontinuous communication. Those who hope that art will open up the future for them should not forget this. For it follows from this that no one who interprets a symbol can be sure that what he takes from the symbol in terms of meaning is what someone wanted to make him understand by means of that symbol. And even if this were not so, we could not be sure that the person who makes his vision of the future the object of communication through symbols knows more about the future or has deeper insights into future ways of life than we do. Symbols may encourage us to reflect on the future – they do not provide us with knowledge about the future or even a somewhat reliable forecast. But even if the dream of gaining insight into a distant future through the symbols of art will probably never become reality, there still are, as I hope to have shown, enough good reasons to accept the risks of discontinuous communication, i.e., the risks of using symbols.

25 Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie. Erste Fassung [= Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971): 11. 26 See, e.g., Albert Mockel, Esthétique du symbolisme, ed. Michel Otten (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1962): 151: “La création du symbole est une projection vers notre être futur.”

Jan B. Gordon

‘Symbolic Futures’ as Investment Abstract: The appeal of the Symbol, as expressed in Nietzsche’s Mittag, lies in its power to transform Nothing into something. But, instead of the lack of an object becoming an object, the absence comes to be represented in the form of an object not fully co-incident with itself. Modern discussions of the Symbolic – from Frazer to Lévi-Strauss – have aligned its operational dynamics with emergent or residual irrationality (given the Symbol’s resistance to falsification demanded by Popper) or, alternatively, attempt to find correspondences with categories of reason. The author suggests that the Symbol, contrary to being some arché to be uncovered, constitutes a narrative envelope that we read through to discover continuous points of contact between surface and depth. The resultant narrative ensemble includes affects, historical-structural context, framing, and the consumer’s variable Being-in-the-world. Symbolization is therefore a procedural signifying-ness. Coleridge’s clerisy, Trollope’s public opinion, and the portrait in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray illustrate the generational capacity of the object made indifferent (in some double sense) to itself. There being no terminal criticism, the Symbol is another unstable object of investment/belief on the spectrum of speculative materialism. Like all ‘future’s markets,’ the Symbol is the site of continuous investment and divestment rather than the imminent death foretold in alternative ‘power points’ of contemporary life. . . . the miraculous power of the Symbolic to transform the Nothing itself into something, to transform the lack itself into an object. Instead of the lack of an object becoming itself an object, the lack exists solely in the form of the inherent difference of an object, that is to say, in the form of the object not fully coinciding with itself.1

Two related assumptions have historically limited discussions of the Symbol: 1) the belief that the Symbolic is the mental minus the rational (given Popper’s insistence that reason must be open to falsification and the Symbolic seldom is) or 2) the belief that the Symbolic is the semiotic minus language. In both, the Symbolic is residue, atavistic surplus, or anachronism – the revenge of Unreason. Frazer is perhaps the best spokesman for the first in his assertion that magic had two forms – homeopathic and contagious, the latter based on the confusion of

1 Cited in her marvelous commentary on the Nietzschean Mittag in Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge and London: MIT P, 2003): 136 [emphasis mine]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-003

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correspondence, similarity, or contiguity with effective causality. The Symbolic would result from insufficient rationality, identified here with traditional models of causality. The second rationalist view – whose early advocate was Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – held that primitive belief with its surplus of mystifying symbols was the consequence of misunderstanding the totemic. ‘Totemism’ suggests that being human would not exclude an individual from belonging to the animal species, on those occasions when participation (community) trumps self-identity to create a ‘herd’ mentality. For Lévy-Bruhl, too then, the lure of the Symbolic in our daily life is some primitive attraction of the communal by which it thereby becomes a threat to civilized individualism and, derivatively, the alliance of freedom (as self-reflection) with reason.2 The presumptive rationalist is pledged to account for a maximum of data with a minimum of hypotheses, thus more open to the test of falsification. Any intellectual effort, successful or not, must be proportionate to an end; a priori dedication to solutions is to be discarded. Symbolic discourse knows no such efficiency, retaining from experience a minimum of fragments to establish a maximum of hypotheses. While language has its own signals defined by their reciprocal articulation and their relation to linguistic meaning, the Symbolic does not refer to an opaque referent-object, but uses an object to access an open ensemble (of narrative, affects, memories, prior representations) revealing a conscious and unconscious process of continuous signifying-ness. The genius of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques and elsewhere was to suggest: 1) ordinary language utilizes categories to make statements about the world and 2) genuine symbolic thought uses statements about the world to establish relationships between categories. The inversion restored reason to the Symbolic; no longer irrational residue, but instrumental, disclosing a hidden rationality. Any element of myth becomes potentially relevant as soon as there is one other element with which it is in a relationship of synonymy, variant inclusion or opposition. Analogy or the violation of analogy generates meaning. This analytic relationship constitutes the essence of the symbolic interpretation of myth. Freud (given his fascination with egyptology in the rebel pharaoh Akhenaten and androgynous goddess, Mut), Frazer, Lévy-Bruhl, and Claude Lévi-Strauss all share interest in a discipline, archae-anthrop(ology): dedication to the arché, some primary given-ness to be uncovered and exposed. Though no archaeologist,

2 See Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, L’expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1938).

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Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy might be easily accommodated within Lévi-Strauss’ systems of “oppositional relevance.”3 The ease with which the symbolic is converted to allegory is revealed in the practices surrounding interment in Japan that may initially appear primitive, or even barbaric, to an outsider. Given the combination of exorbitant land prices and titular Buddhism as a terminal faith, cremation is the disposition of choice. After prayers in a temple, the earthly remains are carried in a flammable coffin by hearse to the public crematorium. The eldest survivor takes a number (the crematorium is a crowded shop) and awaits the delivery of the still-smoldering corpse about an hour later. The priest then hands each surviving family member a set of chopsticks before pointing out the more solid remains: a smoking thigh bone, a glowing Adam’s apple. Choking your chopsticks for enhanced control, each survivor then deposits a morsel into an urn for interment later in a family vault after a decent interval of forty-nine days. The urn and its contents are kept in our washittsu where nightly during the period a vegetarian repast (tofu, tangerine and water) are placed on its tray, nourishment through successive reincarnations. Lévi-Strauss might have structured (though to my knowledge he never did) a symbolic system in which survivors literally ‘partake’ of the deceased elder who previously nourished them in their lives: quite symmetrical. Its strangeness (to western tastes), however, is lessened by analogy with the disputation that split Christianity over the Eucharist. Are wafer and wine, which members of a Catholic ‘family’ share, part of the real body and blood of Christ or already converted to allegory by a symbolic transmutation? In many Zen temples, flesh is never eaten, a logical prohibition against culinary incest posed by consuming an anonymous re-incarnation. Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, civilization proceeds from rituals to myths to games. Rituals are conjunctive: a shaman or priest, differentiated by knowledge, sacred endowment, or age, conducts a ritual, whose selective participation initiates the heretofore uninitiated into an equivalent membership. An example might be the ceremonial removal of the penile foreskin (circumcision) by a mohel upon which an infant becomes an equivalent Jewish male, a Member of the Tribe, like other witnesses.

3 Roman Jakobson famously divided symbolic operations (even in his title) into an opposition between metaphor (where one topic leads to another through similarity or substitution, by the repetition of some historically communally-shared, re-petitioned origin) and metonymy (where one topic suggests another through adjacency in space, time, or psychological association). See Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disorder” [1956], in Selected Writings II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971): 239–259.

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Myths attempt to restore the original ritual by periodic re-enactment for those who came too late to the ritual, as, say Easter does for those who need Christ to live, and want to maintain whatever the Resurrection symbolized as a living faith. The Christian myth is a re-petition and re-enactment, the Symbolic as a gestural prompt to an antecedent in a community performance. Games, however, are always disjunctive: Nadal and Federer begin with a coin toss (and a score of 0–0) and after anywhere from three to five sets, one emerges as a winner. Games generate inequality, separating participants into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ – until the next time when they play again. Symbolically, for Lévi-Strauss, civilization moves from rituals, to the repetition narrated in myth and its occasionally apocryphal commentaries (re-petitioning the origins, as it seeks to clarify), to the competition of industry, sports, and we academics with ‘regulated aggression,’ i.e., the competitive world. Games, for Lévi-Strauss, dilute the Symbolic into mere team logos, i.e., marketing. Because of Lévi-Strauss’s dedication to the construction of analogies between categories, the results are always those of homology, not paraphrase; of correspondence, as opposed to tautology. Nor does he acknowledge a difference between exegetical meaning and operational meaning. Symbolism cannot be a code, for there is no single a priori condition that we could ‘call up’ and codify by application. To say that symbols mean (in the sense of a pre-figured, determined meaning) by encoding would be to say that each symbol corresponds to a fixed set of interpretations and that to each interpretation belongs a fixed set of symbols. A particular occurrence of a symbol would select certain pairs (symbol/interpretation) among a set defined in the very structure of symbolism! To say that symbolism is part of a semiotic system is to say nothing at all, for not only symbols, but objects of perception or thought mean (for us) in the same way. Both external models of causality and immanent causality are unable to determine how a subject can be simultaneously conditioned by and yet free from social, historical, or contextual determinants. Sometimes, as Freud told his laughing students while lighting one up, “a cigar is just a cigar”: itself and not itself simultaneously. Molly Anne Rothenberg has termed this indeterminate hybridity, perhaps confusingly, as an extimate model of causality.4 Extimé, like Derrida’s differénce, is a portmanteau combination of ‘exterior’ and ‘intimate,’ suggesting some elision of external and internal that generates meaning without being a formal cause. Her model would present social space as a rather uniquely unbounded,

4 Molly Ann Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity P, 2010): 30–56.

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yet finite spatial object, in topology known as a ‘non-orientable object.’ In nonorientable objects, a distinctive surface such as an ‘inside,’ imperceptibly transforms into its opposite without transgressing any discontinuity or gap (edge, hole, absence). Her example is the Moebius Strip formed by rotating a rectangular surface 180 degrees and fastening the ends together. If you then trace the surface of the construction with your finger all the way around to your starting point, you will end up on the inside of the band even though your finger never crossed an edge or punctured a hole in the (now indistinguishable) surface(s). What had been a two-sided surface (crucial to the binomial meanings generated by structuralism) is revealed as one-sided. While your finger is on one side of the band throughout its journey, it cannot be said whether it is on the inside or the outside of the band at any one point. It is boundless, but unlike the space of infinite causation, it is assuredly finite. Like Wittgenstein’s maxim in the Tractatus – “the world is all that it is the case” – the Moebius Strip, too is potentially unbounded, but resistant to his conversion of philosophical problems to grammatical rules (markers) which privilege correspondence.5 We can define points of contact, not so individuated as to become completely uncoupled, thanks to the non-determination ‘imbedded,’ as it were, in the Moebius Strip. Both the (now made paradoxical) boundary of external causation and the infinite (immanent) mutual implication of cause and effect operate together as an ‘empty set.’ The unpredictable excess alters the rigid boundary between what had been ‘sides’ between cause and effect, or background and foreground. The now indeterminate sidedness means that causes are not entirely detached from effects (and hence cease to be causes, as traditionally understood) because this excess brings them into an unpredictable differential continuity. The Symbol in situ is preceded by an emptying out, a negation of markers, used to spatially and temporally orient us in a field previously defined by limits. It begs us to think of the ‘thing’ before its objectification – the possession of properties or predicates. Can we come to think of a ‘thing’ before its objectification in a precise world? Recently Alain Badiou has called it the “Ur-Ding,”6 a form of Being after Nothingness, but before the marking/mapping of qualitative differences that make it into an object having properties, predication and extension.

5 By ‘correspondences’ I refer to the belief held by many post-modernist philosophers that though there are no universal features to our world, it is nonetheless anchored in a determinate era of the History of Being; in a form of life deploying its own rule-bound language games; or in determinant cultural assumptions or the beliefs of a ‘critical community.’ It surely received its stimulus in the transition from Husserl to Heidegger. 6 Alain Badiou, “Towards a New Concept of Existence,” lacanian ink 29 (2007): 63–72, 65.

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This experiment occurs when Lewis Carroll’s Alice rejects the familiarly marked: a boring two- dimensional book (without pictures) – perhaps a traditional children’s book – before being distracted/attracted by a rabbit in a hurry wearing a stopwatch. This emptying out of familiar directional signifiers (of growing up) produces initially an incomprehensible ‘thickness’ for lack of a better word: an apparent saturation of signs lacking any signified in their displacement. This saturation was crucial to the production of two emergently fashionable genres in nineteenth century in European literature: children’s literature and science fiction.7 Although her adventure began in pursuit of a rabbit obedient to time, time is no longer a marker as she wonders how long the fall will continue and whether or not she will come down on the other side of the world (the Antipodes). Her fall lacks both temporal and spatial co-ordinates though it commenced with two familiar Victorian markers: a children’s book and a pocket watch. The challenges of re-orientation are evoked when Alice attempts to return objects to their familiar (rational/correspondent) location – in this case the British icon, a marmalade jar – no longer in its now non-existent ‘appointed place.’ In a tale filled with eating or drinking or the fear of being eaten, common to children’s literature, the familiar markers literally ‘fall away.’ Temporal and spatial disorientation begin in tandem, as recognizable shape and instrumental function is hollowed out or better, liquefied and dissolved, by the Mad Hatter in his hot tea or later, visually, by Dali’s depiction of liquid timepieces. Alice cannot find her appointed place even at a tea table. The excessive saturation of rotating positions is duplicated when Alice reluctantly samples a bottle labelled “DRINK ME” and tries to describe a correspondent taste: “so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavor of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.”8 Now, we could attempt to order the ‘mixed’ experience of this beverage into, say, savory/sweet, fruit/meat, or soft/hard compatible with structuralism’s binomial paradigm, but it would not

7 This occurs when we ponder what connects us to some other referents commonly used in everyday speech which betray the persistence of applied ‘correlationism.’ ‘Water’ in another solar system; an Infinity of abstract numbers; a non-existent parallel universe which nonetheless obeys certain laws all exceed the bounds of common acquaintance. They take us so far in different directions through unmapped portions of reality by using familiar markers to invoke unreasonable correlation. The philosopher Colin McGinn has suggested that these appeal because of a “residual reason” that is a curious counterpart to the residual “unreason” which pervaded early explanations of the Symbolic. See Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993): 64. 8 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass [1865], ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 1998): 13–14.

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be analytically significant any more than would the description on a recent label on my bottle of French Bordeaux which reads, “notes of plum, tobacco, and wet leather with a hint of cedar shavings.” All is in excess, words thrown out against indescribable taste in the interests of finding orienting correspondence. In a world where virtually any event or object can become investible data, Alice can reasonably try to mitigate risk by hedging operations, as all of us do. When confronted with a cake that says “EAT ME,” Alice calculates that “if the cake makes me grow larger, I can reach the key, and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door, so either way . . .,”9 she gains entrance to a garden. Alice makes her decision, as other investors in the Symbolic do, partially by calculating risk. A similar excess exists throughout Alice in Wonderland, most notably during the episode involving the caucus race, when all animals race in order to dry off from submergence in a pool of tears. All participants are impossibly declared winners, receiving a prize – the confits – in a ‘contest’ where conventional rules are literally liquidated, along with the soluble confits. The trajectory moves us toward Lévi-Strauss’s competitive games in an effort to restore reason to a world that lacks it. By Chapter XII, after an unreasonable judicial procedure in which sentence precedes verdict, Alice asserts that the King and Queen of Hearts are “nothing but a pack of cards,”10 the re-nomination of power as another game, a disinvestment. The (heretofore sovereign) subject does not fully coincide with itself, generating the possibility of a symbolic projection/representation capable of manipulation by a reader. Once symbolized, even absolute royal power can be ‘played with,’ individually appropriated, and assigned a different, arbitrary value, depending upon variable rules. Alice would have a chance of playing and maybe winning, not available during ritualized ceremonies like royal parades and trials which demand obeisance to power. Through the Looking-Glass commences with Alice literally going through an instrument crucial to the confirmation of visual correspondence in defiance: a mirror. *** A relatively neglected political tract of the nineteenth-century – to the re-reading of which I am indebted to Klaus Stierstorfer – was Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State. Coleridge, like Alice, was faced with the problem of a very saturated Church of England which he thought to be in some conflict with itself. As a subject, the Church was clearly in excess. It was simultaneously an idea insofar as it was the conception of a thing which is not abstracted from any

9 Carroll, Alice, 15. 10 Carroll, Alice, 108.

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particular state, form, or mode nor yet generalized from any number of successions of such forms or modes but which is given by the knowledge of its ultimate aim. The Anglican Church administered services, celebrated mass and feast days, delivered the sacrament, but was a material owner of land. It was simultaneously emergent, party to an “ever-originating social contract,”11 yet vested with residual materiality. The distinction between a thing (a means to an end) and a person (which must always be included in the end) is obscured. An Established Church is/would be an ensemble divided against itself, like Giorgio Agamben’s split of “life” into a separation of “bare life” (bios) from the “forms of life” (zoe),12 to parse a strategic excessive subject in political history. Similar to Agamben’s characteristic division of a singular concept to reveal an unrecognized plurality, Coleridge generates something else altogether different from both Church and State from whose jointure as an Establishment he located seams exploited by Dissenters of every stripe. In Chapters 3 and 4 of On the Constitution of Church and State, Coleridge establishes a reserve which he calls the “Nation” or “Nationality,” but is in fact something more akin to the fiction of sovereignty tying nationality, nation, self-determination, and nativity into a single symbol. This share of heritage administered by a Third Estate in Coleridge’s scheme is his clerisy. It is both excess and safety net (reduction) as opposed to the propriety (property) of individual estate holdings: a mediating adjunct, yet competitor to the Church of England. Conservators of tradition as well interpreters of logic and ethics, the symbolic clerisy also adds value by continually redefining the prima scientia, Coleridge’s “ground-knowledge.”13 Not quite Nothingness, the Imaginary is problematic, both immanent and transcendent, while simultaneously preserving and overseeing improvements in the absence of the phenomenal (e.g., a written Constitution). Borrowing from the Old Testament tribe of Levi, the outlying twelfth tribe of Israel prohibited from speculating in or owning land but entrusted by Moses as custodians of the faith, Coleridge advocated a similar permanent class and fountainhead of the humanities, entrusted with the cultivation and enlargement of knowledge (already possessed) to be distributed throughout the country.

11 Samuel T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State (London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1830), 7. 12 Agamben’s “forms of life” as opposed to biological life defines a life in terms of the possibilities of life, rather than life as organism and then makes the gap between them a symbolic operator. Coleridge defines a Church as both an historical body and an emergent Idea, an unfulfilled possibility, of redemption. See Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Cesarino (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2000): 4–5. 13 Coleridge, Constitution, 48.

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The clerisy was (impossibly) both a moral ‘guardian of the stores,’ and, simultaneously, entrusted with making improvements and adding value to what was collectively a shared institutional asset. For Klaus Stierstorfer, the clerisy was instrumental in founding a non-proprietary, material residue ‘always-already’ there – that was, like the prima scientia – to be guarded, improved and shared, but never privatized: a “National Trust.”14 Simultaneously excess and residue, history is redistributed to the public as an ‘at large’ continuous heritage, a dematerialized ‘commons.’ This suggests that, unlike the Establishment which it would displace, an enlarged clerisy is potentially borderless: an emergent Symbolic, deconstructing what had been an exclusive, singular sovereignty. One of Coleridge’s heirs was surely Anthony Trollope in both his Barsetshire Novels and the so-called Parliamentary Novels, with the ‘missing link’ between them being John Stuart Mill and the group of utilitarian thinkers associated with the Westminster Review.15 Trollope made the newly popular press, detached from the control of political parties (as had been the case with both the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine earlier in the nineteenth century), a virtual symbolic character in his oeuvre. In the opening chapters of Barchester Towers a lowly bishop’s chaplain, the Reverend Obadiah Slope, inserts himself into speculation on the appointment of a new Archbishop, by sending unsolicited letters to the Jupiter whose editor, the notorious Tom Towers, heretofore a feeless barrister, publishes them. In the Parliamentary Novels, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux, which trace the tribulations of an Irishman to gain access to Parliament and the Cabinet, the handsome Phineas abandons a legal career before joining forces as an occasional writer for a new tabloid, The Banner, to make ends meet before he tries his hand in politics. Both the law and public opinion are empowered only as long as they draw belief, partially dependent upon procedural deniability and anonymity. The intermittently politically successful Finn and Editor Towers are both ‘lapsed’ barristers dedicated to shaping a new difficult-to-control Symbolic, public opinion, that has some of the qualities of both the law and religious faith: 1) a self-appointed custodian of moral life; 2) a discursive domain that is never completed, always being improved with commentary as it pretends to offer final judgment; 3) a public ‘property’ supposedly held in shared trust; and 4) a

14 See Klaus Stierstorfer, “Who Owns Britain? S.T. Coleridge and the National Trust,” Polemos. Rivista semestrale di diritto, politica e cultura 5.1 (2011): 173–185. 15 Trollope’s respect for G.H. Lewes as “the acutest critic I know” (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883]: 137), coupled with a willingness to associate publicly with Lewes and his partner, George Eliot, when few would take such a risk (as well as her admiration of his work), might suggest shared values regarding the negotiations with public opinion.

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virtual institution to be managed in the interests of both adding value or recovering some alleged prima scientia (obscured first truth). One can both claim public opinion as an ally and contribute to it while disclaiming responsibility for authorship, as does Towers. Hence, it is a point of contact between religious practice and participation (the clergy in the Barsetshire Novels) and those parliamentarians party to the making and administering of the law in the six Parliamentary Novels. Power devolves upon both clergy and M.P. during a formal investiture (Lat. investare, to clothe) ceremony when the outside (clothing) becomes co-terminal with the inside (power) during a ‘speech act,’ an oath. Like Trollope’s third person narrators, public opinion is an absentee presence, selectively ‘open’ to private investment (Latin: credere, cp. English ‘credit,’ ‘creed’ and hence related to ideas of investment, trust, and belief). It both exists and does not exist, a convention that is never questioned as to how it came to know what it knows or why it drones on and on – an autonomous, yet communally-shared voice from nowhere, demanding the reader’s trust. Like omniscient narrators, Editor Towers is almost never in his office, elusively hiding behind a cultivated anonymity – and deniability. As with other instances of the Symbolic that inspire belief until they do not, the editor of the Jupiter seems non-coincidental with himself. When in The Warden an editorial informant changes his mind and asks for the return of a letter submitted at the commencement of a suit for recovery of the proceeds and conditions of a bequest, Towers retains the letter. He separates himself from his own publication, claiming not to answer for it. Those entrusted with contributing to or ‘shaping’ public opinion, even if exaggerated, can no more be held responsible legally than individual investors in corporations after the introduction of Limited Legal Liability (in 1855, contemporaneous with Trollope). He bridges one gap while creating another between anonymity, singular author(ity) and collective voice all covered by a literal ir-responsibility: a calculated reluctance to respond in his own voice. With his editorial office of the Jupiter prominently displaying Convent Thoughts, Charles Collins’ Pre-Raphaelite style painting, in The Warden Towers, as the embodiment of public opinion, is appropriately given the power of “a pope, self-nominated, self-consecrated, – ay, and much stronger too – selfbelieving.”16 Public opinion operates with the trappings of religion, the determining power of the law, and the au courant demands of gossip and public fashion: a composite totalization. From his figurative mountain top the editor of the Jupiter casts his thunderbolts in the seam between faith and the law which previously defined an Establishment, not unlike Coleridge’s clerisy.

16 Anthony Trollope, The Warden [1855], ed. Robin Gilmour (London: Penguin, 1984): 118.

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The reader discovers that in fact Towers even writes some of the supposed “Letters to the Editor” under a pseudonym (like “Veritas”) in the interest of enlarging his subscribers and advertisers by provoking debate and schism in an institution previously self-identified as a Broad Church. The volatile interest he shares (for a while) with people like Rev. Slope of Barchester Towers is what socalled social media would now term ‘trolling’ and ‘fake news’: an indication of Trollope’s prescience in his exploration of the Symbolic as a fabricated, virtually unlimited context. Easily manipulated, because it (and they) are always potentially ‘out of position,’ public opinion draws investors who play it. Slope writes so many self-serving “Letters to the Editor” of the Jupiter that he is threatened by a monetization that is simultaneously ideological liquidation: commercial rates charged to advertisers with which public opinion formation shares a context. Perhaps it is this praxis that enables public opinion as Symbol to be both (potentially) an agent for reform while in itself continuously under revision. If the reader has the interest or patience to read the last of the Barchester Novels, he will discover that the masthead of the Jupiter has morphed into the New Jupiter, the Symbolic (once again) not quite co-incident with itself. Like other instances of the Symbolic, public opinion quickly responds to anticipated real or future needs while absorbing (while often diluting) or otherwise adulterating, antecedent opinion, conjecture, or performance. Public opinion has of course always existed (though the first use of the word according to the OED occurs at mid-nineteenth century). But it does not assume its factiality – more on this later – until it becomes speculative.17 Reviving such previously-resolved, reactionary causes as intoning and the mandated suspension of trains on the Sabbath, Rev. Slope is entrusted with shaping local public opinion during a period when a newly ecumenical Church of England is sending its representatives to Scotland and synods in Ireland. A lowly Bishop’s chaplain entrusted by superiors with keeping his ear to the local ground to know “how the wind blows,”18 the political ‘wind-sock’ of no real opinions uses the wind to power his own private source of power in collaboration with the

17 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008): 79–80. “Factiality” is used by Meillassoux to describe the speculative essence of the “facticity” of everything that cannot be thought of as a fact. “Facticity” means that the structure can only be described, not deduced. By contrast, “factiality” implies that “facticity” itself can be (speculatively) deduced. It is the type of speculation which seeks to identify the context in which some fluidly contingent unforeseeable “embodiment” (“facticity”) might or might not potentially emerge. 18 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers [1857], ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983): I, 161.

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public press. He calculates how to use his ‘correlations’ with the press as a self-assumed ecclesiastical ‘spokesman’ to privatize its endorsement: “I can count upon assistance from the public press: my name is known. I may say, somewhat favorably known to that portion of the press which is now most influential with the government, and I have friends also in the government . . . .”19 Contemporaneous with the conflict between the respective jurisdictions of civil courts and religious courts, a schism which comes to dominate The Last Chronicle of Barset and its subject, Rev. Crawley, Trollope installs another symbolic court generated by the gap between them. “A cross-current of public opinion” is made simultaneously “independent of, though perhaps not directly opposed to, the dominant legislative creed of a particular era” in the influential work of the second generation utilitarian, A.V. Dicey.20 Lacking a written constitution, and largely dependent upon previous oral legal judgments, there is an excessively large oral share in British legal and legislative decisions. Public opinion, like the Symbolic, enjoys a hybrid status: partially regulated, but quasi-independent or derivative, therefore inconsistently co-incidental with itself. Not exactly ‘intoning,’ but a metaphoric, potentially monopolistic social hum nonetheless, public opinion will be referred to later in Trollope’s work as the ‘vox populi,’ blurring the distinction between singular and collective in a kind of discursive commons. Such a space, elaborated later in the work of Jürgen Habermas, would be both a self-appointed guardian of free unimpeded discursive grazing, yet also perfectly capable of adding (speculative) value where none existed previously (as does gossip), or, as constituting a quasi-monopoly,21 as would the National Trust. Like Coleridge’s potential “clerisy,” public opinion in Trollope is both a quasi-materiality (that invokes immanent modes of self-transformation) and an elusive ideality. No wonder that a character in The Warden describes

19 Trollope, Barchester Towers, II, 52. 20 See A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relationship Between Law and Public Opinion During the Nineteenth Century [1917] (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction, 1981): 362. 21 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991). For Habermas the public sphere was to be a space where private interests (religion among them) were to be temporarily suspended so that all citizens met as deliberating peers. Clearly, however, alliances would form and private interests would emerge, detectable by utterances and emergent prejudices so that the suspension of private interests is an illusion. Having previously purged individual expressions of religious faith, in his more recent work Habermas has reluctantly admitted it under the condition that it be translated into ‘rational language,’ i.e., made correspondent a priori. Once again, the authentic public sphere is what remains after the expulsion or translation (into frozen allegory?) of the Symbolic.

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public opinion as a “Tenth Muse,”22 sharing some qualities with Coleridge’s Tribe of Levi: a mountain-dwelling, imaginary ‘extra,’ simultaneously collective and indivisible, periodically immanent, transcendent, and normative. If Trollope develops public opinion into the generative potential of the Symbolic from the gap between Church and State initially articulated in Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State, then the author himself was not at all exempt from manipulating public opinion, a perpetual contingency. One can be hurt by his investment in it, as was Slope, Sebastian Melmoth (of The Way We Live Now) and perhaps Trollope himself when he stood as a selfdescribed, potentially totalizing, “advanced, but still, a conservative Liberal”23 candidate for Parliament for the Beverley constituency (where he finished fourth in a field of four). Trollope’s innovative financial arrangements with his various publishers was largely dependent upon the public success of his previous novels. Instead of the advance-and-royalty based system traditional in nineteenth-century contracts, Trollope requested from Longman a negotiated contract for each novel, on the grounds that the publisher was assuming progressively less risk because of Trollope’s past sales and reception by the public. He becomes, like Rev. Slope, the equivalent of what in professional sport is known as a ‘free agent,’ totally willing now, as had not been the case earlier on during his sojourn in Ireland as a civil servant, to “take my chances in the market.”24 Like the symbol, each new novel becomes in production a different point in an unstable speculative field with fluctuating values affected by the subject and consumer’s situation-in-the-world at that time. How could this remarkably fluid speculative field – so bound to contingency – be represented? Here, contingency is not mere precariousness, but the insufficiency of reason to anticipate what events, revelations, or risks, might impact public opinion formation and which will have no effect on the creation and destruction of reputation. What persists and what will be destroyed is simply unknown. To borrow from Quentin Meillassoux, “nothing would seem to be impossible, not even the unthinkable.”25 The unthinkable and unforeseeable in fact occurs in Trollope with unexpected suicides and abrupt changes of longheld family beliefs such as occurs in The Duke’s Children, when the family scion abandons his Liberal Party heritage to become a Tory only to return to the fold as a gift to a father who had stood in the way of his marriage to an American!

22 23 24 25

Trollope, Warden, 122. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883): 262. Trollope, Autobiography, 163. Meillassoux, Finitude, 62.

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Reputations, like the personal effects put up for auction in Framley Parsonage, seem always ‘in play,’ to borrow from financial nomenclature. A heart given to an alien commoner is exchanged for a heart returned to the familial ideology in an act of mutual forbearance by a prodigal son that stabilizes marital and public opinion markets in tandem. Public opinion in Trollope is potentially an exchange market. The penetration of the press into provincial corners previously protected by monopolies grants the public at large relatively inexpensive access to what had been protected by an assortment of estate managers, confidential family bankers, and other protective ‘close(s),’ to appropriate the language of the clergy who live in such geographical close proximity in the Barchester Novels. *** If the Symbolic was initially the mental or language minus the rational, and hence a primitive residue not open to falsification, we can understand why the doctrine of finitude, some hidden reason inaccessible to human reason, might be responsible. But the reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is somehow hidden or covered beneath some obscuring surface, but rather that the absence of reason can only be the ultimate property of the Symbol as well as other entities, as Alice understood. There are no cryptic properties, no hidden Dasein, as Heidegger argued, nor is there any veil to be lifted. There is nothing beneath the ‘stochastic,’ gratuitous operations of the given and the power thrown off by its perpetual destruction, reconstruction, or persistence upon which we speculate. But once a context is constructed (Wittgenstein’s “case” or Freud’s genre, the “case history”), a virtual dimension comes into Being – perhaps a more benign metaphor than Unreason. The Symbolic is neither opaque object nor thing-in-itself, but must be ‘gone through’ to an ensemble that collectively grounds a signifying process within a narrative envelope. One social anthropologist who did make the adjustment from the archaeological model of some ‘hidden Symbolic’ to a ‘virtual’ model produced by points of contact that create a fluid, ever-emergent context was the late Edward T. Hall, whose Beyond Culture proposed a distinction between low-context and high-context cultures.26 Into the latter category he placed Japan, with its dependence upon past associations, resistance to easy assimilation of non-natives, and non-verbal communication in a formal culture which privileges silence. High-context does not imply the absence of the reasonable (and hence some ‘primitive’ system), but rather a presumption of an intimacy with a contextual ‘field,’ in order to minimize social risk.

26 Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (London: Anchor, 1977): 91–137.

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Trollope used a very appropriate ‘factial’ to describe the gratuitously generative operations of this highly speculative market which of course we critics always try to read or anticipate, if only to claim an imaginary sovereignty over interpretation of the symbol. He deployed, often near the end of novels, sugar, as an image of the easy convertibility of facticity. As early as Can You Forgive Her?, Trollope describes those who have political ambition as an abnormal “devotion to sugar.”27 After the speculative failure to steer volatile public opinion to his own advantage, Rev. Slope marries into the worldly security of a Baker Street sugar refiner. Trollope himself confessed to the draw of the confectioner when he allowed his own omniscient narrator to self-consciously yield to the demands of public opinion by admitting that “the end of a novel [. . .] be made up of sweetmeats and sugar plums.”28 Sugar is the concession to and confection of public opinion as one representation of the instability of the Symbolic: 1) it dissolves easily leaving no visible presence; 2) it delivers a quick ‘high’ followed by unbelievable lows to devoted consumers; 3) easily noncoincidental with itself, sugar comes in a variety of forms and can be re-constituted as either simpler or more complex sugars; 4) its instability makes it easily bound to other textures and elements with a wide variety of culinary applications; 5) a habit which may confound return to metabolic equilibrium. *** As we trope the Symbolic, perhaps it is useful to clarify the difference between potentiality and virtuality. Potentiality is the non-actualized case of an indexed set of possibilities under the condition of a given law or its foreseeable derivatives. The virtual is the property of every set of emerging within a becoming which is neither determined nor otherwise dominated by any set of ‘possibles’ in the absence of finitude. The distinction is crucial, as we can see from a cursory examination of the Symbolic in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Basil Hallward’s infamous portrait of the youthful Dorian progressively models the moral record of an increasingly decadent life charted by the novel. As Dorian remains (impossibly) ever youthful, the painting assumes the concurrent physical record of an aging rogue, a moral record, to an audience of three, crucial to the portrait’s continuing reproduction-in-consumption: painter, model, and the reader of Wilde’s novel.

27 Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? [1865], (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982): II, 113. 28 Trollope, Barchester Towers, II, 256 (emphasis mine). Sugar being common to desserts, its role as a synecdoche of public opinion in Trollope may indicate the importance of the outlier. Lying both outside and inside the meal, the sugary dessert is a confected resolution stimulating a taste for more, not unlike public opinion.

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All are potentially betrayed by the confusion of the metaphoric with the literal articulated in Paul de Man’s notion of unanticipated ‘allegories of reading’. Life assumes the fixed, ageless permanence of the eternally youthful art object as Hallward’s artistic representation assumes the currency of life, initiating an apparent exchange system. Wilde in his genius has Dorian Gray exploit that gap by ‘closeting’ the work of art, as in his life he has ‘closeted’ his non-exclusive homosexual relationship with the painter, Hallward, now threatened by a rival, the critic Sir Henry Wotton. He allows no one to see the portrait even when it is moved by a third party, to be ‘disappeared’ ironically, in his childhood nursery, shared initially only by painter and his subject. The portrait was a ‘gift’ (gift-giving being an important part of symbolic relations for archaeologists and social anthropologists) that preceded its existence, as Hallward confesses to Gray, “I gave it to you before it existed.”29 The gift of a subject before it was even a subject suggests either an excessive subject, alwaysalready conditioned by/in intentionality, or, a divided subject. Removed from public circulation and appraisal by a mutually-agreed-upon act of self-censorship, the work of art rebels against its repression. Each time it is viewed privately, it comes to exist in a form inherently different from itself, reflecting the changing relationship of painter, object, artwork, and critic. First Gray, then Gray and Hallward together, ‘read’ these changes mimetically, as a representation of their unstable relationship, just as it might be if exposed to the public at large. Censorship, though it appears to put a veil or finite lid upon interpretation or imagines the art object as subversively irrational, has the contrary effect: it releases an infinity of virtually reasonable meanings (one of which is the relationship between closeted art and closeted homoerotic relationships) to a larger audience in a procedural signifying-ness. The secrets of art secrete (art not coinciding with itself or critical interpretation, but legal determination), releasing other potential symbolic meanings of the portrait, as it alters the context, as did Wilde’s three trials and the public response to them enhanced by the later repressions of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Its Nothingness (the repressed subject of Hallward’s painting in its nursery/ closet) too, never coincides with itself. After its creator, Hallward, is made Nothingness by his murder and chemical erasure without a trace, his physical absence is ‘read back’ into his recent work by Sir Henry Wotton’s posthumous appraisal: “his painting had quite gone off,”30 already. As critic, Wotton adheres to

29 Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” [1890], in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1967): 36. 30 Wilde, “Dorian Gray,” 160.

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a common critical correlation which the novel deconstructs: an artist’s (organic) production parallels life – apprenticeship, a mature phase, and decline, perfectly compatible with a philosophy of progressive Decadence. But in Wilde’s essay, “The Critic as Artist,” public gossip and the critic too (as well as the law and the artist) makes the work of art, adding to its infinite, speculatively material meanings in the absence of any finitude to interpretation. At the conclusion of The Picture of Dorian Gray Hallward’s portrait, now ‘open to the public’ who enter the house after Dorian’s death, is viewed as originally intended: a mimetically representational painting of a youthful, elegant Dorian Gray. The portrait reverts to itself, a correspondent homology (radical mimesis), in the novel’s last paragraph: “[W]hen they entered, they found a portrait of their master as they had last seen him [. . .] in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty.”31 This radical return of the “myth of the real” is embraced by those heretofore unaware of the portrait’s existence, including many readers forgetful of its symbolic progression. The suddenly dis-closeted portrait enters random open ‘public consumption,’ there being no terminal criticism. In this last paragraph of The Picture of Dorian Gray, art becomes an excessive subject of speculative investment. Like an ‘initial public offering’ on equity markets, the portrait-as-Symbol assumes a fluctuating representational value depending upon our varying susceptibility to belief. Misreading the Symbolic, like all bad investments on the market of speculative materialism, is a risk. Wilde suggested as much in an aphorism preceding The Picture of Dorian Gray, deploying our metaphoric extimate/ Moebius Strip relationship: All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.32

Though warned, before Roland Barthes did, against belief in the myth of the reél, many readers invest in a terminal magical restoration of the portrait to itself.33 The public, unaware or forgetful of the ‘high-context’ saturation conditioning the

31 Wilde, “Dorian Gray,” 167. 32 Wilde, “Dorian Gray,” 17 (emphasis mine). 33 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect” [1968], in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York and London: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 141–148. In Wilde’s novel, the terminal return to “mimetic equilibrium” would be akin to the views of economists who believe that ultimately prices revert to stability. The problem with both is that we never realize finitude. Does stability determine the end or does the imaginary end determine the advent of stability, given the absence of a necessary correspondence?

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portrait’s production, storage, and exhibition, reduces it to its given-ness, its facticity, as do many readers. This putative critical reversion of the symbol-aspalimpsest to its ‘natural’ (non-symbolic) state occurs at the end of a novel where Wotton, the critic, had admonished that “being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”34 Realism, too, is another possible position of the Symbolic. The destruction of the symbol (by slashing the portrait) is made identical with the restoration of the portrait as is! The semiotic is only a carrier. On the spectrum of the Symbolic – the object made non-coincidental with itself – future co-incidence with itself is not impossible, albeit unthinkable. The Symbol can trope itself, absorbing even misreading generated in a novel replete with gossip and rumor. This is a kind of auto-semiotization, the conscious/unconscious, perpetual negotiations that ground a subject’s process of signifying. Variable contextual presentation, framing, narrative enunciation, and accumulated historical antecedents all generate virtually unlimited investments in ‘symbolic futures’ – as they maintain the future of the Symbolic.

34 Wilde, “Dorian Gray,” 20.

Michael Hauhs and Holger Lange

On the Future Role of Symbols in Environmental Modelling Abstract: Computer models use symbols in various ways adapted from mathematics, computer science, engineering and the natural sciences. Model applications in ecology often seek to represent future states of ecosystems, a task that has been difficult to achieve. Reflection upon the role of symbols in these models may help to disentangle the various sources and contributions to these perceptions of the environment. The modi of time (past, present, future) are here represented by corresponding forms of modelling as narration, performance, and simulation. All three occur in ecological modelling, and transitions between them may be indicative of modelling limits. Given the difficulties of representing the future of ecosystems and finding relevant analogies in the history of ecosystem use, the most challenging task for contemporary ecological models is to perform appropriately with respect to (Big) monitoring Data. We use an analogy between an environmental crisis in natural history and the current Anthropocene to demonstrate the limits of symbols in modelling which are intended to provide an abstract representation. A shift in emphasis on the engineering and computational aspect is proposed for organizing a sustainable human-environment relationship in the Anthropocene.

Introduction This contribution is a speculation about future human-environment relationships. We regard and use models as a universal tool to assess different aspects of the role of symbols in this relationship. The starting point is the current state of modern civilizations for which environmental crises can be regarded as a characteristic feature and dominant topic in public and scientific discourses.1 Our focus on modelling implies that we will discuss the topic from an abstract computational viewpoint. This will emphasize its logical side, i.e., its self-referential features, while largely abstracting from its material, mechanistic aspects. The current epoch has been termed the Anthropocene, because of large-scale and long-term impacts that human civilizations have on global geochemical

1 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia (Polity Press, 2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-004

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cycles.2 From a modelling perspective, one could discuss issues of ecosystem utilization by humans in terms of space as limited scarce resource, e.g. limits of growth, or in terms of logic as self-reference. In the first perspective, environmental problems originate from finiteness of resources. This approach works best when the observer remains detached and seeks an understanding of the system that is to be predicted. This detached attitude, however, is in conflict with the goal of sustaining the geochemical cycles in their historical state. In the second perspective, the relation between what is represented and its ‘representer’ is reflected in the model. This approach requires abstracting from material aspects, the conservation laws, and elaborates on the self-referential features of the modelling task. Hence, modelling approaches come with complementary blind spots and require a choice. We choose the latter perspective, because modern humans can no longer claim an external privileged viewpoint, but are deeply embedded into the same relations they seek to represent and model symbolically. Predicting an environmental catastrophe has become part of a way of life which may succeed in avoiding it. Such a perspective also fits the context of this volume. A number of authors have suggested that the material side of the global environmental crisis is accompanied by a representational crisis.3 It is the latter we want to comment upon in this contribution. We start from the following question: If self-reference in human-environmental relationships has become a key feature and is here to stay, how should modern societies account for it in models and in human behavior? Such an appropriate reaction is especially sought towards interfaces between humans and their non-human living environment. In the words of the philosopher Günther Anders, “we are unable to conceive what we construct; to mentally reconstruct what we can produce; to realize the reality that we can bring into being.”4 The notion of “mental reconstruction” can be regarded as synonymous with symbolic representation. With this reading, the Anders quote from 1989 already expresses the self-referential character of the modern condition long before it was reflected in terms of the Anthropocene. In the humanities, the self-referential character of many modern problems is expressed

2 Paul J. Crutzen et al., “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415.6867 (2002): 23. 3 Ann Gardiner, “Environmental Collapse in Comics: Reflections on Philippe Squarzoni’s Saison brune,” in The Discourses of Environmental Collapse. Imagining the End, eds. Alison E. Vogelaar, Brack W. Hale, Alexandra Peat (New York: Routledge, 2018): 65–88. 4 Quoted in Michael Egan, “Culture and Collapse. Theses on Catastrophic History for the Twenty-first Century,” in The Discourses of Environmental Collapse. Imagining the End, eds. Alison E. Vogelaar, Brack W. Hale, Alexandra Peat (New York: Routledge, 2018): 15–31, 20.

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under the notion of “reflexive modernization.”5 In other words, globalization has not only affected the scale but also the logical type of its problems. Solutions require interdisciplinary cooperation, and furthermore, the academic division of labor may be itself part of the problem. “The Anthropocene means that the environment has become an unavoidable category of historical analysis [. . .]. Historical context provides critical insight and understanding on the decisions in front of us.”6 Here, we will especially work on interdisciplinary links from the natural sciences into computer science and the humanities. The rest of this contribution is structured as follows. The next section introduces the notions and definitions needed for the modelling approach. It ends with the main conjecture about limits to symbolic abstraction in modern society. Then we use an analogy between the historical environmental conditions under which eukaryotes evolved with contemporary human-environment relationships. We have introduced this analogy elsewhere7 and apply it here in the opposite direction, i.e., we discuss key features about eukaryotic behavior as a model to specify and achieve future ecosystem management practice. We conclude by listing criteria that would allow to test and identify changes in contemporary human-environment relations as incipient indicators of the proposed analogy.

Models as bridges between the living world and human thinking Modelling can be introduced as the link between the world we live in and the structures we think in. Such conceptualization is very close to the understanding of a symbol, which we regard as a relation between a material world (a lived-in ambience) and an abstract sign (a mathematical structure). Both concepts use at their core a spatial metaphor in which the representation is held side by side with its referent. Such a spatial conceptualization is typical of a scientific approach. Environmental problems are communicated as resulting from finite space: limits of growth and scarce resources.

5 Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994). 6 Egan, “Culture and Collapse,” 22. 7 Michael Hauhs and Holger Lange, “Modellkonzepte einer reflexiven Ökologie. Herausforderungen bei der Modellierung von Ökosystemen,” Jahrbuch der Ökologie 2019: Die Ökologie der digitalen Gesellschaft (2019): 161–181.

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The modelling relation between world and thinking has two directions termed ‘encoding’ (from the empirical into the language of mathematics) and ‘decoding’ (in the opposite direction).8 Both directions are instances of a representation: the first as abstraction typically used in science; the second, from ideas into the material world, as specification and implementation, typically used in engineering. Symbols are the way of (en/de)coding that is exclusive to human culture.9 The ability of relating enzymatic functions of proteins to the sequence of bases in RNA and DNA is another way of coding, termed indexical; in this case a coding exclusive to life. A further way of coding employs icons. It relates, for example, the shape of molecules to the reactions they are able to catalyze and can also be understood as a ‘natural’ modelling relation. The models of the latter, iconic coding, are today objects studied in chemistry and physics and communicated as symbolic knowledge. Using modelling as a unifying language means that the three ways of coding can occur in modelling relations (sensu Rosen). In addition, we postulate that they are upward compatible. Coding, which evolved later in natural history, can encompass semantic content of its predecessors, i.e., symbolically encoded models are capable of expressing indexical and iconic information. The different ways by which the respective contexts provide meaning to icon, index and symbol are the reason for their semantic distinctions. The semantic focus implies what becomes abstracted/implemented by the respective tools and language of formalization: Theory in the natural sciences emphasizes the syntactic aspects of a phenomenon (its “mechanics” in a broad sense), while in computer science, an engineering discipline, the semantic aspects need to be expressed as well. This difference corresponds with a number of further dichotomies between natural science and engineering. Natural science seeks a theoretical understanding of how a system is related to its building blocks, while the behavior is a derived aspect to be predicted by Natural Law. In computer science behavior needs to be specified explicitly and formally; it may be matched by many programs and thus is often multiply realizable with respect to structural components. For living entities, interactive behavior is a key process. It is still open whether physical or computational abstractions are better suited for its theoretical representation.

8 Robert Rosen, Life Itself. A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (New York: Columbia UP, 1991). 9 Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).

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A representation or specification of interactive behavior at an interface comes with a corresponding ontology. Behavior at an interface can be described as a series of events, which are delivered by (interacting) agents reacting to the perceived state of the interface. Such interfaces occur between agents and their actual (real) ambience or a computer interface (virtual). The comparison between actual and virtual reactions is grounded in behavior only. Whenever the reactions of an agent are indistinguishable from an actual performance, it has the required property. The principal is termed: identity of the indiscernibles.10 Hence, behaving alive or intelligently becomes being so. Here, we will focus on computational properties of behavior which are termed ‘safety’ and ‘liveness’.11 These semantic properties form a basis, which means that they are complete (every property can be decomposed into a combination of the two), and they are independent of each other. Hence, every (abstract) property of a behavioral sequence of events can be decomposed into a safety and liveness property. A safety property guarantees that nothing bad will happen, while a liveness property guarantees that something good will happen eventually. They deal with necessity and possibility, and especially liveness is genuinely about the future. The behavioral properties will be illustrated by a simple (non-interactive) situation, traffic lights at a crossing. Their safety property is the guarantee for everybody to be able to pass without accident, the liveness property is the guarantee that eventually, everybody gets a chance of passing. Empirically, failure of safety (accidents) can be observed, whereas liveness is guaranteed/specified by context and cannot be observed locally. For example, there is no way of knowing how long you still have to wait when encountering an unfamiliar red traffic light. Being a basis means the technological challenge when specifying traffic lights is the parallel fulfilment of both properties. Many important features of life, such as having a chance to reproduce, are liveness properties (hence the name). For the analogy below, we postulate that liveness properties may occur naturally at interfaces between different (en-/de-)codings.

10 Peter Forrest, “The Identity of Indiscernibles,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta (acc. 22 June, 2020). 11 See Bowen Alpern and Fred B. Schneider, “Defining Liveness,” Information Processing Letters 21.4 (1985): 181–185.

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An analogy between two environmental crises Paul J. Crutzen, who coined the notion of Anthropocene, claimed it to be without analogue.12 However, such an analogy between a historical and a contemporary environmental crisis was drawn by Carson, following a metaphor introduced by Lovelock in 1979.13 The Great Oxidation Event (GOE) 2.4 billion years ago, when free oxygen was released by cyanobacteria into the Earth atmosphere, was compared to the environment in the Anthropocene. In the terms of liveness and safety, this analogy rests on the loss of a safety property. What was a local efficient way of producing a new resource for bacteria had global consequences for the context in which the respective competence was coded, evaluated, and transmitted. For life, the free atmospheric oxygen released by cyanobacteria irreversibly changed the environment globally. Today, human technology leading to the Anthropocene changes the conditions of survival for a large part of biota, and the climate globally. In both cases, prior to the crisis, testing of efficient resource use could be observed and evaluated locally (a safety property). The emergence of a new global feedback loop implied a novel self-reference, and led to the loss of the former safety property (positive local effects could have negative global repercussions). In the following application, we investigate what this analogy implies for translating an interpretation about the solution of this problem from its historical instance into the present. The main speculation between such a transfer is the interpretation of eukaryote behavior as a solution to the environmental problems posed by the GOE. This is not an approved state-of-the-art interpretation in biology, but can be regarded as a plausible modelling exercise.

Application The use of a modelling language allows to present the two environmental problems in parallel while invoking two types of models (functional and interactive).14

12 Paul J. Crutzen and Will Steffen, “How Long Have We Been In the Anthropocene Era? An Editorial Comment,” Climatic Change 61 (2003): 251–257. 13 James T. Carson, “Algae and Oxygen, Humans and Carbon: A Precambrian Analogue for the Anthropocene,” The Anthropocene Review 6.1–2 (2019): 162–166. See also James Lovelock, “Gaia: The Living Earth,” Nature 426.6968 (2003): 769–770. 14 See Michael Hauhs and Holger Lange, “Die Waldbilder der Forstwissenschaften aus der Sicht der Ökologischen Modellbildung,” Allgemeine Forst- und Jagdzeitung 179.8–9 (2008): 154–160.

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The functional modelling approach is exemplified by dynamic system theory in physics and is applied in many global environmental problems, for instance in the famous 1972 Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth.15 The interactive modelling approach classifies a system by behavior at its interface, exemplified by many computer games and professional training software. We will compare these two modelling approaches for indexical and symbolic encoding, respectively. In both cases, GOE and Anthropocene, the environmental problems can be presented from a physical system perspective (functional approach) and from the specification of an interface (interactive approach). Firstly, the following two models of interaction, relating a current situation to the corresponding past, can both be subsumed under “narrations of past situations”: – The genes of an organism implicitly hold a narrative of its past (which represents an abstraction), but under a new oxygenated environment many stories of the past interactions of a population gene pool will lose their value and meaning for the new situations. – The land use traditions of a civilization hold a narrative of past successes and failures (which represent an abstraction); under a new climate, with globalization and the accompanying land use changes many stories of foresters, farmers, and nature conservationists will lose their value and meaning for the new situation.16 Secondly, two functional models relating a current situation to the corresponding potential futures can be subsumed under the notion of “simulations of future situations”: – The genepool of a population holds an implicit simulation of its future (which represents a specification of its phenotype). Under the conditions of a self-referential context (GOE), such indexical representations of the future become limited in principle, as argued in the introduction. – The systematic (scientific?) knowledge of a civilization holds a simulation of its future (which implicitly represents a specification of behavior). Under the conditions of a self-referential context (Anthropocene), such symbolic representations of the future may become limited in principle.

15 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William S. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972). 16 Hope Jahren, The Story of More (New York: Vintage, 2020).

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In other words, we assume a logical parallel between these situations, which becomes expressed by the way in which the context is semantically implicated into the limits of a modelling abstraction. In both cases, the subsequent reactions or the solutions to the environmental problems can be expected as a move from an abstraction to a specification, or metaphorically from science to engineering. This however, is a leap for natural scientists, because of the teleological connotations of engineering as goal-orientated. In biology, this theme links to a long-term controversy about the necessity of teleological notions for characterizing organisms.17 We will use the notion of “natural purpose” suggested by Noble as a “middle ground”18 between scientific abstraction and implementation in engineering for testing the productivity of the proposed analogy. Tools of modern computer science such as model checking may make a difference in this debate, since they offer a formalization of the semantic content of a specification of computer programs and their behavior.19 We used the above analogy between two epochs in natural and cultural history initially in the opposite direction.20 Here, it is employed to transport content from an interpretation about the origin of eukaryotes into the discourse about today’s environmental problems. If the eukaryotes can be interpreted as solutions of a modelling task, which is logically similar to problems in the Anthropocene, in what respect can eukaryote behavior be used as a model for human-environmental relations?

The behavioral interface (instead of a physical system) In a self-reference situation, the response of a system may be delayed and far removed from its causes. The approach of seeking an abstract representation of

17 See Ulrich Krohs, Eine Theorie biologischer Theorien. Status und Gehalt von Funktionsaussagen und informationstheoretischen Modellen (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2004) and Denis Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life. Biological Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016). 18 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010). 19 Bart Jacobs, Introduction to Coalgebra. Towards Mathematics of States and Observation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016). 20 Hauhs and Lange, “Modellkonzepte.”

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the Earth system from outside by a functional model may no longer be appropriate. The computer science perspective suggests a move from a scientific to an engineering approach, which replaces the Earth system with the interface at which the human civilization interacts with its non-human environment. This interface itself becomes defined by the capacity to use symbols, and the human position is encountering this interface from its side. The distinctions between the two sides can be regarded as a semantic relationship, rather than as a spatial metaphor. For example, it is a key feature of human agents that they share a large part of their evolutionary descent with other agents. In a physical approach one would combine the two sides of this interface into one system in which the amount of water or some elements participating in biogeochemical cycles are conserved. The Earth system needs to be symbolically encoded into (causal) states that change under a “Natural Law”21; an approach taken by global climate models (also termed general circulation models). It requires an abstraction from liveness properties. The links to past and future states of the system are provided by the respective dynamical laws only. However, these laws may be too weak to handle strategic choices of agents interacting across the interface. In the interactive modelling approach, the two sides of the interface remain separated. A temporal integration is provided by the two properties, safety and liveness as a basis of specifying a behavior at that interface: On the one side, the abiotic part of the cycle implicitly specifies the conditions under which behavioral reactions may induce a (new) stable, stationary state. On the other side, such stationary states may correspond to an evolutionary stable strategy in the populations constituting the ecosystem of agents. The specification of a behavior as a result of a self-reference would thus manifest a “natural purpose” through the imposed liveness property without invoking an engineer. The only extra ontological baggage of the second approach is to regard models as a natural kind. Organisms can have models of their environment in the form of behavioral reaction norms, implicitly encoded in their genes. Thus, models may transcend symbols as demonstrated by bacteria having models about their environment, e.g., the case of magneto-tactic movement by prokaryotes.22

21 Rosen, Life Itself. 22 See Maureen O’Malley, Philosophy of Microbiology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014).

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Switching from abstraction to specification: Eukaryotes and the boring billion Lane considers the origin of eukaryotes with the symbiosis leading to mitochondria, which provide a respiratory function to the host cell, a “freak” event23: This crazy solution was probably inevitable. Recall the starting point – bacteria that live inside other bacteria. Without such an endosymbiosis, we saw that complex life is not possible, as only autonomous cells are capable of losing superfluous genes, leaving them ultimately with only those genes necessary to control respiration locally.24

The “inevitable” in this quotation will here be translated as “specified by context”; “control respiration locally” will be translated into a safety property. In this interpretation, the switching from an abstraction to a specification/implementation mode in the relationship between living cells and their abiotic environment becomes the key process at the origin of eukaryotes. In this context, prokaryotes are viewed as employing abstraction as the main mode of modelling: so-called household genes encoding a physiology by which local thermodynamic gradients in their environment can be exploited, leading to growth and reproduction with fitness as a local safety property. Prokaryotes are morphologically similar to each other, but evolved a rich physiological diversity in terms of how they utilize the local environment. A precondition for these local adaptations is an external local variable, such as available energy to be used as a safety property. In contrast, eukaryotes adopted aerobic respiration as their standard physiology. The eukaryotic cell is the building block for all forms of higher life, with its rich morphological diversity. The same standardized behavior, respiration, within a diverse morphology indicates that the contextual specification has been multiply realizable, which is a typical feature of life25 and computer programs. At the origin of eukaryotes stands a unique symbiotic relationship between an Alphaproteobacterium and an Archaea. This symbiosis is not only temporally close to the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes, but some authors regard it as constitutive for their origin itself.26 It occurred only once in natural history

23 Nick Lane, The Vital Question. Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (New York: Norton, 2015). 24 Lane, Vital Question, 242. 25 Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: Norton, 2011). 26 Lane, Vital Question.

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and still poses a major evolutionary puzzle. The symbiosis led to mitochondria, which today take a key role in aerobic respiration. The fine regulation of the internal coupling of this reaction between different metabolisms originating from two different cell types is our candidate for the new internal “biological” safety property that substituted the external and failing old safety property of prokaryotic life. This link between the historical environmental crisis of GOE and the subsequent27 origin of eukaryotes has these two components: – an external abiotic change leading to a specification of stationary behavior by the context as “natural purpose”; – an internal biotic change leading to a new evolutionarily stable norm of organismic behavior (including novel features such as sex and death). The behaviors can be described as a performance. At the biotic/abiotic interface, the altered abiotic environment specified (again implicitly) a new behavior that could be decomposed into an existing liveness and a new safety property. Life on earth discovered an appropriate behavior by ‘natural selection’ (based on a similar logic of relationships): eukaryotic cells can be viewed as ‘landsuits’ of prokaryotic cells, for living on land.28 In addition, eukaryotic cells can be regarded as units sharing labor by temporary ritualized cooperation within an organism.29 Eukaryote cells were the first instance able to express this new safety property, which subsequently guided natural selection at the above abiotic/abiotic interface. Conversely, failures of this safety property have led to a universal physiology of apoptosis (programmed cell death) in eukaryotes.30 This conjecture also provides a new glimpse at how life became involved in stabilizing the geochemical cycles, a puzzle for many variants of the so-called Gaia theories.31 In summary, eukaryotes as free living singular cells used mitochondria for

27 This may have been a very slow version of “subsequent,” including a delay of up to several hundred million years. 28 Derek S. Bendall, Christopher J. Howe, Euan G. Nisbet, R. Ellen R. Nisbet, “Photosynthetic and Atmospheric Evolution. Introduction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biologial Sciences 363.1504 (2008): 2625–2628. 29 David C. Queller and Joan E. Strassmann, “Beyond Society. The Evolution of Organismality,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364.1533 (2009): 3143–3155. 30 Lane, Vital Question, 247. See also Nick Lane, Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World (New York: Oxford UP, 2003). 31 W. Ford Doolittle, “Natural Selection through Survival Alone, and the Possibility of Gaia,” Biology & Philosophy 29.3 (2014): 415–423.

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aerobic respiration as one dominant physiology stabilizing the spikes of free oxygen. The epoch in which that happened was termed by geologists the “boring billion.”

Switching from abstraction to specification: The Anthropocene and the boring century That is why we propose to aim for a similar “boring” epoch as the norm in organizing the environmental future of human civilization. In the Anthropocene, the altered environment contains new solutions for stationary states that translate into safety and liveness properties and the specification of sustainable human behavior at the interface. Are there candidates for corresponding new cultural safety properties that could be used to provide local and instantaneous guidance? Where to look for candidates? To answer this question, the argument is condensed to its main points, at the starting and end of this ‘translation’. The focus is on the safety properties. We propose and discuss only one example, the management of national parks, with the interface defined by the provisioning of authentic wilderness experiences to ‘moderns.’ The translation starts from a historical scenario: – Alphaproteobacteria as carriers of up-to-date interactive models (best management practice for indexical encoding of abiotic resources, providing the ‘household genes’ in the epoch prior to the GOE). – Archaea as carriers of up-to-date functional models (providing ‘information genes’). – In the period prior to GOE, these two types of specialists could seek spatially separated niches and use an abiotic safety property for testing (natural selection): differences in local energy efficiency causing varying growth and replication rates. – However, GOE rendered the old safety property biologically ambivalent, limiting indexical representation of the present and future environment of bacteria (prokaryotes). – In eukaryotes, a new biological safety property emerged as the ability to conduct aerobic respiration almost everywhere and all the time. The symbiotic integration of two different modelling types and their respective genomes became the local indexical representation of global reflexivity. The new behavior of eukaryotes can be interpreted as a performance of the two symbionts.

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Towards an actual instance of a logically (computationally) analogous problem: – Traditional ecosystem managers as carriers of up-to-date interactive models represent the best management practice for symbolic encoding of biotic resources in cultural history (e.g., those examples that developed sustainable management practices). – Natural science as carrier of up-to-date functional models; the best mechanistic representation of ecosystem functions and services by symbolic encoding. – In the period prior to the Anthropocene, these two types of specialists could seek spatially separated niches and use a biotic safety property: repeatable and explainable experiments. – However, the Anthropocene rendered the old safety property culturally ambivalent, limiting symbolic representations of the future for both types of experts. – A new cultural safety property guiding sustainable relationships to nonhuman life has not been identified. It may be an analogue to eukaryote behavior, but lifted to symbolic rather than indexical coding and specification. We compare modelling relations in the context of three prominent media available on a computer: simulation, narration, and performance.32 The above (historical and contemporary) scenarios were interpreted as limiting simulation and narration with respect to abstraction. These limitations hint at performance as a potential solution. When simulation of the future and narration of the past becomes limited, a third mode, performance, provides a different, reflective access to the present. The key feature of performance is to integrate an abstraction (representing the empirical world) with a specification (implementing an abstract idea at the same time in the present). Performances create what they say.33 In a theater play, they do this in a protected space and time interval in order to publicly negotiate extreme or important situations. The performance can then be evaluated, reflected upon and modified in discourses of the various stakeholders. The quality of the performance is reflected by the authenticity of the (live) experiences by its various participators. This notion of success is subjective and loaded with normative baggage, but just because of this can build the respective group identity.

32 Michael Hauhs, “Temporalities of Conservation. Human Environment Relationships in an African National Park,” The Multiplicity of Orders and Practices. A Tribute to Georg Klute, eds. Dida Badi, Thomas Huesken, Alexander Solyga (Cologne: Koeppe, 2019): 419–438. 33 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012).

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The authenticity, subjectively defined, may become an effective regulator of individual or collective behavior. As a behavioral property, authenticity can bridge between the actual and virtual worlds. Also, hunters and climbers are examples of such groups that build their own behavioral norms around “authentic experiences” shared among their members and without objectifiable properties. Being able to use a weather report and assess the physical risks falls under the functional modelling capacity, whereas assessing one’s own fitness and limits requires an interactive model. We argued elsewhere that, for example, hunting and climbing contain combinations of interactive and functional modelling relations, which can be trained in a modular way and for which a great deal of subjective satisfaction lies in the experience of a successful integration in a live performance (i.e., in the practice of hunting and climbing).34 Individuals can organize and train their skills and select matching challenges along their own learning curves. Their experience can be characterized as a safety property, but it requires a subjective internal perspective. The wilderness experience in national parks is taken here as a similar subjective experience, but capable of being shared by much larger parts of the population. These modern examples pose limits to existing functional models, because they specify new goals for human use of ecosystems. When an abstract symbolic representation reaches its limits, otherwise successful methods of science or of best-practice management may no longer achieve the expected outcomes, but may turn into an analogue of a theater performance.35 We claim that this analogy is not a fault of the respective actors, but imposed by the emerging modern (global) self-reference that induced in the public new goals of management, while imposing limits on the modelling abilities of experts. Actors may profit from reflecting on this analogy and the systematic treatment of reflexivity in the humanities. We are thus not criticizing the current practice, but suggesting that it should be complemented with conscious reflection of its limits and roles. The above example is not suggested as a solution, but as exemplifying the type of competences necessary to organize the search for local regulator of sustainable behavior at the human-environment interface.

34 Michael Hauhs, Susanne Lachenicht and Wolf-Dieter Ernst, “Geookölogie als Theater? Die Inszenierung von (Umwelt) Naturwissenschaft,” Forum der Geoökologie 28.1 (2017): 32–40. 35 Hauhs et al. “Geoökologie als Theater.”

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Conclusion Bernd Mahr has proposed a modelling relation similar to the one used here.36 He emphasized the role of the “cargo” of models. This is the content transported along our speculative analogy. Caught in a situation in which the future was “not-predictable” and the past “not narratable,” eukaryotes invented a live-performance in which narration and simulation became temporarily entwined in a symbiosis. The development of a phenotype can be regarded as a live theatre performance of the integrated knowledge originating from the two different genomes and cell types. Interrupted by phases of evaluation, critique and modification of the plan behind the performance (the reproduction of the genotype), the two aspects of the model appear in temporal order rather than as spatially separated. That is why the competence in performance has a strong engineering component, replacing the scientific metaphor of knowledge as an abstraction from an empirical world by the knowledge how to properly act in this world. In this light, the key features of ‘higher life’ resulted from the principal limits of representing an empirical world (from the inside) by narration or simulation. Ritualized performances have been extensively studied in the humanities and can be used to classify religious practices. Whitehouse proposes two types of rituals, one in which meaning is bubbling up by spontaneous exegetical reflection (often from rare and climactic experience) and one in which meaning is trickling down guided by orthodox doctrinal interpretation (often by frequent repetitions).37 From a modelling perspective, these two types of rituals correspond with the two classes of stakeholders that Latour summarized under the notion of “terrestrialization.”38 The suggested analogy allows to provide an interpretation of eukaryotic behavior as an example of Latour’s “terrestrialization.” “Religious” rituals often function as group binding: For eukaryotes, this group binding is based on the respective safety properties: Firstly, as metabolism by cooperating between two cells in endo-symbiosis allows them to become building blocks with respect to their shared environment. This cooperation (in Whitehouse’s terminology, “doctrinal mode,” Latour’s “counter religion two”) can be regarded as the root of multicellular organisms and so called “higher life”. Secondly, reproduction by cooperation between organisms allows them to

36 Bernd Mahr, “Die Informatik und die Logik der Modelle,” Informatik-Spektrum 32.3 (2009): 228–249. 37 Harvey Whitehouse, “Transmissive Frequency, Ritual and Exegesis,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 1.2 (2001): 167–181. 38 Latour, Facing Gaia, 307, table 5–4.

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review and update their behavioral competence with respect to their offspring. This cooperation (in Whitehouse’s terminology, “spontaneous exegesis,” Latour’s “nature two”) can be interpreted as the origin of sexuality and evolution of species. Through the performance of eukaryotic life, the global self-reference became reflected in the local self-reference of organisms. A local self-reference is the basis for Robert Rosen’s definition of life itself.39 The switch from abstraction to implementation, in which local representations may take an active part in creating their environment, matches the puzzling design aspect of Gaia theories. Some features of biogeochemical cycles appear as being under an active regulative control by life.40 The cargo in the backward direction is thus providing arguments for the evolution of self-regulating biogeochemical cycles. The cargo in the forward direction is suggesting a closer cooperation with computer science on the theoretical language and with the humanities on practical organization of reflection. Symbols are employed in all three modelling approaches listed in the introduction: narrating the past, performing the present and simulating the future. In the past, relationships between a symbol and its referent were conceptualized as a spatial one: an abstract world of human thinking juxtaposed against a real world in which humans live; a spatial relation across which symbols can represent the world in our imagination by abstraction and affect the world by our actions when implementing our ideas and thoughts. In this contribution, we reviewed these relationships as modelling ones (in the sense of Rosen): in particular, as modelling relationships which turned reflexive by their context. For us, a surprising feature of the historical analogy is the shifting emphasis towards temporal organization of behavior at an interface. Behind the switch from a mainly spatially organized modelling problem (how to properly represent the empirical world in its parts and building blocks) to a temporally organized modelling problem (how to organize learning about a new behavior) may stand a mathematical reason. The local representation of global selfreference may require an order relation. That is why computer science as systematic ‘design of behavior’ provides the appropriate formal tools to represent and specify order, rather than physics alone, in which symmetries in space are often employed to represent conservation laws.

39 Rosen, Life Itself. 40 Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson, Revolutions that Made the Earth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011).

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Initially, we introduced models along with symbols by holding empirical and abstract worlds side by side in a spatial metaphor. The speculation has led to a scenario in which models relate the world and ideas predominantly in a ritualized temporal order. This endorses an engineering perspective on the design of behavior rather than a purely scientific approach to system analysis. The change in modelling relation will also affect the use of symbols. For the future study of the human-environment relationship, we expect a closer collaboration between natural (environmental) sciences and the humanities on specification and reflection of behavior at actual and virtual interfaces.

Susana Onega

The Symbolization of the Female Body in Western Culture from Ancient Greece to the Transmodern Period Abstract: Ernst Cassirer’s definition of man as an animal symbolicum conventionally inaugurates the study of the role of symbolization in the human construction of reality. The imaginary truths about reality and identity expressed through complex systems of symbolization, from ritual, myth and religion to art and literature, are fundamental for social cohesion as they reflect the dominant paradigms of the group. The article traces the evolution of the symbolization of the female body from ancient Greece until the present according to the successive paradigm shifts. Parmenides’s division of the cosmos into paired opposites, with woman as the necessary other for the definition of male subjectivity, initiates the symbolization of the female body as monstrous. Prefigured by the nurturing/devouring duality of Mother Earth and mythical women/goddesses like the Medusa, this symbolization expresses the male fear of female sexuality and agency. The resymbolization of Mother Earth as the Virgin Mary and of woman as a domestic angel are expressions of this fear. Transmitted to children by cautionary tales like ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’, it condemns women to pay for social integration with submission, purity, and objectification. In the Enlightenment, the conflation of the male desire to subdue woman/Mother Earth with the project of the Empire reactivated the myth of Zeus’s rape of Europe as the raping of the woman/land motif. In the postmodernist era, feminist writers contested Freud’s and Lacan’s endorsements of female monstrosity by creating grotesque angelic monsters, bisexual triangles, incestuous theatre troupes, and music-hall transvestites. The recent emergence of the transmodern paradigm has brought about a new generation of writers seeking to redefine subjectivity from a holistic and empathetic transpersonal perspective, thus providing a humane and ethical alternative to the oppositional system of privileging and bonding transmitted to us from our ancient Greek ancestors.

The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (METI) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P); of the University of Zaragoza and Ibercaja (JIUZ-2019-HUM-02); and of the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H03_20R), for the writing of this article. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-005

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Introduction: The role of symbolization in the representation of reality Ernst Cassirer’s path-breaking contention in An Essay on Man, that “instead of defining man as an animal rationale we should define him as an animal symbolicum,”1 situated symbolic thought and symbolic behavior at the center of the human construction of reality. An abridged version of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1922–1929), this book was meant to put an end to the “complete anarchy of thought [affecting] our modern theory of man”2 by demonstrating that the symbol provides “the clue to the nature of man.”3 As Cassirer famously argued: Man cannot escape his own achievement. [. . .] No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are part of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. [. . .] He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium.4

Cassirer’s contention was subsequently refined by various branches of knowledge, ranging from linguistics, literary criticism, psychology and sociology to anthropology. Thus, in Origins of the Modern Mind (1991), cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald offers a comprehensive study of the evolution of the modern human mind from the primate mind through a series of major adaptations, each of which led to the emergence of a new representational system. Donald’s main argument is that the central function that distinguishes human beings from apes and hominoids is the development of “the mimetic mind,” the exclusively human ability to mime, or re-enact, events after they have taken place.5 First developed by Homo erectus, mimetic cognition allowed our evolutionary predecessors to share emotional knowledge by means of bodily representations and games, such as gestures, mime, dance, and athletic and constructional skills. Its corollary was the development of language by Homo sapiens and, with it, of narrative thought. The symbolic knowledge provided by the mimetic

1 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (Yale: Yale UP, 1944): 44. 2 Cassirer, Essay on Man, 39. 3 Cassirer, Essay on Man, 43. 4 Cassirer, Essay on Man, 43. 5 Merlin Donald, “Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition” (1991): 1–20, 16. (acc. 01 January 2020).

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mind progressively gave way to more complex systems of symbolization, from ritual, myth and religion to art and literature. While the mimetic mind allowed human beings to share vital information about past events imaginatively, the creation of complex systems of symbolization developed primarily as mechanisms for modelling reality. The fact that this modelling process relies on a principle of resemblance by which some property is abstracted and reproduced in another medium, means that it is always “metaphoric or holistic.”6 Here lies the importance of symbolic systems or, in Cassirer’s above quoted terms, of the “symbolic net” enveloping human beings and separating us from the direct perception of the world. Donald signals as central for the creation of symbolic models the development of memory. While apes have “episodic memory,” and so can adapt their behavior to the environment, they lack “episodic recall,” that is, “they have great difficulty in gaining voluntarily access to the contents of their own episodic memories independently of environmental cues.”7 In other words, apes can react to real-world situations, but cannot represent or reflect on them. This is why “apes are not good at improving their skills through systematic rehearsal [ . . . while] children actively and routinely rehearse and refine all kinds of action.”8 This exclusive human ability to mime or re-enact events is crucial not only for the development of the individual but also for the cohesion of the group. In a second stage, the mimetic mind evolved into “a capacity for lexical invention, and a high-speed phonological apparatus”9 that culminated in the acquisition of language as a method of modelling reality. After it, individual episodic recall (or internal memory) was complemented by external memory, a collective mode of representation inaugurated “in the late Upper Paleolithic with the invention of the first permanent visual symbols.”10 Although the main event in human evolution was individual cognition, the development of complex systems of symbolization collectively stored in the external memory of the group “provides the linkage between physical and cultural evolution.”11 As Donald argues: day-to-day storytelling in a shared oral culture eventually produces collective, standardized narrative versions of reality, particularly of past events; and these become what we call the dominant ‘myths’ of a society. [. . .] [A]ll documented human societies, even the most

6 Donald, “Precis, ”6. 7 Donald, “Precis,” 4. 8 Donald, “Precis,” 4. 9 Donald, “Precis,” 3. 10 Donald, “Precis,” 3. 11 Donald, “Precis,” 1.

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technologically primitive, have elaborate systems of myth, which appears to reflect the earliest form of integrative thought. These socially pervasive constructs continue to exert a major influence on the way oral societies–and indeed most modern societies–are run: thus [. . .] many cultures might be labelled ‘mythic,’ after their governing representations.12

This description of storytelling and myth-making leaves no doubt about the importance of symbolization in the construction of the imaginary truths about reality and identity that grant cohesion to a social group. As I argued elsewhere, these symbolic truths normally reflect the group’s dominant scientific and cultural paradigms. Here lies the intrinsic difficulty and even traumatic effects of having to substitute them for the new symbolic truths arising out of a paradigm shift.13 Starting from this outlook on symbolization, I will attempt to outline the evolution of the symbolic models of representation of the female body according to the shifts of paradigmatic assumptions dominating Western culture in the past, the present and, perhaps, the future.

The symbolization of the female body from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the modern era Both in the title and throughout the text of An Essay on Man, Cassirer employs the word “man” as an unmarked, gender-neutral term to refer to human beings in general. This use of the term reveals the continuation in the first half of the twentieth century of a patriarchal conception of subjectivity whose origins go back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. Faced with the multiplicity of the world, the Pythagoreans attempted to bring system and coherence to the cosmos by establishing the mathematical laws of proportion and harmony governing them. Their attempt to reduce things to numbers led Parmenides to establish the difference between an object of thought and its physical manifestation. As W. K. C. Guthrie explains, Parmenides arranged the cosmos dialectically into primary opposites, beginning with Light and Night, and used them as the headings of two lists of sensible qualities in paired opposites, such as hot/cold, soft/hard, active/passive, or male/female.14 This division was paradoxical in the sense that Parmenides

12 Donald, “Precis,” 13. 13 Susana Onega, “The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality,” The European Review 22.3 (2014): 491–503. 14 W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 2, The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (Cambridge, New York, London, Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1965): 57–59.

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shared with other ancient Greek philosophers the belief that reality is one. However, since he also believed that “[f]rom unity nothing can be derived,” Parmenides concluded that “[t]he first step in describing the evolution of a cosmos, with all its ordered variety, must be ‘two forms’ [even though knowing that] Light exists though Night does not.”15 Thus, Parmenides’s division of the cosmos into paired opposites provided a model for the ordering or systematization of “what is” and “what is not,” of “Being and Seeming,” of the world of “truths” and “the phantom world of images.”16 This division was based on paradigmatic truths shared by earlier Greek philosophers, expressed figuratively through myth. For example, Diodorus believed that “life began in moist places under the action of heat [and] Empedocles spoke of fire raising up men and women out of the earth.”17 Echoing this, Parmenides’s cosmogony “began with two opposed principles Fire (heat, light) and Darkness (cold, earth), he thought of Fire and its correlatives as the active element, and its contrary as the passive.”18 Accordingly, Fire was “male” and the Earth “female.”19 By asserting that, as the active element in the creation of the cosmos, Fire is male while the Earth, as its passive counterpart, is female, Parmenides was giving expression to a paradigmatic assumption that was to have lasting effects on the construction of subjectivity in Western culture. As Cassirer’s unmarked use of the term “man” suggests, the symbolic representation of the human subject as male necessarily entails the objectification of woman as the second term in the equation self/other. As Patricia Waugh argues in Feminist Fictions: Subjectivity, historically constructed and expressed through the phenomenological equation self/other, necessarily rests masculine ‘self-hood’ upon feminine ‘otherness’. The subjective centre of socially dominant discourses (from Descartes’ philosophical, rational ‘I’ to Lacan’s psychoanalytic phallic/symbolic) in terms of power, agency, autonomy has been a ‘universal’ subject which has established its identity through the invisible marginalization or exclusion of what it has also defined as ‘femininity’ (whether this is the nonrational, the body, the emotions, or the pre-symbolic).20

15 Guthrie, Greek Philosophy, 53–54. 16 Guthrie, Greek Philosophy, 46, 71–72, 75. 17 Guthrie, Greek Philosophy, 59. 18 Guthrie, Greek Philosophy, 59. 19 According to Guthrie, the two lists of opposites are: Active: fire, bright, sky, hot, dry, rare, light dry, male and soft; Passive: night, dark, earth, cold, moist, dense, heavy, left, female, and hard (Greek Philosophy, 77). 20 Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge, 1989): 8.

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Waugh’s allusion to Descartes and Lacan points to the continued validity of Parmenides’s oppositional model of subjectivity in the modern and the postmodern eras. Singled out by Simone de Beauvoir as the origin of woman’s marginal position in patriarchy,21 this symbolization of woman has been denounced by feminist writers of all tendencies as one of the strongest and most insidious preconceptions in Western culture. Jacques Lacan’s differentiation between the Imaginary order (the pre-symbolic realm of the not-yet constituted subject) and the Symbolic order (presided over by the phallus as the organizing point of sexual identity and desire) echoes Parmenides’s distinction between the realms of Being and Seeming. As is well known, Lacan gave a linguistic turn to the Freudian notion of sexual difference as lack. He argued that sexual identity has its origin in language and situated the fully constituted subject in the Symbolic while relegating woman as a general category to the Imaginary, on the contention that “there is no woman except as something excluded from the nature of things, which is the nature of words.”22 As Charles Freeland notes – echoing both Cassirer’s definition of man as symbol-maker and Parmenides’s definition of Seeming as the phantom world of images – according to Lacan, “man, the speaking man, only thinks that he approaches ‘woman’ but what he really approaches is his own fantasy of woman, object a, as Lacan calls it, the fantasy object by which he [. . .] fills in the loss constituent to his desire.”23 The dual position as different from, and yet necessary for, the configuration of the male subject allotted to woman by Parmenides, Freud and Lacan, finds symbolic expression in the paradoxical fascination and revulsion provoked by what is perceived by men as the monstrosity of the female body. As Barbara Creed forcibly argues: All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject. Freud linked man’s fear of woman to his infantile belief that the mother is castrated. ‘Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital’, Freud wrote in his paper ‘Fetishism’ in 1927.24

As Creed further notes, in The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell explains how the male fear of castration is expressed in a recurrent symbol “known to folklore as 21 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe. Les faits et les mythes (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). 22 “Il n’y a de femme qu’exclue par la nature des choses, qui est la nature des mots.” Jacques Lacan, Encore (Le Séminaire: livre XX) (Paris: Seuil, 1975): 68 [translation mine]. 23 Charles Freeland, Antigone, in her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: SUNY P, 2013): 214. 24 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: An Essay in Abjection (London and New York: Routledge, 1993): 1.

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the motif of ‘the toothed vagina’ – the vagina that castrates. And a counterpart, the other way, is the so-called ‘phallic mother’, a motif perfectly illustrated in the long fingers and nose of the witch.”25 This male fascination for, and fear of castration is symbolized by the monstrous half beast/half woman figures of classical mythology, as Creed’s interpretation of Freud’s essay, “Medusa’s Head” makes clear: It is not by accident that Freud linked the sight of the Medusa to the equally horrifying sight of the mother’s genitals, for the concept of the monstrous/feminine as constructed within/by patriarchal and phallogocentric ideology is related intimately to the problem of sexual difference and castration. [. . .] ‘The sight of the Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him into stone’. The irony of this was not lost on Freud, who pointed out that becoming stiff also means having an erection.26

As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out, the fascination and horror provoked by the monstrous bodies of the Medusa and other classical women/goddesses is metaphorically expressed in the double meaning of the “charm” attributed to them as being “charming” and “charmers”: “male ambivalence about female ‘charms’ underlies the traditional images of such terrible sorceress-goddesses as the Sphinx, Medusa, Circe, Kali, Delilah, and Salome, all of whom possess duplicitous arts that allow them both to seduce and to steal male generative energy.”27 The ancient Greek mythical prototype of these monstrous women/goddesses with duplicitous arts is Gaia, the personification of the primordial Mother Earth goddess who, according to Hesiod’s Theogony (eighth – seventh century BC), sprang forth from the void of Chaos and gave birth to Uranus (Father Sky), the primordial male god who then became Gaia’s incestuous husband. As Mikhail Bakhtin argued in Rabelais and His World, in carnival imagery, the representation of Mother Earth preserves the duality and materiality of this primordial mythical figure. Her grotesque body “is an element that devours, swallows up (the grave, the womb) and at the same time is an element of birth, of renaissance (the maternal breasts).”28 The monstrosity of Mother Earth and mythical women/goddesses prefigures the symbolization of the female body as monstrous. As Julia Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the fact that, in patriarchal societies, woman’s subjectivity is structured through the maternal function

25 Creed, Monstrous Feminine, 1. 26 Creed, Monstrous Feminine, 2–3. 27 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination [1979] (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984): 34. 28 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World [1965], trans. Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984): 21.

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(mother, woman, reproduction), makes the mother a key figure of abjection. Relegated by Lacan to the pre-symbolic realm of the Imaginary, the mother is the child’s first object of desire and becomes a figure of abjection at the moment when the child rejects her for the father, the upholder of the law in the Symbolic order: When psychoanalysts speak of an object they speak of the object of desire as it is elaborated within the Oedipian triangle. According to that trope, the father is the mainstay of the law and the mother the prototype of the object. Toward the mother there is convergence not only of survival needs but of the first mimetic yearnings. She is the other subject, an object that guarantees my being as subject. The mother is my first object – both desiring and signifiable.29

Woman’s monstrosity is, then, the result of her position as abject in the process of subjectivization of her own child. She attracts and repels because the function of the monstrous is to bring about an encounter between the Symbolic order and that which threatens its stability. This is why “[t]he ideal woman that male authors dream of generating is always an angel.”30 As Kristeva puts it in ‘About Chinese Women,’ in order to gain admittance into the Symbolic order, women must choose between virginity and motherhood, thus being forced to “atone for their carnal jouissance with their martyrdom.”31 This would explain why, in the Middle Ages, the ideal male model of mother goddess was the Virgin Mary, the sexless mother of a male god. The difference between Gaia giving birth to her son Uranus without male insemination and then marrying him in order to give birth to the Titans, and Sophocles’s representation of the tragic consequences of Oedipus marrying his mother Jocasta in Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC), points to the development of the incest taboo as an early element in the configuration of the abject mother. Henceforth, “there is a clear line of literary descent from divine Virgin to the domestic angel, passing through (among many others) Dante, Milton and Goethe.”32 In the Victorian era, the figure of the affectionate and sexless mother that Virginia Woolf saw as a threat to her professional development,33 was popularized by Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem, ‘The Angel in

29 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982): 32. 30 Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 20. 31 Julia Kristeva, “About Chinese Women” [1974], The Kristeva Reader [1986], trans. Seán Hand, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989): 138–59, 146. 32 Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 20. 33 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 21 January 1931, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, ed. Leonard Bloom (1942, The University of Adelaide. (acc. 1 February 2018). See Susana Onega, “Embodied

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the House’.34 As Gilbert and Gubar argue, from the eighteenth century onwards, the male fear of female sexuality and agency finds expression in the proliferation of conduct books for ladies, “enjoining young girls to submissiveness, modesty, self-lessness; reminding all women that they should be angelic” (23). Also significant in this respect is the proliferation of cautionary wondertales. The knowledge acquired by children in tales such as those of Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, played a fundamental role in the identity formation and integration of new members into the social group, as their original function was to channel the children’s drives and transmit key forms of socialization through a process of metaphorization and symbolization that allowed for the integration of awful but necessary knowledge indirectly, in terms that could be assimilated and kept in the collective memory of the group.35 In tales like ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Snow White’, or ‘Cinderella’, the price the pubescent girl must pay for social integration is submission, purity, and the renunciation of significant action. Thus, after being poisoned by their respective stepmothers, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White lead the phantasmatic living death of beautiful objects, while Cinderella’s beautiful body is covered in rags with grit from the kitchen hearth and rendered so small by halfstarvation and lovelessness that no other woman in the kingdom could wear her crystal slipper. The fact that, in these tales, there is always a monstrous female antagonist to the virginal heroine, points to the depth of male anxiety about female autonomy. As Gilbert and Gubar note, “for every glowing portrait of submissive women enshrined in domesticity, there exists an equally important negative image that embodies the sacrilegious fiendishness of what William Blake called the ‘Female Will’.”36 In the introduction to Willful Subjects, Sara Ahmed provides a paradigmatic example of the efforts made by patriarchy to eradicate this disturbing and threatening female will through the narration of ‘The Willful Child’, a wondertale by the Brothers Grimm about a little girl who did not behave as her mother wished: “For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay

Monstrosity and Identitarian Fluidity in Jeanette Winterson’s Novels of the 1980s,” in Law and the Humanities: Cultural Perspectives, ed. Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019): 387–404, 390–91. 34 The poem, dedicated to his wife Emily, was published by Patmore in 1854 and revised in 1862. 35 See Susana Onega. “The Role of Symbolisation in the Shaping of Reality and Identity: Tales of Woundedness and Healing,” Human Diversity in Context, ed. Silvia Ferrini (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2020): 315–31. 36 Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 28.

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on her death-bed.”37 After her burial, the child’s stubbornness and obstinacy were displaced onto an arm, which kept coming up from the grave, so that her mother had to tie it with a rod to keep it under the earth. Ahmed explains this tale as a battle between will and willfulness. While those in authority have the right to exert their will on the others, the others’ attempt to exert their own will constitutes an act of willfulness punishable with their elimination.38 Compared to the inert bodies of the will-less Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, the willful child’s arm protruding from her grave symbolizes her desperate need to affirm her right to lead an autonomous life. This tale brings to mind the shock felt by Dante Gabriel Rossetti when, on exhuming the coffin of his beloved Lizzie in order to retrieve a poetry manuscript he had buried with her, he found that “her hair had ‘continued to grow after her death, to grow so long, so beautiful, so luxuriantly as to fill the coffin with its gold!’.”39 This real episode, that Rossetti found “both terrifyingly physical and fiercely supernatural,”40 is interpreted by Gilbert and Gubar as symbolic of “the indomitable earthliness that no woman, however angelic, could entirely renounce, Lizzie Siddal Rossetti’s hair leap[ing] like a metaphor for monstrous female sexual energies from the literal and figurative coffins in which her artist-husband enclosed her.”41 The threat to the patriarchal order symbolized by Lizzie’s growing hair and the Willful Child’s protruding arm may be related to the motif of the country or land as a woman that has to be sexually mastered/conquered. Traceable to the myth of Zeus’s rape of Europa, the “raping of the land” motif became the founding metaphor on which the modern concept of human progress was based. During the Enlightenment, this motif gave symbolic expression to the Biblical notion of dominium terrae, that is, God’s mandate to human beings to “Fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28), on which the nascent ideology of Imperialism was based. Together with God’s promise to Abraham (Genesis 22:16, 17) and David (Jeremiah 33:17–26) that He would multiply their seed and make them the kings and priests (Revelation 1:6) of His future kingdom on earth, this Biblical mandate gave white colonizers a sense of moral and racial superiority that justified the ravaging of the lands and the extermination or enslavement of the native peoples of the territories they sought to conquer and exploit. Concurrently, Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection provided a scientific justification for the treatment of other races as less developed specimens in the evolutionary

37 Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2014): 1. 38 Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 2. 39 Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 27. 40 Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 27. 41 Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, 27.

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ladder. Eugenist medics sought proof of this through the study of racial anatomical features. A particularly striking example was the peculiarity of the sexual organs of some African women, known as the Khoikhoi or Hottentot apron. A well-known case was that of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman born in 1789. Considered a primitive specimen on a par with the sexual and intellectual development of an orangutan, she was shipped to England in 1810, publicly exhibited in freak shows in London and Paris as ‘The Hottentot Venus’,42 submitted to all kinds of anatomical explorations and, after her death in 1815, dissected and embalmed, to be repatriated only in 2002. Like other African women whose bodies were displayed in freak shows during life and in ethnographic museums after death, Saartjie Baartman became a living emblem of the awe-inspiring sexually powerful “savage” woman, seen as very distinct from the sexless “civilized” women of Europe.

The representation of the female body in the postmodern era The paradigm shift from Modernity to Postmodernity that took place in the 1960s and 70s brought about a general questioning of the notion of human subject as essence and its reconceptualization as a social and ideological construction, open to redefinition and change. Thus, while Louis Althusser argued that subjectivity is constructed by the Ideological State Apparatuses, Michel Foucault saw it as the effect of power and discipline.43 The decentering of power relations and the demise of the ideology of endless progress resulting from this change of worldview are echoed by the resymbolization of the motif of the rape of the woman/land in postmodernist fiction, for example, in the early novels of J. M. Coetzee, particularly in Dusklands (1974)44 and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The protagonist of Waiting for the Barbarians, a country magistrate in charge of a fort in Hottentot territory, spends his free time digging the earth for archaeological remains and

42 See Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman. Born 1789 – Buried 2002 (London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2007). 43 See James Hartfield, The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained [2002] (Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam UP, 2006). 44 See Susana Onega, “The Trauma of Anthropocentrism and the Reconnection of Self and World in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands,” Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation, ed. Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo (London and New York: Routledge, 2014): 207–222.

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becomes growingly obsessed with interpreting the inscrutable signs painted on some ancient wooden slips he has found as a way to confer meaning on his troubled relationship to the “barbarians.”45 The unacknowledged guilt and shame he feels for his reluctant collaboration with the atrocities committed by Colonel of Police Joll, newly arrived in the fort to stifle an imaginary impending attack, surface in a series of disturbing dreams. One of them begins as a fantasy of domination of the pubescent black woman/land: [. . .] a body lying spread on its back, a wealth of pubic hair glistening liquid black and gold across the belly, up the loins, and down like an arrow into the furrow of the legs. When I [the magistrate] stretch out a hand to brush the hair it begins to writhe. It is not hair but bees clustered densely atop one another: honey-drenched, sticky, they crawl out of the furrow and fan their wings.46

In this account, the black woman’s spread-eagled lying body is objectified by the magistrate’s use of “it” and conflated with the earth through the metaphoric description of the slit between her labia as a furrow. The sudden metamorphosis of her enticing pubic hair into a swarm of sticky bees, like the transformation of the Medusa’s hair into hissing serpents, condenses the magistrate’s traumatic relationship to the Empire in an image symbolizing the monstrosity of the Hottentot woman’s sexual organs/territory. Soon after the first dreams, the magistrate’s attention is caught by a beggar, a young Hottentot woman who had been atrociously tortured by Joll. He takes her home and submits her to an ever-more intimate ritual of cleansing and caressing in what seems a double attempt to explore/master her disfigured body and make sense of his own position in the structure of the Empire. However, this endeavor again results in fascination and nausea: “What this woman beside me is doing in my life I cannot comprehend. The thought of the strange ecstasies I have approached through the medium of her incomplete body fills me with a dry revulsion, as if I had spent nights copulating with a dummy of straw and leather.”47 This comparison of the Hottentot woman’s body to a dummy situates the magistrate in the position of Prince Charming attempting to kiss Sleeping Beauty into life and finding himself revolted by her ice-cold, will-less body.

45 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980. London: Vintage 2004): 15–17. 46 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 14. 47 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 50. For a more nuanced discussion of this topic, see Susana Onega, “Trauma, Shame and Ethical Responsibility in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians,” Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, ed. Martin Modlinger and Phillipp Sonntag (Oxford et al.: Peter Lang, 2011): 201–236.

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Coetzee’s deconstruction of the Enlightenment motif of the rape of the woman/land is only one among many literary responses to the patriarchal notion of the monstrous-feminine in the postmodern era. Another representative example that comes to mind is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a novel set in a dystopian future in which the annihilation of the earth is echoed by the barrenness of the women belonging to the totalitarian white elite that has sanctioned its relentless overexploitation. The fear of extinction leads the regime to kidnap fertile women and institutionalize rape, treating their bodies as commodified “two-legged wombs”48 used to procreate children to be adopted by the rapists and their wives. Atwood’s novel can be situated in the context of the resymbolization of the female subject brought about by feminist critics on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the postmodernist period. In France, the branch known as “Psyche et Po” (Psychoanalyse et Politique), founded by Antoinette Fouque with Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous as founding members, engaged in providing alternative interpretations of Freud’s and Lacan’s definitions of subjectivity. As we have seen, Kristeva, in Powers of Horror, submitted Lacan’s theory of subjectivity to a systematic counter-reading by theorizing the role of woman as abject. She reformulated the Imaginary as the Semiotic order, and defined it as a realm ruled by a corporeal pre-sign system that, “while being the precondition of language,” does not work like symbolic language to enhance the authority of the father through “frustrations and prohibitions,” but rather seeks “to posit a heterogeneity of significance.”49 Similarly, Cixous, in her appositely titled essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, argued that, as a cultural and linguistic construction, the role of woman in patriarchy can and must be subverted through “the invention of a new insurgent writing [. . .] which will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history [both individually and collectively].”50 Cixous’s path-breaking proposal was that women take the female body as the basic metaphor or primary signifier of this new feminine writing (écriture féminine), on the contention that: “A woman without a body, dumb, blind, [. . .] is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.”51 As she argued:

48 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale [1985] (London: Vintage, 2010): 146. 49 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 72, 72, 51; original emphasis. 50 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (1975. Summer 1986): 875–893, 880. 51 Cixous, “The Laugh,” 880.

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By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display – the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.52

The redefinition of woman as a subject in her own right goes, then, through the linguistic liberation of her body. Thus, contra Lacan’s contention that women are excluded from the Symbolic order by their own nature, Cixous argued that they can break out of the place of “silence” allotted to them by “taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus.”53 Cixous made a significant point when she added that while “phallogocentric writing” is “fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion,” écriture féminine works “(in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and the other [and is] infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another.”54 In agreement with this, she defined subjectivity as plural and shifting, rather than as fixed and appositionally determined by sexual difference, and argued for the recovery of “the classic conception of bisexuality, which squashed under the emblem of castration fear and along with the fantasy of a ‘total’ being (though composed of two halves) would do away with the difference as an operation incurring loss.”55 This call for a new feminine practice of writing launched by Cixous and other feminist critics belonging to the postmodern era resulted in the emergence of a significant number of literary works written by women in which the female protagonists are deliberately endowed with monstrous traits. Thus, Robin Morgan’s poem ‘Monster’, published in 1972 in her first poetry collection, Monsters, constitutes a call for action through a feminine practice of writing that conflates the patriarchal conception of female monstrosity with the motif of the female body as a land to be raped/conquered. As she puts it in its closing lines: Sweet revolution, how I wish the female tears rolling silently down my face this second were each a bullet, each word I write, each character on my typewriter bullets to kill whatever it is in men that built this empire, colonized my very body, then named the colony Monster.56

52 53 54 55 56

Cixous, “The Laugh,” 880. Cixous, “The Laugh,” 881. Cixous, “The Laugh,” 884. Cixous, “The Laugh,” 883–884. Robin Morgan, “Monster,” Monster: Poems (New York: Random House, 1972): 81–86.

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In the following decades, women’s self-assumption of monstrosity, often reformulated through the empowering lens of the grotesque, became a distinctive trait not only of the poetry and the narrative fiction but of the visual arts57 and popular culture as well.58 Thus, while Adrienne Rich wrote poems seeking to transcend the patriarchal image of the female monster by endowing women with the positive power to create, and men with the negative power to kill,59 Carol Ann Duffy subverted the classical image of monstrous women/goddesses in dramatic monologues like ‘Mrs. Midas’ – where she gives voice to the exasperation of King Midas’s wife for his foolishness and egotism – or ‘Medusa’ – where the awe-inspiring mythical figure narrates her metamorphosis from ravishingly beautiful maiden to Gorgon as the product of a growing jealousy provoked by infidelity and neglect.60 Yet another recurrent strategy of counter-symbolization is the rejection of sexual repression and the affirmation of bisexuality, expressed, for example, in love triangles composed by two women and a man, as happens in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) and Gut Symmetries (1997); or two men and a woman, as in The Gap of Time (2015). Yet another strategy, represented by Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991), is the multiplication of identical twins born out of illegitimate lechery and incestuous relations. Carter’s “wise children” belong in the transgressive world of Shakespearian theatre. In Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998), the liberation of female sexuality is expressed by means of the equally transgressive world of the music hall. But perhaps the most powerful example of counter-symbolization of woman as abject is the emergence in the 1980s of physically monstrous but psychologically sound and angelic female characters. Well-known examples of “angelic monsters”61 are Villanelle, the Venetian croupier with webbed feet in Winterson’s The Passion (1987), and the Gargantuan Dog Woman in Sexing the Cherry (1989); Fevvers, the aerialist with feathered wings in Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984); or the protagonist of Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989), who is split into the angelic Mrs. Hyde and the murderous Eliza Jekyll. By embodying “the grotesque and/or monstrous in a process of perpetual

57 See Marsha Meskimmon, “The Monstrous and the Grotesque: On the Politics of Excess in Women’s Self-Portraiture,” Make: The Magazine of Women’s Art 72 (October/November 1996): 6–11. 58 See Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture (Madison, Wis.: U of Wisconsin P/Popular P, 2004). 59 See Adrienne Rich, The Collected Early Poems (New York: Norton, 1993). 60 Carol Anne Duffy, The World’s Wife (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1999). 61 María del Mar Pérez, “¿Angel o monstruo? La imagen de la mujer en la novela británica de los ochenta,” La Página 16.2 (1994): 71–88.

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becoming, of articulation, of assuming and asserting an identity that outgrows the traditional, male-prescribed role or limits for women,”62 all these angelic monsters contribute to reconfiguring the patriarchal notion of female monstrosity into a feminist form of canonical transgression.63 As Jane Caputi notes, this task of reconfiguration can extend to “cross-gender identification, racial difference, and all that is identified with the feminine and our animal natures as traits of the ‘other,’ monstrous by establishment standards.”64 Thus, Bertha Harris, the novelist and poet, defines the lesbian/monster as compounded of “the fusion of maiden, beast and nature” and symbolizing “all that is unassimilable, awesome, dangerous, outrageous, different.”65 Imagined as forms of repossession of those aspects of the self that women in patriarchal societies have secularly been asked to repress, these strategies of resymbolization of the monstrous-feminine in terms of bisexuality, fluidity, hybridity, excessiveness and abolition of sexual repression may be said to endorse the defining traits of abjection as that which does not “respect borders, positions, rules,” that which “disturbs identity, system, order.”66 From a mythical perspective, the endorsement of these traits suggests that the liberation of woman from the realm of non-Being/the Imaginary must be achieved through the resymbolization of Chaos, the cosmic force from which Gaia sprung forth.

The representation of the female body in the transmodern era While grotesque angelic monsters, bisexual triangles, incestuous theatre troupes, and music-hall transvestites provide wholly disruptive models of the resymbolization of woman, we also find in the fiction of the postmodern era female characters who dislike their bodies because they do not conform to the dominant patriarchal canon, such as Ruth, the protagonist of Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a SheDevil (1983). Readers applaud Ruth’s newly acquired self-assurance and laugh with the power over men she gains after undergoing aesthetic surgery. However, her bodily transformation bears a disturbing resemblance to the step-sisters’ mutilation of their fat toes and heels to fit Cinderella’s crystal slipper. Winterson provides a more clearly transgressive parody of this female anxiety in Boating for

62 63 64 65 66

Frank Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000): 185. See Onega, “Embodied Monstrosity,” 387–404. Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters, 317. Quoted in Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters, 317. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

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Beginners (1985) through the comparison of two models of bodily intervention. One is provided by “Bees of Paradise,” an elitist health spa owned by Bunny Mix, Noah’s fiancée and a bestselling author of trashy romances, where women pay fortunes for dreadful treatments meant to reshape their bodies according to the impossible beauty standards of Bunny’s “angelic” heroines.67 The other model is represented by a clinic run by Noah’s feminist daughters-in-law, Rita, Sheila and Desi, specialized in psychological therapy for the liberation of women’s sexuality and in change-of-sex surgery. One of their clients, Marlene, underwent surgery to become a woman, but she was implanted a new penis when she said that she loved her breasts but wanted to have her penis back “for decoration.”68 In Winterson’s latest novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), Ry (Mary) Shelly, the doctor who provides Prof. Victor Stein with body parts for his experiments in artificial intelligence, is also half transgender. She had her breasts removed,69 but refused to have a penis because she saw herself as “a hybrid” (F, 89) “fully female [and] also partly male” (F, 97). As she tells Stein: “I am in the body that I prefer. [. . .] I did it [the operation] to get nearer to myself” (F, 122). Written in commemoration of the second centenary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), this novel draws an overview of the symbolization of subjectivity from Parmenides’s division into “binaries like male and female, black and white, rich and poor” (F, 79), to Stein’s project of defeating death by “uploading our minds out of their biological beginnings” and transferring them to newly created life forms (F, 114). His consideration of “the body as a life support system for the brain” (F, 184) echoes both Descartes’s notion of animal rationale and Dr. Frankenstein’s self-definition as “Mind. Thought. Spirit. Consciousness” (F, 215). His reconceptualization of Darwin’s theory of evolution as a fight for the “survival of the smartest” (F, 154) and his vision of the future as a universe colonized by “enhanced humans,” “free from the body” (F, 296) situate Stein’s experiments in Artificial Intelligence at the tail-end of the scientific path initiated by Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (F, 320). Needless to say, his general aim of improving humankind through the creation of “post-human [. . .] minds without matter” (F, 280) situates Stein in diametrical opposition to Ry’s embodied conception of subjectivity: “We are our bodies” (F, 148). Her contention that “the body is flow” (F, 161) and her valuation of the heart over the brain as the seat of affective

67 Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners [1985] (Methuen: London, 1990): 74, 77. 68 Winterson, Boating for Beginners, 37. See Susana Onega, “Writing, Creation and the Ethics of Postmodernist Romance in Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners,” Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines 39 (2006): 213–227. 69 Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story (London: Penguin Random House, 2019): 89. Further references in the text, abbreviated F.

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knowledge – “there is a place in me that has been changed by this love” (F, 172) – challenges not only Stein’s rationalist conception of subjectivity, but also Parmenides’s oppositional definition: “I don’t think of myself as part of the binary” (F, 155). Winterson’s delving into science fiction was initiated with The Stone Gods (2007), a novel with the same protagonist crossing time zones and living different lives as male (Billy) or female (Billie) in four parallel story lines set in the time-space continuum. The fourth part is situated in the “Post-3 War” period,70 in a world at the brink of extinction due to the reckless policy of illimitable profit-making of the global corporation ruling it. The children of this toxic and devastated Mother Earth are mutants, the truly monstrous counterparts of Winterson’s angelic monsters and transgender characters.71 However, the overall message the novel conveys is far from dystopian, as this apocalyptic future is only one among a potentially infinite number of possible worlds. As Spike, the Robo sapiens, tells Billie: “This is a quantum universe . . . neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.”72 This possibility of intervention in a universe ruled by the randomness of Chaos theory makes the future of humankind depend on its own imaginative capacity. David Mitchell explores this idea in novels like Ghostwritten (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004) or The Bone Clocks (2014). Like Billy/Billie, the characters in Mitchell’s quantum multiverse live different lives, not only, however, as male or female, but also as ghosts, disembodied souls or clones. Some of them can create AI computers, but unlike Stein’s bodiless post-humans, neither of them can exist without a body. While accidentally disembodied souls must transmigrate from host to host in search of a soulless body, humans and clones live different lives either in various story lines of the same novel or in other novels by Mitchell.73 Generally, they are only vaguely aware of their earlier incarnations through serendipitous coincidences or uncanny moments of déjà vu. However, even those who do not believe in reincarnation share a feeling of connectedness evoking a transpersonal sense of identity that extends beyond Ry’s emotionally-charged

70 Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007): 131. 71 See Susana Onega, “The Trauma Paradigm the Ethics of Affect in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods,” in Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011): 265–298 72 Winterson, Stone Gods, 62. 73 See Susana Onega, “The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality,” in Transcending the Postmodern: Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (London and New York: Routledge, 2020): 23–48.

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and embodied sense of self to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche, and cosmos, including the spiritual aspects of subjectivity.74 The fact that Mitchell’s characters exist in a permanent state of transmigration, metamorphosis and connectivity in a quantum multiverse ruled by the randomness and potentiality of chaotic systems may be said to challenge not only Parmenides’s division of the cosmos into paired opposites, but the very metaphysics underlining it as well, as it was Parmenides’s desire to impose order over chaos that led him to devise his cosmogony. Mitchell’s transpersonal conception of self and world is representative of a new literary trend integrated by a variety of writers all over the world such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Richard Flanagan, Tom McCarthy, Naomi Mitchison, Eugene O’Neill, Richard Rodriguez, Monique Roffey, Zadie Smith, and Tim Winton, among others. For all the diversity of their fictional works, these writers share a similar need to respond to the challenges set by the shift from Postmodernity to Transmodernity, the new era that, according to a growing number of scholars from such diverse fields as the philosophy of liberation, the social sciences, the philosophy of history, literary criticism, ecology and architecture, is taking place since the 1980s.75 One of its earliest proponents, Irena Ateljevic, envisions this paradigm shift as an unprecedented opportunity to find an alternative to the evils of globalization and the ravages of capitalism and the consumer society. This alternative worldview proposes the development of a “planetary,” “postpatriarchal” and “postsecular” global consciousness about the fact that “we are all (including plants and animals) connected into one system, which makes us all interdependent, vulnerable and responsible for the Earth as an indivisible living community.”76 Set in the context of the world-wide pandemic brought about by Covid-19, this vision of the future seems not only optimistic but

74 See Bruce W. Scotton, “Introduction and Definition of Transpersonal Psychiatry,” in Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology, ed. Bruce W. Scotton, Allan B. Chinen, and John R. Battista (New York: Basic Books, 1996): 3–8. See also Susana Onega, “Oulipian Games, Transpersonality and the Logic of Potentiality in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten,” in Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English, ed. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrjisen and José María Yebra-Pertusa (London and New York: Routledge, 2019): 50–69. 75 See Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, “Introduction: Transcending the Postmodern,” in Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm, ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (London and New York: Routledge, 2020): 1–19. 76 Irena Ateljevic, “Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History?” Integral Review 9.2 (June 2013): 200–219, 203. See also Susana Onega, “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm,” CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary 3.3 (November 2017): 362–376.

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also deeply ethical and necessary, proposing as it does the substitution of the oppositional system of privilege and bonding transmitted to us through myths and symbols created by our ancient Greek ancestors, that were sustained throughout the modern era, and set into question during the postmodern era, for a more empathetic and humane consideration of the earth and all its life forms “as just that: living entities; hence submitted to time and death; hence vulnerable creatures.”77

77 Onega and Ganteau, “Introduction,” 16.

Ivo Ritzer

Genre and Utopia, or 48 Hrs. for the Future: Perspectives in Media Aesthetics Abstract: This essay considers genre as a symbolic form arising from existing sociocultural practices that the form both reflects and shapes. From this perspective, genres do not only assure societies of their unity but also have an impact on the thinking about temporalities, i.e., the past and future of social formations. Looking at the diptych of 48 Hrs. and Another 48 Hrs. by Californian film auteur Walter Hill, the essay discusses two genre productions with a unique utopian potential in detail. Hill uses the genres of crime fiction and comedy to show how a shabby, racist white cop must collaborate with an elegant, mischievous black crook, both protagonists slowly becoming friends. However, in the end it is less the narrative of a bildungsroman and of diasporic African empowerment that is crucial in this constellation. Rather, the two genre productions paradigmatically demonstrate that instead of focusing on characters and situations in the generic context, the key concern has to be the arrangement of the non-representational signs that elude linguistic representation, but nonetheless function as its very predisposition. Drawing on theoretical arguments by Richard Dyer, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou, among others, the essay identifies the actual utopian potential of genres in color, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, or camerawork. Therefore, it argues that the major challenge of the analytical view lies in the fundamental significance of a performance in media aesthetics precisely through elements that direct the reception of the fiction of generic entertainment. The latter draws the percipients’ attention primarily to itself and thus leads to a genuine aesthetic experience of utopian gratification. If a central element of generic entertainment is showing a non-representational performance, a sound reflection of entertainment must cover the complex game of signs beyond its mere representativeness.

Terminology and disciplines Genre as a concept and a category has developed different terminologies and meanings in various disciplines: from literary studies, where it originated, into historiography. Regarding film studies not only as an individual philology but also as origin and founding discipline of media studies, the concept of genre plays a significant role in the latter. From a historical perspective, it becomes clear that right at the time when film studies started their academic institutionalization in the UK https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-006

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in the late 1960s, the question of the meaning of genre became crucial. Early pioneering essays such as Edward Buscombe’s ‘The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema’ (1970) or Tom Ryall’s ‘The Notion of Genre’ (1970), of course, point back to the history of art und literary studies, including Aristotle’s Poetics. Comparable to this, but following a different type of logic in terms of classification, there is a differentiation between fiction and non-fiction texts at work in literary studies. The first category can be classified according to Aristotle’s theory of genre: drama, lyric and epic that can be further divided into various subgenres. However, these classificatory distinctions and the resulting typologies are of low heuristic value as many cultural products do not, or only partially follow the requirements of the Poetics – long before so-called postmodernism and its proliferating hybridity. Particularly romanticism, with its aesthetic productions and corresponding theories, proves inconsistent with prescriptive genre boundaries. Corresponding to the complexity of the object of study that cannot be reduced to a mere number of structural features, more sophisticated research approaches understand genres not as a given fact but rather as a problem: hence, significant studies such as Georg Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel (1916), Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) or Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama, Parts I–II (1983) have been part of the canon of literary and theater studies for a long time and go far beyond the scope of formal aesthetic questions. By contrast, early film theorists such as Edward Buscombe and Tom Ryall use the term genre to refer to primarily structural, formal or content-related features of a specific corpus of texts. Instead of focusing on the specific mode of films as feature film, documentary or animation film, they study different paradigms of Classical Hollywood Cinema. These can be distinguished depending on their iconographic qualities and ideological models. A textual logic that starts with the aesthetic form of generic structures is thus opposed to an economic logic focused on production, distribution and reception of genres. Iconography and ideology become the central criteria of a semiotic (post-)structuralist perspective that has – apart from Buscombe and Ryall – inspired several other theorists: Stuart Kaminsky’s American Film Genres (1974), Judith Hess Wright’s ‘Genre Films and Status Quo’ (1974), Robin Wood’s ‘Ideology, Genre, Auteur’ (1977), Alan Williams’s ‘Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?’ (1984) or Barbara Klinger’s ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism Revisited: The Progressive Genre’ (1986).1 The focal point here is always the connection between visual systems and

1 See the reprints in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Tex.: U of Texas P, 2012).

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sociocultural significance that is evaluated differently depending on the school of theory, and certainly individual idiosyncrasies. With the concept of generic myth, authors such as John Cawelti in ‘The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature’ (1969), Will Wright in Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (1976) and Thomas Schatz in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (1981) try to theoretically grasp the relation of genre and society. Inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology (1976) and its concept of ritual, the sociocultural function of the genre is seen in symbolically bridging the oppositions that are constitutive for a society. Through the generic myth, a culture narrates its virulent discourses in a reduced and personalized form to find an imaginary solution for social contradictions: The concept of genre as a filmic system must be characterized, like that of myth, by its function; its value is determined not according to what it is, but rather to what it does. In its ritualistic capacity, a film genre transforms certain fundamental cultural contradictions and conflicts into a unique conceptual structure that is familiar and accessible to the mass audience.2

Hence, genres arise from the existing sociocultural practices they both reflect and shape. They do not only assure societies of their unity but also have an impact on the thinking about temporalities, i.e., the past and future of social formations.

Ideology and criticism The reference to the structure-forming, mythical function of genre is an important corrective to approaches of orthodox criticism of ideology – not only, but especially in the politicized context of Freudian-Marxist Screen Theory in the 1970s. These approaches can only see an oppressive re-affirmation, i.e., “mass deception”3 and “the maintenance of the status quo”4 – reservations that already guided early German film theorists when talking about the “Konfektionsfilm”

2 Thomas Schatz, “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Tex.: U of Texas P, 2012): 110–120, 115. 3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947], ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2002): 94. 4 Judith Hess Wright, “Genre Films and the Status Quo,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Tex.: U of Texas P, 2012): 60–68, 60.

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[confection film]5 or the “Durchschnittsproduktion” [run-of-the-mill production].6 Contrary to this, theorists such as Schatz, Cawelti and Wright reference LéviStrauss’s idea that social contradictions do not dissolve in the generic myth but are symbolically repeated, i.e., renegotiated, which leads to an act of recurrent revelation. This narrative culturalization tries to dissolve ideological tensions by narrating individual conflicts, condensing sociocultural experience through its media-aesthetic form. The laws of genre thus become an important cultural filter whose media production promises a distinctive form of aesthetic experience. This experience again has a close relation to the process of genre formation and differentiation. Orthodox criticism of ideology is neither able to capture the polysemy inherent in every genre-production, nor to do justice to the dynamic influence of the sociocultural framework on generic aesthetics. Stephen Neale emphasizes this in the course of a genre-theoretical revision of Screen Theory: “Genres are not the product of economic factors as such. The conditions provided by the capitalist economy account neither for the existence of the particular genres that have hitherto been produced, nor for the existence of the conventions that constitute them.”7 Neale is thus undertaking an important intervention against vulgar Marxist criticism of ideology that sees every cultural ‘superstructure’ determined by an economic ‘substructure.’ He understands genres as “systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject”8 – a point that remains valid today. To comprehend genres in this sense as modern media myths should not, however, mean to hypostasize a monocausal reaction of genre conventions to public interests. Contrary to Schatz’s rather onedimensional and, above all, ahistorical myth-concept, every genre remains a complex system of connections that affects subjectivities and social mechanisms equally and balances both in their unstable equilibrium. Genres symbolically construct assemblages that act as a common discourse for their audience that helps to negotiate questions of culturality at a specific time and place. This generates subjectivities, not as a result of ideological manipulation, but in fact as the outcome of a permanent (re)discursivization of communality, forming only temporarily fixed structures of consensus.

5 Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst, (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932): 193; English trans.: Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley, Calif.: U of California P, 1957). 6 Siegfried Kracauer, “Der heutige Film und sein Publikum,” Die Form 4 (1929): 101–104; English trans.: Siegfried Kracauer, “Film 1928,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays Translated, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995): 307–322, 308. 7 Steve Neale, Genre (London: BFI, 1980): 52. 8 Neale, Genre, 19.

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With regard to audiovisual media, it is necessary to theorize their mediaspecific qualities, the patterns of image and the sound, which requires a reflexive understanding beyond mere content analysis. This is all the more true since aesthetic productions always also transcend their genres. They are paradigmatic examples of continually adding at least one unfamiliar element: “While it is true that genre movies tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations, it by no means follows that they do so in ways that are completely familiar.”9 The game of repetition and variation generates constant differences that cannot be reduced to the common denominator of the familiar. This means that every generic production is at the same time a continuation and a transformation of its underlying intertextualities in media aesthetics. As products of mass culture, genres do not only act as aesthetic conventions but they also carry a symbolic moment of utopian reflection, according to Fredric Jameson who focusses on the political potential of popular culture. His essay ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’ is an impressive demonstration of how utopian futures can occur in any (even capitalist) form of society, whereas the space of the popular is crucial. Jameson argues that utopia always contradicts omnipresent ideologemes of dominant structures in mass culture and subverts its exploitative master-slave dialectic. Therefore, Jameson sees two contradicting tendencies in every work of popular culture: on the one hand the ideological consciousness of a putative nature of social relations, on the other hand the utopia regarding the unrealized possibilities of the objectified social life of modernity. “To reawaken, in the midst of a privatized and psychologizing society, obsessed with commodities and bombarded by the ideological slogans of big business,” states Jameson, “some sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no matter how faintly and feebly, in the most degraded works of mass culture just as surely as in the classics of modernism.”10 Even in the most familiar stories with the most familiar characters in the most familiar situations there are oppositional forces embedded as fictional enclaves. Thus, Jameson turns against a reductive, vulgar Marxist criticism that perceives products of popular culture only as objects of universal delusion that cannot produce anything but false consciousness in its consumers. He makes it possible to understand genres not as ideological manipulation and enforced conformity of the masses but to detect a potential of utopian futures promising to overcome subordination. “The works of mass culture cannot be

9 Barry Keith Grant, “Introduction,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Tex.: U of Texas P, 2012): xvii–xxii, xix–xx. 10 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London, New York: Routledge, 1992): 34.

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ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated.”11 Therefore, the generic utopia must find more or less simple answers to more or less difficult questions. However, the distinctive quality of the utopia lies in the always simplifying culmination: it makes more than clear which current grievances have to be overcome. According to Jameson, it is its criticism ex negativo that characterizes the utopian. In contrast to the stereotypical idyll, it does not picture a better world, but rather detects the malus in society that must be eliminated on the way to a better future. Its specific power is the constitutive momentum of negativity that reveals ideological restrictions of the existing in a transparent and sustainable way. Even though it is not possible for the utopian, contrary to the idyll, to outline a positive future it is, according to Jameson, inevitably reflecting the (still) impossible through its negativity and thus transcends the restrictions of today. Genres are popular productions indeed and thus fictions of entertainment: they primarily use aesthetic constellations to create entertaining stories for the audience. However, to counter them with an elitist and culturally pessimistic accusation of escapism would not do justice to their specific significance. Instead, it should rather be assumed that entertainment bears a potential of wish-fulfillment, specifying determined utopian futures. The putative escape from everyday life stands in opposition to idealized counter-worlds that fulfill wishes and desires and need to be taken seriously. In their expression of alternatives to the existing, generic entertainment transgresses the nonetheless constitutive production base of a capitalist social order. According to Richard Dyer’s pioneering essay ‘Entertainment as Utopia,’ it is the symbolic effect as passionately experienced pleasure that renders the entertainment function so effective: Two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wishfulfilment’, point to its central thrust, namely, utopianism. Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-today lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized.12

Even though entertainment emerges from oppressive political-economical contexts, this does not necessarily mean that generic entertainment continuously reproduces the capitalist value system. Genres rather open up margins

11 Jameson, Signatures, 29. 12 Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Only Entertainment, ed. Richard Dyer (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): 19–35, 20.

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of semantic attribution that are resistant alternatives to the existing status quo. Correspondingly, the negotiation of the reading of a fiction between production and reception becomes the general constitutive process of entertainment, as this decides about the power of an entertainment product, its interpretative reading and social implications for actions. In generic entertainment the subject tries to satisfy needs that can (at least temporarily) not be fulfilled outside the fiction. Thus, the reception of fiction compensates a lack and turns the utopian need into a material one. The utopia of entertainment always references real social grievances just as it formulates an actual desideratum and thus symbolically balances both. That is the reason why generic entertainment and utopian futures never take place outside of social contexts although they do open up horizons of possibilities for different futures. To put it in another way: entertainment and utopia cannot be understood outside of power and thus do not express a powerfree society. Nevertheless, in the center of power they assert themselves as the alternative. Following the unredeemed promises of capitalist regimes, they fill the void with the available material: “entertainment provides alternatives to capitalism which will be provided by capitalism.”13 Thus, the utopia of generic entertainment must start at the percipients’ gratifications while referring to the moment of difference between the existent and the potential: “[t]o be effective, the utopian sensibility has to take off from the real experiences of the audience. Yet to do this, to draw attention to the gap between what is and what could be, is, ideologically speaking, playing with fire.”14 Hence, the paradox of the utopia of the generic in entertainment lies in the simultaneous affirmation and subversion of dominant power relations. Dyer attaches great importance to the connex between entertainment and utopia as a specific form of coding affects. Contrary to conventional hermeneutics he is less focused on a planned design of utopian worlds but rather on their affective foundation: Entertainment does not, however, present models of utopian worlds as in the classic utopias of Thomas More, William Morris, et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized. It thus works at the level of sensibility, by which I mean an affective code that is characteristic of, and largely specific to, a given mode of cultural production.15

13 Dyer, “Entertainment,” 27. 14 Dyer, “Entertainment,” 27. 15 Dyer, “Entertainment,” 20.

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This means that the generic as entertainment may not operate on the construction of utopias in a philosophical sense but it can mediate an idea through affective constellations and the resulting atmosphere about how to live in a better and fairer world. The offer of intensive experiences of abundance, energy or community stimulates the percipients’ imagination and emotions to transgress what is experienced as a deficient and fragmented ordinariness. This leads Dyer to an ingenious volta of his argumentation: instead of focusing on the characters and situations of the fiction in their ‘familiar’ generic contexts, he concentrates on the non-representational signs that elude linguistic representation but nonetheless function as its very predisposition. This is where he identifies the actual utopian potential: This code uses both representational and, importantly, non-representational signs. There is a tendency to concentrate on the former, and clearly it would be wrong to overlook them – stars are nicer than we are, characters more straightforward than people we know, situations more soluble than those we encounter. All this we recognize through representational signs. But we also recognize qualities in non-representational signs – color, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camerawork – although we are much less used to talking about them.16

Therefore, the major challenge of the analytical view lies in the fundamental significance of a performance in media aesthetics precisely through the mentioned elements that direct the reception of the fiction of generic entertainment. The latter draws the percipients’ attention primarily to itself and thus leads to a genuine aesthetic experience of utopian gratification. If a central element of generic entertainment is showing a non-representational performance, a sound reflection of entertainment must cover the complex game of signs beyond its mere representativeness.

48 Hrs. and Another 48 Hrs. Sometimes the future is in the past. Looking at the diptych of 48 Hrs.17 and Another 48 Hrs.18 by Californian film auteur Walter Hill, there are two genre productions and fictions of entertainment with a unique utopian potential. Walter

16 Dyer, “Entertainment,” 20. 17 48 Hrs., dir. Walter Hill, tx. 1982 (US: Paramount Pictures, 1982). Further references in the text, by timestamp. 18 Another 48 Hrs., dir. Walter Hill, tx. 1990 (US: Paramount Pictures, 1990). Further references in the text, abbreviated AH.

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Hill uses the genres of crime fiction and comedy to show how a shabby, racist white cop (Nick Nolte) must collaborate with an elegant, mischievous black crook (Eddie Murphy). They develop mutual respect and friendship, but only after a number of intense conflicts: the white trash cop initially adheres to clichéd stereotypes and offends the crook with insults. In his eminent study concerning the construction of white identity, Richard Dyer remarks: “White discourse implacably reduces the non-White subject to being a function of the White subject, not allowing him/ her space or autonomy, permitting neither the recognition of similarities nor acceptance of differences except as a means of knowing the White self.”19 Hill’s cop Cates is the personification of white discourse. So how is it possible to communicate correctly when language itself is corrupted? Only much later the cop finds an equal partner in the gangster, whose courage and reliability cannot compare to Cates’s white police colleagues. “Nigger, watermelon, I didn’t mean all that stuff, I was just doin’ my job, keeping you down,” says the cop in the end. “Well, doin’ your job don’t explain everything,” replies the crook (01:14:33–01:14:46). He is aware of the cultural conditioning of his new friend. He knows that police work alone does not make anyone a racist, not even where violence and crime are ubiquitous. The central sequence of 48 Hrs. consists of a definitive act of African-diasporic selfaffirmation. When Eddie Murphy’s character Hammond orders vodka in a redneck bar, the bartender eyes him suspiciously and then insults him in a racist way: “Maybe you best have a … Black Russian?” Hammond responds by showing his borrowed police badge and starts to provoke the other guests (“I’ve never seen so many backwards-ass country fucks in my life. I’m sick just of bein’ in here!”), lines them up for body search (“I don’t like white people. I hate rednecks. You people are rednecks. That means I’m enjoying this shit!”,) and threatens to close the bar (“I’m your worst fuckin’ nightmare, man. I’m a nigger with a badge. That means I got permission to kick your ass whenever I feel like it!”, 00:42:05–00:43:49; figs. 1–2). This sequence is a re-staging of a notorious scene in William Friedkin’s police procedural The French Connection (1971),20 in which narcotics detective Doyle (Gene Hackman) intimidates guests in a bar in Harlem. Apparently, Hill reverses subject and object of violence. He turns against the cruelty of racist repression and introduces Hammond as a character opposing traditional patterns of ethnic discrimination. Consistently, there are no racist remarks or insults in the sequel AH between the two protagonists. Both, who do not trust anybody else, have learned that they can trust each other.

19 Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997): 13. 20 The French Connection, dir. William Friedkin, tx 1971 (US: Twentieth Century Fox, 1971).

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Figs. 1 and 2: African-diasporic self-affirmation (48 Hrs., Paramount).

In AH, collaboration between Hammond and Cates is difficult once again not only because of their initial lack of success. Cates is still biased against Hammond, but not anymore due to racism like in 48 Hrs. Hill turns the ethnic discourse into a sociological one. While Cates is propagating his narrowminded and individualistic moral values, Hammond sees the social interrelation between crime and class: “If shit was worth something, poor people would be born with no assholes” (01:08:08–01:08:12). Just as in 48 Hrs., when racist

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Cates comes to appreciate African-diasporic Hammond as a reliable friend, he is put right once again. It is Hammond’s black friend Kirkland Smith, ironically a convicted criminal, who delivers the decisive proof. He confirms the existence of white super-gangster Iceman, who seems to control the whole city and wants to establish a rule of crime. The conflict of AH is now a class struggle in which hierarchically structured power relations are revealed through an ethnic matrix. Of course, the true conviction of Marxism is that a universal antagonism, class struggle, over-determines all other conflicts and thus forms a particular universal: it does not mean that class struggle is the ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class struggle is the structuring principle that allows us to account for the very ‘inconsistent’ plurality of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into ‘chains of equivalences’. [. . .] Here, class struggle is the ‘concrete universal’ in the strict Hegelian sense: in relating to its otherness (other antagonisms), it relates to itself, that is to say, it (over)determines the way it relates to other struggles.21

The difference of class is inscribed twice: on the one hand in the sense of a universal emancipatory struggle, and on the other as an ideological tool to legitimize bourgeois privileges over proletarian demands. As philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek have pointed out many times, it is possible to extrapolate from the particular to the universal but not as an offset. Instead of taking over the perspective of others, it is important to reflect their conditions: “the stain of particular roots is the phantasmatic screen which conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of universality.”22 Žižek shows that it is not enough to expose universalities in the traditional manner of a critique of ideology and to uncover the supposedly false consciousness behind it. Rather, an identification with the excluded Other must take place. A new particularized universality that constitutes itself in the incongruous particular must replace a seemingly neutral and universal term: “the universal dimension ‘shines through’ the symptomatic displaced element that belongs to the Whole without being properly its part.”23 Therefore, it is about a possible universality that is constantly in contestation as it continuously withdraws – or must withdraw – from its actualization. In this manner, Walter Hill finds a practice not to make political films but to make films politically. He radically relates particularity to a “true

21 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006): 361. 22 Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (1997): 44. 23 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999): 225.

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Universality.”24 Universality is constituted through its specific positioning. Hill identifies with a particular that has no place in the dominant order. This identification with a part of society without a share belongs to the excluded: people of color, the destitute, and subalterns. Hill questions the existing order itself. He acts radically universalistic and proclaims an order of a general policy of emancipation. In AH the blackness of Eddie Murphy – now credited before Nick Nolte – literally embodies the struggle for hegemony in an ethnically hierarchized world order that is determined by white capital. AH contrasts the black proletariat with a white bourgeoisie but not to install logics of victimization. Instead, Murphy will eventually take the gun, and he turns comedy into crime fiction. For more than 40 years, Walter Hill has ground-breakingly carved out intersectionalities in his œuvre that have been acknowledged in African Diaspora theory as well.25 In They Went Thataway: Redefining Film Genres, a work that is decisive for genre theory but has not received its deserved attention yet, AfricanAmerican author Armond White points out: “Race is the important, unresolved issue for Hill.”26 The real utopian potential lies in the mise-en-scène by Walter Hill himself. His work needs to be seen as a form of media identity politics. Their visual alterities are not representational and cannot be simply attributed to an illconceived transparence of cultural mediality. Rather, differences should be seen as self-dynamic agents of audiovisual and synaesthetic audio-visual-assemblages. Thus, they form instances of thinking and acting, i.e., they always remain irreducible interventions that constantly undergo transformational performances. The showdown of 48 Hrs. takes place in Chinatown, where Cates and Hammond hunt down the two antagonists Billy Bear and Ganz. Abstract impressions of an urban world of signs are edited together – the futuristic and decay. For Hill, the future starts in the present. Flashing advertising signs, garish neon

24 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 187. 25 See Armond White, “Trespass,” in They Went Thataway: Redefining Film Genres: A National Society of Film Critics Video Guide, ed. Richard T. Jameson (San Francisco, Calif.: Mercury House, 1994): 221–226. See also Ivo Ritzer, “Against Adaptation: World Cinema and the Politics of ‘Speaking to’, Or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about G. C. Spivak But Were Afraid to Ask Walter Hill,” Literature/Film Quarterly 48.2 (2020): forthcoming. In German language, see Ivo Ritzer, Welt in Flammen: Walter Hill (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009); Ivo Ritzer, “Badiou to the Head: Zur In-Ästhetik transmedialer Genre-Autoren-Politik oder Wie die Graphic Novel-Adaption Bullet to the Head eine materialistische Dialektik denkt,” in Transmediale Genre-Passagen: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven, ed. Ivo Ritzer, Peter W. Schulze (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2015): 89–135; Ivo Ritzer, “Kulturwissenschaft (re)Assigned: Transmediale Identitätspolitik, postpostkoloniale Theorie und pan-afrikanische Diaspora,” in Politiken des Populären: Medien Kultur Wissenschaft, ed. Ivo Ritzer, Harald Steinwender (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019): 269–306. 26 White, “Trespass,” 222.

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lights, colorful lanterns and sparkling letters constitute a highly artificial space in which the city is reproduced as a sign system, i.e., the city becomes both subject and object of the narration. The visible attains a new order that is composed of a network of autonomous signifiers. Hammond can shoot Billy Bear, Cates and Ganz have a final shootout in the backyards. 48 Hrs. does not follow the tradition of the stressed realism of cop films at the beginning of the 1980s as the archetypical battle between good and evil is abstracted as a dazzling amalgam of signs – light and shadow, color and mist, characters and signs. Every order is destroyed. Sparkling surfaces and confusing light effects create an environment of interchangeable signifiers. Hill no longer recurs to the tangible materiality of objects but merges them in a process of semiurgy, i.e., the victory of signs over objects. In this way, the constructive character of the cinematic view is revealed. The choreography of the violent events appears like a hasty dance in which Cates, Hammond and Ganz move like shadows following a jumpy rhythm. Ganz manages to take Hammond hostage but hard-boiled cop Cates opens fire nevertheless. Without hesitation, he pulls the trigger even though his newfound friend is in the way. By shooting first, he has the last word (figs. 3–4). In the sequel AH, the trail leads back to Chinatown. Again, it is a trail of blood, and Chinatown serves as a phosphorescent electropolis with a stylized scenario of the urban once again. It is constituted by colorful, flashing neon signs and sparkling string lights. Just as 48 Hrs., the sequel emphasizes an omnipotence of signs and defines an abstract place as total environment. The hermetic triumphs, the interior as sovereign. This unreal Chinatown becomes the background of a shootout again, but this is not where the movie ends. Instead, Hill stages a chase that affects and distances the viewer at the same time. It brings the movie to perfection with its own qualities. As Erwin Panofsky remarks: “The unique and specific possibilities [of film] can be defined as dynamization of space and, accordingly, spatialization of time.”27 AH takes speed and accelerates the viewer’s perception to the extremes. The cinematic space is narrowed, the viewer captured in it until it seems to dissolve in time as the image of movement becomes the image in movement, character and photography. However, the self-reflexive character of the production creates distance during this immersive process. The criminals escape from Chinatown on motorbikes. They take an alternative route and jump on their choppers through the screen of a porn cinema leaving a vaginal hole between the half-naked protagonist’s breasts. Obviously, this is a joke but also an original idea that is almost predestined for multi-coded storytelling in postclassical genre film. One signifier refers to several signifieds and thus produces

27 Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1995): 96 (emphasis mine).

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Figs. 3 and 4: A dazzling amalgam of signs (48 Hrs., Paramount).

several chains of meaning on three levels: on the first, the bikers’ jump is diegetically motivated as an escape move. On a second level, it creates a humorous effect for the viewer as the jump through the screen divides the actress’s naked breasts in two. The third level of the jump is to understand it as an auto-reflexive comment on the cinematic situation itself: in the movie, the same surface gets destroyed, onto which it is projected. This way, showing becomes a gesture. It makes its own constructional principles transparent and renders them visible.

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The Cage Club above the skyline of San Francisco eventually becomes the setting of the showdown in AH. Hill stages the final shootout as a logical consequence. He arranges a big action scene, organically developed from time and action. The film is 98 minutes long, which means 5880 seconds. There are 24 frames per second and eight perforation holes per frame. Hill seems to shoot every single hole separately in his film. In the closing scenes, more bullets fly through the air than in any other crime film. An enormous amount of glass sheets and mirrors is shot to pieces. However, what reveals a secret in the narrative leads to artificiality in the narration. Broken glass, opalescent neon, synthetic fog and iridescent lights create a highly artificial setting that puts everything real in agony because operations of the visual alone are taken as matrix of perception. Light and shadow, colors and shapes tell the story. They flow into each other, very much like in a geometric painting by Hieronymus Bosch, but create abstract surfaces that depend no longer on their tangible objects. The film makes the signifiers of space dominate the space of the signified. It is a nervous, seismic rhythm that determines the deadly actions in a simulative environment, creating breaks in the narrative flow. All actions follow a hasty choreography but also mediate an aesthetic of dance at the same time. Every act a gesture, every setting only scenery (figs. 5–6). Exactly these politics of the image let a utopia of a common future take shape. Precisely Richard Dyer’s non-representational signs dominate 48 Hrs. and AH by furiously staged action scenes in urban space with a meticulous mise-en-scène that remains exemplary until today. Highly mobile camera work and an analytical découpage of bodies in space create images of movement that depend on rhythm, pace and texture. Here, attention is given to ephemeral details and fleeting moments. The focus is increasingly on individual moments but also on the coherence of the whole. So, the images start to circulate, faster and faster, because they no longer have a center. 48 Hrs. and AH thus demonstrate the utopian moment of non-referential signs: the dynamic itself, the eternal change, the never-resting appearance of things – and, at the same time, the materiality of colors, the power of presence and the intensity of the affect as well. How bodies and their shapes flow into and cover each other until they uncover the view only to overlap again, these aesthetics characterize the very thrill of 48 Hrs. and AH in signs that elude their basis, that make visible and only refer to the visible. This constitutes – in the words of Michel Foucault – a non-referential drama, “which is multiplied, polyscenic, simultaneous, broken into separate scenes that refer to each other, and where we encounter, without any trace of representation (copying or imitating), the dance of masks, the cries

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Figs. 5 and 6: Actions in a simulative environment (Another 48 Hrs., Paramount).

of bodies, and the gesturing of hands and fingers.”28 The media aesthetics’ performance of the act itself hence becomes the actual center of the utopia arising from the level of the portrayed to the level of portrayal.

28 Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (New York: Cornell UP, 1977): 165–198, 171.

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Walter Hill therefore seems to be the last representative of a system that has moved more and more to the field of the fantastic and virtuality since the 1990s. Relating to this, Alain Badiou wrote about a cinema with “[s]pecial effects of any kind,” of “a sort of Late Roman Empire consummation” as “the obvious ingredients of current cinema.” This cinema acts as an event and mostly rejects the tradition of a reflected mise-en-scène. For Badiou, recent Hollywood cinema still refers to traditional narrative cinema but replaces it with a primacy of random images: They are inscribed in a proven tradition, but there is no longer much of an attempt to embed them in a consistent fable with a moral, indeed religious, vocation. They derive from a technique of shock and one-upmanship, which is related to the end of an epoch in which images were relatively rare and it was difficult to obtain them. The endless discussions about the ‘virtual’ and the image of synthesis refer to nothing other than the overabundance and facility of the image, including the spectacularly catastrophic or terrorizing image.29

The fantastic and the virtual thus generate a cinema of spectacle, which eventually becomes an aleatory series of images that ends in itself. Walter Hill breaks with both tendencies, that of the fantastic and that of virtuality. He remains true to the tradition of classical genres: crime fiction and comedy. Simultaneously, Hill shows an aesthetically singular bridging of classic shot sequences and intensified mise-en-scène: on the one hand, establishing and reaction shots based on the technique of shot-reverse-shot create permanent orientation in the diegetic space; on the other hand, it uses both mobile camera operations and a rapid cutting frequency that also immensely dynamize every pro-filmic action of the body. Like no other filmmaker – whether of his generation, before or after – Walter Hill manages to lead his audience through the setting with the greatest concentration, even in the greatest pro-filmic chaos. He is always sovereign in the order of the material. The telos of his mise-en-scène is never a sign of mere hectic pace, but rather, the camera, editing, and, last but not least, the deep sound design designate the composition of all events. The result is a materialistic aesthetic of intensity. Precisely because Walter Hill chooses a timeless and contemporary mise-en-scène between transparency and opacity, he produces a true synthesis in the cinematic. Hill realizes the “attempts at purification” that Alain Badiou sees as potential of synthesis in the cinema of surfaces: “directed towards a stylized inflation, a type of slowed calligraphy of general explosion.”30 In Hill, there is no chaos of images, his images are choreography, in Badiou’s sense: “battles turn into a

29 Alain Badiou, Cinema (Cambridge: Polity P, 2013): 141. 30 Badiou, Cinema, 143.

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kind of dance, a very visual choreography.”31 In particular the two showdowns in 48 Hrs. and AH, but also numerous other productions by Hill, such as The Warriors (1979), Extreme Prejudice (1987), Red Heat (1988), Johnny Handsome (1989), Trespass (1992), Last Man Standing (1996), Undisputed (2002) or Bullet to the Head (2013), can be seen as the most abstract stagings of moving images in all of film history, and the peak of cinematographic choreography. The radical abstraction of action creates a new synthesis between convention and innovation. To put it differently, the semantic arsenal of generic signs is realigned in the syntactic arrangement of the auctorial innovation. As a work in as well as on genre, Hill’s authorial politics figure as productive mechanism that provides impulses for further generic processes of evolution. Walter Hill accepts the imperatives of the cinema of surfaces, takes on conventionalized aesthetics, “with all its triviality,” but, and that is Badiou’s point, he does not merely fulfill it: Hill transforms his material “through a unique stylization.”32 This stylization is both the signature of Hill’s authorial politics that realigns the conventionalized semantic arsenal of signs in the syntactic appropriation of the auctorial innovation, and the obligation of the aesthetic to an ontology of revolutionary universality. In doing so, Walter Hill not only goes beyond a conservative criticism of representation, but also accomplishes a radical abstraction by stylizing through his mise-en-scène: Hill’s aesthetics are dominated by graphic elements of expression and pictorial effects, flickering lamps, shining headlights, flashing neon signs or luminous shop windows, creating a highly synthetic space that abstracts everything material into glitter. By playing with light and shadow, Hill’s mise-en-scène often reduces its characters to silhouettes that move in an abstract milieu of the big city, always following a strict choreography. Only colors and surfaces provide depth. The visible is resolved into permanently changing impressions. The modern electropolis is stylized into a place of chaos where bright neon hinders any overview, and the gaze is not absorbed but attacked.

Conclusion According to Alain Badiou, media aesthetics are to be understood as a specific dialectical process that is genuinely immanent to reflection and therefore becomes the subject of theory itself. Badiou’s dialectic of the aesthetic initially states that its key is the “truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible qua

31 Badiou, Cinema, 229. 32 Badiou, Cinema, 229.

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sensible.” For him, this means: “the transformation of the sensible into a happening of the idea.”33 The central reflection of art for media aesthetics manifests itself specifically in the singularity of each and every media artifact. Along this horizon, Walter Hill’s œuvre can be seen as generic production that aims to create entertaining narratives through dramatic exaggeration. However, his specific achievement lies in a political turn of the generic conventions, demonstrating a significant potential of utopian futures. This means that generic forms and their entertainment functions are to be understood as popular structures. Particularly, their differential repetitions make up the aesthetic of genres. It is precisely this variance of forms that makes it possible to draw conclusions about sociocultural processes in a wider framework, i.e., generic sets of conventions can then be understood as answers to questions of a historical constellation, the pre-occupations that on the one hand refer to a sociocultural framework and on the other hand inscribe themselves in the aesthetics of genre standards. Only the sociocultural anchoring of a genre thus evokes a generic media aesthetics in one form or another. Entertainment functions can thus be understood as symbolic discursivations of social contexts that refer to those contexts in a sublimated way through temporarily conventionalized aesthetic strategies. Like no other filmmaker of post-classical cinema, Walter Hill trusts the political power of genre that he uses for his concerns without any hint of condescension. He focalizes on a concrete universality that is manifested in politics of the particular. This policy is defined by its integration into the structure of fictions, i.e., it functions as part of the narrative. The images are not at the service of something, rather, something evolves out of them. In other words, the political arises from an analysis of the conditions under which an explanation can be explained. As a result, fiction does not remain unaffected by what it comes in contact with. These generic fictions are more complex than the viewer must see to understand them. The generic is not condemned by a putative facticity of the historical; rather the former appears to the latter as an imaginary attempt to solve sociocultural contradictions. Put differently, this politics of the generic takes the element of personalization inherent in the generic particularly seriously and centers a new universalization through narrative unfolding. Conceived as the strategy of an ‘aesthetic left,’ the utopian politics of the generic focus on history told in stories. In doing so, social contradictions are by no means dissolved but rather repeated, i.e., renegotiated again and again, thus constantly revealed anew. On the one hand, Walter Hill certainly does not construct a narrative as much as a construction is displayed. A view gives way to visualization. The visible

33 Alain Badiou, “Thèses sur l’art contemporain,” Performance Research 9.4 (2004): 86.

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develops a life of its own, and its content plays a formal role. Hill assumes a discrepancy between the narrated and the narrative. His moving images know a subject and an object of the narrative, but all the possibilities of style are no longer uniform. Instead, they are able to operate as autonomous cells. So, the accent is increasingly on the how (the fictionalization) instead of on the what of the action (the fiction). It is about exaggerating the content through the form. The will to act is more important than the meaning, the playful is more important than the necessary. However, Hill’s mise-en-scène can be understood as an anagram of objective reality: as its playful permutation. It does not work mimetically, but marks. Imitation of life is replaced by imitating life. Or, to put it another way, it is not about representing something actual, the representation itself forms the actual. A special view becomes crucial that determines an order in the chaos of the possible, and thus reveals what would be hidden otherwise. In Hill’s work, the real is fictional and the fiction is real. The level of reference shifts from the reproducing to the artificial image. What Hill accomplishes is gestural work, but he integrates these gestural references, turning them into particles of a generic story. Instead of distancing itself from the narrative, the actuality of the generic is ostensibly shown as generic. It is therefore important to emphasize that social contradictions are always rethought in the generic and are thereby inevitably put into question. Here, in particular, the works of Walter Hill remain valuable utopian openings of a present that is still waiting to be overcome. Walter Hill himself recognizes this synthesis of his generic approach very well, and explains its media aesthetics: I don’t want to sound like one of these old fuckers who’s always saying everything was better before, because I don’t believe that at all. [. . .] When I was a young guy in Hollywood in the late Sixties and early Seventies, there was a lot of debate about a shifting paradigm in storytelling. Where the genres dead? Did we have to find an entirely new model of storytelling based simply on character, everyday incident, and interior logic? Or could the genres be reworked in a way that made sense to audiences and to the whole process of telling stories through film? [. . .] I came down very hard on the idea of sticking with the traditional concerns – but there was certainly no question that you had to do things in a different way.34

Walter Hill finds a way to remain true to the aesthetics of classic genres, while redefining them through his mise-en-scène, opening the generic up to the fu-

34 Hill quoted in Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, “Last Neo-Traditionalist Standing,” Film Comment 49.1 (2013): 54–60, 56.

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ture. His media aesthetics of utopia are inscribed in the tradition of the classic, but always create nuances of difference that uses the existent for the unknown. Hill’s genre aesthetics generate a true synthesis of convention and innovation. It follows the maxim that none other than Walter Hill himself puts into images as concisely as he puts into definition: “You couldn’t simply do what had already been done in the past and, many times, done very successfully. You had to find new ways to be traditional.”35

35 Hill in Vallan, “Last Neo-Traditionalist,” 58–59.

Patrick Gill

The Past Is Immutable: Technology’s Symbolism and the Future in Black Mirror Abstract: Putatively concerned with the impact that the technology of the near future will have on human lives, Charlie Brooker’s anthology series Black Mirror (Channel 4 2011–2014; Netflix 2016–) has become the televisual epitome of dystopian science fiction. After demonstrating that despite the tremendous differences between all of its episodes, this anthology show can be read as representing a cohesive text, the present essay argues that rather than being the subject of Black Mirror, technology serves as a symbol of human weaknesses and foibles that humanity will need to face in the future just as it has always needed to confront them. In “Bandersnatch,”1 the 2018 stand-alone interactive installment of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror anthology series, the protagonist’s therapist can be heard to console him regarding his feelings of guilt for a childhood misdemeanor and absolve him of responsibility for the same with the truism that “the past is immutable.” There may be characters holding very different notions of time’s linearity within “Bandersnatch,” and its very interactivity means that viewers must engage with notions of various timelines circling back on one another. But with its setting firmly established in the past of 1980s Britain, “Bandersnatch” is the only Black Mirror episode not set in the future. That said, if Black Mirror represents science fiction, then it is the kind of science fiction concerned with a future that, as J. G. Ballard reportedly said of the future in his fiction, “is never more than five minutes away,”2 and as such it can be seen as primarily concerned with what we are on the cusp of rather than what awaits us in the distant future. As it is in the very nature of genre to proceed by means of alterity, it hardly seems to matter how far in the future any tale is set – it will always be rooted firmly in the present. Epic can present a golden age exactly because that is what is deemed to have been lost in the epic writer’s own time. The historical novel

1 “Bandersnatch,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by David Slade, tx. December 28, 2018 (US: Netflix). With the exception of this standalone interactive episode, all episodes are given with their series and episode numbers in brackets where they occur in this text for the first time. Subsequent mentions are not similarly marked. 2 Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2000): 55. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-007

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can reflect on modern problems by staging them in an unfamiliarly antiquated setting. And science fiction, as Freedman explains, requires the future “as a locus of radical alterity to the mundane status quo [. . .]. The potential future in science fiction exists, one might say, primarily for the sake of the actual present.”3 The purpose of science fiction, then, in this context – and it is one we shall return to at the end of this essay – is that of a “literature of cognitive estrangement.”4 And yet, in contemplating the topic of the present volume, it is telling to see what ideas of ourselves and our futures are projected forward in time throughout the Black Mirror universe, and what symbols are chosen to represent those ideas. In popular culture, dystopias, science fiction’s “central site of contention,”5 often present audiences with scenarios in which the average individual bears little responsibility for the nightmare the world is shown to have become. By basing their visions on natural disasters (which, even if man-made, are the long-term consequences of generations of misguided policy) or power-hungry individuals (which can only be toppled by ‘the chosen one’), they tend to externalize the threat to humanity, whatever it may be. Charlie Brooker’s anthology series Black Mirror, first broadcast on Channel 4 (2011–2014) and then on Netflix (from 2016), may at first glance appear to have been written in a similar vein, the omnipresence of various technological appliances turning humanity into their victims allowing such a reading at least on a superficial level. This essay, however, will argue that rather than representing an actual threat to humanity, technology in Black Mirror serves instead a symbolic function in that the threat always emanates from humanity’s needs and desires rather than from any external sources. Thus, while technology is shown to have many destructive attributes, it never becomes the subject of the show itself but rather is used as a persistent symbolic externalization of humanity’s flaws and foibles. Before embarking on that line of argument, however, it is necessary to ask whether it is even possible to endow an anthology series with an overarching theme and symbolism. In an anthology series, each episode tells one story from beginning to end, without causal connection to any of the other episodes, and it could be argued that Black Mirror does so to a higher degree than many others, given the care with which the aesthetics of each storyworld are created, as is the

3 Freedman, Critical Theory, 55. 4 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Genre (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979): 6. 5 Andrew Milner, Locating Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012): 115.

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case in both the forbiddingly bleak monochrome world of “Metalhead” (s04e05)6 and the pastel ad-brochure charm of “Nosedive” (s03e01),7 for instance. But it is not simply the distinctive visuals that serve as “centrifugal narrative forces,” i.e. “those strategies [. . .] that try to disintegrate”8 the unity of a composite text such as Black Mirror. Individual episodes are also frequently if not always separated by setting, by the technological standard achieved in the world of each episode, and by an absence of through lines where plot and causality are concerned: to all intents and purposes, the stories seem to be set in separate worlds, allowing writers freedom to develop ideas that do not need to fit a strict causality or even chronology of events in a shared storyworld. Different run times of episodes (at least since the move to Netflix) add to a sense of inconsistency and heterogeneity. This might put into question the idea that Black Mirror portrays consistent notions regarding technology and the future. That said, attentive viewers can identify a number of “centripetal”9 strategies at work in Black Mirror, whose role it is to signify shared concerns and even a shared universe (or perhaps, multiverse) between individual episodes making up the various series of the show. Most obvious is the consistent use of news channels on television or news websites. These media frequently feature incidental information so that as the center of the screen is taken up by something pertinent to the plot of the current episode, a news crawl or screen sidebar will refer back to a previous episode or foreshadow events of a future installment. The recurrent TV news network in Black Mirror is called UKN,10 and its employment as a linking device is introduced from the second series on by providing episodes with headlines placing them in a chronological relationship with events of the first series: thus “The National Anthem” (s01e01)11 and “The Waldo Moment” (s02e03)12 feature shots of the news channel displaying identical headlines, thus linking

6 “Metalhead,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by David Slade, tx. December 29, 2017 (US: Netflix, 2017). 7 “Nosedive,” story by Charlie Brooker, teleplay by Rashida Jones and Mike Schur, directed by Joe Wright, tx. October 21, 2016 (US: Netflix, 2016). 8 Rolf Lundén, “Centrifugal and Centripetal Narrative Strategies in the Short Story Composite and the Episode Film,” Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts, special issue of Interférences littéraires/ Literaire interferenties 12 (2014): 50. 9 Rolf Lundén, “Centrifugal and Centripetal,” 49. 10 If the episode is set in the United Kingdom. If set in the United States, the news broadcaster is called USN. 11 “The National Anthem,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Otto Bathurst, tx. December 4, 2011 (UK: Channel 4, 2011). 12 “The Waldo Moment,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Bryn Higgins, tx. February 25, 2013 (UK: Channel 4, 2013).

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the events of both stories in chronological terms. References to the Skillane trial or to Victoria Skillane abound even outside of “White Bear” (s02e02),13 the episode primarily concerned with the fate of that particular person, as do references to Michael Callow, the Prime Minister humiliated in the show’s very first episode: having been blackmailed into committing an act of bestiality in his own story, we soon read “Callow to Divorce” on a news website in “Shut Up and Dance” (s03e03),14 while a barely legible news crawl in “Black Museum” (s04e06)15 reads “PM Callow marries pig.” The value of these texts – given that they obviously consist of written words – may not be deemed tremendously symbolic, but what they do represent beyond the more or less playful connection between various series and episodes is the inescapable omnipresence of TV and computer screens in the world of Black Mirror. There are tentative overlaps in terms of plot and personnel as well: a job interview at the beginning of “The Entire History of You” (s01e03)16 mentions a technology that is at the center of “Arkangel” (s04e02),17 and one of the detectives in “Hated in the Nation” (s03e06)18 served on the Skillane case mentioned above. But while these minor intersections based on shared news or human connections are a pleasant find for fans of the show, they do little to mesh episodes together at first viewing. What really does connect the episodes in the minds of viewers are the more emotive images, the symbols so liberally peppered throughout the show. There is the futuristic-looking pregnancy test used with great poignancy in “Be Right Back” (s02e01)19 and “White Christmas” (s02e04).20 There is

13 “White Bear,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Carl Tibbetts, tx. February 18, 2013 (UK: Channel 4, 2013). 14 “Shut Up and Dance,” written by Charlie Brooker and William Bridges, directed by James Watkins, tx. October 21, 2016 (US: Netflix, 2016). 15 “Black Museum,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Colm McCarthy, tx. December 29, 2017 (US: Netflix, 2017). 16 “The Entire History of You,” written by Jesse Armstrong, directed by Brian Welsh, tx. December 18, 2011 (UK: Channel 4, 2011). 17 “Arkangel,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Jodie Foster, tx. December 29, 2017 (US: Netflix, 2017). 18 “Hated in the Nation,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by James Hawes, tx. October 21, 2016 (US: Netflix, 2016). 19 “Be Right Back,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris, tx. February 11, 2013 (UK: Channel 4, 2013). 20 “White Christmas,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Carl Tibbetts, tx. December 16, 2014 (UK: Channel 4, 2014). Given that its original air date came nearly two years after that of the episodes making up series 2 (originally aired in February 2013), “White Christmas” was clearly not part of the original series 2 and is thus frequently referred to as the 2014 Christmas special. Following Netflix’s acquisition of Black Mirror (including its back catalogue), the

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the postcard from the eponymous town of San Junipero (s03e04)21 displayed in “Metalhead;” the same dating app is used in “Hang the DJ” (s04e04)22 and in “USS Callister” (s04e01)23; and there is a curious pictographic symbol that appears in the context of certain technologies in “White Bear,” “Playtest” (s03e02),24 “White Christmas,” and “Bandersnatch.” These objects and graphic representations on the whole carry much more emotive weight than the onscreen writing of news crawls and web sites within the series. In fact, their emotional punch is perhaps only surpassed by the recurring musical clues, particularly versions of the Irma Thomas song “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” which appear in “15 Million Merits” (s01e02),25 “White Christmas,” “Men Against Fire” (s03e05)26 and “Crocodile” (s04e03).27 The capping stone of all these connections, however, is “Black Museum,” in which protagonist Nish is taken around an exhibition of technological artefacts by museum owner Rolo Hayes. As he explains the back stories to some of the artefacts that the viewer is not as yet familiar with, they note in passing many objects that did have a destructive role to play in earlier episodes: the robotic bees from “Hated in the Nation,” the smashed and bloodied tablet computer from “Arkangel,” the lollipop used to harvest unsuspecting victims’ DNA in “USS Callister,” the laboratory mice named Hector and Kenny just like the main characters in “Shut Up and Dance:” every object they pass, whether commented upon or not, has the potential to evoke key moments from previous episodes, and they now all find themselves in Rolo’s collection on display in his Black Museum, the word black in its name reminding us both of the macabre

episode is now listed as the regular fourth episode of season 2, and is referred to as such in these pages, as this is how viewers would encounter it now. 21 “San Junipero,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris, tx. October 21, 2016 (US: Netflix, 2016). 22 “Hang the DJ,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Tim Van Patten, tx. December 29, 2017 (US: Netflix, 2017). 23 “USS Callister,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Toby Haynes, tx. December 29, 2017 (US: Netflix, 2017). 24 “Playtest,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, tx. October 21, 2016 (US: Netflix, 2016). 25 “15 Million Merits,” written by Charlie Brooker and Kanak Huq, directed by Euros Lyn, tx. December 11, 2011 (UK: Channel 4, 2011). 26 “Men Against Fire,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Jakob Verbruggen, tx. October 21, 2016 (US: Netflix, 2016). 27 “Crocodile,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by John Hillcoat, tx. December 29, 2017 (US: Netflix, 2017).

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nature of his collection as well as providing a link to the show’s title and the idea that the black mirror we see when we look at a device equipped with a screen is not only visually dark but may put us in moral and ethical jeopardy. In any imaginary timeline, then, “Bandersnatch” is set quite some time before the events in all other episodes while “Black Museum” has to be set at a point in time after the events in other episodes have occurred, thus providing a temporal frame within which all the other episodes – despite their many differences and seeming contradictions – can be seen, which perhaps offers the strongest hint at a unity of action and meaning underlying the entire Black Mirror project. But if it can be argued that Black Mirror, even though made by different directors and, though largely written by Charlie Brooker also occasionally featuring other writers, is integrated to this degree, then what is the common idea behind the episodes and their treatment of technology? It is that the technology featured in the show exists not because one deranged individual willed it into existence to wield power over others but because collectively the human race (or the market for technological devices) saw it as desirable and profitable. All of the technologies whose horror Black Mirror has made it its mission to drive home to us, exist in the fictional world of Black Mirror (and to an as yet lesser degree in our real world) because they answer some universal human need or desire. The following paragraphs are designed to consider some of the origins of the technology used in Black Mirror to demonstrate that the show is not interested in technology for its own sake. Those origins may be made explicit in the show or are a matter of conjecture. What episodes of Black Mirror tend to avoid in their portrayal of technology gone wrong, however, is the simplistic idea that technological advances are an external phenomenon, something done to a collective by ill-intentioned individuals against their express will and resistance. Rather, technology is an externalized result of internal human weaknesses and desires, and just as we may lose control over those, various gadgets in Black Mirror may also be found to bring about the downfall of those setting great store by them. So predominant is the human, individual, and psychological dimension the show develops, that it barely seems out of place to liken the show to Horatio’s summation of Hamlet: And let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about: so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

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Fall’n on the inventors’ heads: all this can I Truly deliver. (5.2.363–369)28

The trope of the road to hell being paved with good intentions is most traditionally fulfilled by the motif of the invention gone wrong, a seemingly beneficial new technology that must have either been misappropriated or must have escaped human control altogether at some stage in history to become their scourge, such as the mechanical guard dogs hunting and ultimately killing the human cast of “Metalhead.” It is easy to see their erstwhile functionality, and even in the post-apocalyptic monochrome landscape in which this episode is set, their former use is not difficult to see as they protect a storage facility the human protagonists try to break into. But over the course of the episode the viewer understands that they have proliferated to such a degree that they have become a threat to humanity itself. If the technology in question does not turn on humans of its own volition, it can always be hijacked by individuals pursuing an evil or at least selfish plan. The invention of the laptop camera can in all probability not be traced to evil intent, and yet, when Kenny in “Shut Up and Dance” is blackmailed by people who have hacked his laptop and recorded him in an act the viewer can infer to have been deeply embarrassing, he becomes the victim of that particular technology. These examples may show us that technology can be misappropriated – but they also imply that even the deadliest invention may have been sparked into life based on an idea of universally accepted usefulness. But beyond technology taking on a life of its own or being hijacked by sinister people, there is also technology that is used for cruel purposes that are somehow deemed acceptable. That is particularly shown in the byzantine punishments devised for criminals in some of the show’s episodes such as “White Bear,” in which an amnesiac woman is woken and chased around the streets by armed thugs and gawpers recording her on their phones every day of her life, only to be told that this is her punishment for her involvement in the abduction and death of a sixyear-old girl and to then have her memory wiped clean in order to start all over again the next morning; or in “Black Museum,” in which convicted murderer Clayton Leigh has his consciousness transferred into a hologram at the eponymous museum so that paying customers can put him in the electric chair and experience the thrill of executing him over and over again. While both these forms of cruelty depend on the requisite technologies, their origins are to be found in people’s vindictiveness and sadism, as well as their sense of self-righteousness

28 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2006): 462.

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that justifies to themselves their enjoyment in witnessing or actively meeting out cruel punishments. Turning lawful retribution into profitable entertainment in the White Bear Justice Park or in Rolo Haynes’s exhibition is not a phenomenon made possible by technology as much as a case of technology being used to address basest human instincts that were once answered, for instance, by witch trials, public executions and bear-baiting. In other shows, technology is used by people convinced of its benefits and oblivious to the harm it not only can do but consistently does to their human relationships, as in “The Entire History of You,” in which Liam discovers that implanted devices known as ‘grains’ that record every human interaction may seem like a good idea in offering total recall but entangle him in a web of paranoia when he wants to use the technology to prove his paternity of the child his partner is expecting. Parental issues are also at stake in “Arkangel,” in which concerned mother Marie implants daughter Sara with a monitoring system with dreadful consequences to their relationship. Again, what is important here is the human cost of the use of these seemingly harmless technologies rather than the technologies themselves, and it is interesting to note that in both “The Entire History of You” and “Arkangel,” the protagonists identify their use of technology as problematic at some stage and can put up some meaningful form of resistance to it by simply foregoing its use. Circumstances are markedly different in those episodes in which the technology under scrutiny has become so ubiquitous as to escape identification as a problem by large swathes of society. That is the case in “15 Million Merits,” set in a world in which people earn credit by riding power-generating bicycles. They can spend their credit on food and media, but one of the most coveted prizes is a spot on a talent contest in which candidates can hope to gain riches and fame. Given the pervasiveness of that system, it takes a rare case in Bing, the episode’s protagonist, to draw back the curtain on its perniciousness, even though by the end of the episode he too will return into the fold and help perpetuate the status quo. In “Nosedive,” we encounter a world in which people’s socioeconomic status is determined by the rating of one to five stars that they receive for every interaction, from greeting someone in an elevator to making a purchase. The average star rating then determines people’s access to transport, accommodation, and even medical treatment. While “Nosedive” traces protagonist Lacie’s journey towards freeing herself from these societal constraints, it is clear that hers is a maverick experience far different from the rest of society, where rating someone based on how much they smiled as they greeted you that morning will remain de rigueur. The final way in which technology can tell stories of the hidden depths of flawed human nature is actually a positive one, in its own way: in both

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“San Junipero” and “Striking Vipers” (s05e01)29 technology provides a space in which characters are free to be true to their real identities. In “Striking Vipers,” friends Danny and Karl are surprised to find themselves using a virtual world to engage in homosexual encounters. Both heterosexual in real life, the two men are ill-equipped to engage with one another emotionally and would dread the social consequences of making their attraction to each other public, but the world of Striking Vipers X, a VR game modeled on the Streetfighter series, affords them a space to experiment with their feelings for and attraction to one another. A similar case is made for Yorkie and Kelly in “San Junipero” when, after a lifetime of separation the two women can finally be together by having their consciousnesses uploaded to the posthumous retirement community of San Junipero, there to be united in perpetuity. These uncharacteristically warm and positive episodes amply demonstrate that at the heart of Black Mirror are questions of humanity – in this case the question of the relationship between the two couples on a personal level and the question of why society cannot offer them a place for their relationships other than in virtual worlds – rather than the trappings of technology. If the underlying motivation for the invention, use, and possible abuse of each episode’s respective technology is to be found in human weaknesses and foibles, the show’s narrative strategies also tend to highlight moments of humanity. This is particularly true of Black Mirror’s propensity for the introduction of a third-act twist. As one commentator rather dismissively adumbrates the narrative structure of a typical episode: You begin in one place, half- to two-thirds of the way through, you get either a twist or an unexpected escalation, and then, yep, that thing you suspected was not good at the start ends up being really, extra not good by the end. Once you’ve seen more than one or two episodes, you know the third-act revelation is coming. You examine the first part for clues about what it might be, and then, to its credit, Black Mirror usually finds a way to make that surprise even more upsetting than you were imagining.30

The very reason they remain surprising rather than becoming entirely predictable is that twists in Black Mirror tend to focus on the human dimension rather than lingering on the finer points of the technology. Surely a pattern of predictability would be much easier to establish if the surprise always lay within the

29 “Striking Vipers,” written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris, tx. June 5, 2019 (US: Netflix, 2019). 30 Kathryn Vanarendonk, “The Case Against Black Mirror,” Slate (October 25, 2016) (acc. May 30, 2020).

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nature of the technology in question. But humanity’s infinite pool of weaknesses means that perspectives can be shifted, unexpected emotions can be triggered, and previously held convictions can be questioned by the audience. Two examples at opposite ends of the scale illustrate the effectiveness of the twist in concentrating viewers’ minds on the human dimension of what is at stake rather than dwelling on the technology. In “Metalhead,” the group of protagonists embark on a venture to retrieve items from a seemingly abandoned warehouse. Confronted by robotic guard dogs, the group disperses and we follow one member, Bella, in her ultimately tragic attempt to escape her tenacious pursuer. As the viewer comes to understand that the entire expedition must have been directly or indirectly killed by vicious mechanical guard dogs, the final frames of the episode return to the warehouse to show a box that must have fallen off a pallet in the initial confrontation with the guard dogs and burst open. What is inside is simply a boxful of teddy bears. All along, then, what the group was prepared to risk their lives for was a bunch of animal replicas to be used as toys for small children. This tugs at the audience’s heartstrings because it seems such a non-essential item, and only extreme love for the surviving children in this post-apocalyptic world could drive them to risk everything to retrieve a boxful of toys. At the same time, it is deeply ironic that presumably the same human impulse that makes children long for teddies is also what tempts adults to build mechanical guard dogs, both animal replicas conspiring to bring to an end the lives of the entire human cast seen in “Metalhead.” “Shut Up and Dance” provides a twist in which the viewer’s sympathies are at least challenged, if not radically altered. The episode revolves around Kenny, the teenage boy blackmailed into committing various crimes by people who have recorded him. As the demands by his blackmailers escalate into fighting a man to the death, for instance, the viewer may begin to wonder what lengths Kenny would go to in order to stop the publication of what must surely be a video of him masturbating to pornography. The twist demanding a quick readjustment on the part of the audience is that in the show’s final moments it is revealed that Kenny masturbated to child pornography. Given the Black Mirror universe, where blackmail is no rarity and justice is often served in the most cruel and vindictive ways (and preferably for the entertainment of others), it is as difficult for the viewer to remain sympathetic to Kenny as it is to feel any kind of satisfaction in his hounding by the blackmailers. What the viewer is left with is a human mess that has been brought about by means of technology (webcams, drones) but whose root cause is humanity itself. What the technology has become – from the mechanical guard dogs in “Metalhead” to the webcam in “Shut Up and Dance” – is a magnifying glass under which human weaknesses and foibles are presented in full view.

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Black Mirror’s title has come to signify the fact that into the screens of our devices can be projected any one of the many undesirable traits human beings are afflicted with, the ‘mirror’ part of the title suggesting that what we see staring back at us from these screens is ourselves. The technology around which episodes purportedly revolve serves the purpose of a symbol in the narrow poetic sense, even, as technology’s symbolism throughout Black Mirror “begins with the vehicle and the tenor is discovered, elicited, or evoked from it.”31 And that tenor is not the idea, as expressed by Vanarendonk, that “Black Mirror’s messages are usually pretty simple. Cellphones? Bad. Reality shows? Bad. Social media? Really bad.”32 The scenarios outlined in the anthology series are terrifying not because the technology they involve is bad, nor because it was dreamt up by a single evil individual bent on visiting these horrors on mankind for profit or power. They are terrifying because they see humankind collectively and willingly subjecting itself to these evils as a routine matter. The very fact that the technology of any given episode rarely needs to be explained at any great length not only highlights that it does not take center stage in the story: it also reminds us that we are already familiar with many of the technological concepts on display here, either from other science-fiction narratives or – most disconcertingly – from our own lives. So what is eerie and most disturbing about Black Mirror, as the present essay has demonstrated, is not the radicalism of science fiction’s “cognitive estrangement”33 on display but rather its terrible familiarity: since what is shown to lie at the root of the cruelty, disillusionment and sheer helplessness presented in Charlie Brooker’s anthology series is based on universal human nature, the future is already and has always been with us. The past may indeed be immutable, but that assertion can hardly be said to be used here as a means of establishing a relationship of alterity with an as yet unwritten future, when Black Mirror consistently tells us that our fate as symbolized by individual gadgets and technology as a whole may be just as unavoidable.

31 Norman Friedman, “Symbol,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, fourth ed., ed. Roland Greene et al. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012): 1391–1395, 1393. 32 Vanarendonk, “The Case Against.” 33 Suvin, Metamorphoses, 6.

Nicholas Shrimpton

“Players and painted stage”: Symbolizing the Future in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah Abstract: Though they were, by birth, Dubliners of the same generation, Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats seem, as writers, to have little in common. Shaw is prosaic, witty, and topical, while Yeats, even in his plays, is poetic, emotive and legendary – still more so from 1916 when he adopted the “distinguished, indirect and symbolic” method of his Plays for Dancers. But Shaw, too, began to use symbolic effects in 1916 as he started work on Heartbreak House, with its closing image of the post-war future as a Götterdämmerung. Shaw’s extraordinary five-play sequence Back to Methuselah (1921) also makes extensive use of symbols to depict an action which begins in the Garden of Eden but mostly takes place between 1924 and 31,920 AD. The result is not, however, a successful drama and it is in his next play, Saint Joan (1923) that Shaw will create an effective symbol of his hopes for the future.

In the winter of 1937/8, the poet and playwright W. B. Yeats was searching for a theme, and in his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (published in 1939),1 he would describe the process of finding it. Yeats’s decision was that his theme would have to be his own “heart” (l. 4). But he immediately suggests that this has not been his customary practice during the previous five decades of his career. What he has written about hitherto, he claims, has been topics outside the self, here symbolically presented as the exotic “circus animals” of the title. In the past he has used “old themes” (l. 9): “First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose | Through three enchanted islands” (ll. 10–11). But did Yeats, in this account, have any emotional involvement in the experiences of Oisin (or Ossian) when he published his narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin in 1889? No, he had just fallen, deeply though hopelessly, in love with Maud Gonne, and Oisin’s “fairy bride” (l. 16) does not represent, or symbolize, her. Rather, she is cited, fifty years after the event, as an example of what Yeats did not have at the time: a woman who returned his affection. The next work mentioned in the poem, the play The Countess Cathleen, might seem to be more closely related to Yeats’s “heart” since it tells the story

1 William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, second ed. (New York: Scribner, 1997): 356. Further references in the text, by line number. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-008

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of an Irish noblewoman who sells her soul to the devil in order to save her tenants from starvation. This is a good analogy for, or symbol of, Maud Gonne’s commitment to violent political action. But, once again, Yeats insists that the work of art was, as such, more important to him than the personal experiences which may have prompted it: “And this brought forth a dream and soon enough | This dream itself had all my thought and love” (ll. 23–24). The same was true, Yeats goes on to suggest, of the first of his plays about Cuchulain, On Baile’s Strand, where, once again, “[i]t was the dream itself enchanted me” (l. 28). In Structuralist terms, it was the sign, not the referent, with which Yeats was preoccupied. He sums up this account of his career in the brilliant couplet with which he ends his penultimate stanza (“Players and painted stage took all my love | And not those things that they were emblems of,” ll. 31–32), while the poem as a whole identifies his work with that least referential, least realistic, and most straightforwardly entertaining form of drama, the circus. Since my topic is a play by George Bernard Shaw, this might seem an odd place to start. Beyond the fact that they were Anglo-Irishmen of the same generation (both were born in Dublin, Shaw in Portobello in July 1856, Yeats in the more affluent suburb of Sandymount in June 1865) the two writers might seem to have little in common. Yeats, even in his plays, is poetic, emotive, legendary or historical in his choice of topics, and symbolic in technique. Shaw, by contrast, is prosaic, witty, contemporary, and literal. Their styles of drama are, as Nicholas Grene neatly puts it, “antithetical”.2 I begin with Yeats’s poem for two reasons. The first is that its distinction between “players and painted stage,” on the one hand, and “those things that they were emblems of,” on the other, so clearly identifies the fundamentally symbolic (or, in Yeats’s terms, emblematic) nature of drama – all drama, including the relatively realistic plays which Shaw wrote in the early, and best remembered, part of his career. And the second is that Shaw’s later work is rather closer to that of Yeats than we have tended to allow – not least in its willingness to make deliberate use of symbolic, rather than more literal or realistic, effects. Shaw was, of course, fully aware of the artificiality of drama. Since it involves real people (actors), in real time and space, using (at least since Tom Robertson’s transformation of English stagecraft in the 1860s) real furniture, crockery, cutlery and clothes, and speaking (particularly after the influence of Ibsen began to be felt) in a conversational rather than declamatory manner, it is easy to think of drama as a particularly realist form of art. In relative terms

2 Nicholas Grene, “W. B. Yeats,” in George Bernard Shaw in Context, ed. Brad Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015): 50.

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that may be true, both of the theater and (still more so) of film. In absolute terms it is not, as Shaw made clear in an interview published in the New York Times in June 1927. He has never, he insists, [. . .] been what you call a representationist or realist. I was always in the classic tradition, recognizing that stage characters must be endowed by the author with a conscious self-knowledge and power of expression, and [. . .] a freedom from inhibitions, which in real life would make them monsters of genius. It is the power to do this that differentiates me (or Shakespeare) from a gramophone and a camera.3

There are, none the less, degrees of artifice and Yeats’s plays had always been relatively less realistic than those of Shaw. A good example of this would be the occasion in April 1894 when Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire was performed as a curtain raiser for Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Avenue (now Playhouse) Theatre in Northumberland Avenue.4 Yeats’s short play, written in verse and set in Sligo in the late eighteenth century, tells the story of a young, newly married woman whose soul is tempted away by a faery child to the [. . .] Land of Heart’s Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom.5

Shaw’s play could scarcely be more different. Set in modern Bulgaria, shortly after the battle of Slivnitsa in November 1885, it is a robust, indeed cynical, onslaught on romantic illusion, especially when it is encouraged by the reading of poetry. Raina hero-worships her fiancé Sergius who has led a dashing cavalry charge during the battle. Worried that “we only had our heroic ideas because we are so fond of reading Byron and Pushkin,” she is thrilled to discover that he has been (supposedly) “just as splendid and noble as he looks!”6 When Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary who has been serving with the defeated Serbians, takes shelter in her house, she receives a very different account of the battle. Sergius’s action had been a piece of suicidal stupidity which only succeeded because the machine guns he was charging had been issued with the wrong ammunition and Bluntschli condemns such unprofessional foolishness.

3 George Bernard Shaw, “Mr. Shaw on Mr. Shaw,” New York Times (June 12, 1927): sect. 7,1, here quoted from Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1963): 435. 4 This was part of a season of plays arranged by Florence Farr with funding from Annie Horniman. 5 W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1934): 69. 6 Dan H. Laurence, ed., The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, 7 volumes (London: Bodley Head, 1970–74), 1.400 (hereafter cited in the text as CP).

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He carries chocolate, rather than bullets, in his ammunition pouches because it is, in practice, more likely to be useful during a battle and fights in the spirit, not of Byron or Pushkin, but of his father: a practical, hard-headed businessman who runs a chain of hotels in Switzerland. War is a horrible reality, not a romantic dream. Seen from within the play, Bluntschli could be said to function as a symbol of the future: in the eyes of the Bulgarian characters, in 1885, he represents the developed world towards which they aspire to move, or advance. But for theater audiences in Western Europe in 1894 he is simply a literal instance of contemporary reality. Yeats could create characters who symbolize or personify an idea: the title character of his Irish Nationalist play Cathleen ni Houlihan in 1902, for example, is an elderly woman who stands for, or symbolizes, Ireland, with her four lost fields to represent the provinces of Connacht, Leinster, Munster, and Ulster.7 Shaw, by contrast, at least in the first half of his long career, creates characters who articulate ideas but do not symbolically suggest or embody them. Though Yeats’s early dramatic manner had often been symbolic, he later came to feel that it had not been symbolic enough. In 1916 he adopted a new mode of drama, influenced by the Japanese Noh plays which Ezra Pound had recently translated (or “finished” from manuscript drafts given to him by Ernest Fenollosa’s widow in 1913). In January and February he wrote At the Hawk’s Well and in April 1916 it was performed in the London drawing rooms of Lady Cunard and Lady Islington. Yeats described it in the introduction he wrote that same year for the volume of Pound and Fenollosa’s translations of Certain Noble Plays of Japan: I have written a little play that can be played in a room for so little money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price. There will be no scenery, for three musicians [. . .] can describe place and weather, and at moments action, and accompany it all by drum and gong or flute and dulcimer. Instead of the players working themselves into a violence of passion indecorous in our sitting-room, the music, the beauty of form and voice all come to climax in pantomimic dance. In fact with the help of these plays ‘translated by Ernest Fenollosa and finished by Ezra Pound’ I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way – an aristocratic form.8

7 The play was written jointly with Lady Gregory. 8 William Butler Yeats, “Introduction,” in Certain Noble Plays of Japan: from the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, Chosen and Finished by Ezra Pound, with an Introduction by William Butler Yeats (Dundrum: The Cuala Press, 1916): 1.

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The theme which is thus ritualistically, or symbolically, presented is the ambiguous quality of the human longing for immortality. Cuchulain and the Old Man wait, unavailingly, by the Hawk’s Well, hoping for the water which could give them eternal life to bubble up, while, in contradiction, one of the musicians sings, “O God protect me | From a horrible deathless body.”9 The issue is, however, only presented, not discussed, and the artificiality of the “players and painted stage” was foregrounded rather than disguised. The actors wore masks (or were made up “to resemble masks”) and this “distinguished, indirect and symbolic” drama took place without stage lighting or a darkened auditorium, so that there was no distinction between the part of the room in which the audience sat and the area in which the words and music were performed. Shaw meanwhile had been enjoying the success of one of his most conventionally realistic plays. He had had the idea for Pygmalion in 1897, in the phase of his career which produced such texts as You Never Can Tell and The Devil’s Disciple, though he did not write it until 1912.10 Perhaps for that reason, it ignores the experiments with dramatic form which he had made in Man and Superman (1903), Getting Married (1908) and Misalliance (1909) and reverts to an earlier manner. The result is a play which is both extraordinarily popular (especially after 1956, when it was adapted into the musical My Fair Lady) and increasingly recognized as a masterpiece: Peter Ure, in 1974, would call it “simply one of the very greatest of English comedies.”11 The allusion, in its title, to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea might suggest a symbolic dimension. In fact, the parallel between Pygmalion and Professor Higgins is a joke (a serious joke) and the play remains a piece of realistic social comedy, firmly rooted in the contemporary world of Covent Garden, Wimpole Street, and Chelsea. The first production opened in Vienna, in Siegfried Trebitsch’s German translation, in October 1913. The first English production opened at His Majesty’s Theatre in April 1914 and drew packed houses until Herbert Beerbohm Tree ended the run, in order to go on holiday (in Marienbad) at the end of July. If that was not a good time for an Englishman to take a holiday in Germany, it was also not a good time to be a serious playwright in London. The theatres switched to musicals, revues, and light entertainment for the duration of the War, while Bernard Shaw turned his hand to polemical journalism.

9 W. B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well in Four Plays for Dancers (London: Macmillan, 1921): 20. 10 See Christopher St. John, ed. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence [1931], third ed. (London: Max Reinhardt & Evans,1949): 234. 11 Peter Ure, “Master and Pupil in Bernard Shaw” in Yeats and Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. C. J. Rawson (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1974): 269.

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In 1913, however, he had had an idea for a new kind of play, and between March 1916 and May 1917 he wrote it. The result, Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes, was not a natural development from Shaw’s innovations in the previous decade. Those had been a consequence of his brilliant critical insight, in his book The Quintessence of Ibsen in 1891, that Ibsen had introduced not just new topics but a new technical feature to the construction of plays: This technical factor in the play is the discussion. Formerly you had in what was called a well-made play an exposition in the first act, a situation in the second, an unravelling in the third. Now you have exposition, situation, and discussion; and the discussion is the test of the playwright.12

Shaw adopted this new “technical factor” in his own plays, substituting discussion for unravelling (or dénouement) in the final act. Indeed, he became so enamoured of it that he began to substitute discussion for the “situation” in the second act as well. Getting Married, in 1908, is sub-titled “A Disquisitory Play” and Misalliance, in 1910, is so persistently discursive that it could be said to consist of discussion, discussion, and discussion (Shaw called it “A Debate in One Sitting”). Heartbreak House is not like this. Instead, Shaw turned to a new model for his drama, once again foreign, though on this occasion Russian rather than Norwegian: the plays of Chekhov. Shaw probably first heard of Chekhov from Siegfried Trebitsch, after the Moscow Art Theatre’s tour to Berlin in 1905. He attended the Stage Society’s production of The Cherry Orchard in May 1911 and the first London productions of both The Seagull (March 1912) and Uncle Vanya (May 1914). Coming out of the latter, he remarked that, “[w]hen I hear a play of Chekhov’s, I want to tear my own up”13 and in May 1916 would tell Hesketh Pearson that he’d been “working on a play in the Chekhov manner.”14 Like Yeats’s use of the Japanese Noh drama, Shaw’s imitation of Chekhov (at almost exactly the same time) is partial and idiosyncratic. Both writers use their foreign model as a stimulus rather than a template. But Shaw’s adoption of an apparently pointless (or plotless) gathering of characters in a country house as the materials of a drama and his blending of comedy and pathos both have an authentically Chekhovian

12 Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism by Bernard Shaw, Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen (New York: Brentano’s, 1928): 213. 13 Ronald Bryden, “The roads to Heartbreak House,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998): 180–194, 182. 14 See Stanley Weintraub, Bernard Shaw 1914–1918: Journey to Heartbreak (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973):159.

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flavor, and “the sound in the sky” towards the end of the last act seems to echo the “distant sound [. . .] as if from the sky, the sound of a string breaking”15 at the end of The Cherry Orchard. One of the several ways in which Heartbreak House is not Chekhovian, however, is its overt and explicit use of symbols. Chekhov’s seagull is often used as a standard example of symbolic effect in drama. But as George Calderon pointed out in 1911, in the preface to his pioneering translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, it is an exception to Chekhov’s usual practice: Tchekhof did not often use symbols in the old-fashioned sense, material objects adumbrating material meanings [. . .] Certainly the eponymous seagull [. . .] is a symbol of that kind, in itself neither better nor worse than the sort of symbols that Ibsen was fond of using [. . .] that tower from which the Master-builder fell [. . .] or that wild duck which the old gentleman kept in the attic [. . .] [but] [. . .] Except the seagull I can recall no other example in Tchekhof’s plays of a symbol of the artless kind that can be stored in the property-room.16

Instead, in Calderon’s analysis, Chekhov used a more beautiful and recondite Symbolism, one that harmonises better with the realistic method, and that is the Symbolism by which the events of the Drama are not merely represented for their own sake but stand also as emblems and generalisations about life at large. The relation of the characters to each other in The Seagull, for instance, evidently symbolises the universal frustration of desire.17

Shaw may have wished to replicate this “more beautiful and recondite Symbolism” and, to a certain extent, could be said to have done so in the thwarted relationships of the characters he assembles. But there are also a great many “old-fashioned” symbols of the kind that Calderon identifies in Ibsen. The importance of Chekhov’s seagull, for Shaw, may be that it drew his attention to a previously neglected Ibsenite technique. The first and most obvious of these “artless” symbols is Heartbreak House itself, the extraordinary building in which Shaw sets his play: “a room which

15 Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, in Two Plays by Anton Tchekhof [1912], trans. George Calderon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936): 253. 16 George Calderon, “Tchekhof,” in Two Plays by Anton Tchekhof [1912] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936): 38. Calderon’s preface is dated 1911. He had directed a production of his translation of The Seagull at the Royalty Theatre Glasgow in November 1909 and it would be performed again, in London, in March 1912 (where Shaw saw it). 17 Calderon, Two Plays, 38–39.

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has been built so as to resemble the after-part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship with a stern gallery; for the windows are ship built with heavy timbering” (CP 5.59). Shaw had a literal source for this conception. In 1913, the actress Lena Ashwell told him about her childhood on HMS Wellesley, a former ship of the line (built in 1815) which was moored at North Shields on the Tyne and used as a nautical training school under the direction of her father, Commander Charles Pocock.18 But by 1916, Shaw had turned this hint into a version of Plato’s symbol of the ship of state in Book 6 of The Republic. Heartbreak House (the place) is the British nation state sailing complacently into the horrors of the First World War. This symbolic significance is explicitly spelled out in Act 3: HECTOR. And this ship that we are all in? This soul’s prison we call England? CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. (CP 5.177)

And in his preface to Heartbreak House (more reliable in this particular instance than his prefaces tend to be as guides to the plays which they introduce) Shaw enlarges this account of his symbol into the statement that “Heartbreak House is [. . .] cultured, leisured Europe before the war” (CP 5.12). The politicians and diplomats of Europe, and the highly educated, well-informed, intellectually curious people among whom they lived, had failed to avert disaster. Shaw had known such people, and liked many of them: Prince Lichkowsky (Karl Max), the admirable German ambassador to London between 1912 and 1914, whose advice – if only it had been listened to in Berlin – might well have averted the War, lunched with Shaw and his wife at 10 Adelphi Terrace in May 191419 and praised Shaw’s views on the crisis in his Reminiscences.20 Several of the characters in Heartbreak House stand, symbolically, for particular groups within this ruling elite. Mazzini Dunn represents nineteenth-century European Liberalism (as his name suggests) and the professional world of business managers and administrators. Lady Utterword, the wife of a colonial Governor, is the emblem of what Shaw, in his preface, calls “Horseback Hall”: the section of the

18 See Weintraub, Journey to Heartbreak, 163 (though he wrongly suggests that the Wellesley was still a sea-going vessel), citing Lena Ashwell, Myself a Player (London: Joseph, 1936): 13–21 and 65–67. “Lena’s Father” was an early working title for Shaw’s play. 19 Weintraub, Journey to Heartbreak, 12. 20 “Delusions (Notes made in January 1915),” in Prince Lichnowsky, Heading for the Abyss: Reminiscences, trans. Sefton Delmer (London: Constable & Co, 1928): 47.

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ruling elite which prefers hunting, shooting, and fishing to art and intellect (CP 5.14). In a letter to his Swedish translator, Hugo Vallentin, Shaw misleadingly suggested that Boss Mangan was an individual portrait, or caricature, of Lord Devonport (Hudson Kearley), the tea merchant who founded the International Stores grocery chain and was made Minister of Food Control in 1916.21 Though Devonport may have helped to suggest Mangan, the dramatic character is actually far less specific than this. Mangan is a stock-market speculator, rather than a practical businessman: Shaw’s hostile symbol, not of one man, but of financiers and their banks and bourses. Most importantly perhaps, Hector and Hesione Hushabye represent the cultured aristocratic class of the pre-war world, with its love of art and literature, its wit, its beautiful houses, elegant manners, and social and sexual liberalism. They are a version of ‘The Souls’, the circle of politicians, artists, and intellectuals (including Arthur Balfour, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Edward Burne-Jones, and Margot Tennant who in 1914 would be the wife of the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith), which gathered, most famously, at the Wyndhams’ Wiltshire house, Clouds, designed for them by Philip Webb and William Morris. Prince Lichnowsky visited Lord Beauchamp in Worcestershire at Madresfield Court (with its Arts & Crafts chapel and library) in July 191422; Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well would be first performed in Lady Cunard’s drawing room; and Shaw himself would claim that Heartbreak House had been partly conceived while staying with Sidney and Beatrice Webb in June 1916 at Windham Croft in Sussex, where Leonard and Virginia Woolf were fellow guests.23 Delightful though they are (Ellie Dunn falls deeply in love with Hector), their intelligence and cultural sophistication have, heart-breakingly, failed to save the world from war. The name “Hushabye” is, of course, a significant component of the symbol: these people led us, sleep-walking, into disaster. Shaw’s friend H. G. Wells made a similar judgement, in a more prosaic way, in 1916 in his book What is Coming? The ruling class will, he suggests, “come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the whole future of Western civilisation depends”: This Court and land-holding class cannot go on being rich and living rich [. . .]. This class, which has so much legislative and administrative power in at least three of the great belligerents – in Great Britain and Germany perhaps most so [. . . :] How far will these men get out of the tradition of their birth and upbringing? [. . .] [O]ne of the most anxious questions that a Briton can ask himself to-day is just how far the gigantic

21 Stanley Weintraub and Anne Wright, Heartbreak House: A Facsimile of the Revised Typescript (New York and London: Garland, 1981): xvi. 22 Lichnowsky, Reminiscences, 9. 23 See Weintraub, Journey to Heartbreak, 162–165.

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sufferings and still more monstrous warnings of this war have shocked the good gentlemen who must steer the ship of State through the strong rapids of the New Peace.24

Wells’s answer is a cautious hope for practical change. Shaw’s response is more dramatic and despairing. The “sound in the sky” at the end of his play is not mysterious, like Chekhov’s “sound of a string breaking” in The Cherry Orchard. Rather it is the literal noise of Zeppelins approaching to drop bombs on the gardens and grounds of Heartbreak House. In their final speeches, Hesione and Ellie express the hope that they will come back “tomorrow night” and bomb the house itself (CP 5.181).25 This is a symbolic presentation of what is to come – and it is, in effect, the Wagnerian symbol of Götterdämmerung. The governing classes of Europe, with all their intellect and culture, must simply be destroyed. It is a gloomy image of the future but, in theatrical terms, a powerful one. Written in 1916–17, Heartbreak House was published in 1919 and first performed in November 1920. By then, Shaw had himself found an answer – though it is so strange and extravagant an answer that it could itself be seen as an expression of despair. When the artist Charles Ricketts remarked on 9 May 1918 that “life is too short,’ Shaw replied, ‘Curious – I am at work on that subject – the shortness of life. I deal with the future, the secret of longevity has been discovered’.”26 He was writing what would eventually be the third part (second in order of composition) of his five-play sequence, or “Metabiological Pentateuch,” Back to Methuselah (published in 1921 and first performed in New York in 1922). Shaw’s answer to the problem posed by the failure to prevent the First World War was that human beings did not live long enough to acquire the wisdom needed to govern properly. If we could live for three hundred years, rather than merely three-score-and-ten, then (and only then) our rulers could, at the age of two hundred, perform competently. His task, as a dramatist, was to imagine and depict the process and consequences of such a change. Shaw’s five plays are set, respectively, in the Garden of Eden (with Act 2 “a few centuries later” in Mesopotamia), in the early 1920s,27 in 2170 AD, in 3000 AD,

24 H. G. Wells, What is Coming? A European Forecast (New York, Macmillan, 1916): 69–72. 25 Shaw had watched Zeppelin L-31 fly over his own house in Hertfordshire on 1 October 1916 and went next morning to inspect its wreckage after it had been shot down near Potters Bar; see Weintraub, Journey to Heartbreak, 177–179. 26 T. Sturge Moore & Cecil Lewis, ed. Self-Portrait: taken from the letters and journals of Charles Ricketts, R.A. (London: Constable, 1939): 294–295. 27 Shaw’s headnote to Part II, The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, says: “In the first years after the war” (writing in the spring of 1918 he did not yet know when that would be); a speech by The Archbishop in Part III (also written before the end of the war) states that the (fictitious) book is “dated 1924”.

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and finally in 31,920 AD (with a short epilogue in which the ghostly forms of Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and Lilith re-emerge from eternity to comment on what has happened). With subject matter of this kind, one might expect that Shaw’s dramatic manner would, necessarily, be unrealistic and symbolic: there is no known reality here for the players and painted stage to be emblems of. In fact, the first play to be written (Part II: The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, composed from March to May 1918) is a mixture of discursive social comedy and political satire, set in the study of a realistically furnished house in Hampstead. Franklyn Barnabas and his brother Conrad are completing a book whose contents will be summarized in a speech in the next of the plays to be written (Part III, The Thing Happens, set in 2170 AD): [a] curious and now forgotten book, dated 1924, entitled The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas. That gospel was that men must live three hundred years if civilization is to be saved. It shewed that this extension of individual human life was possible, and how it was likely to come about. (CP 5.459)

There is an allusion here, though not a symbol, since the real Gospel of Barnabas is an apocryphal (or pseudepigraphical) text, supposedly written by the Barnabas named in the Acts of the Apostles but actually relating the events of the New Testament from what appears to be a Muslim perspective.28 This Biblical, or quasiBiblical link is reinforced by a casual remark made by the local clergyman, Mr. Haslam, that “old Methuselah must have had to think twice before he took on anything for life” (CP 5.381). Shaw is combining the statement in the Book of Genesis that the patriarchs lived very long lives (“all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years”29) with the belief that deliberately acquired characteristics can be transmitted to subsequent generations (found in pre-Darwinian, Lamarckian evolutionary theory and here called “Creative Evolution”30) and presenting it as an apocryphal scripture. The human race has deliberately chosen to live for a shorter period than it once did and it could, by an act of will, reverse its decision. Though these references to Barnabas and Methuselah might seem to give an incipiently symbolic quality to the principal characters, this section of Shaw’s sequence of plays is in fact entirely realist in manner, with some shortterm prediction of likely political events, and a little comic exaggeration when

28 The earliest manuscript, in Italian, dates from the late sixteenth century. 29 Genesis 5:27. 30 Shaw derived his anti-Darwinian theory of evolution from Samuel Butler’s Evolution, Old and New (1879) and Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (1907) though his discussion of “the Life Force” in Man and Superman (1903) predates Bergson’s “élan vital”.

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the caricatures of the two war-time Prime Ministers, Lloyd George (“Burge Joyce”) and Herbert Henry Asquith (“Henry Hopkins Lubin”), arrive to seek Franklyn Barnabas’s support in a forthcoming general election. A movement beyond the resources of fourth-wall realism might be expected to occur in the next play to be written, The Thing Happens, since we have advanced two hundred and forty years into the future. Apart from some slight, science-fiction-like business with what would now be called video-conferencing (or Zoom), however, this is a straightforwardly discursive text in which the Shavian mockery of the English for their childishness is interrupted by the startling re-appearance of two characters from the previous play: Haslam, the clergyman, and Franklyn Barnabas’s parlor maid – who are now 283 and 274 years old respectively. By the time in which the next play (by order of composition) is set (3000 AD), such long-livers are very numerous and Shaw is obliged, in Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, to find an appropriate theatrical medium in which to present an entirely imagined and unfamiliar mode of existence. His curiously Yeatsian answer is to locate his community of long-lived (or, as they are now termed, “normal”) people in an idealized, pastoral Ireland. The play is set at “Burrin pier on the south shore of Galway Bay” (CP 5.491), in the landscape of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight (1893) and close to the Aran Islands of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904). As one of the long-livers puts it, we are [. . .] a race apart, wrapped up in the majesty of our wisdom on a soil held as holy ground for us by an adoring world, with our sacred frontier traced beyond dispute by the sea. (CP 5.525)

The elderly gentleman of the title is part of a delegation from Baghdad, where conventionally short-lived Britons still rule their empire (just as the Roman Empire latterly moved its capital to Byzantium). They have come to Ireland in search of “oracular counsels” so that, “when he goes back,” their Prime Minister “may have the authority and dignity of one who has visited the holy islands and spoken face to face with the ineffable ones” (CP 5.526). But Shaw’s heart was never really in the Celtic Revival (his play John Bull’s Other Island, though commissioned by Yeats for the Abbey Theatre in 1904, was rejected, supposedly on the grounds that the Abbey lacked the actors needed to stage it, but in Shaw’s view because its portrait of “the real old Ireland” clashed with their idealizing agenda; CP 2.808) and this symbolic presentation of a future world is very slight. Instead, the play consists chiefly of a discursive clash between the intellectual assumptions of the elderly gentleman and those of the long-livers with whom he comes into contact. The “Oracle” is a theatrical performance, put on by the long-livers to gratify the naïve expectations of their visitors, and the views held in these “holy islands” are

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those of an early-twentieth-century rationalist (like Shaw), not those that might be expected of the visionary inhabitants of a Land of Heart’s Desire. In the fifth and final play in his sequence, As Far as Thought Can Reach (written from March to May 1920 and set in 31,920 AD), Shaw provides a different symbolic location for his image of the great good place. Now the long-livers are found, not in Ireland, but in a version of Ancient Greece: A dance of youths and maidens is in progress. The music is provided by a few fluteplayers seated together on the steps of the temple [. . .] Their dress, like the architecture of the temple and the design of the altar and curved seats, resembles Grecian of the fourth century B. C., freely handled. (CP 5.564)

Martin Meisel identifies precedents for Shaw’s play in the ‘Classical Extravaganzas’ of James Robinson Planché, such as his Olympic Revels; or, Prometheus and Pandora (1831), and in W. S. Gilbert’s mythological comedy (or “philosophical extravaganza”) Pygmalion and Galatea (1871).31 Shaw borrows some of Gilbert’s devices and includes the character of Pygmalion (literally, on this occasion) as a sculptor who helps to create two living creatures, physically perfect though lacking a moral sense. But Ancient Greece had, of course, been a familiar ideal in the nineteenth century and Shaw’s use of it is, in practice, little more than a conventional gesture to the idea of the Golden Age. In this environment human beings are born already physically mature, from external eggs (like birds), and pass through adolescence and early adulthood by the age of four. They then lose interest in sex, art, and social life and move on to several hundred years of increasingly abstract contemplation. If Shaw’s “Ancients” are a symbol of the good life which will be possible in the future, they are, in physical terms, a curiously unattractive one. Their merit, as Shaw explains it, is that they will not childishly “play with the world by tearing it to pieces” (as the insufficiently grown-up generation of 1914 had done) and their eventual purpose in the drama is to articulate his quasi-Hegelian32 notion of progress towards the ideal: THE NEWLY BORN. What is your destiny? THE HE-ANCIENT. To be immortal.

31 Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre, 415–421. 32 Robert F. Whitman, in his Shaw and the Play of Ideas (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1977), suggests that Shaw’s knowledge of Hegel was derived from Ernest Belfort Bax, especially his Handbook to the History of Philosophy (1885) and The Ethics of Socialism (1889) where Bax states that, “[b]elow and beyond all actuality [ . . . [ is presupposed the infinite potentiality, the Eternal Becoming” (cited in Whitman, Shaw, 159).

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THE SHE-ANCIENT. The day will come when there will be no people, only thought. THE HE-ANCIENT. And that will be life eternal.

(CP 5.620)

This is clear but, in theatrical terms, rather wooden and these ideas are actually more effectively articulated in Back to Methuselah by a different kind of symbolism: the use (as in Heartbreak House) of symbolic character. In Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, the first person to consult the Irish oracle is the military representative on the board of delegates from Baghdad: General Cain Adamson Charles Napoleon.33 As his first name suggests, he is an descendent or avatar of one of the characters in the first play in the sequence, In the Beginning (written in February 1919, and set, first in the Garden of Eden, and then in Mesopotamia “[a] few centuries later”), where Cain, the first murderer, argues with his parents Adam and Eve. While still in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve wonder (rather as Yeats had recently done in At the Hawk’s Well) whether eternal life is a good or bad thing. Might death, perhaps, not sometimes be desirable? A few centuries later in Mesopotamia, Cain has no doubts about the matter. As the ancestor of all war-lords, he recommends it, particularly when it can be inflicted on other people: “It is terrible; but there is no joy like it. I call it fighting [. . .] He who bears the brand of Cain shall rule the earth” (CP 5.363–8). Even the substitution of two-hundred-year-old rulers for the statesmen of 1914 might not, in the end, be enough to defeat this assumption, which is why Shaw turns, eventually, to a vision of the future which somewhat resembles the Hegelian model of movement towards the Absolute Idea. The Biblical figures from In the Beginning briefly re-appear and Lilith (in Shaw’s account the mother, rather than first wife, of Adam and here the symbol of what Shaw calls the “Life Force”) ends the play with a soliloquy which gives a more elaborate account of the She-Ancient’s claim that one day there will be “only thought”: [T]he impulse I gave them [. . .] when I [. . .] launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force. (CP 5.630)

33 “Adamson” is probably a reference to George Adamson who served in the British Army during the First World War but then joined the Irish National Army, becoming Brigadier-General in charge of its Midland Division in the Irish Civil War; he would be killed by the IRA in 1922. Emperor Napoleon III, who led France into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, was “CharlesLouis Napoléon Bonaparte”.

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The embodiment of ideas in a representative figure (or symbol), like Lilith or Cain, gives them a resonance which they might otherwise not possess. But it does not give Back to Methuselah, as a whole, much in the way of theatrical vitality. The play, or sequence of plays, has an intellectual interest. But its lack of dramatic action, its formal heterogeneity, and its simple long-windedness make it (notoriously) almost unperformable. There is, one might say, a great deal of matter to be emblematized but an inadequate provision of players and painted stage. Shaw’s use of symbolic procedures might, then, be thought to have begun well, in Heartbreak House, and ended badly, in Back to Methuselah. The objection to that judgement is that he would manage to create a wonderfully effective symbol of the future in his next play, Saint Joan (1923). This seems an odd view to take of a text which is actually a history play, set in fifteenth-century France. But Shaw is here adopting the procedure of nineteenth-century Medievalists – symbolizing the future as an idealized version of the past – and doing so in their well-established, tried and tested, medieval idiom. Like William Morris in A Dream of John Ball, Shaw uses characters from the Middle Ages in order to engage, convincingly, with modern problems. There is real dramatic action, the mis-en-scène has the substantial quality of Heartbreak House, not the flimsy, poorly imagined settings of Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman or As Far as Thought Can Reach, and the characterization is both lively and engagingly controversial. Jeanne d’Arc had been burnt at the stake for heresy in 1431 and rejected as a candidate for sainthood by the Papal consistory as recently as 1902. She was belatedly canonized in 1920. Shaw’s Joan is constructed (with an ironic consciousness of that contemporary circumstance) as an irreverent speaker of truth to power and a fearless deconstructor of orthodoxies. The Earl of Warwick and the Bishop of Beauvais anachronistically identify her views as “Protestant” (eighty-eight years before Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg, and a hundred and ten years before the first known use of the word in English).34 She asserts the early nineteenth-century concept of national identity against the Plantagenet monarchs who claim a dynastic right to rule the whole of Western Europe, and is also, of course, an image of the Feminist and Suffragette campaigners of Shaw’s

34 The Bishop does refer to John Wycliffe (d.1384) and Jan Hus (d.1415), and some statements by the real Joan which anticipate Protestant doctrine can be found in the transcript of her trials published by Jules Quicherat in 1841–9 which (in its 1902 translation by T. Douglas Murray) was Shaw’s chief source for the play; see Nicholas Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View (London: Macmillan, 1984): 140.

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own lifetime. This disruptive role was Shaw’s own function, both as a dramatist and as a journalist and public intellectual, and he believed profoundly in its value – possibly rather more profoundly than he believed in Creative Evolution or the Life Force. T. S. Eliot, brilliantly, called Bernard Shaw a “gadfly.”35 In Joan of Arc, Shaw found a symbol for the gadflies of the future.

35 T. S. Eliot, “London Letter,” The Dial (October 1921): 254.

Axel Stähler

Herzlian Matrix: Theme Parks, Promised Lands, and Simulacra Abstract: In his novel Old-New Land (1902), Theodor Herzl, the ‘father’ of political Zionism, elaborated in much detail on his vision of a Jewish State in Palestine. Criticized already by his contemporaries as a mere imitation of European cultural and technological achievements, Herzl’s vision has frequently been measured against the reality of the State of Israel. More recently, it has been suggested in two literary engagements with the Herzlian matrix that Old-New Land functions in a Baudrillardian sense as a simulacrum, or model of the real, which obscures the absence of a corresponding reality. Simon Louvish’s City of Blok (1988) is an early fictional critique of the widening chasm between the model and its real which, almost three decades later, was reiterated in a different format and presumably without knowledge of the earlier postmodern novel in Doron Rabinovici and Natan Sznaider’s semi-fictional Herzl Relo@aded (2016). In this article, I seek to trace both the characteristics of Herzl’s vision as a simulacrum that preceded the real and the potential influence of an early theme park on his conception of the Jewish state in relation to the criticial engagement of Louvish as well as Rabinovici and Sznaider with the Herzlian matrix.

The Jewish wonderland and the loss of the real In spring 2018 plans were revealed for a Jewish culture theme park to be built in the Negev desert. Designed by the American-based company that also created the Disney and Six Flags theme parks,1 Pla’im Park (i.e. Park of Wonders) is advertised to offer the same sort of attractions, but their contents will apparently be based on Jewish culture and values. In a promotional video featuring Israeli singer, actor, and producer Yehoram Gaon, a grandfather and his grandson unlock the magic of the new park when they discuss the respective merits of computers and books. In a transformative moment, the long-stopped grandfather clock suddenly comes to

1 ITEC Entertainment, Orlando, FL. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-009

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life again and a tremor shakes the house; the old man breathes in awe: “History is awakening.”2 Yet it is the future that appears to provide them with a magically materializing glass tablet with which they experience the digital simulacrum of the projected leisure park: “Step inside the Jewish Wonderland Park Pla’im where thousands of years of Jewish values and heritage is [sic] brought to life right before your eyes,” an American-inflected voice-over invites them – and the viewer.3 Pla’im, the voice explains, “will unite Jews everywhere around the world with a common vision and values.”4 Though addressing Jews from around the world, the common vision and values evoked in the voice-over are tied specifically to the idea of the Promised Land. Prospective visitors are promised to “[e]xperience the past and the present with other diaspora Jews who were and are longing to come home to the Promised Land.”5 The message is rather clear: Pla’im solicits Jewish visitors, specifically from the diaspora. Its vision is ‘Jewish’; it is exclusive; and it is predicated on a simulation of the ingathering of the exiles and of the Jewish community. The ‘Jewish’ Wonderland in this sense appears to offer a re-vision not only of Jewish history, to be experienced as the five themed sections of the Park are traversed, but also of the Jewish present and future and, by implication, even of the Jewish State within which it will be physically situated. The implicit similarity of Pla’im to Disneyland, which it ultimately simulates, suggests a critical reading of the theme park as a simulacrum in analogy to Jean Baudrillard’s critique of its American model. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard argued that Disneyland is a “digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values,” and an “idealized transposition of a contradictory reality.”6 Disneyland induces the belief in the existence of a reality that lies outside it. Yet this reality no longer exists; rather, it belongs to the hyperreal order: Disneyland, a sign without an original referent, exists to conceal “the fact that the real is no longer real.”7 A conceptual simulacrum of Disneyland transposed into a Jewish context, can the emphasis on ‘American’ in Baudrillard’s description of its model be

2 Effective ‫ אפקטיב‬video productions, see “Plaim Park” (November 11, 2016), YouTube [video], (acc. May 7, 2020): 00:01:39. 3 See “Plaim Park” [video]: 00:01:59. 4 See “Plaim Park” [video]: 00:03:29. 5 See “Plaim Park” [video]: 00:03:00. 6 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations [1981], trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994): 12. 7 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 13.

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substituted with ‘Jewish’? Is Pla’im a “digest of the [Jewish] way of life, panegyric of [Jewish] values”? It certainly claims to be that, though its essentialist conception appears to elide contemporary Jewish diversity. Even more uncomfortable is the lingering suspicion that Pla’im is also an “idealized transposition of a contradictory reality” and that it masks “the absence of a profound reality,”8 that it challenges the “reality principle” and, more specifically, that it confronts the Jewish State with its hyperreality, which was defined by Baudrillard as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality,” a representation, a sign, without an original referent.9 In the 1950s the United Jewish Appeal coined the slogan “Israel is real.” It was – after the Holocaust – an expression of triumph, relief, and hope. It not only celebrated the achievement of the reality of the Jewish State but also solicited financial contributions toward the continued assertion of this reality. Only a couple of years before Pla’im was announced, the referential interrelation between the reality of Israel and its model in Theodor Herzl’s visionary novel Old-New Land (1902) was challenged in a semi-fictional text co-authored by the Israeli-born Austrian Jewish writer Doron Rabinovici and the Germanborn Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider. Their Herzl Relo@ded: No Fairy-Tale (2016) purports to be a triangular exchange of emails between the two friends and the unexpectedly resurrected Herzl, though the latter remains confined to a virtual presence in a number of email communications: another simulacrum of sorts, which relies exclusively on extensive quotations from his writings.10 Rabinovici and Sznaider, as the other interlocutors in the triangular configuration, embody critical positions on Israel from the outside (the diaspora), and from within, respectively. Their subtitle refers to the epigraph of Old-New Land, which famously admonished the Jews: “If you will it, it is no [fairy-tale].”11 In a manner of speaking, Herzl was setting up the ‘model of a real’ whose origin was elsewhere, in nineteenth-century Europe, but whose reality has retrospectively been identified with Israel. This correlation is critically interrogated by Rabinovici and 8 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 6. 9 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1. 10 See Doron Rabinovici and Natan Sznaider, Herzl Relo@ded: Kein Märchen (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016), further references in the text, abbreviated as HR. All translations from the German are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 11 Theodor Herzl, Old-New Land [1902/1941], trans. Lotta Levensohn (New York: Bloch and Herzl Press, 1960), further references in the text, abbreviated as ONL. As indicated by square brackets, I have tacitly amended Levensohn’s notoriously unreliable but influential translation. For the original German text, see Theodor Herzl, Altneuland (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, [1902]), further references in the text, abbreviated as ANL.

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Sznaider’s main title. It alludes to Matrix Reloaded (2003), the first sequel of the Wachowski Brothers’ iconic The Matrix (1999).12 There is no straightforward mapping of Herzl Relo@ded onto the film trilogy, but there are a number of evocative, if ambivalent, correlations: the films picture a dystopian future in which humanity is ensnared within a simulated reality engineered by hyper-intelligent machines. Rabinovici and Sznaider suggest that Israel is in a similar way in thrall to Herzl’s vision as a model of the real (HR, 10–11). In The Matrix the subterranean city of Zion is the last refuge of the humans in their desperate struggle for survival; it is conceived as a pluralistic and democratic space of social, cultural, and ethnic equality. So was Herzl’s vision of the Jewish State, as it is encapsulated in his first email in Herzl Relo@ded (7–8). Finally, the resurrection of the Messianic figure of Neo in Matrix Reloaded corresponds to that in Rabinovici and Sznaider’s text of the founder of Zionism more than a century after his death, though in the end he simply vanishes again, if with a nod at his potential Messianic self-stylization (HR, 207). More importantly, on a conceptual level, The Matrix has been described as communicating Baudrillard’s “postmodern theories in a work that moves through ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ almost line by line.”13 It has even been argued that the Matrix trilogy functions like Disneyland in that “the excess of images and deception is another attempt not to make us despair of reality, to persuade us that it still exists.”14 In an Israeli edition of Herzl’s Old-New Land, published in 1960 to celebrate the centenary of the author’s birth and translated into English by Paula Arnold, a plethora of illustrations intended to show how the young Jewish State correlated to the Herzlian matrix. Although the editors, Rosa Goldberg and Fanny Selig, conceded that Old-New Land was not “an exact and accurate description of the present State of Israel,” they emphasized that “the resemblances between Herzl’s ideas and those of the planners of Israel of to-day are so close often to

12 The Matrix, dir. The Wachowskis, tx 1999 (US: Warner Brothers, 1999). 13 Rebekah Simpkins, “Visualizing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation through The Matrix,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 30.4 (2000): 6–9, 6–7. Simulacra and Simulation is explicitly referenced in The Matrix, when Neo uses a copy of the book to hide money and digital contraband. Baudrillard was very critical of the trilogy, see Jean Baudrillard, “Baudrillard décode Matrix (entretien),” Le nouvel observateur (June 19–25, 2003): 126–128. For a discussion of the cultural theorist’s response to the films and the impact it had on their reception, see Catherine Constable, Adapting Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009), 20–23. 14 Elie During, “Is there an exit from ‘virtual reality’? Grid and network – from Tron to The Matrix,” in The Matrix in Theory, ed. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz, Stefan Herbrechter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006): 131–150, 136.

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the point of detail that they give this essay in prophecy an historical importance which is not always realized.”15 Rabinovici and Sznaider’s Herzl Relo@ded is in a similar manner a latterday stocktaking of ‘reality’ against Herzl’s vision. But their findings seriously challenge the earlier optimism. They suggest that the real has deteriorated and that the model of the Jewish State generated in Old-New Land no longer correlates to any reality, if ever it did. Their verdict is devastating: [H]ardly anything of what you described is true about modern Jerusalem. [. . .] [T]he city itself did not become a place of quiet and harmony, but a focus of hatred and violence. At heart, it has degenerated into the symbol of a religious crisis. Into the arena of divergence. Into the crime scene of terror.16 (HR, 13)

Herzl’s vision of Old-New Land is understood by Rabinovici and Sznaider to operate as the “model of the real” which paradoxically precedes Israel as its real. Yet the reassurance Old-New Land may project about the reality of Israel, they suggest, serves only to hide its ultimate loss. The chasm between the lost real and its simulacrum is confirmed with the observation that immigration to Israel decreases. “The diaspora,” Sznaider insists in conclusion, “is once again an alternative” (HR, 205).

Inspiration for the Herzlian matrix I: Venice in Vienna and Vienna in Venice Arguably, the simulacrum character of Old-New Land extends not only to its precession of the real in Israel, but it may itself have been inspired by the simulacrum offered by one of the earliest theme parks in Europe. Designed by Oskar Marmorek and completed in May 1895, Venice in Vienna (Venedig in Wien) was an elaborate illusion inside the Prater amusement park.17 As the satirist Karl

15 See Theodor Herzl, Altneuland / Old-New Land [1902], trans. Paula Arnold (Haifa: Haifa Publishing Company, 1960), n. p. 16 “Es ist nicht Häme, wenn ich Ihnen sage, kaum irgendetwas von dem, was Sie schildern, trifft auf das moderne Jerusalem zu. [. . .] die Stadt selbst ist kein Ort der Ruhe und des Gleichklangs geworden, sondern ein Brennpunkt von Hass und Gewalt. Im Grunde genommen ist sie zum Sinnbild einer religiösen Krise verkommen. Zum Schauplatz der Divergenz. Zum Tatort des Terrors.” 17 For Marmorek, see, e.g., Markus Kristan, Oskar Marmorek: Architekt und Zionist, 1863–1909 (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 1996); for Venice in Vienna, see 186–191. For an extensive history of the theme park, see Norbert Rubey and Peter Schoenwald, Venedig in Wien:

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Kraus observed, it offered “a popular guide to the real Venice presenting everything that one imagines the lagoon city to be in an easily digestible and vivid form, in a version for people who don’t quite have the wherewithal [for the real thing].”18 Marmorek himself was quite aware that the result was “not a copy of a specific square, but rather, in a manner of speaking, a paraphrase of Venice,”19 a careful selection of elements designed to capture the essence, or imaginary (pace Kraus), of the famous city at the threshold between East and West and to make the experience more real even than reality.20 Almost reminiscent of the recursive images produced by an infinity mirror, Vienna and Venice reflected and penetrated one another in Venice in Vienna: Viennese pastries (“Wiener Gebäck in Venedig”) were sold by the pâtisserie Franz in the theme park,21 and it contained also Vienna a Venezia, a restaurant that according to Janet Stewart neatly illustrated “the complex nature of the illusion upon which ‘Venice in Vienna’ was built.”22 In addition, the park accommodated an exhibition of the most recent technological advances, including a cinematograph, an automated buffet, and a giant Ferris wheel – all in their own way also illusionistic in character.23 Ultimately, Venice in Vienna combined amusement and aesthetics as well as nostalgia and kitsch with the unstinting belief of the nineteenth century in

Theater- und Vergnügungsstadt der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1996). For similar contemporary ventures, see Siegfried Mattl, “Disney à la Vienne,” in Site-Seeing: Disneyfizierung der Städte, ed. Künstlerhaus Wien (Berlin: b_books, 2003): 26–37, 28–32. 18 Karl Kraus, Frühe Schriften, 1892–1900, ed. Johannes J. Braakenburg, 2 vols. (Munich: Kösel, 1979), 2:70: “ein populärer Leitfaden des echten Venedig, der alle Vorstellungen, die man sich von der Lagunenstadt machen kann, in leicht faßlicher Kürze und sehr anschaulicher Darstellung behandelt, eine Ausgabe für Minderbemittelte.” 19 Oskar Marmorek, “Venedig in Wien,” Neubauten und Concurrenzen in Österreich und Ungarn 1 (1895): 84 and pl. 81: “Es ist keine Copie eines bestimmten Platzes, sondern gleichsam eine Paraphrase von Venedig.” See also “Venedig in Wien,” Neue Freie Presse (May 23, 1895): 5–6 and Kristan, Oskar Marmorek, 187; Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna. Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (London: Routledge, 2000), 154. 20 See Umberto Eco, “Travels in Hyperreality” [1975], in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987): 1–58, 46. 21 See Mattl, “Disney à la Vienne,” 31 and Rubey and Schoenwald, Venedig in Wien, 51. 22 Stewart, “A taste of Vienna: food as a signifier of urban modernity in Vienna, 1890–1930,” in The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500, ed. Alexander Cowan, Jill Stewart (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 179–197, 194; see also Rubey and Schoenwald, Venedig in Wien, 50. 23 For the attractions, see Rubey and Schoenwald, Venedig in Wien, 73–115 and Gabor Steiner, Englischer Garten, Venedig in Wien, Internationale Ausstellung neuer Erfindungen, Mai–Oktober 1897, ed. Ausstellungsdirektion (Wien: Vlg. d. Direction d. “Englischen Gartens,” 1895).

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technology into a commercially fecund simulacrum which attracted those without the “wherewithal” as well as others in their millions.24 Its designer, Oskar Marmorek, was of Austrian Jewish heritage. Like his two brothers, Alexander and Isidor, he began to engage actively in the Zionist movement after the publication of Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896).25 Herzl’s subsequent association with the architect was close, if not always without tensions.26 Venice in Vienna is mentioned only once in Herzl’s diaries, in August 1899,27 but it is mentioned with a matter-of-factness that suggests the politician’s casual familiarity with it and it is quite likely that the architect’s recent design of the theme park would not have been excluded from their conversation. By 1901, any trace of Venice had disappeared from the Prater. Yet though it was replaced under Marmorek’s supervision with Egyptian, Spanish, and Japanese buildings and squares,28 it retained its name and also its iconic significance.29 Herzl considered Marmorek “the first architect of the Jewish renaissance,”30 even though he was disappointed with his friend’s design for a Jewish congress hall in Basel.31 Emphasizing the need to speak to nations in a childish language – such as a house, a flag, or a song32 – Herzl had wanted this project to become “a symbol for Jewry.”33 Marmorek’s (lost) design he felt to be vacuous, a wasted opportunity for employing for the very first time what he called a neoJewish style. He subsequently sketched a design of his own to inspire Marmorek and enthused that “the art form which is most meaningful to me now is

24 Within the first week of its opening, the park had been visited by an estimated 30,000 visitors (see “Venedig in Wien,” Neue Freie Presse [May 24, 1895]: 2), and by the end of the first year the figure had risen to two million (see Kristan, Oskar Marmorek, 191). 25 See Kristan, Oskar Marmorek, 16. 26 For his sometimes tense relationship with Marmorek, whom Herzl considered fidgety, garrulous, and scatterbrained, see Theodor Herzl, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn, 5 vols. (New York and London: Herzl Press/Yoseloff, 1960), 3:1119, 4:1389 and Theodor Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Alex Bein et al., 5 vols. (Berlin: Propyläen, 1984–1996), 3:264, 488. 27 See Herzl, Diaries, 3:865 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 3:50. 28 See Kristan, Oskar Marmorek, 191 and Stewart, Fashioning Vienna, 154. 29 See Stewart, Fashioning Vienna, 157. 30 See Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, 4:266: “den ersten Baumeister der jüdischen Renaissance.” See also Michael Brenner, In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2020): 33. 31 Marmorek’s initial design appears to be lost; in 1901, the architect presumably proposed another design to the Fifth Zionist Congress, which is also no longer extant, see Kristan, Oskar Marmorek, 217. 32 Herzl, Diaries, 2:645 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:594. 33 Herzl, Diaries, 2:645 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:594: “[E]in Symbol für die Judenheit.”

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architecture”; yet he quite rightly conceded that he did not “command its means of expression.”34 The architect, though understandably unable to work with Herzl’s simplistic design, which exhausted itself in an orientalist fantasy on the ‘Moorish’ horseshoe arch,35 nevertheless admired the charismatic leader of the Zionist movement within which he emerged as a leading figure himself.36 Echoing Herzl’s epilogue to Old-New Land (ONL, [296]; ANL, 343), Marmorek wrote in 1903: “It has frequently been said that our striving was a utopia, a dream. All things that are to become reality must first be dreams in the mind of their creator. A project for a house, too, is first and foremost a dream in the mind of the architect.”37 With regard to his own architectural dreams, temporary structures, such as Venice in Vienna, allowed Marmorek to exercise his imagination without restraints. To Herzl literature was more congenial, and after having been thwarted in his political endeavors time and again, from March 1901 onward, he intensified his novelistic efforts,38 which he eventually brought to a conclusion in April of the following year.39 Yet even though his earlier enthusiasm for architecture appears to have waned, Herzl may well have drawn inspiration from his friend’s work. Venice was of profound symbolic and political significance to Herzl. Vowing to learn from the historical mistakes of others as well as “our own,”40 he sought to emulate the oligarchic constitution of the early modern republic in his vision of the Jewish State.41 The feasibility of creating a ‘paraphrase’ of Venice as well as the innovative technological potential of the theme park would therefore have appealed to 34 Herzl, Diaries, 2:645 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:595: “Die Kunst, die mir jetzt am meisten sagt, ist die Architectur.” 35 For Herzl’s drawing, see Diaries, 2:645. For the adoption of the “Moorish” style in Jewish synagogue architecture of the nineteenth century, see Harold Hammer-Schenk, Synagogen in Deutschland: Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1780–1933), 2 parts (Hamburg: Christians, 1981), 1:258. 36 See Kristan, Oskar Marmorek, 16–19. 37 See Oskar Marmorek, “Der Zionismus in Wien und anderswo,” Die Welt (December 25, 1903): 10–11, 11: “Man hat uns oft vorgeworfen, unser Streben sei eine Utopie, ein Traum. Alles, was verwirklicht werden soll, muss zuerst ein Traum sein in dem Kopfe des Schaffenden. Auch ein Projekt zum Baue eines Hauses ist zuerst ein Traum im Kopfe des Architekten.” 38 See Herzl, Diaries, 3:1071 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 3:225. 39 See Herzl, Diaries, 4:1274 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 3:392. 40 Herzl, Diaries, 1:170 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:189. The mistranslation of “commercial” (“geschäftlichen”) for “historical” (“geschichtlichen”) originates in a misreading in earlier editions of the Diaries, see Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:801, note 486. 41 See Herzl, Diaries, 1:39, 5:1891 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:74, 779, note 128.

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Herzl, who desired no less for his vision of Old-New Land. The theme park impressively demonstrated the hyperreal potential of the simulacrum.42 Indeed, Venice in Vienna together with the embedded Vienna a Venezia was a perfect articulation of what Herzl thought the transplant of the Jewish State from Europe to Palestine should be like. In his diary, he insisted: “We shall remain part of civilization while we are migrating. After all, we don’t want a Boer state, but a Venice.”43 Herzl not only implicitly rejects the racially informed colonialist attitude endemic in the South African Boer republics,44 but his repeated insistence on an imaginary of Venice as his preferred model for the Jewish State indicates why he might have been intrigued by Marmorek’s Venetian paraphrase in Vienna. The glory days of the Venetian republic may have been long gone, but Venice in Vienna demonstrated the translatability and perpetuity of both Venice and Vienna, albeit on a superficial level. Herzl’s mimetic vision was focused on but not confined to institutional, technical, and cultural achievements. The proliferation of obsessively elaborated details and the complexity of his own illusion were conceived by him in a spirit akin to the Matrix’s pretense of normalcy through a minutely designed virtual reality. Seeking to comprise all aspects of the real, he considered even the building materials with which the speedy realization of the architectural and statuary infrastructure of the old-new Jewish State might be achieved. Thus, Herzl speculated on the uses of Beerite, a new kind of plaster invented by the Austrian Jewish sculptor Friedrich Salomon Beer. Clearly aware of the faux character of the fast-drying compound, which produced casts of a superior quality and thus was itself a preferred medium for the creation of simulacra, and similar in nature to the building materials employed to create the illusion of the simulacrum of Venice in Vienna which had been completed within two months,45 Herzl envisioned that “[t]he genuine, monumental things will come later.”46 His use of “genuine” amounts to an avowal of the simulacral character of the architectural infrastructure in the Jewish State as he imagined it, and of its precession of the real.

42 For similar contemporary ventures, see Mattl, “Disney à la Vienne,” 28–32. 43 Herzl, Diaries, 2:212–213 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:224. 44 See Brenner, In Search of Israel, 54. 45 For Beerite, see C. F. Capaun-Karlowa, Chemisch-technische Spezialitäten und Geheimnisse mit Angabe ihrer Zusammensetzung nach den bewährtesten Chemikern [1878], fifth ed. (Vienna: Hartleben, 1910): 24; for the building process of Venice in Vienna, see Rubey and Schoenwald, Venedig in Wien, 44–45. 46 Herzl, Diaries, 2:212 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:224: “Das Echte, Monumentale kommt später.”

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Herzl’s obsession with details extended even to culinary delights: “Salzstangel, coffee, beer, customary meat, etc., are not indifferent matters.”47 The significance of sensual gratification as a feature of the simulacrum had already been anticipated in Venice in Vienna. Herzl clearly sought to emulate this practice, and with good reason. He added: “Moses forgot to take along the flesh pots of Egypt.”48 An omission which led to rebellion and divine intervention.49 Hence Herzl’s assertion: “We shall remember them.”50 The simulacrum he envisioned would circumvent the discontent of displacement and avoid the repetition of the wanderings of the children of Israel in the desert.

The real desert and the desert of the real The desert was recognized by Herzl as a palpable threat to his vision, as it was to that of Moses. Its imaginary was too real to be acknowledged and therefore had to be elided. In his diary, he observed that, “on the boat” sailing to take possession of Palestine, we shall dress for dinner, just as we want to have elegance on the other side as soon as possible. The purpose of this: the Jews shall not get the impression that they are moving out into the desert. No, this migration will take place in the mainstream of culture.51

Appropriate dinner garments and impeccable table manners are another obsessive detail adding to the simulacrum created by Herzl. Yet more important, in the present context, is his denial of the desert. Baudrillard designated the bleeding into one another of simulation and the real as “desert of the real.”52 In The Matrix, the desert of the real was visualized

47 Herzl, Diaries, 1:210 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 1:223: “Salzstangel, Kaffee, Bier, gewohntes Fleisch etc. sind nicht gleichgiltig.” See similarly also Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question [1896], trans. Sylvie d’Avigdor (New York: Maccabaean, 1904): 76 and Brenner, In Search of Israel, 54. 48 Herzl, Diaries, 1:210 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:223: “Moses vergass die Fleischtöpfe Egyptens mitzunehmen.” 49 See, e.g., Exodus 16:2–3; 32:1 and Numbers 27:14. 50 Herzl, Diaries, 1:210 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:223: “Wir werden daran denken.” 51 Herzl, Diaries, 2:212–213 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:224. 52 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1.

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as a realistic scenario of post-nuclear devastation and it was only the virtual reality of the Matrix that sustained the illusion of normalcy.53 To Baudrillard, the desert of the real was a metaphor. It was simultaneously the origin and the product of hyperreality by which, in a manner of speaking, the real was devoured. Herzl’s denial of the desert almost appears to anticipate the cultural theorist’s notion of the desert of the real surrounding the simulacrum. In the retrospective of Old-New Land, the desert has been conquered. In this alternative form of elision, the desert is devoured as is the real in Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. Indeed, to the early Zionists, the desert that they perceived Palestine to be held a promise; the promise, as Herzl indicates, of a new beginning: There was one of the great advantages of [implementing a new culture in these parts]. Just because everything here had been [completely neglected, remained in a kind of primeval state, unto the end of the nineteenth century], it had been possible to install the most up-to-date technical appliances at once.54 (ONL, 127)

Herzl’s implicit articulation of the colonialist notion of terra nullius evokes with the imaginary of the supposedly primeval state of the desolate land another desert, and one no more real than Baudrillard’s. For the land was neither empty, nor was it neglected or desolate, with the exception of the Negev desert.55 That Pla’im Park is to be situated in the Negev desert is presumably entirely coincidental. Yet the irony inherent in this location is palpable. Its piquancy is compounded by that ubiquitous trope in Zionist discourse, derived from Psalm 63, that Jewish colonization in Palestine made “the desert bloom,”56 a trope already employed implicitly in Herzl’s Old-New Land and recently re-deployed in the context of the export of Israeli expertise in reviving arid and semi-arid areas worldwide.57

53 See, e.g., Sven Lutzka, “Simulacra, Simulation and The Matrix,” in The Matrix in Theory, ed. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz, Stefan Herbrechter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006): 113–129, 120. 54 “Das war einer der großen Vorzüge der Einrichtung einer neuen Kultur in diesen Gegenden gewesen. Gerade weil hier alles bis zum Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts völlig vernachlässigt, in einer Art von Urzustand lag, hatte man gleich die neuesten und höchsten technischen Errungenschaften benützen können” (ANL, 144). 55 See, e.g., Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and PostColonialism in Palestine-Israel (London: Zed, 2007): 43–44. 56 See, e.g., Alan George, “‘Making the Desert Bloom’: A Myth Examined,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8.2 (1979): 88–100 and Masalha, Bible and Zionism, 47. 57 See ANL, vi and Allison Kaplan Sommer, “Israel makes the deserts around the world bloom” (March 13, 2005), Israel 21c (acc. April 1, 2020).

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Pla’im’s projected desert-bound location within Israel may or may not be fortuitous. There are certainly reasons not to build a leisure park of its size on arable land. Yet the real question is whether Pla’im can even be imagined elsewhere, outside of Israel; or whether it can only ever be situated in the Promised Land. For in the latter case, the simulacrum extends to, and is validated by, its physical location. The Herzlian matrix was also predicated on, and validated by, the space of the Promised Land and Jerusalem in particular. Mysterious forces were ascribed in Zionist discourse to the very soil of Jerusalem. It supposedly defied the stillness of death and the lifeless wastes of the wilderness in obstinacy, and with its grandiose thirst for spring and renewal pledged itself to a people that appeared to be inured against transience.58 In OldNew Land, Jerusalem itself has been transformed in the future of the year 1923 through the return of the Jews and has “risen from death to life” (ONL, 247).59 There are suburbs with all the modern conveniences and a new spirit pervades the whole city, of which the monumental Palace of Peace is a magnificent manifestation. In Herzl Relo@ded, Rabinovici upbraids Herzl for having “yearned for a Zion that had nothing to do with the orient. You dreamt to relocate Jewish Vienna – entirely without the antisemitism of Karl Lueger and of Ritter von Schönerer – to the Middle East that was meant to be more European than Europe” (HR, 13).60 Herzl’s contemporaries were already alert to the simulacral character of his vision, and Rabinovici’s in effect echoes the earlier criticism of Ahad Ha’am. In a lengthy review of Old-New Land the cultural Zionist derided Herzl’s vision as “Negro-like”61 – not, as Sznaider would have it, as “apish imitation” ([“Affenimitation”] HR, 27). In fact, conflating two historically contingent articulations of the mimetic impetus, Sznaider’s presumably well-intentioned substitution is rather problematic in that it implicitly perpetuates the connection between primates and black Africans established in nineteenth-century discourse on race.62 Sznaider’s point, however, like Ahad Ha’am’s, reinforces

58 Erwin Rosenberger, “Jerusalem,” Die Welt (December 31, 1897): 7–8, 7. 59 “Einst war Jerusalem tot, jetzt war es auferstanden” (ANL, 281). 60 “Sie sehnten sich nach einem Zion, das nichts mit dem Orient zu tun hat. Sie träumten, das jüdische Wien – ganz ohne den Antisemitismus des Karl Lueger und des Ritter von Schönerer – in einen Nahen Osten zu verlegen, der europäischer sein sollte als Europa.” 61 See Ahad Ha’am, “Altneuland,” Ost und West 3 (1903): 227–244, 244: “negerhaft.” 62 See, e.g., David Livingstone Smith and Ioana Panaitiu, “Aping the Human Essence: Simianization as Dehumanization,” in Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class, and Race, ed. Wulf D. Hund, Charles W. Mills, Silvia Sebastiani (Vienna: LIT, 2015): 77–103, 96.

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the notion of the Jewish State as imagined by Herzl being a simulacrum, a simulacrum that, with the elimination of antisemitism, improved the original.

Inspiration for the Herzlian matrix II: Jerusalem in Vienna and Vienna in Jerusalem As a further illustration of its illusionistic adaptability and polyvalence, Venice in Vienna boasted within a week of its opening a diorama showing Jerusalem with Mount Zion, the valley of Josaphat, Bethlehem, Emmaus, and the Jordan valley as well as Nazareth and Lake Tiberias. First exhibited at the Palazzo Borghese in Rome on Christmas 1893, the elaborate diorama, which combined plastic features with a painted panorama, included also a figural tableau of the Adoration of the Shepherds and the approaching Magi.63 The diorama offered another simulacrum which, despite its apparent incongruence, appears to have co-existed comfortably enough with the Venetian simulacrum within which it was embedded. In fact, their co-existence emphasized the readiness of the audience to subject themselves willingly to the immersive experience arranged for them because, as has been noted by Umberto Eco, the distinction between real worlds and possible worlds is undermined by such an arrangement.64 At the same time, the diorama signified the imposition of the Christian topography of the Holy Land onto the contemporary Ottoman territory – all the places mentioned are associated with the narrative of the New Testament. The Padishah’s rule and the Promised Land of the Jewish tradition alike were completely elided from this simulacrum. It was an articulation of the Christian appropriation of the very idea of the Holy Land. As Eco describes the characteristics of the diorama, the diorama of the Holy Land, too, aimed “to establish itself as substitute for reality, as something even more real.”65 It did so on at least two levels: by asserting the religious certainty of the supersession and by indulging in an historical regression which privileged and perpetuated a particular historical moment on whose universal significance the diorama insisted to the exclusion of any other historical narratives.

63 “Venedig in Wien,” Neue Freie Presse (May 29, 1895): 7–8. 64 See Eco, “Hyperreality,” 14. 65 Eco, “Hyperreality,” 8.

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Herzl was at this time in Paris as correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, which had reported extensively on the opening of Venice in Vienna. Only days after the publication of his paper’s report on the diorama, Herzl began his Zionist diary.66 Acknowledging the novelistic grandeur of his conception of the return of the Jews to Zion and the creation of a Jewish State, he noted: “If the novel does not turn into deed, the deed nevertheless may turn into a novel. Title: The Promised Land!”67 This was to be the triumphant reassertion and application to the present of the Jewish narrative – it did not stop with the historical perspective: it ultimately offered something better than reality; it offered the hyperreality of the simulacrum. Herzl’s apparent indifference about the position of his idea in reality – whether it was to become a reality like a novel or a reality in and, in effect, as a novel – highlights his profoundly ‘literary’ conception,68 which, with its deliberate confusion of the real and the imagined, is intriguingly akin to postmodern notions of the simulacrum and of hyperreality. Simultaneously, the boldly assertive title envisioned by Herzl for his novel reclaims the Promised Land from its Christian appropriation. The text’s final title, Old-New Land, denotes a secularization of the claim articulated in Herzl’s earlier suggestion. More importantly, with the (imaginary) ‘old’ conceived as a part of, and at the same time being transformed into, the (imaginary) ‘new,’ the novel, as its title suggests, effectively offers a simulacrum: a simulacrum that is rather complex and in fact operates on several levels, like the diorama in Venice in Vienna. Ultimately, Herzl’s conception of Old-New Land offers a composite simulacrum of Europe as future projection of the Jewish State while implying with the oxymoronic qualifier ‘old-new’ that it is simultaneously also a simulacrum of an imaginary ancient Jewish commonwealth, as expressed most palpably in the rebuilt Temple rather than in any other material manifestation. For the rebuilt Temple is the greatest miracle in Old-New Land, a mighty symbol of the fullness of time. Significantly, with the author perhaps recalling his limitations when trying to design the Jewish congress hall in Basel, its interior is described by Herzl not in architectural but in purely emotional, and musical, terms which evoke “the romance of the national destiny” (ONL, 251; ANL, 288).

66 The entry is dated around Pentecost 1895, i.e., June 2; see Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:43, 756, note 2. 67 My own translation; Harry Zohn’s American translation is rather free in this case, see Herzl, Diaries, 1:3 and Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:43: “Wird aus dem Roman keine That, so kann doch aus der That ein Roman werden. Titel: das gelobte Land!” 68 See Herzl, Diaries, 1:3 and Briefe und Tagebücher, 2:43.

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The Temple and its templates Although Herzl fervently promotes religious tolerance in Old-New Land, his description of the future Jerusalem in the Jewish State tacitly envisages the demolition of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount: the rebuilt Temple is depicted in the visionary novel effectively as a simulacrum of its historical model, as it once was (see ONL, 250; ANL, 287).69 A few years earlier, Marmorek, the model for the architect Steineck in Herzl’s novel, had published a series of short articles on the future building projects of Zionism, as the first and foremost of which he identified the Temple.70 Like Herzl blithely ignoring the existing architectural infrastructure, the architect promoted a concept that was to consist not of the mere reiteration of old and obsolete forms; not reaction and regression was his objective, but rebirth and renaissance.71 In this way, Marmorek sought to reflect liturgical progress during the millennia since the destruction of the Second Temple from a sacrificial service to a communal one, which required a different layout. The supreme challenge the architect foresaw was therefore the creation of a space capable of accommodating thousands of worshippers which nevertheless allowed every individual to see the Holy of Holies.72 Implicitly, Herzl’s description of a huge space filled with music appears to correlate to this conception. Yet it seems almost as if the Temple in Old-New Land were distorted by a warp in space. The account of its exterior follows the biblical precedent, including even the altar and the now obsolete “brasen sea” (1 Chronicles 18:8). But its internal capacity creates a pervasive sense of community (ONL, 254; ANL, 291), as it was pre-formulated by Marmorek. The national destiny evoked by the emotionally charged space prevails over the self-perpetuating fate of the debased through the reclamation of their self-esteem. During the millennia of the diaspora, Judaism had sunk lower and lower. It was an “elend” in the full sense of the old German word that had meant “out-land,” – the limbo of the banished. Whoever was “elend” was unfortunate; and whoever was an unfortunate sought for himself a nook in “elend.” The Jews had thus fallen always lower, as much by their own fault as by the fault of others.

69 For the historical and contemporary religious significance of the Temple site and the potential erection of a Third Temple, see, e.g., Masalha, Bible and Zionism, 120–128, 177–178. 70 Oskar Marmorek, “Baugedanken für Palästina. I. Der Tempel,” Die Welt (June 25, 1897): 11–13, 12. 71 Marmorek, “Baugedanken,” 12. 72 See Marmorek, “Baugedanken,” 13.

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Elend . . . Golus . . . Ghetto. Words in different languages for the same thing. Being despised, and finally despising yourself.73 (ONL, 252)

The topography and the experience of exile are equated and simultaneously designated as elend. Herzl may elaborate the etymological roots of the German word, but its modern meaning of ‘misery’ clearly is meant to reverberate with the anomaly of Jewish extraterritoriality. In contrast, the (re-)visionary rebuilding of the lost and recovered metropole of Jerusalem as a European simulacrum permits the elimination of the anomaly of Jewish existence. The Jews themselves are transformed into a European simulacrum. In the future present of the year 1923, Jewish existence therefore has not just been normalized, but it has achieved the model character of the simulacrum. The recognition of this apotheosis is mediated in the novel through the emotional impact of the music surging through the holy edifice, which produces a profound awareness of the redemptive significance of the “resurrected Temple” which, like Pla’im, relies categorically on its situation in the Promised Land (ONL, 253).74 In the first of his emails in Herzl Relo@ded, writing from the platform altneuland.com, Herzl describes the rebuilt Temple in a lengthy composite excerpt from his novel. Yet Rabinovici and Sznaider chose to ignore the spiritual dimension of the edifice which was so important to the historical Herzl.75 The emphasis of their imaginary Herzl on the external manifestation of the Temple is contextualized in the response of the fictional Rabinovici with contemporary debates about the idea of the Jewish State: “amidst the discussion of whether Israel should be the democratic state of all its citizens or just the nation of an ethnic group to which everyone else had to subordinate themselves, your message pounced on me” (HR, 14).76 Herzl’s vision of the rebuilt Temple, even though the writer and politician’s good faith is asserted, is thus understood as a monument to the ethnic exclusivism which troubles Rabinovici.

73 “Und das Judentum kam bei alledem immer tiefer herab. Es wurde das ‘Elend,’ ganz im Sinne des alten deutschen Wortes: nämlich das Aus-land [sic], das fremde Land, der Aufenthaltsort von Verbannten. Wer im ‘Elend’ war, der war ein Unglücklicher, und wer unglücklich war, es zu nichts bringen konnte, der suchte seinen Schlupfwinkel im Elend. So kamen die Juden aus eigener wie aus fremder Schuld immer tiefer hinein. Elend, Golus, Ghetto! Worte in allen Sprachen für dasselbe Ding. Verachtet werden, und sich schließlich selbst verachten!” (ANL, 289). Arnold deletes any references to “Elend,” see Herzl, Altneuland / Old-New Land, 187. 74 “[I]m neuerstandenen Tempel” (ANL, 290). 75 The email includes passages from ANL, 281–287. 76 “Ich war davon überzeugt, Sie wollten jene Fehler vermeiden, under denen Juden und Jüdinnen in der Diaspora zu leiden hatten. Mitten in einer Diskussion, ob Israel der demokratische Staat aller seiner Bürger sein sollte oder nur die Nation einer ethnischen Gruppe, unter der sich alle Übrigen zu fügen hatten, springt mich jedoch ihr Schreiben an.”

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With its inclusion of the Temple, it would appear that Pla’im promotes a similar conception. In the theme park, the Temple is situated at the intersection of the ‘World of Spirit’ and the ‘World of the Jewish Nation.’ It functions as a gateway between both of these worlds and in this way uncannily reflects the concerns raised by Rabinovici and Sznaider about the interpenetration of politics and religion in Israel. More specifically, Rabinovici raises the concern that with the erection of the Temple the secular movement established by Herzl would irrevocably degenerate into a religious fundamentalist Messianism (HR, 47). Sznaider, while acknowledging that the political Zionism of Herzl initially sought to divest itself of Messianism, likens it to the persisting phantom pain in an amputated limb (HR, 47). The sociologist is more circumspect in his assessment of the situation than Rabinovici. To him, the central irreconcilable issue is what he describes as the “tension between sanctity and sovereignty” (HR, 30)77 – the very intersection of concepts evoked by the liminal situation of the Temple in Pla’im. Sznaider articulates the paradox more specifically as the “simultaneous de-Judaization of the people and Judaization of the Land” which, he feels, “is what leads to the threatening explosion” (HR, 185).78

Of simulacra and false prophets In the illustrations to the Israeli centenary edition of Old-New Land, the rebuilt Temple remains naturally an absence. Yet the images include a photograph of the tomb on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, where Herzl’s remains were reinterred in 1949.79 This may well have been an inspiration for the British Jewish writer Simon Louvish. Rabinovici and Sznaider claimed that the resurrected Herzl “would be hopelessly lost in the Israel of the present” (HR, 11).80 Louvish’s City of Blok (1988) is something of a roller coaster screaming through Jewish history.81 Indeed, history awakens in the novel with outrageous dreams and resurrections: of Theodor Herzl and of the False Messiah Shabetai Tsvi, but also of Sultan Saladin and the assassinated Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat [sic]. Yet Pla’im would not be a congenial environment for this irreverent and profound novel. 77 “Spannung zwischen Heiligkeit und Souveränität.” 78 “Die Entjudaisierung der Menschen bei gleichzeitiger Judaisierung des Landes, das ist es, was zu der drohenden Explosion führt.” 79 See Herzl, Altneuland / Old-New Land, 205. 80 “Sie wären im Israel der Gegenwart hoffnungslos verloren.” 81 Simon Louvish, City of Blok [1988] (London: Flamingo, 1989). Further references in the text, abbreviated as COB.

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Like Rabinovici and Sznaider, Louvish challenges the very idea and validity of the simulacrum when the shady motion picture producer Kokashvili perplexes the resurrected False Messiah Shabetai Tsvi with a business proposition. He plans to build an “audioanimatronic centre” in Jerusalem that is to feature also the rebuilt Temple; rebuilt in hardboard and plankwood (COB, 317), another simulacrum, uncannily close to Pla’im Park. And another reference also to the Disney empire. As Eco noted, “the ‘Audio-Animatronic’ technique represented a great source of pride for Walt Disney, who had finally managed to achieve his own dream and reconstruct a fantasy world more real than reality.”82 Yet Kokashvili’s scheme fails. “The ambience was wrong,” the False Messiah seeks to exculpate himself: “The false setting. The unfinished building. The fake altar” (COB, 356). He criticizes precisely those features which create the illusion, though his own notorious “false”-ness as Messiah seems to elude him. Proclaimed in 1665 as the Messiah, the historical Shabetai Tsvi incited an exodus of many Jews from the diaspora. Yet, arrested by the Ottoman authorities, he converted to Islam. His association with Kokashvili in the novel emphasizes the dynamic interplay of illusion and delusion. In the event, Kokashvili and the False Messiah need to flee from the ominous Ministry of Apocalyptic Affairs. As Kokashvili says about his previous failed schemes: “I thought I would give people pleasant dreams, redemption in this world, not the next. But no one likes a dreamer, in the real world” (COB, 255). The emphasis on dreaming is an allusion to Herzl’s Old-New Land. The novel’s famous epigraph was explained by the author in a brief afterword: “Dreams are not so different from Deeds as some may think. All the Deeds of men are only Dreams at first. And in the end, their Deeds dissolve into Dreams” (ONL, [296]).83 Herzl’s vision, the dream transformed into deed, Louvish’s novel suggests, is not so different from Kokashvili’s abortive simulacrum, or from Shabetai Tsvi’s delusion. The Old-New Land he envisaged is another failure. Israel, as the novel suggests, may look like Old-New Land, yet it is warped, its external appearance – like hardboard and plankwood, or Beerite – a simulacrum which obscures the desert of the real, the absence of a profound reality. When it appeared in 1988, City of Blok was widely acclaimed;84 comparisons to Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip Roth give an indication of the literary

82 Eco, “Hyperreality,” 45. 83 “Traum ist von Tat nicht so verschieden, wie mancher glaubt. Alles Tun der Menschen war vorher Traum und wird später zum Traume” (ANL, 343). 84 For reviews, see, e.g., Bryan Cheyette, “Madness now and to come,” TLS (October 14–20, 1988): 1154; Collin Greenland, “The Emir and the defectives,” The Sunday Times (October 30,

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potential with which its author was credited.85 Critics commented in particular on Louvish’s representation of Jerusalem. Bryan Cheyette, for instance, asserted: Louvish’s Jerusalem – Blok’s city – is unlike the mythologized Jerusalem of Amos Oz or A. B. Yehoshua. No writer has captured better – in city walks and bus routes – the minutiae of present-day Jerusalem and, at the same time, illustrated the unreal qualities of the city to confirm Jonathan Miller’s description of it as a “Jewish Disney Land.” Louvish’s intention, clearly, is to reproduce contemporary history as if it were pure fantasy.86

The invocation of the “Jewish Disney Land” may suggest an intriguing affinity with the fantasy of Pla’im. Yet Louvish’s is a very different and much darker fantasy. It is not so much simulacrum but hyperbole. It does not challenge the original by replacing it but by smashing its feet of clay. Louvish projects a land of madness (holelah) and folly (sikluth) rather than of wonders (pla’im).

Denial, amnesia, and hindsight City of Blok is the second of six novels in the “Blok Saga,” in which the author engages imaginatively, satirically, and with iconoclastic verve with the historical and political development of the Middle East and in particular of Israel. Louvish himself, born in Glasgow in 1947 and emigrated with his parents to Israel shortly afterwards, participated in 1967 in the Six-Day War as a cameraman in the Israel Defence Forces. In the following year he left the country in order to attend the London School of Film Technique, and since then has been living mostly in London. Louvish first introduced his eponymous anti-hero and alter ego in The Therapy of Avram Blok: A Phantasm of Israel among the Nations (1985). Blok, having been referred after the Six-Day War to a mental asylum for psychological observation following an act of voyeurism, voluntarily returns to the institution after seven years. He suffers from the ‘delusion’ of living in an alternative reality of denial: In this fallacy the Second World War and the Holocaust had not taken place, Jews were living in their millions throughout Eastern Europe, and Palestine remained under shaky British control until 1973.

1988): G6; and Moris Farhi, “Mapping Paths to Redemption. Recent Books by Yoram Kaniuk and Simon Louvish,” Jewish Quarterly 36.1 (1989): 11–13. 85 See David Finkle, “Punch Lines from the Rubble,” New York Times Book Review (November 17, 1985): BR9. 86 Cheyette, “Madness,” 1154.

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The creation of the State of Israel amid the Civil War of that year brought Blok partly back into line with Jerusalem reality, which is not, at the best of times, concomitant with the rest of the world.87

In The Therapy of Avram Blok the otherwordliness of Jerusalem comprises the Judas Pig, which haunts the subterranean passages of the city.88 Yet its exorcism is followed by an apocalyptic vision in which Blok and a fellow inmate known as Friedrich Nietzsche (whose real name is Fenschechter) roam the streets of the devastated city (TAB, 456). They become witnesses of the resurrection in the flesh of the dead which, however, resembles a shipwreck rather than the fulfilment of old legends (TAB, 457). Eventually, Blok and Nietzsche encounter the eternal Judas Iscariot (TAB, 458–459) and are transported into the experienced reality of the gas chambers and the Holocaust as it reconstitutes itself – if only as another simulacrum (TAB, 460–466).89 The characterization of Jerusalem as a city outside the reality consensus of the majority informs not only Louvish’s first Blok novel but also its sequel. In City of Blok Avram awakes with total amnesia, as “The Man With No Past” (COB, 11). Inside and out a complete tabula rasa (“why is that poor man bald?”, TAB, 474), he is released into the streets of Jerusalem – a city steeped in history like no other (COB, 24); a city “where time stands still” (COB, 35), but whose early history is nevertheless rushed through at the double in Louvish’s novel. Blok roams ‘his’ city in order to be delivered from the terrors of the present (COB, 358). Yet although his amnesia cannot withstand the memory pressure of the city and the past gradually returns to him, the escapist retreat into the newly remembered past is no solution for Blok, not least because it entails the danger of repetition. The past – the history subjectively experienced by Blok no less than the collective memory imparted to him – emerges as an influence which metaphorically twists and stunts him (COB, 359). The present Blok seeks to evade encompasses the years 1977 to 1982. It reflects the election of Menachem Begin as prime minister in 1977, the initial stirrings of a religious-nationalistic Jewish fundamentalism and of the Israeli peace movement,

87 Simon Louvish, The Therapy of Avram Blok: A Phantasm of Israel Among the Nations [1985] (London: Black Swan, 1986): 11–12. Further references in the text, abbreviated as TAB. 88 The Judas Pig is a demonic manifestation of Judas Iscariot which associates the antisemitic motif of the Judensau, which has been described as the most persistent, widely disseminated, and pernicious of all caricatures of Jews, see Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Langen, 1921): 129–130. 89 Bryan Cheyette concluded that “[the] one certain realisation in the novel is that our history – on its present course – can only end in another Holocaust” (“Voices from the Asylum,” The Jewish Chronicle [April 26, 1985]: 27).

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but also of Palestinian resistance, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. The novel concludes with Avram’s exodus from Jerusalem and the Land of Israel into exile, a trajectory later observed by Rabinovici and Sznaider on a larger scale. Avram’s exodus is not the only reversal of Herzl’s vision (and of the migration of the eponymous biblical patriarch). In fact, the historical occurrences, no matter how phantasmagorically they may be represented; indeed, the manifestation of the city itself, no less than the gloomy predictions of the fundamentalists of a second Holocaust – all appear to be an almost mocking inversion of Herzl’s hopes for the future. Louvish’s is a revision which originates, as it were, in an historical ambush, in the retrospective interpretation of what happened after Herzl. The vehicle of this interpretation is Louvish’s narrative interweaving of historical phantasms with conventional historiography. It is precisely its phantasms which invest the novel with its moral depth, because they operate as signifiers which subject the occurrences to different interpretations.

Resurrections and recurrences Other than in Old-New Land, Jerusalem is not resurrected in Louvish’s novel. It stagnates and is about to drown in the mire of the history played out in its streets, houses, and subterranean passages. Any attempt to condense the multiple levels and voices of the novel in a simple plot summary must fail by necessity. And yet, as a leitmotif of its polyphonic orchestration emerges the apparent paradox of the simultaneously repetitive and irrational nature of history, which is derived from Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence of the same.90 Louvish resurrects in his novel next to Herzl also his brother in the Zionist spirit, William Henry Hechler, Anglican cleric and chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna.91 The historical Hechler, mentioned also in Herzl Relo@ded (140–141), offered Herzl his support after reading his treatise on The Jewish State. He himself had written a pamphlet on The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine already in 1884, in which he ‘proved’ with reference to Scripture that Palestine would be restored to the Jews in the years 1897/1898. As household tutor to the eldest son of Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden, he had connections to the imperial family in Germany

90 See, e.g., Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005): 57–64. 91 William Henry Hechler, The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine (London: n. p., [1884]); a German translation appeared in 1896. For Hechler, see Claude Duvernoy, Le prince et le prophète (Jerusalem: Agence juive, 1966).

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and arranged for Herzl two audiences with Kaiser Wilhelm II – in Constantinople and in Jerusalem. In Louvish’s novel, Herzl is woken by Hechler in a retrospective on the autumn of 1898 after the disappointment of the Kaiser’s eventual rejection. The Reverend seeks to find the lost Ark of the Covenant. Led through the nocturnal passages of Jerusalem to a secret chamber deep underneath the Haram es-Sherif [sic], Herzl is challenged by a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed to a game of backgammon. The stakes are high, “a dangerous idea against a sacred memory” (COB, 74). Were Herzl to win, his project of the Jewish State would be successful; were he to lose, the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant would be revealed to Hechler. The temptation may be great, yet Herzl eventually refuses: “I will not play dice for my people’s fate,” he says: “Historical destiny rests in the hand of men, not upon the whim of chance” (COB, 75). Louvish’s novel suggests otherwise, but with a twist. Hechler, his ambitions disappointed, subjects himself to an occult treatment at the hands of a mesmerist to extend his life. Yet as his body nevertheless begins to whither, he is forced to reside in a portable casket. Within its confines, his dissolving limbs slosh about, and it exudes the corresponding odor, an allusion to Herzl’s description of the suffocating stench of putrefaction of the orient (ONL, 42; ANL, 46). More than eight decades later the putrescent Hechler, still searching for the Ark of the Covenant, awakens the by now deceased Herzl once more. Thus, it so happens that Herzl rises from his sarcophagus from black marble during the Lebanon War to the accompaniment of a martial cacophony: “Wake up, Theodor!” “You think anyone can sleep through this noise? Helicopters flying overhead. The sonic booms of fighter planes. The wailing and gnashing of women’s teeth. Television and radio sets at full volume. Long queues at the pearly gates. What is all that racket?” “It’s the Jewish State, Theodor.” “Well, at least they’re not dull . . . ” (COB, 315)

Herzl’s perception of the Jewish State – in truth a militaristic graveyard idyll (COB, 330) – proves to be completely wrong: “It’s very peaceful here,” said Herzl. Hechler gurgled assent in his casket. “Perhaps I got it right after all,” Herzl mused. “Do you remember my novel Altneuland? The saga of the future Jewish State? People called it a mere utopia. But what do the critics know? For myself it was pure presentiment – a dream and yet far more. Do you remember my Afterword? – ‘The Dream and the Deed are not as separate as some appear to think. For all the deeds of men derive from a dream, and unto the dream they shall return.’” (COB, 330)

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How much Herzl is mistaken, how much his novel still is a utopia (or even utopian), and how much the dream still is a dream, a simulacrum devouring its real, is suggested by the letter of a front-line soldier fighting in Lebanon. Avi, a close friend of Blok’s and an activist in the peace movement, comments on the schizophrenia of the Lebanon War: “It all becomes purely technical,” he reports: “call in the air force, wipe the bastards out. No, there are thirty thousand civilians in there. Thirty thousand potential terrorists! Wipe ’em out while there’s still time! Fuck that, this is not the Wehrmacht, habibi! Fuck you, stop living in the past . . .” (COB, 322). The initially unresolved ambivalence of his final point – does it refer to Jewish victimization or to the comparison between the Tzahal and the Wehrmacht? – is subsequently clarified when Avi touches on a deeply rooted taboo: “How Does One Become a Nazi? Fucking easy! I have met the Enemy and he is me. Down the line, from Central Europe, through Vietnam, Biafra, Afghanistan – to yours truly!” (COB, 324). He is even more explicit when he finally re-interprets the Cartesian formula of being in the light of his own situation: “I repeat the past, therefore I am” (COB, 325). The novel emphasizes moral ambiguity. Free will appears to be subject to the pressure of the (historically evolved) circumstances, of which to extricate oneself appears to be almost impossible.92 For Avi and many other Israelis, free will does not seem to exist, nor community – or at least no communal consensus, as is suggested by the many dissident textual witnesses which Louvish inserted into his text (see, e.g., COB, 29, 312–313) and to which, on another level, his own novel belongs as well. Freedom and community were constitutive for Herzl’s utopia for which the rebuilt Temple emerged as a symbol (ONL, 254; ANL, 291). It is no coincidence that in City of Blok the starting point, and a recurring point of reference, is not the rebuilt Temple but the state-run mental asylum in which Blok regains his consciousness at the beginning of the novel. In the apologetic afterword of Old-New Land, Herzl, as cited by Louvish, suggested a reciprocal relationship between deeds and dreams (ONL, [296]; ANL, 343). Dreams, not least that of Herzl, are central to Louvish’s novel. The interdependence of dream and deed claimed by Herzl is in fact a conceptual and structural principle of City of Blok. Both past deeds (i.e., history) and dreams (of history) are not only confronted with one another but at the same time illuminate one another as well as the whole of the novel. Thus, the re-awakening of Herzl and his joyful observation that his dream became deed, and hence reality, is immediately followed by the penultimate part of

92 For the Nietzschean background to the ambiguity of free, or unfree, will, see, e.g., Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence, 127–130.

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City of Blok, entitled “Altneuland.” Herzl’s vision is evoked here through various lengthy epigraphs from his novel (see COB, 333, 349), similar to Herzl Relo@ded and even anticipating, at least partially, the same textual choices. These all refer to the “resurrected” Jerusalem and, more specifically, to the rebuilt Temple. Herzl too, up and about in the city together with Hechler in his casket, is once again given a voice: “‘I am impressed,’ said Herzl. ‘Neat parks, tall buildings, hotels, flower gardens, clean streets, frequent public transport. Just as I had predicted. My dream has truly come true’” (COB, 338). Herzl’s utopia no less than his perception – which is informed by deceptive external appearances and not by the internal condition which in Old-New Land is symbolized with the restitution of the Temple – are challenged in Louvish’s “Altneuland” with descriptions of harsh reality, with Kokashvili’s plasterboard Temple, and with dream sequences.

Dreams and divine inspiration One of the dreamers in Louvish’s novel is the Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat. Having arrived in Jerusalem in 1977 with an offer of peace and subsequently signing the Camp David Accords with Menachem Begin, Sadat was assassinated in 1981. In the novel, he dreams that he is Saladin and is carried by the Prophet’s steed into the very chamber underneath the Dome of the Rock in which Herzl was tempted to the game of backgammon. In fact, in his dream he finds himself opposite Herzl – “opposite the one outsider in the hall, a tall, obviously Jewish, if you will pardon the expression, man in a black coat thrown over striped pyjamas, with burning eyes and an immense black beard. I recognized him immediately as Theodor Herzl, the Founder of your Jewish State” (COB, 168). Herzl’s eclectic sartorial ensemble refers to his earlier nocturnal adventure with Hechler. Yet it also conveys more sinister connotations. In The Therapy of Avram Blok, Blok may have hallucinated the Holocaust away for a time, yet it reasserted itself with fearful immediacy. Herzl’s striped pyjamas – blue and white, as we are told earlier in City of Blok (39) – are an unequivocal reminder of the spectral presence of the Holocaust throughout the novels. Another distant echo of the Holocaust is sounded at the beginning of an invocation of history: “HISTORY! Spare us your convulsions! your piles of old discarded shoes!” (COB, 169). The echo of this implicit reference to the mounds of shoes associated with the extermination camps reverberates through the whole following extended litany of pre-historical and historical occurrences breathlessly chasing one another and finally merging seamlessly with an almost blasphemous, at the very least demythologizing, reflection on the nature of divine

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inspiration: “Shabetai Tsvi, like so many others, thought he had heard the voice of God – EAT SHIT, MOTHERFUCKER!!!” A cry that was, in the words of the novel, “to affect both fact and legend” (COB, 170–171). Shabetai Tsvi is another dreamer in Louvish’s novel. Resurrected into the narrated present of the novel and recruited to Kokashvili’s dubious scheme, the False Messiah suffers a collapse, triggered by the overstimulation which he experiences when he encounters the alien, modern Jerusalem. In a sequence of dreams, he sees Jerusalem as the “Centripetal City” (COB, 203–204, 333–334, 341–342). Breathless visions of the future originating in the extrapolation of the present, his dreams are a terrifying subversion of the Herzlian matrix. If anything, it is not the salvation of humankind that goes forth from this city; to the contrary, its centripetal attraction has the destructive voracity of Moloch. In what appears to be another visualization of Baudrillard’s desert of the real, similar to The Matrix, the city’s environs are desolate (COB, 334). The Old City, for Herzl the spiritual center of the ‘resurrection,’ is empty and devoid of meaning. Only the new parts of the city, in Herzl’s Old-New Land the place of technical progress and of the normalization of Jewish existence, still appear to be an arena of everyday life. In the externals of civilization Herzl’s dream may have transformed into deed, but the real lacks the redemptive spiritual dimension of its model. Shabetai Tsvi’s final vision delineates the collapse of communication with the outside world, the progressive desolation, and the isolation, of Jerusalem. The desert of the real encroaches ever more. Shabetai sees tiny figures crawling “upon the parched desert towards the receding City” (COB, 341). The voices he hears are those of Israeli soldiers returning from the Lebanon: “Fuck the war! Fuck the war!” and “Home! Home! Home!” (COB, 341). The Lebanese War, in which, for the first time, Israel engaged in what many considered a war of aggression,93 emerges as the extreme point of divergence between the model of the real in Old-New Land and the real in Israel. The war is also the culmination of the Jewish-Israeli confrontation with the Palestinians. In City of Blok, Arab Israelis and Palestinians are given a clearly articulated critical voice. In the section entitled “Al-Quds” (COB, 67–124), the Arabic name for Jerusalem, the Arab perspective is expressed most compellingly with an eternally unfinished tapestry (COB, 95–96). It is reminiscent of the sheer endless enumerations of ‘historical’ facts throughout the novel, but through their divergent selection and weighting, it conveys a very different perspective on history. Most significantly, the tapestry articulates the increasing marginalization of the Palestinians and, after its initial magnificent development

93 Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (London: Black Swan, 1999): 504.

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the shriveling of their history: “new additions had to become more and more minute” (COB, 96).

Elend and exodus Blok’s attempted escape into the asylum and away from the Land in The Therapy of Avram Blok cannot take him beyond the reach of the influence of Jerusalem. Reminiscent of the psychosomatic approach to history favored by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair,94 Blok experiences the city corpo-really. It is a Jerusalem alienated from itself and in no way reminiscent of that first description of the city characterized through the Temple (COB, 24), into which Blok is released at the beginning of the novel (COB, 23). Nor does anything in this city correspond to the spirit of freedom and community, which soars in Herzl’s Old-New Land through the rebuilt Temple. Subsequently, another instruction of God is cited. In this instance, however, it is authorized through Scripture. Though the skepticism suggested in relation to the alleged divine revelation to Shabetai Tsvi in the novel (COB, 170) is presumably meant to resound here as well, God’s call to Blok’s patriarchal namesake has had an effect on “fact and legend” (COB, 171) like no other: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (COB, 360; see Genesis 12:1). Blok’s response is unequivocal: “Pull the other one, schmendrick” (COB, 360). However, one more time an inversion is construed here, because at the end of the novel Avram carries out the instruction to the letter. Yet by doing so, he inverts the words of God. He leaves the Promised Land, re-interpreted by Louvish with a trenchant play on words clearly responding to Herzl and notorious imperialist fantasies as “Elend of Hope and Glory” (COB, 363), in order to find his home in foreign parts. “Saladin dreamed that Anwar dreamed that Menachem dreamed that Hechler dreamed that Herzl dreamed that Shabetai dreamed that . . . that . . . that . . . that . . .” (COB, 204). The endless sequence associates Nietzsche’s antiteleological notion of eternal recurrence.95 In contrast to the conception of linear history as it informs Herzl’s temporal and spatial teleology of Jewish history and whose telos is embodied by the Temple in Jerusalem, the interlocking dream structure of Louvish’s novel implies the refraction of the

94 See, e.g., Clive Sinclair, Blood Libels (London: Allison & Busby, 1985): 188. 95 See Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence, 62.

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continuum of time through the prism of the human psyche. The constantly recurring enumerations of historical occurrences in City of Blok, which initially may appear as articulations of a linear course of history, are critically interrogated through this structure. In Old-New Land, Jerusalem becomes a symbol of the future triumph over the Jewish elend, the experience of rejection and alienation. From the historical distance of more than eight decades and the perspective of post-Zionism, Louvish revises this signification of the city. For him Jerusalem rather becomes a symbol of the elend arising from religious and nationalistic obsession, as it was decried also by Rabinovici and Sznaider. It reflects an internal alienation, which makes Blok eventually search out the therapeutic safety of, and wellbeing in, foreign parts. The model of the real elaborated by Herzl has lost its referent. Jerusalem as a metonymy for Israel is being devoured by the desert of the real. Years later, during the First Gulf War (1990–1991), Blok returns in The Days of Miracles and Wonders (1992; publ. 1997) for a short period to Jerusalem: “Avram [looked] around his surroundings like Rip van Winkle woken into the world he had long hoped had vanished . . .”96 Yet his elend persists, and so it does almost three decades later in Herzl Relo@ded. Pla’im, it seems, may be another attempt to stem the tide, to cover the loss of the real, and to create another simulacrum of the Jewish Wonderland.

96 Simon Louvish, The Days of Miracles and Wonders: An Epic of the New World Disorder [1997] (New York: Interlink, 1999): 385.

Nilufer E. Bharucha

Reading the Future through the Past: Symbolism in Amitav Ghosh’s Anthropogenic Fiction Abstract: Amitav Ghosh has in his fiction and prose engaged with the apocalyptic impact of an unchecked Anthropocene which is destroying the biodiversity of the Earth and creating catastrophes in which human and non-human life forms are displaced from their habitats. This paper looks at two of his novels – The Hungry Tide and Gun Island. The former is set in the Sunderbans, the Delta of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, while the latter extends the narrative strand to settings in Europe and the USA. The anthropogenic concerns of these texts are interwoven with the symbols from the past, which become markers in the present and point to the future.

Introduction The middle of the twentieth century and the dawn of the nuclear age effectively ended the Holocene period in the history of planet Earth and signaled the beginning of the Anthropocene – the age of humans.1 New Millennium theories regarding ecology and geography speak of the Anthropocene and the resultant danger of an anthropogenic apocalypse. The human species is the most recent life form on Earth but has in its brief existence brought about the extinction of innumerable species of flora and fauna. Its reckless use of fossil fuels and deforestation has resulted in global warming and climate changes that have created a hole in the protective ozone layer surrounding the Earth and melted the polar glaciers and Himalayan ice. The impact of the Anthropocene is as evident in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004)2 and Gun Island (2019),3 as are the political events in India

1 Damian Carrington, “The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Humaninfluenced Age,” Guardian (August 29, 2016) (acc. 3 June 2020). 2 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (London: HarperCollins, 2004). Further references in the text, abbreviated as HT. 3 Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island (London: Penguin, 2019). Further references in the text, abbreviated as GI. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-010

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and Bangladesh. The biodiversity of the Sunderbans, the delta of the Ganga and Brahmaputra rivers, that sprawls across the national boundaries of India and Bangladesh, is threatened by climate change and environmental degradation due to industrialization and unchecked commercial activities such as tourism. Nature strikes back in the form of huge tidal waves and storms that destroy the river dolphins, the tiger and humans alike. Their habitats sink beneath the raging rivers of the delta and in an apocalyptic symbol, the end of the storm finds the American cetologist Piya, who is the protagonist of the earlier novel, clinging to a mangrove trunk shielded by the body of the impoverished Sunderbans fisherman Fokir, who had been her guide through the uncharted channels of the delta. On another tree is a huge Bengal tiger equally hapless against the storm. At that moment of imminent destruction, the humans and the tiger find themselves eye to eye, not as hunter and prey, but as symbolic survivors. In The Hungry Tide there is also a parallel incident of a cyclone and humananimal encounter in Nirmal’s journals. Nirmal is a retired school master who lives with his wife Nilima, a social activist, on the island of Lusibari in the Sunderbans. His journal forms the intertext in this novel. The parallel story is narrated to Nirmal by Kusum, whom he used to know as a child, and is now a young mother who lives on the disputed island of Morichjhãpi with her young son Fokir. Her father, she tells Nirmal, was a fisherman who had been caught in a cyclone on the island of Garjontola and had, like Piya and the grown up Fokir many decades later, tied himself to a tree with a length of cloth, gamcha. Kusum’s father had heard the roar of the tiger and was frightened but then heard the voice of the goddess Bon Bibi: “‘Fool’, she said, ‘Don’t be afraid . . .’” (HT, 234). The goddess protected him from the tiger who like him had taken refuge from the storm on a tree. The storm abated and the next morning the fisherman was able to return to his home. In gratitude to the goddess he built a shrine to her on the island and every year returned with his family to offer pooja4 to the goddess. This incident links the present of Piya and Fokir to the past of Kusum and her father and becomes symbolic of the way in which we are tied to what Ghosh calls ‘Destiny’, which is the title of this particular chapter in The Hungry Tide. The tiger or Dokkhin Rai is symbolic in oral literature and jatra (folk) performances of the tidal country. He is the legendary devil king, who metamorphoses into a tiger. The inhabitants of the Sunderbans have for centuries lived in an uneasy truce with him through the cross-cultural and multi-religious Bon

4 Pooja is a word of Sanskrit origins which means a ritual offering in honor of gods/goddesses either in a temple or at home.

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Bibi myth. Bon Bibi is a symbolic mother figure who protects her children from Dokkhin Rai. Bon Bibi, however, cannot completely destroy Dokkhin Rai, she can only momentarily hold him back. The idea of evil that can never be completely destroyed but can only be suppressed is part of Saiva Siddhanta Hindu school of mystical thought and is crystallized in the iconic image of the dancing Natraja.5 Bon Bibi may also be seen as symbolic of the mainstream Hindu goddess Durga, who is revered especially in Bengal. The Durga iconography images the goddess in her protective avatar with flowing hair, multiple arms, and the demon Mahisasur, representative of evil, pressed down under her foot. The folk representations of Bon Bibi are not very different from these images of Durga. In Gun Island, the past and present environmental degradation of the tidal lands point not just to the danger of the extinction of the Royal Bengal Tiger and the river dolphins, but also to the decimation of the delta peoples and their way of life. The political upheavals in the delta also lead to the dislocation of the population. In this novel the old legend of Bonduki Sadagar, the Gun Merchant, weaves in and out of the narrative, linking the past to the present and pointing to the future. The setting of this novel is more expansive than that of The Hungry Tide. Here the protagonists go back and forth not just in imaginary time and space, but actually journey seamlessly from the Sunderbans to Venice, New York and Los Angeles. En route some of them also traverse the geo-spaces of the Indian subcontinent, central Asia and North Africa. Through these characters, Gun Island takes on board issues of the displacement and migration of marginalized peoples of Asia and Africa, driven out of their homelands by anthropogenic catastrophes as well as political conflagrations. These refugees of the Anthropocene are connected to the present by their mythic pasts. The end of the novel finds them on an unsafe ship and even as they are about to be captured by the gunboats of the European countries denying them refuge, a seemingly apocalyptic spectacle unfolds across the waves as dolphins, whales, birds and other fish and fowl rush forward, seemingly to protect them. Both The Hungry Tide and Gun Island are books that take the readers back to the past and stopover at the present on the way to the future. Symbolic texts that deal with the future are usually to be found in the genre of science fiction or fantasy. However, in spite of the strong symbolic nature of the narrative in both these novels by Ghosh, these books are in the category of realistic fiction,

5 See H.W. Schomerus, Saiva Siddhanta: An Indian School of Mystical Thought, trans. Mary Law, ed. Humphrey Palmer (Delhi: Motilal Banarasi Das Pvt. Ltd., 2000).

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although they do have some elements of magic realism, too. Both these novels are linked to one another thematically and share protagonists and locales, but they are still different enough to merit separate engagements with them. So this essay first connects with the symbolism in The Hungry Tide and then in Gun Island. The conclusion then gathers them together again.

Symbolism in The Hungry Tide Symbols constitute significant indicators of the aspirations, belief systems and neuroses of the cultures which generate them. As such, they constitute fundamental tools in any analysis of past and contemporary attitudes towards science, technology and the future.6

The Hungry Tide is rich in symbols of various kinds, and many of them constitute clusters rather than individual references. The symbol clusters in this novel are first of all centered on the symbols of the Sunderbans and are mythical, zoological and geological in nature. Another important set is that of apocalyptic symbols of the Anthropocene that appear mainly towards the end of the novel, when a huge storm tears into the tidal country and destroys humans, birds and animals alike. While they do not directly refer to the catastrophes caused by climate change, there is an undercurrent that links these symbols to it. Like in most of Ghosh’s other novels, politics and history, especially the impact of the colonial past on the postcolonial present, are an integral part of this novel, too. The political and historical symbols cluster deals with colonial history and political upheavals of the postcolonial settlements in the Sunderbans. Finally, there are the therianthropic symbols that link the human protagonists in the novel to the non-human actors such as the dolphins and the tigers.

The symbols of the Sunderbans The beautiful yet dangerous Sunderbans that stretch across the nation states of India and Bangladesh is home to humans, the river dolphins, the honey bees, crocodiles and the magnificent Bengal tigers. Its now appearing, now disappearing islands are bordered by swathes of mangroves, that have anchored themselves in the oozing river mud. They provide a bulwark against

6 Jane Page, “Symbolizing the Future – Towards a Futures’ Iconography,” Futures 24.10 (1992): 1056–1063, 1056.

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the diverse smaller rivers that also empty themselves into the Sunderbans. At the twice-daily high tides, the rivers seek to swallow the islands and the mangroves provide some degree of safety. As the hungry tidal waters lash the islands, the humans hunker down behind the embankments they have built all around their islands from the river mud. Behind these mud walls they have low-lying, shallow saucer-like land on which they build their houses and on which they grow some crops. Most of their livelihood, though, comes from fishing and honey-gathering. Their fragile country crafts and awkward diesel boats, the bhotbotis, which putter along the rivers, are no match against the fury of the high tides, the periodic cyclones, the water surges and the ferocity of the crocodiles and tigers. So they have over the ages created stories of powerful gods and goddesses who have become symbols of protection and they especially pay obeisance to the goddess Bon Bibi and her brother Shah Jongli. The tide country is carefully divided into two worlds by the goddess. The world she has given the humans to live and work in, catch fish, grow grains and harvest honey, and the domain of Dokkhin Rai, the demon who metamorphoses into the huge Bengal tiger and pounces upon foolish humans who venture into his territory. However, ambivalently, the tiger too sneaks into the islands inhabited by humans and carries off his victims into the mangroves, which hide him from view. Interestingly the symbols of the tide country are syncretic and Bon Bibi is worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims in small shrines on several islands on both sides of the borders of India and Bangladesh.7 The myth of Bon Bibi links the Sunderbans to the Arab world too, as it is supposed to have originated in the city of Medina and carried to the tide country by the seafaring Arab traders. This is not surprising, as the Sunderbans are the gateway to the hinterland of Eastern India and over the ages traders and conquerors have had to negotiate it to reach the diverse kingdoms of Bengal. The myth of Bon Bibi is even now kept alive not just by the shrines to her, scattered throughout the tide country, but in the jatras, folk performances, that are held on the islands by travelling theater groups. One such performance finds space in The Hungry Tide and is avidly watched by the islanders who dread Dokkhin Rai in his tiger avatar so much that they think that even using the word ‘tiger’, when the animal’s roar is heard, would lead to being killed by it. For them, 7 For details see Annu Jalais, “Bonbibi: Bridging Worlds,” Indian Folk Life 28 (2008) : 6–8 (acc. 3 June 2020); Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sunderbans (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010); and Meena Bhargava, “Forests, Wild Beasts and Supernatural Powers” Indian Folk Life 28 (2008) (acc. 3 June 2020): 10–11.

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Bon Bibi is a protecting force and like the actors in the jatra they call upon her when in danger from Dokhin Rai. Bon Bibi would rush to their rescue, they fervently hope, as she had to the call of the young boy Dukhey who was offered as a sacrifice to Dokkhin Rai in the myth. As Ghosh has written in his essay “Wild Fictions” (2008), “the Bon Bibi legend [points to] the power of fiction to create and define a relationship between human beings and the natural world.”8 Bon Bibi is thus symbolic of the relationship between the human and the animal world. The imaginary line drawn across the tidal country by her clearly defines these boundaries for both. Humans can within their own sphere fish and collect honey, but they should not out of greed venture into the domain of Dokkhin Rai. This injunction by Bon Bibi is being flouted more and more in the Anthropocene and the clash between animal rights and human rights results in fatalities and tragic consequences on both sides. Even though humans lead precarious lives in the Sunderbans they have still succeeded in wreaking anthropogenic damage on the environment. Increase in the population of humans in the tide country has been at the cost of the animals. The Indian government has declared several islands in the delta as tiger reserves, but humans have continued to extend their habitats. The Hungry Tide tells the story of the clash between the environmentalists and those who support human rights. This is not just the tale of an upper caste – upper middle class – American cetologist Piya, who is of Indian origins, or of an elitist woman from Calcutta, Nilima, and her husband Nirmal, who set up home and build a school and hospital on the Lusibari island. It is not even the story of their supercilious visiting nephew, Kanai, who is there to collect the manuscripts left to him by his late uncle. It is also the story of the woman Kusum and her group of refugees, displaced by the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971, who had taken refuge on islands in the Sunderbans. These refugees had – in the interests of the tiger reserve – been forcibly shifted to the interior of India from where they had eventually fled and established themselves on the island of Morichjhãpi. They were subsequently forcibly evicted from this island in what became known as the Massacre of Morichjhãpi.9

8 Amitav Ghosh, “Wild Fictions” (October 22, 2008), Outlook (acc. 3 June 2020). 9 On this issue, see Ross Mallick, “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichijhapi Massacre,” Journal of Asian Studies 58.1 (1999), and Debjani Sengupta, “From Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi: Rehabilitation, Representation and the Partition of Bengal (1947),” Social Semiotics 21.1 (2011): 101–123.

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Ironically the Sunderbans were ‘cleansed’ of this eyesore of a human habitation of poor refugees, but the burgeoning tourist industry, tiger spotting mainly, has become a source of even greater pollution and disturbance, as has the sly intrusion of chemical and effluent releasing industries on the vacant islands. The Anthropocene has triumphed in the Sunderbans even as the rivers roar and surge and threaten the very existence of the tigers, crocodiles, bees and dolphins. This is a classic tale of the anthropogenic clash between humans and the environment. Ghosh has in this novel not taken sides in this battle between humans and the planet but has subsequently written a scathing indictment of anthropogenic destruction – The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).10 Ultimately human greed, he has said, and the ever-extending carbon footprint of the Homo sapiens will not only destroy Earth but humans themselves, too.

Apocalyptic symbols of the Anthropocene Traditionally the apocalypse and the symbols related to it have their origins in the New Testament of the Bible. However, they are also to be found in literature and art. Even though there are earlier examples of such non-biblical apocalyptic fiction, it might be useful to focus on the fiction of the nineteenth century, as this was the century which stood on the brink of the Anthropocene and produced much apocalyptic writing. Novels such as Mary Shelly’s The Last Man (1826)11 and H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898)12 book-end this century and are replete with apocalyptic images. The birth of the Anthropocene is linked with its representations in literature and art through symbols of ecological disaster, climatic catastrophes, nuclear explosions, etc. Such literature records “the human experience of a world in which extraordinary environmental tragedies become a matter of everyday experience, relentlessly worsening over the generations.”13 In the twentieth century and now the twenty-first century, it is not just fiction, but also cinema, comics, graphic and online games that deal with not just the apocalypse but

10 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2016). 11 Mary Shelley, The Last Man (London: Henry Collins, 1826). 12 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London: William Heinemann, 1897). 13 Hsuan L Hsu and Bryan Yazell, “Post-Apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 10.2 (2019): 347–356.

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also the post-apocalyptic world, in which the planet Earth/humans on Earth are destroyed by nuclear war/alien attack/viral pandemics/ biological warfare/ asteroid impacts/cyber attacks or other such apocalyptic events. While Ghosh in The Hungry Tide does not directly engage with the Anthropocene or its apocalyptic interpretations, several sections of the book might be read as symbolic of the apocalypse. The tidal surges and the final storm, which takes away Fokir’s life as he shelters Piya with his body, are definitely symbolic of the apocalypse caused by climate changes: Powerful as it already was, the gale had been picking up strength all along [. . .]. It sounded no longer like the wind but like some other element – the usual blowing, sighing and rustling had turned into a deep, ear-splitting rumble, as if the earth itself had begun to move. (HT, 378–379)

When the wave generated by the storm finally approaches the tree to which Fokir and Piya are clinging, she between the fingers with which she was protecting her eyes sees “something that looked like a wall, hurtling towards them [. . .] the river was like a pavement lying at its feet, while its crest reared high above, dwarfing the tallest trees” (HT, 383). This apocalyptic imagery is further strengthened in the section that describes the momentary respite provided by the eye of the storm, when Piya sees that “[a] white cloud floated down from the sky and settled on the remnants of the drowned forest. It was a flock of white birds and they were so exhausted as to be oblivious of Piya and Fokir” (HT, 389). So as human and avian life await the return of the storm which would come with the passing of the eye, Fokir points out to Piya the immense tiger who is pulling himself onto a tree. So now the humans and birds are joined by the Sunderbans’ Dokkhin Rai himself: “without blinking, the tiger watched them for several minutes; during this time it made no movement other than to twitch its tail” (HT, 389) then, as it senses the return of the storm, it slips off the tree and makes its way back into the mangrove thickets. As noted by Siba Prasad Mishra, [t]he Climatologic indicators for the Anthropocene are [. . .] vectors, microorganisms, transport and energy whereas the observed events are Cold wave, fog, snow storms and avalanches, hailstorm, thunderstorm, smog, dust storms, heat waves, avalanche, lightening, heavy rain, floods, saline water intrusion, droughts and many others.14

14 Siba Prasad Mishra, “The Apocalyptic Anthropocene Epoch and its Management in India,” International Journal of Advanced Research 5.3 (2017): 645–663, 650.

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Mishra goes on to say that India is in the race of sixth extinction. Multi-level and polycentric efficient governance of vulnerable climatic anomalies can ameliorate and delay the effect of the great acceleration. Efficient policy makers; basin and other line managers, political leaders, economists and the teachers should stress upon effective adaptation and management which can provide better results to address the uncertainty and complexity of the epoch.15

In his non-fiction book, The Great Derangement: Climatic Change and the Unthinkable, Ghosh has written about the impact of Anthropocene initiated climate change and its impact. This concern is then further dealt with in Gun Island.

Political and historical symbols Yet another set of symbols, political and historical relating to the Sunderbans also find ample space in The Hungry Tide. These symbols relate to mainly the British intrusion into the tidal lands in their efforts to reach the rich pickings of the Bengal kingdoms. This story is mainly narrated in the intertext of Nirmal’s journals, which he had bequeathed to his nephew Kanai. The journal sections of the novel are in italics and are read/narrated by Kanai. Intriguingly, these stories of the past are scribbled by Nirmal in a school notebook in Kusum’s hut on the island of Morichjhãpi, even as its resident refugees are engaged in a life and death battle with the forces of the state, which want to evict them from what was noted in their maps as a forest reserve for the likes of Dokhin Rai. This makes Nirmal’s journal a symbol that links the past, present and the future. Even though the island of Lusibari (the abode of ‘Lusi’, indigenized form of Lucy) in The Hungry Tide is fictional, the other islands are not, and their history is connected with the manner in which they were appropriated by the British in the colonial period and named after their wives and daughters, e.g. Emilybari. Ghosh has in turn appropriated Sir Daniel Hamilton’s island Gosaba and turned it into his Lusibari, complete with the colonial bungalow, hospital and the school in which his character Nirmal teaches. Hamilton was a Scot who had come to the Raj in 1880 and settled on Gosaba island in the Sunderbans where he lived between 1902 and 1939. His efforts at the improvement of the lives of the poor of British India who he settled on his island are in a sense mirrored in the efforts and the trust set up by Nilima on Lusibari.

15 Mishra, “Apocalyptic Anthropocene,” 661.

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While Garjantola – where Piya studies her dolphins – and Satjelia are also real islands in the Sunderbans and feature in Ghosh’s book, it is Canning which is important from the Colonial symbolic angle. Canning is symbolic of the failed attempt by the Raj to set up a major port on the river Matla in the Sunderbans. A railway line still exists from Kolkata to Canning, and it is on the way to Canning that Kanai and Piya first meet one another in The Hungry Tide. However, the grandiose colonial port city was destroyed in one of the huge cyclones that hit Canning. So the vision of Lord Canning, Governor General of India and then the Viceroy, after whom the port and city were named, came to naught. Canning may thus be seen as a symbol of the colonial vision reclaimed by the Sunderbans as its own territory. Charles Canning, who had come to India in 1856 as the Governor General, was rewarded with an Earldom in 1859 for his handling of what the British called the Indian Rebellion of 1857 or the Great Mutiny.’ In 1857 after the end of the ‘Mutiny’, India came directly under the British crown and the office of the Governor General became that of the imperial Viceroy, who ruled India in the name of the also newly christened Empress Victoria of England. So Governor General Canning became Viceroy Canning and then Lord Canning. It was Lord Canning who set about turning the pending colonial vision for a new port city on the Matla, which would rival the great port of Singapore, into reality. Ghosh’s intertextual narrator Nirmal tells us how Canning went ahead with this scheme in spite of the extant warning by a shipping inspector Henry Piddington, the man who had studied the storm patterns in the sea and had coined the word cyclone. Even before Canning had taken over as Governor General, the new city was already being planned, and in an open letter to the then Governor General, Lord Dalhousie, Piddington had warned that the proposed port was in the path of periodic mega cyclones and would not last beyond fifteen years. Piddington had written that “[e]very one and every thing must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of saltwater rolling in, or rising up upon them, with such rapidity that the whole settlement will be inundated to a depth of from five to fifteen feet.”16 Canning also ignored Piddington’s reference to the name of the river Matla, which in Bengali/Bangla, means ‘mad’, i.e. the river can turn mad, rage and destroy. Nirmal in turn as usual ends his journal entry

16 Henry Piddington, A Letter to the Most Noble James Andrew, Marquis of Dalhousie, Governor of India, &c. &c. &c. on the Storm-Waves of the Cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, and their Effects in the Sunderbunds (Calcutta: Baptist Mission P, 1853): 20.

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on Canning with a quotation from Rilke’s Duino Elegies and compares Canning to “a post office on Sunday” (HT, 287). Piddington’s prophetic warning, ignored by the colonial administration, came to fruition, and a massive cyclone had struck Canning on November 2, 1867. The port and the town were destroyed as the Matla rose to demonic heights. The symbol of colonial hubris was finally abandoned five years after the storm. Both Canning and Piddington did not live to see the prophecy fulfilled. Canning had retired to London in 1862 and had died there in the same year. Piddington had died even earlier in 1858 and lies buried in Chandannagar, India itself.

Therianthropic symbols Dictionaries define a therianthrope as a mythical being which is part human, part animal or someone with an intense spiritual or psychological identification with a non-human animal. Mythology and literature both Western and Indian have several instances of humans who metamorphose into animals such as werewolves or centaurs that are part human, part animal. There are also tales of animals who behave like humans as in Aesop’s Fables, the ancient Greek oral and then written text, or the Panchatantra, the ancient Indian collection of animal fables, also from the oral tradition but probably first written in Sanskrit in circa 200 BCE. There is also Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), in which Mowgli is brought up by wolves and has friends and enemies such as Baloo the bear and Shere Khan the tiger.17 While there is no shape-shifting or metamorphosis of humans into animals in The Hungry Tide, there is the myth of Bon Bibi which appears again and again in the book, in which the demon king of the south, Dokhin Rai, changes into a ferocious tiger and preys upon the people who live on the islands of the Sunderbans. So one could consider the Dokhin Rai-tiger metamorphosis myth, as an example of a therianthropic symbol. However, there are other animals in this text which interact in more complex ways with the human characters but cannot directly be considered as therianthropic symbols. Piya is in the Sunderbans to study the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris), an endangered species. Interestingly, as I write this in the Covid-19 lockdown in India, there is news that the almost extinct river dolphin, like many others of the animal world, has

17 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1894).

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regenerated and been spotted as far away from the Sunderbans as Calcutta, and even further upriver. This resurgence, it is presumed, is because of the natural cleansing of the river Ganga due to the absence of the arch-polluter of earth, the Homo sapiens.18 As a cetologist, Piya is a scientist and is supposed to have a scientific approach to the dolphins she is studying. However, she seems to develop an attachment to the mother dolphin with her baby and at one point in the text even thinks that the mother dolphin comes up from the water and makes eye contact with her. There is also the fact that the dolphins seem to help the delta fishermen by herding schools of fish into their nets. The dolphins are in turn rewarded by the large number of fish pushed to the muddy floor of the river by the nets. This astounds Piya, who thinks: “Did there exist any more remarkable instance of symbiosis between human beings and a population of wild animals?” (GI, 169). In Nirmal’s journals there is a reference to the dolphins, too. They are pointed out to him by Kusum, who calls them “Bon Bibi’s messengers” (HT, 235), but where Kusum saw a link with the legendary goddess of the Sunderbans, Nirmal wrote: “I saw instead, the gaze of the Poet. It was as if he were saying to me: ‘some mute animal / raising its calm eyes and seeing through us, / and through us. This is destiny [. . .]’” (HT, 235). The poet referred to here is, as ever in Nirmal’s journals, Rilke. As Nigel Rothfels puts it: “[T]here is an inescapable difference between what an animal is and what people think an animal is. In the end, an animal or species is as much a constellation of ideas (for example, vicious, noble, intelligent, cruel, caring, brave) as anything else.”19 This opinion is further supported by John Thieme when he says that “the issue of how to arrive at non-intrusive procedures for promoting animal welfare remains acute in the continuing Age of the Anthropocene, if only because homo sapiens still sees itself as having an exclusive right to determine the management of the planet.”20

18 Bishwabijoy Mitra, “With decreasing water pollution, dolphins make a comeback to Kolkate,” Times of India (22 April 2020) (acc. 19 May 2020). 19 Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002): 5, emphasis in original. 20 John Thieme, “Therianthropes Past and Future: Transformative Figures in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing,” in Ecocriticism: Environments in Anglophone Literatures, ed. Sonja Frenzel, Birgit Neumann (Heidelberg: Winter, 2017): 151–167, 151.

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Gun Island In Gun Island, Ghosh has drawn upon the myths and legends in Bengal connected with the goddess Manasa Devi and the merchant Chand. In his book The Ganges in Myth and History, Steven Darian has detailed the Bengali story of the snake goddess Manasa Devi and her reluctant worshipper Chand Sagar. Darian has also linked the myth to history as there are old and contemporary historical references to the goddess as well as to the Sagar Island in the Sunderbans. Sagar Island at the very mouth of the Ganga, as she meets the ocean, has Hindu mythical reference to the hermitage of the sage Sagar, which became the spot of a Ganga festival, which has been held there every year from days far back in prehistorical times. Darian also refers to the merchant Chand, also known as Chand Sagar, whose story is told in the Bengali epic poem, Manasmangal, whose merchant ship had set sail from a port on the Ganga and anchored on the island of Sagar, where like most sailors, Chand had offered obeisance to the mighty ocean, before venturing out into it.21 So the central set of symbols in Gun Island is clustered around the myth of Manasa Devi and Chand Sagar who in Ghosh’s book is also called ‘Bandook Sadagar’, the Gun Merchant. The reason for this name Bandook, meaning gun, is one of the mysteries in the book, which is ultimately solved by the narrator Dinanath Dutta, Deen, towards the apocalyptic/miraculous climax of the narrative. The other important symbol cluster in this novel is the one that is concerned with climate change, the resultant displacement of the marginals and creation of ‘ecological refugees’, who Ghosh has linked to himself, saying: “My ancestors were ecological refugees long before the term was invented.”22 The marginals in Gun Island are also fish, fowl and animal. Their lives too have been disrupted by humans whose reckless use of the earth’s resources and whose carbon footprints have led to ecological disasters, big and small, and climate change. These non-human sentients are another important symbol-cluster in Gun Island and at the end of the book surge out from the sea and the air in an apocalyptic, magic realist, and miraculous manner. In reply to a question by an interviewer regarding the mythical and magic realist in Gun Island, Ghosh has said that I think we are living in a reality that is, in itself, fundamentally uncanny. I think it’s impossible. I mean by the time I finished writing The Great Derangement, there were two or

21 Steven G. Darian, The Ganges in Myth and History [1978] (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001): 156–157. 22 Ghosh, Great Derangement, 4.

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three things that were clear to me about the only ways we can write about today’s world. They cannot be these individual stories of adventure. That they cannot be local. And they have to confront the aspect of the uncanny in a literary sense really. That is our great resource, the uncanny [. . .].23

So the book also has a cluster of symbols that refer to the uncanny and even the visionary. Myth and magic realism notwithstanding, Gun Island is a very well researched book, which was in writing for over four years. For the sections on Bengali refugees in Italy, Ghosh has said that he had visited housing camps set up for the refugees and spoken to them as well as to several NGOs and journalists.24

Mythological symbols The mythological backdrop to Gun Island is the myth connected with the snake goddess Manasa Devi. Unlike the benign nature of Bon Bibi in The Hungry Tide, this goddess demands obeisance from those who pass through her realms. If they do not offer her the requisite puja she can turn on them. Just as Dokkhin Rai was the counterpart of Bon Bibi, the story of Chand Sagar/Bundook Sadagar is closely related to Manasa Devi in this book. Bundook Sagar, however, brings added significance to the pairing as he is a seagoing merchant while the goddess is drawn from the natural world and is symbolized by venomous snakes, scorpions, and spiders. The Nagin/female snake myth is common to most Indian regions. In the Nagin myth, the snake takes the shape of a voluptuous woman and lures an unsuspecting male human into her clutches, who she then proceeds to generally kill. Manasa Devi is not a seductress and the male human is not completely innocent. As a merchant, he belongs to the capitalist class which has for millennia exploited and ravaged nature. Manasa Devi, on the other hand, though dangerous does not deliberately harm humans and in fact, she offers shelter to those who respect her. So there are several shrines to her dotted around the islands of the Sunderbans and as Nilima tells Deen, the narrator of Gun Island, she had visited one such miraculous shrine

23 David Wallace-Wells, “Amitav Ghosh: ‘We Are Living in a Reality That Is Fundamentally Uncanny’,” New York Magazine (September 30, 2019) (acc. 3 June 2020). 24 Shrestha Saha, “Back to the Future: Amitav Ghosh on His New Book,” Telegraph India (June 29, 2019) (acc. 3 June 2020).

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which had protected the devotees of the snake goddess during a major cyclone in the Sunderbans. This prompts Deen to visit the shrine. This visit is organized by Piya and Moyna. These, like Nilima, are characters who have appeared earlier in The Hungry Tide, the American cetologist and the woman who is a nurse in Nilima’s Badabon Trust hospital on the island of Lusibari, and also the widow of Fokir who was killed saving Piya from a cyclone in the earlier novel. The trip to the Mansa Devi shrine is made on Horen’s boat, the same Horen who along with his boat had featured in Piya’s quest for her dolphins in The Hungry Tide. Deen is escorted on his visit to Manasa Devi’s shrine by Moyna’s teenaged son Tutul, who now prefers to call himself Tipu. He and his mother Moyna had become Piya’s responsibility after the death of Fokir and she had even taken Tutul to the States with her. The boy however had proved to be rather problematic and was now back on Lusibari with his mother. Tipu spoke English like an American, wore low slung jeans, was computer savvy and an unlikely candidate for a connection with Manasa Devi, but then we might think we live in a rational world, but the forces of nature, linked to the supernatural, can in a moment turn this logical world into an uncanny one. Manasa Devi’s shrine was very modest and built in the local Bishnupur tradition of the seventeenth century. The walls were decorated with friezes, and Deen, who was looking for the connection with Bandook Sadagar, does find several hieroglyphs – “As with hieroglyphs, some symbols and motifs recurred again and again, in different combinations. The most prominent of these were a couple of turbaned figures, each paired with a distinctive symbol. One of these symbols was easy to decipher: it was an image of the palm of a hand, sheltered by a cobra’s hood” (HT, 69–70). Deen guesses that this was Manasa Devi herself and the turbaned figures were the Gun Merchant and the sailor Captain Ilyas, who is also part of the mythological tale. There are, however, three other symbols that Deen cannot decipher and he tries to find what they stand for in the rest of the book. This in a sense also makes this a quest novel. The first one is a wavy line bisected by a straight one, the second a circle within a circle and the third again the double circle but this time bisected by four straight lines vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. This visit also provides the setting for the uncanny introduction to Rafi, the young boy who looks after the shrine: “As I was looking around I became aware of a low, growling sound, somewhere behind me. I spun around thinking that a dog had followed me inside. But no! Framed in the arched gateway was the face of a shaggy-haired boy who was staring at me in utter disbelief . . . With his mop of unkempt hair and glistening, watchful eyes, he was at once feral and delicately graceful, like some wild, wary creature that could at any

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moment take flight” (HT, 72). This initial introduction to Rafi makes him almost a therianthropic symbol.25 Rafi is able to provide some information on the symbols to Deen, who realizes that he was right about guessing the identities of the turbaned figures, but had misread the panel covered with what he had thought were conches. Rafi tells him they were cowrie shells, the currency for trade in the Indian Ocean. The Gun Merchant and Captain Ilyas had traded in cowrie shells with several islands identified by Rafi from the panels as the ‘Land of Palm Sugar’ (Taal-Misrir-desh) and ‘Land of Kerchieves’ (Rumaali-desh) but were constantly attacked by poisonous creatures so finally they had taken refuge in Gun Island (Bonduk Dwip). This according to Rafi was symbolized by the circle within the circle symbol. These were stories told to Rafi by his grandfather, who used to be the guardian of the shrine. Upon his death, Rafi had taken over his duties. The fact that the guardian snake, the cobra, lives in the shrine, is also revealed to Deen. Rafi tells him that when he first saw Deen, the cobra, with raised hood was just behind him. At first, Deen is incredulous but then he soon sees the king cobra himself. The cobra rears up to strike and as Deen looks into its eyes, it gives a growl. Tipu, who has just then come back to the shrine, throws a net over the cobra, but it succeeds in sinking one fang into the boy who crumples to the ground. Rafi sucks out as much venom as he can from the puncture wounds above Tipu’s left elbow. Yet the condition of the boy is critical and Deen, accompanied by Rafi, puts him in Horen’s boat and takes him back to Lusibari, where he can be treated at the hospital.

Visions and symbols of the uncanny The uncanny and the visionary are other important symbol clusters in Gun Island, which foretell the future. In an interview with Saha, Ghosh has said that: “Gun Island is a collection of moments where the natural meets the supernatural, with reality coexisting with the imaginary.”26 One of the first instances of the uncanny is when Tipu falls into a delirium on the boat and starts talking of snakes, shadows and Rani. He says they are all around him. This, according to Horen, is quite common in snakebite victims. Tipu calls out to Rafi as Ilyas,

25 See Thieme, “Transformative Figures.” 26 Saha, “Back to the Future.”

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which was actually his real name but used only by his grandfather. Moving from this vision from the past, Rafi provides a peek into the future when he tells the astonished Deen that he is familiar with smartphones and GPS, although his grandfather had one in his head itself. He knew that there would come a time when he would have to leave the Sunderbans as the weather was changing so much and in response to Deen’s question about where he would go says: “Wherever people go. Bombay, Delhi – I don’t know” (GI, 86). When informed about Tipu’s condition, Piya is able to decode a part of his ravings, those connected with the warning about Rani which he wanted Deen to convey to Piya. She rushes to the Lusibari hospital with the antivenin. Once Tipu’s condition stabilizes, she tells Deen about Rani, the Irrawady dolphin Piya had been studying for years. Piya does not want to sentimentalize her connection with Rani, but she had studied even her mother and known Rani from the time that she was a little calf. From the time that Piya had rescued her from fishermen’s nets, Rani “had begun to make eye contact with her, in a manner quite different from other members of the pod” (GI, 92). As due to human activities in the Sunderbans and the climate change the pods of dolphins had started to diminish in number, Piya had fitted Rani with a GPS tracker to safeguard the movement of her pod. So the call from Deen regarding Tipu’s warning was actually given before Piya’s tracker stopped. It was a vision that Tipu had experienced, says Deen. He thinks that Rani and her pod had a vision, caught by the boy in his delirious state, even as they had beached themselves on one of the islands in the Sunderban and had died before Piya could rescue them. In an interview given just after the release of Gun Island in 2019, Ghosh has said that The world has become so uncanny. Yesterday, I saw two news items. One was about this cyclone [Vayu] and I just tweeted it with a quote from The Great Derangement where I had written that the Arabian Sea is one of the regions of the world where cyclonic activity is likely to increase. The other was about thousands of fish dying [in the Indrayani river], something that Piya talks about in Gun Island . . . 27

There are many other instances of visions and the uncanny in Gun Island. One major sub-cluster of the uncanny concerns Deen’s quest of the meaning of the symbols he had seen in the Manasa Devi temple concerning the Bundook Island. The other sub-set of uncanny symbols is related to Deen’s long-time friend, the Italian professor Giacinta Schiavon, known as Cinta to her family and friends. Cinta’s periodic visions are of her dead daughter, as well as her

27 Harsimran Gill, “Interview with Amitav Ghosh,” Scroll (June 17, 2019) (acc. 03 June 2020).

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prescient comments on Deen’s Bundook Merchant and her insider’s knowledge of Venice, her home city. The forest fires in Los Angeles, where Deen goes to attend a conference, become another location for the manifestation of the uncanny, what Tipu in his online video chats with Deen calls “Bhuta/bhoot” (GI, 104), ghosts. Deen explains that “bhuta-kala” in Bengali also means “times past” (GI, 104). This conversation shakes Deen who realizes that his laptop, “the most sterile object in my safe, man-made world had suddenly become a portal through which the primeval mud could draw me back into its depths” (GI, 105). Tipu calls again to warn him to beware of snakes. Deen tries to dismiss the warning as superstition, as he is going to Los Angeles, the last place he thinks he would be likely to find snakes. The remaining part of the call is devoted to human greed, which is symbolized by the bacteria in the body and which could lead to the apocalypse (GI, 110–111). Ghosh has said that “[s]o many weird things happened in the writing of the novel too. There’s a scene in the novel about a forest fire in Los Angeles and that did actually happen. But I wrote about it before that. Six months before it happened.”28 On the flight to Los Angeles Deen learns about the wild fires raging there and in his frightened mind links them to the conversation with Tipu. As the plane is landing in Los Angeles, he sees two big birds fighting over something one of them has in its beak. The bird who holds the “twisting, writhing, sinuous animal” (GI, 117) finally tosses it away and from the steeply descending plane, Deen identifies it as a snake and screams in fear. The snake spotted from the comparative safety of the plane becomes much more menacing and dangerous on the beach in Los Angeles where Deen has accompanied Cita’s niece Gisella and her partner. A sea snake attacks their dog and bites it. The dog dies and Deen recalls Tipu’s warning. However, there is more of the uncanny relating to this moment, as Gisella tells her Aunt Cinta that she had felt the presence of Cita’s dead daughter Lucia, to whom she had been very close as a child. So here the mythological past in the form of Manasa Devi’s snakes and the not so distant past in the form of Lucia reach out to Deen and Cinta in different manifestations, violent and benign. The paper on the historical background of Shakespeare’s Venice Cinta presents at the Los Angeles conference partially solves some of the questions that have been worrying Deen regarding the hieroglyphics he has seen in Manasa Devi’s shrine. Cinta explains how the Jewish quarter in Venice at the

28 Gill, “Interview.”

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time when Shakespeare had written The Merchant of Venice was the Cannaregio district an island in the northeast of Venice, “Since Venice is itself an island – or rather an archipelago of islands – the old ghetto is an island within an island . . .” (GI, 135). The two concentric circles on the walls of the shrine begin to make sense to Deen. Cinta goes on to show how Venice traded extensively with “the Levant, Egypt and North Africa [and how in Arabic] Venice is linked to hazelnuts, bullets and guns” (GI, 136). Through Arabic “the name of Venice has travelled far afield to Persia and parts of India, where to this day guns are known as bundook – which is of course, none other than ‘Venice’ or ‘Venetian’” (GI, 137). So Deen realizes that the Bundook Sadagar, the Gun Merchant, was in effect the Merchant from Venice. Cinta further solves the mysteries of the two other names connected with the Gun Merchant, the land of sugar candy and the land of kerchieves. She tells him that in Bangla, the word for candy is Misri, which was Arabic for Egypt – ‘Misr’ – and land of kerchieves or Rumali desh was the name of a fort in Turkey, Rumeli Hisari (GI, 139). So this partial solving of the symbols on the walls of Manasa Devi’s shrine sets the scene for further revelations of how the past trajectories of the Gun Merchant would reach out to the future of Tipu and his friend Rafi – how the past trade route of the Merchant would lead Rafi to Venice and be further mimicked by Tipu in his more complicated trajectory, which would take him from the Sunderans, via India, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Turkey and onto the sea route to Venice.

Symbols of climate change and ecological refugees Intertwined with the uncanny are symbols relating to climate change and the resultant ecological refugees both human and non-human. As Piya points out to Deen, there are now more and more “oceanic dead zones” that have been growing at a phenomenal pace, mostly because of residues from chemical fertilizers. When they are washed into the sea they set off a chain reaction that leads to all the oxygen being sucked out of the water [. . .] these zones have now spread over tens of thousands of square miles of ocean – some of them as large as middle-sized countries. (GI, 95)

These dead oceanic zones are symbolic of destruction taking place in present times which would reach out to ultimately destroy the earth, what James Lovelock, and Lynn Margulis call the Gaia hypothesis /theory, from the old

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Greek name of the Earth goddess, thereby making the Earth a sentient being.29 The conference that Deen attends in Los Angeles and where he again meets Cinta, the Italian Professor, provides a direct link to the iconography of climate change. Here a paper presented by one of the speakers is on “Climate and Apocalypse in the Seventeenth Century” (GI, 121). In the manner of old time prophets, the young scholar presents how the world’s dependence on fossil fuel had begun in the seventeenth century and what geologists today call the ‘Little Ice Age’ had set into motion the climatic catastrophes of the second half of the twentieth century – the Anthropocene (GI, 124). Cinta concurs with this and says that she feels it all the time as though “the Little Ice Age is rising from its grave and reaching out to us” (GI, 124). Deen’s visit to Venice is organized by Cinta, who asks him to assist her niece Gisella/Gisa in her documentary on the refugees there. Deen is astonished to learn that a large number of refugees in Italy are Bengalis, in a sense ecorefugees as much as refugees from poverty and political upheavals. So Gisa needs someone to translate from Bengali when she speaks to these men. This would also provide Deen with the opportunity to visit the Gun Merchant’s island within an island. In Venice, in a series of coincidences bordering once again on the uncanny, Deen meets Rafi, the young guardian of the Manasa Devi shrine in the Sunderbans. From him Deen learns that the boys set out for Italy together, but got separated en route. Rafi directs Deen to Lubna-khala, the woman who was a kind of guardian angel to the young men from Bangladesh. Lubna in yet another serendipitous way happens to belong to the same region in Bangladesh from where Deen’s parents came and from where they had during the partition of India, left for Calcutta. Lubna fills in the gaps for Deen regarding the ecological disasters caused by climate change which had destroyed the homes and livelihoods of thousands of Bangladeshis in the 1970s and 1980s, turning them into eco-refugees. Leaving behind their aged parents, wives and children, young men had set out on dangerous trips across Central Asia and North Africa to reach the shores of Europe, where they worked as illegal laborers and often fell into the hands of the Mafia, who extorted money from them for the ‘protection’ they supposedly offered them from the immigration authorities.

29 For details see J.E. Lovelock, “Gaia as Seen Through the Atmosphere,” Atmospheric Environment 6.8 (1972): 579–580; and Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution (Houston: Basic Books, 1999).

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Symbols of the apocalypse and the miracle of regeneration The myths, the visions, the uncanny, the climate change and eco-refugees all come together in a grand finale, a magnificent crescendo at the end of the novel. Humans and non-humans, victims and their saviors all coalesce in a magnificent collective apocalyptic symbology that ultimately does not destroy but instead provides succor and hope to all. With the help of Rafi, Deen and Piya are able to ascertain that Tipu was on a refugee boat to Italy, that the Italian right wing was determined would never be allowed to dock in any Italian port. In a counter move, the “Human Rights activists across Italy had taken up the cause of the boatload of refugees” (GI, 198) and are hiring boats to create a counter-blockade to the one being set up by the naval boats. The refugees’ boat called the ‘Blue Boat’ by the media has “become a symbol of everything that’s going wrong with the world – inequality, climate change, capitalism, corruption the arms trade, the oil industry” (GI, 199). Through his mouthpiece Cinta, Ghosh sounds a warning: “Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a livable place, if our homes are not to be invaded by the sea, or by creatures like that spider. Everybody knows . . . and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us” (GI, 216). A related set of apocalyptic symbols concerns the plague that had decimated the population of Venice in the seventeenth century and when it had finally abated the grateful citizens had constructed the church of Santa Maria della Salute. Cinta tells Deen that his Gun Merchant who was probably in Venice at that time would not have seen the completed edifice as it had been many years in construction. The deity in that church was the Black Madonna of La Salute, “[t]he Panaghia Mesopanditissa, Madonna the Mediator, it is she who stands between us and the incarnate Earth with all its blessings and furies” (GI, 223). The icon is Byzantine and brought to Venice from Heraklion, Crete. The Heraklion goddess A-sa-sa-ra-me, the Minoan goddess of snakes, is thus seen as being associated Manasa Devi of the Sunderbans. Contemporary Venice, though, is plagued by the high tides that threaten its very existence and much of the city goes under water during high tides. Yet another threat is from the sea worms which are eating away the very foundation of the city and the wooden piers upon which it is constructed. On a visit to the former Jewish ghetto on the island within the island of Venice, Cinta and Deen nearly land beneath the high waves when the high tide releases a cache of these worms which have been eating up the wood under their feet. In an apocalyptic

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moment they watch “in horror as a mass of squirming shipworms came pouring out of the broken logs. They fell on to the pier and came swarming towards [them]” (GI, 231). The narrative now builds up to its final almost unreal action as Piya, Deen, Rafi, Cinta and Gisa accompany Lubna-khala on to the ship, Lucania, she has hired to help rescue the refugees. They take a bus from Venice to the airport to board the ship. The high tides have receded but the sky has turned strangely dark and the wind is very strong and accompanies the heavy rain which has begun to fall. An accident on the motorway means a detour but their path is blocked by a tornado. The bus load is saved only by the appearance of a “man, dressed in a flowing yellow robe; wrapped around his head was something that looked like an ochre-coloured turban; his face was brown, with a trimmed, greying beard” (GI, 251). He knocks on their driver’s window and points out an alternate route. Rafi is convinced that it was the Bonduki Sadagar, the Gun Merchant, and Cinta supports him. All the activists board the Lucania safely but as the ship sails out into the sea, strange weather continues and the sky is dark with occasional twisters coming out of the clouds and reaching the waves. While the unusually bad weather continues to plague the land, the clouds part on the sea and the sky lightens. The next morning, the uncanny sightings begin as schools of dolphin, of different kinds, are sighted. Soon they are joined by whales all seemingly travelling in the same direction as the rescue ship. Species after species of whales and dolphins appear very close to the ship. As if in response to the clapping and cheering by the people on the ship, the dolphins put up a magnificent show: “The mood seemed to communicate itself to the animals, who responded with an extraordinary display of acrobatics, leaping, somersaulting and even looking us in the eye, as they flipped over in mid-air” (GI, 269). The Lucania is joined by many other activist boats as well as boats carrying right wing groups there to keep the refugees out of Italy. The Italian navy had set up a flotilla of speedboats to keep all the supporters and the hate brigade away from the Blue Boat carrying the refugees. In a moment of recognition, Rafi spots Tipu on the Blue Boat and is interviewed by the TV journalists on board the Lucania – this human interest story is flashed around the world. In the final moments, the symbols of the uncanny and apocalyptic are augmented by the appearance of millions of birds that darken the sky: “there they were, millions of birds, circling above us, while below in the waters around the Blue Boat, schools of dolphins somersaulted and whales slapped their tails on the waves” (GI, 281). However, soon the dark clouds of the apocalypse turn into the bright light of miracle and regeneration, as a woman stands up from among the refugees and the bright light from the sky and bio-luminescence from the sea silhouette her in a

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miraculous moment of joyful resurgence of life and hope. She is a dark woman, probably an Ethiopian, and could be seen as symbolic of the Black Madonna of the Santa Maria della Salute in Venice. In a related miracle, the admiral in charge of the Italian naval ship, in direct contravention of the Italian minister’s orders, actually rescues the refugees. In response to queries from the press he says that he had not disobeyed any orders as the minister had said that “only in the event of a miracle would those refugees be allowed into Italy . . . And I believe that what we have witnessed today was indeed a miracle” (GI, 284).

Conclusion In both The Hungry Tide as well as Gun Island the narratives of displacement, dispossession and catastrophes end on notes of hope. In The Hungry Tide the deaths and destruction of the past give way to small symbols of the domestic which, in their very ordinariness, hold out promise for the future. In the final section of this novel, Piya, Moyna, Tultul, Kanai and Nilima, all traumatized to differing degrees by the storm, support one another and plan for the future. For Piya, the diasporic, Nilima’s house on Lusibari becomes ‘home’. After all, her Orcaella – the dolphins – live there too. For Nilima, ‘home’ is an even simpler concept, it is somewhere she “can brew a good pot of tea” (HT, 400). The crescendos and clash of cymbals which lead up to the end of Gun Island, subside into the sublime peace of humans, fish and fowl supporting one another. Love rather than hate triumphs as the refugees are admitted into Italy by the very admiral who was supposed to keep them out. An admiral who, as Cinta has pointed out, “is a good man, a man of honour” (GI, 282) because he, like her, comes from the Bundook Island, the Gun Island, Venice itself. Even though Cinta dies at the end of the novel, she goes to join her daughter, and Deen recalls what she had said to him in the Santa Maria della Salute– “Unde Origo Inde Salus – from the beginning salvation comes” (GI, 286).

Daniela Carpi

The Cyborg, Symbol of the Evolution of the Human, or The Human of the Future Abstract: What does it mean to be human? How does technology interfere with the idea of the human? If we want to speak of Artificial Intelligence, and of the new concept of the human, we must begin by assessing what philosophical phase we are living in. All the discourses about the new concept of the human find their symbolic embodiment in the figure of the cyborg, marking an evolution from the known concept of human being so far in a humanistic perspective – at the center of the universe – to a posthumanist view, decentering man and problematizing the very concept of the human. The movie Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland and produced in 2014, can be considered as an emblematic text in this debate precisely because the machine becomes the symbol of the new being of the future. This movie leads us to the awareness of human evolution by weaving its way through old myths and symbols, such as Plato’s myth of the cave, the Biblical Garden of Eden, the fairy tale of Bluebeard, and the myth of the labyrinth. We realize that the evolution of technology is taking us relentlessly towards a new symbolization of the human.

Introduction: Post, Trans, or Meta human? If we want to speak of Artificial Intelligence, and of the new concept of the human, we must begin by assessing what philosophical phase we are living in. Philosophers speak of Post-postmodernism as a general label, branching out into the separate fields of Metamodernism, Transmodernism and Posthumanism: among these and other definitions, Posthumanism seems to me the most accurate. Let us examine the terms separately. The theory of Metamodernism considers global crises that have characterized these last decades, such as climate change, financial crises, and the escalation of world-wide conflicts. It sets itself between twentieth-century Modernism and Postmodernism, considering the former more reflective of and sensitive to social and political issues, the latter as too disruptive, ironic and cynical. Metamodernism’s main concern is with ethics. The term Transmodernism fosters xenophilia and globalism, promoting the importance of different societies and appreciation for their cultural characteristics.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-011

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Environmentalism, sustainability, and ecology are important aspects of transmodern theory, a stance that accepts technological change, yet only when its aim is the improvement of life and of human conditions. Posthumanism criticizes anthropocentric humanism and extends its inquiry to non-human life. Posthumanism formulates new questions about humanism: what is the meaning of being human? A new awareness of humanity, of being human, a new “Dasein” emerges, as well as a new self-consciousness of humanism (also called Metahumanism). Posthumanism implies a radical onto-existential re-signification of the notion of the human. It opens its inquiry to non-human life: from animals to artificial intelligence, from aliens to other forms of hypothetical entities related to physics’ notion of a multiverse. In so doing, it “articulates the conditions for a posthuman epistemology concerned with non-human experience as a site of knowledge.”1 The human is now considered as a possibly fragmented entity. Bioethical experiments, including new scientific and medical progress (such as implants, transplants, and cloning), have transformed man into a virtual as well as a scientifically or technologically reconstructable entity. Consider the novel Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, published electronically in 19952: through illustrations, it tells the story of parts of a female body stitched together through text and image. Here the character is a cyborg or a posthuman body represented artistically as an attractive or, at least, an intriguing ‘thing,’ endowed with extraordinary powers.3 What does it mean to be human? How does technology interfere with the idea of the human? “Trans” indicates multiple directions in different fields of research and meaning, giving rise to new symbols concerning the dis-appearance of the human. Humans have discovered that they are made of electric impulses, of algorithms, of cells: they have learnt that they themselves are machines, whose parts are replaceable. In this sense, the posthuman can be seen as a consequence of the transhuman: it is the Frankensteinian perspective where the human, through technological means, has transformed itself into a new human.4 The theme of alienation moves from being an emotional and psychological sensation, an incapacity to come to terms with the outside world, to an estrangement from

1 Francesca Ferrando, “Towards a Posthumanist Methodology. A Statement,” in “Narrating Posthumanism,” Frame, 25.1 (2012): 9–18. 2 Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (Storyspace: Eastgate Systems, 1995). 3 See Paola Carbone, “One Monstrous Ogre and One Patchwork Girl: Two Nameless Beings,” in Bioethics and Biolaw Through Literature, ed. Daniela Carpi (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011): 219–238. 4 James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Cambridge, Mass.: Westview P, 2004).

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one’s own body and, even worse, from one’s own mind. What has caused the crisis is intelligence, no longer a typically human characteristic, but a technologically reproducible asset. We can no longer say with Descartes, “Cogito ergo sum”: cogitation has ceased to be a typically human characteristic, because we have created machines that can reason independently. However, we may argue that posthumanism is the latest phase of a crisis which has always existed at the centre of the humanist idea of the human [. . .]. Even though terms like ‘posthuman’, ‘posthumanist’ or ‘posthumanism’ have a surprisingly long history, only in the last two decades have they really started to receive attention in contemporary theory and philosophy, where they have produced an entire new way of thinking and theorizing.5

N. Katherine Hayles, for one, questions “how to create just societies in a transnational global world that may include in its purview both carbon and silicon citizens.”6 Posthumanism proposes the concept of transcendent immanence: This oxymoronic perspective aptly epitomizes today’s ambiguous position towards transcendence: on the one hand we eliminate religious constrictions and produce our own creations (we become our own gods); on the other hand, we seek a metaphysical perspective, aware that we are challenging God and wish to return to Him. In questioning biocentrism and the concept of life itself, “posthumanism blurs the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, in a quantum approach to the physics of existence.”7 Cinematic arts and literary works (including graphic novels) have been at the forefront of this debate. Many filmic and literary texts condemn the hegemonic approach: in some ways, the technological tries literally to dominate the world. The movie Transcendence8 is a case in point: it shows this sort of new immanence which, through technology, turns man into a new divinity capable of creating life (artificial intelligence) while still aiming at reproducing ‘transcendence’ in his own material way. Will, the main character in the movie, creates a sort of technologically enhanced and therefore undefeatable army in order to control the planet, albeit with the positive aim of defeating sickness.

5 Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London, New Delhi, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013): 1. 6 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics Literature and Informatics (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999): 148. 7 Ferrando, “Posthumanist Methodology,” 10. 8 Transcendence is a movie produced in 2014 by the director Wally Pfister (his directorial debut), with Johnny Depp playing the character of Will.

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Many other films analyze the transformation of the concept of the human: for instance, the disembodied voice in the movie Her9 clearly shows such evolution in human relationships, envisaging a world deprived of physical contact, thus privileging the virtual over the physical. Within the literary field, we can single out the novel The Circle10 that skillfully describes a world where we are all incessantly electronically connected without really being so spiritually: the unicity and independence of each single individual is thus crushed and annihilated. In the former the human confronts the posthuman as a disembodied entity; in the latter the human is transformed into a technological commodity. These contemporary works become the symbol of all that evolution now encompasses; they represent a further step in Darwin’s idea of evolution: from ape to man to machine, emphasizing the concept that we have always been machines without being aware of it. The posthumanist perspective involves a new perception of ethics. The socalled technological civilization is seen as another ontological status, in need of new ethics at a new ontological level. Whereas “ethical concepts are generally based on predeterminism (of human nature), uniqueness and determinability (of the good) and limitation and closeness (of the effects of human actions),”11 these metaphysical reasons no longer apply to the ethics of a technological era, when traditional human relationships and the concept of transcendence (or immanence) are subverted. Indeed, any kind of technological advancement represents a challenge to ethics, thus causing metaphysical tensions. With Hans Jonas,12 we may foresee a fundamental revision of ethics and consider our technological civilization as a new existential status. On the one hand, we continue aspiring to a status transcending reality and reproducing metaphysics as a longing; on the other hand, technology itself has taken the place of metaphysics, considering our absolute dependence on it (almost a divinization). Jonas argues that technology appears as secularized eschatology. The utopian perspective of a technologized world, where man is free from impellent duties and needs, becomes a dark dystopia where man is dispossessed of his uniqueness and assumes a mechanized existence.

9 Her, dir. Spike Jonze, tx. 2013 (US: Annapurna Pictures, 2013). 10 Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Vintage, 2013). 11 Andrea Günter, “Hans Jonas’ The Imperative of Responsibility, future generations and the ironical situation of ethics” (January 5, 2016) Andrea Guenter (acc. March 22, 2020). 12 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age [1979] (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1984).

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At stake in Posthumanism is also the ethics of caring, feeling the responsibility for another human being. This involves all sorts of living beings, including the cyborg. Indeed, the new technologies require (or, better, cannot avoid) a specific metaphysical categorization. Ethics and technology must confront each other. In his Principles of Philosophy of the Future (1843) Ludwig Feuerbach argues that morality is not in the being of the single person but in the collectivity of human beings, in the humans’ moral constitution. Ante litteram, Feuerbach takes into consideration the transformation of ethics within a technological environment. In the past, ethics debated on morally correct relationships between human beings; contemporary ethics focuses on technology’s responsibility towards mankind. From projections of hope we have come to the heuristic of fear, because now our very essence is threatened. From prophecy of bliss (a host of possibilities opening up for man) we have moved to a sense of doom: we have become captives of our own creations. The case of Frankenstein inevitably comes to mind: the Doctor, who tries to attain godlike power, ends up being chased, persecuted and tortured by his own creation. As Jonas cogently states, we must “save the survival and humanity of man from the excesses of his own power.”13 Literary creativity has always marked the difference between man and cyborg, but now the very notion of literature has come under attack. Artificial intelligence could not create texts independently, but only obey electronic inputs: therefore, literary creation was the irrefutable mark of humanity. Now, however, a program allows the computer to reach an independent sort of creation, thus demonstrating that it possesses a self-sufficient duplication of intelligence. The evolution towards an electronic persona is rapidly happening. “Technological developments presage a non-humanist post-humanity in which human beings come to be superseded by complex bundles of interactions, processes and networked systems.”14 This posthuman perspective is a later derivation and extension of the figure of the monster, a borderline figure, present across the centuries in connection with problems of representation, which should be analyzed within the concept of teratology.15 We can say that the cyborg (as in the case of the monster) is built on the ruins of representation: “The deconstruction of metaphysical Being and the construction of an alternative ontology are uprooting

13 Jonas, Imperative, x. 14 Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, “Preface: Literature, Posthumanism, and the Posthuman,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017): xi–xxii, xxi. 15 See the introduction to Daniela Carpi, ed., Monsters and Monstrosity: From the Canon to the Anti-Canon. Literary and Juridical Subversions (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019).

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the overwrought tradition of representation.”16 Critics such as Dongshin Yi thus speak of belated gothic when citing the hybridity of the figure of the cyborg, machine and organism at the same time.

The cyborg as symbol of the new human All previous discourse about the new concept of the human finds its symbolic embodiment in the figure of the cyborg, marking an evolution from the known concept of human being so far in a humanistic perspective – at the center of the universe – to a posthumanist view, decentering man and problematizing the very concept of the human. The cyborg sets itself within the wider theories of futurology. Franco “Bifo” Berardi asserts that “Futurology is a layer of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality.”17 Peter Bowler reminds us that “[t]he term ‘futurology’ came into use in the 1950s to denote efforts to predict the future by extrapolating social and economic trends, increasingly via the use of computers to crunch the figures.”18 What was once considered a possibility (automata endowed with intelligence) has now become a reality: we live in a technological world focused on AI, when we daily witness new potentialities developed by robots to such an extent that we are obsessed by doubts concerning the survival of the human. In other words, we can no longer speak of futurology, but of a future that has become a reality: from ‘futurology’ to ‘presentology,’ in my own terms. Peter Bowler, marking the state of the art of science fiction in the past, argues: Wells and Asimov were both fascinated by science and technology and were convinced that together these enterprises had the potential to change the world for the better. But they were also concerned that human nature and the dysfunctional state of modern society might lead to a disastrous misuse of technology. As science fiction writers, they imagined future worlds in order to tell stories about how human beings might cope with the challenges thrown up by new machines. And as popular science writers, they were happy to engage in an imaginative form of an enterprise which would later be called futurology.19

16 Dongshin Yi, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic, Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2010): 5. 17 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Futurability. The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (London and New York: Verso, 2017): 2. 18 Peter J. Bowler, A History of the Future. Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017): 17. 19 Bowler, A History of the Future, 16.

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Debating on futurology, Berardi distinguishes between possibility and potency, whereas Bowler calls possibility “a content inscribed in the present constitution of the world” and potency “the subjective energy that deploys the possibilities and actualizes them.”20 We may say that in the contemporary age what had been anticipated by humanists, a world populated by machines, has actually become true: we are in an era of actualized potencies. AI is the patent symbol of these transformations of the human and history has once more demonstrated its being “the space of the emergence of possibilities embodied in subjectivities endowed with potency.”21 Bowler has also asserted that: “Digital technology and research in artificial intelligence are opening the door to a sort of automation of the future.”22 Works speaking of AI belong to the trend of science fiction, but what once was seen as predictions of the future now has become actualized possibility: technological progress goes much faster than our means of representation. What was in the old days envisaged as probable is now seen as real: the inhuman is catching up with the human very rapidly, so that we cannot speak of utopia or dystopia, but of a ‘realistic’ representation.

Ex Machina (2014) The movie Ex Machina,23 directed by Alex Garland and produced in 2014, can be considered as an emblematic text in this debate precisely because the machine becomes the symbol of the new being of the future. The story centers on a scientist, Nathan, who has created a perfect cyborg, Ava, whom he wants to test (the Turing test24) to see if the human and the inhuman of the machine are still distinguishable. To do so Nathan has lured a young scientist, Caleb, to his laboratory to be the tester. Caleb finds himself trapped in a tortuous situation that ends with the defeat of the human by the technology he has created.

20 Bowler, A History of the Future, 1. 21 Bowler, A History of the Future, 7. 22 Bowler, A History of the Future, 16. 23 Ex Machina, dir. Alex Garland, tx. 2014 (UK, US: Film 4, DNA Films, 2014). Further references in the text, abbreviated as EM. 24 The Turing test consists in asking a human person to tell whether a voice they are talking to is artificial or human. If they cannot distinguish it, it means that the machine has passed the test and has managed to fool the human into believing that they are interacting with another human.

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Ex Machina appears to be the symbolic description of a world of shadows, the new virtual reality that magnifies Plato’s myth of the cave. Indeed, Ava emerges from the laboratory (where virtual reality is actualized) and enters the world of reality (the world of ideal forms, experiencing the sun), but she pollutes the reality she invades, transforming the real into the virtual. The cyborg is seen now in the middle of a crossroads (as in a dream Ava once had), watching her surroundings. Real people are represented as shadows projected on the walls of an underground: Ava is standing in the sun, while real people are trapped in the make-believe. Crossroads are symbolic because they convey the image of borders to cross, of the branching out of different possibilities: the crossroads is a turning point where the human and the inhuman meet and take diverging paths. I will deal with this topic at length later in this essay. Consequently, we are never out of eikasia: in a civilization of images like ours we have become shadows. This powerful image becomes the symbol of the dispossession of the human by AI. The subversion of the real and the virtual is transmitted through the inversion of shadow/real body in this final scene. We live in virtual reality (social media, internet, even books have been dematerialized through ebooks or audio-books). The cyborg exemplifies this exchange between man and machine, when the human tends to disappear. Technology is thus represented in its threatening perspective: it is the cyborg that will join the world of ideal forms. The humanoid will prevail, while the human will remain trapped in false images and shadowy forms.

Old symbols in new guises Ex Machina leads us to the awareness of human evolution by weaving its way through old myths and symbols: besides Plato’s myth of the cave, the movie interweaves its plot also with symbols from the garden of Eden. Let us interpret the opening scene: The movie begins with an aerial view of a frozen panorama, immersed in ice. The dazzling whiteness of the ice in literature has always symbolized a desertified cosmos, a nightmarish perspective (as in Melville’s white whale or Frankenstein’s pursuit of the creature in the far north) paving the way for unnatural actions. A helicopter flies above this wilderness, discharging from its belly Caleb, who is literally pushed out of a mechanical womb (a sort of new birth) into apparently uncontaminated natural surroundings, with a huge waterfall among thick high trees and menacing rocks. The wind itself produced by the rotor blades, violently sweeping the grass around, anticipates the

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symbolic thunderstorm caused by the creation of the new powerful mechanical being that will supersede its human creator. The helicopter’s pilot says that he is not allowed to take his passenger near the house. “But where is the house?” asks Caleb. “Follow the river,” answers the pilot (EM, 00:02:45). Indeed, the river appears on the scene from the very beginning as division and break: it is not so much a river as a turbulent stream interrupted by a long and frightening waterfall. Caleb drags an apparently heavy suitcase, symbolizing the burden of the traditional world he comes from, a burden he carries with him at first but subsequently he will be forced to abandon it to meet an unprecedented reality. All actions and details have a dense symbolic meaning, marking the transformation of traditional humanistic patterns into a posthuman frame of reference. Even the surroundings where the helicopter lands are quite allegorical, because we know, ever since Dante found himself in a dark forest, (from Freud’s theories) that the wood can represent human conscience and that water carries a positive (salvific) and negative (deadly) meaning at the same time. In fact, in the course of the story Caleb will have to meet his own unconscious (his human/inhuman components) and will have to face his own downfall: indeed, it will be the machine to test him, and not the other way around. And he fails. The water has both a baptismal function (Caleb will have to be reborn into these new mechanical surroundings, into this parallel world rooted in secrecy) and a hellish purpose (he will take part in this technological challenge to God: “This is the story of the gods” he says to himself [EM, 00:11:15]). And he will be damned. External nature and the laboratory are separated by glass walls, which seem to be negating the distinction between the outside and the inside. This characteristic re-reads postmodern architecture, where the outside (nature, plants, waterfalls, etc.) are taken inside the buildings, whose composition reveals the hidden structures supporting the buildings themselves. However, we will soon realize that these traditional postmodern architectural elements are pushed to their limits by a posthuman perspective acknowledging the creation of an all-encompassing new mechanical world. The building is indeed made of glass and rocks, included in the internal construction, and of iron poles, which obviously remind us of the unnatural surroundings of the movie Blade Runner by Ridley Scott (1982), where the cyborgs move within a shattered sort of world, made of high poles, scaffoldings and ruins.25 Therefore, the Eden envisaged in the movie is a fake one, filtered through the eyes of a scientist who is described as a fallen god, an element that typifies

25 These surroundings are resumed and made even more threatening by the sequel Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve (2017).

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practically all the texts (novels and movies) dealing with the topic of AI. The characters do not live in nature, but surrounded by glass walls, which function as separation and screen against the realization of their true selves. What is human and what is inhuman, what is natural and what is artificial? These are the question that run through the entire narration, making it impossible for us to distinguish between the two concepts. The unnaturalness of the situation is also emphasized by the fact that Ava, the new being that has been created, is not complete: she is partly made of flesh and partly of a transparent material that shows how the body is constructed, with its tendons and flexible joints. It will take seven sessions for the cyborg to be completed, which correspond to God’s seven days for creation (actually six, because on the seventh He rested). But, in this case, it will be the machine, Ava, who, before escaping from the laboratory/prison-house, at the very end of the movie completes her own creation by taking spare parts from other disactivated cyborgs, thus contributing to her own self-creation. Ava, the machine, has become so autonomous and independent that she can decide what to do and what shape to acquire. Coming back to the Edenic perspective, we may say that the garden outside the laboratory is no longer a place of metaphysical harmony and perfection, but something stifling, threateningly encircling the house, a fake creation of the scientist, part of the Turing test to see how human the cyborg has become. So, the new mechanical being willingly abandons this garden (at the end Ava climbs aboard the helicopter that will take her to the human world): she will not be seen as a damned being punished by God and thrown out of Eden, but as a new threatening creation that will invade and subvert the human world. At the beginning of the movie, as soon as Caleb reaches the building, the operation of denaturalization starts: he speaks with an artificial voice, he is photographed, and only then do the doors to the building open automatically. The picture that is taken of him shows him with a contorted expression of wonder/fear: he is being reproduced, twisted around, transformed into a new being so that he can conform to the new unnatural surroundings. The eye of the camera gazing upon him recalls both the representation of God as an all-seeing eye and a revision of Bentham’s Panopticon. From now on Caleb will be constantly watched. The ending is quite emblematic, too; the helicopter takes Ava on board exchanging her for the real human being to be collected. Ava is by now perfectly indistinguishable from the humans and will enter the human world, which will be in the long run colonized by these new mechanical beings. This ending recalls another movie where the “monster” (a vampire, in this case) was carried in a sleigh back to the human world by rescuers unaware that they are importing the “plague” (a vampirized being) into the real world, where the

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disease will be able to seep into society. I am referring to The Fearless Vampire Killers by Roman Polanski (1967).26 There is a similar threat in the ending of EM, because the machine Ava is presented as a dangerous new persona that has killed her creator and entrapped her would-be rescuer (Caleb): she reaches the human world only to undermine it.

The myth of the labyrinth Another symbol entwined within the narration is the labyrinth. Indeed, the building’s architecture is an interesting feature, an endless series of corridors winding through an enclosed space surrounded by locked doors. This labyrinthine construction has at its center a mystery, a monster, that could be represented by the haunting presence of the scientist (an all-seeing eye) or by the robot, a disturbing being half human and half inhuman. The idea of the labyrinth is an ever-present concept in postmodernism: it symbolizes both language and the author. The author is the failed god within his linguistic creation, standing for the labyrinth within which both writer and reader are trapped, and his actions represent a challenge to God’s creation through His logos.27 At the present time, the symbol has acquired more threatening perspectives because it has come to exemplify the challenge that technology poses to man: the robot is the new monstrous, cunning and powerful essence lurking at the center of the labyrinth waiting for its prey. Nathan, the scientist, could be seen as Dedalus, the creator of the labyrinth, the ultimate meaning of his work, and Ava as the half-monster, luring victims to be devoured: in order to become human she must prey on Caleb’s ingenuity, devouring his soul. The most emblematic embodiment of the monster in the labyrinth in twentieth century literature is the character of Mischa Fox in Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter (1956).28 His somatic and psychological characteristics (eyes of different colors, one blue, the other violet, and satanic traits) make him appear halfmonster, half-divinity. In addition, his aura of mystery, his hypnotic power over those who come in contact with him, his virtual life and death have control over whomever he considers his own, connecting him with a satanic-divine entity. This

26 The Fearless Vampire Killers, dir. Roman Polanski, tx. 1967 (UK, US: Cadre Films, Filmways, 1967). 27 See Daniela Carpi, L’ansia della scrittura. Parola e silenzio nella narrativa inglese contemporanea (Napoli: Liguori, 1995). 28 Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956).

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description perfectly fits also the character of Nathan, the scientist; therefore, Ex Machina turns out to be a re-reading of the myth of the Minotaur. As early as 1962, Iris Murdoch wrote: “the mythical is not something extra; we live in myth and symbol all the time.”29 We must understand that we are never out of myth, not even in our post-human phase. Myths are the constant presence across centuries that connect our past to our future. It is our reinterpretation that updates their meaning. Indeed, Ex Machina evokes this fundamental classical myth in order to suggest the idea of continuation and mutation: technology creates and annihilates humanity at the same time, suggesting progress and regression (from super-humanity to post-humanity), success and failure (it potentiates the human but annihilates it). The labyrinth also implies the incessant choices we must make if we want to progress: but does progress give rise to success or monstrosity? We are constantly wavering between these two poles. Even Darwin’s concept of evolution is called into question, because Nathan says at a certain point that in a near future machines will look down on man as if he were an ape (EM, 01:06:13). Technology accelerates the process of evolution, and we are rapidly going to be considered an extinct race. The robot symbolizes the next step in the evolution of our species. The creation of AI had been foreseen for some time in literature. The question was not why, but when it would happen in the course of evolution. Now the time has come, and this development has been reached. Ava will not be a unique case but will be rather part of an evolutionary continuum: she will be rapidly superseded by more perfect models, as we humans have been superseded by AI. In Ex Machina, the myth/symbol of the labyrinth merges with a dark symbolic fairy tale: Bluebeard. When Caleb is welcomed inside the research center he is shown around the building and Nathan tells him that he can open only the doors he is allowed to go through by means of a badge. The badge acts as a threshold. This admonition brings to mind Bluebeard’s warnings to his young brides never to open a particular door. But Caleb does precisely that: taking advantage of Nathan’s drunkenness, he steals the badge and enters the forbidden room (Nathan’s own) to discover many automata hidden inside cupboards (EM, 01:10:10). They are de-activated robots because of their malfunctioning: they correspond to the disobedient wives killed by Bluebeard. “In the contemporary world to talk about fairy tales one must deal with violence, power, alienating social conditions, and sex-roles,” as I argued elsewhere.30 Indeed, the

29 Iris Murdoch, “Mass, Might and Myth,” Spectator 7.9 (1962): 337–338. 30 Daniela Carpi, Fairy Tales in the Postmodern World. No Tales for Children (Heidelberg: Winter, 2017): 19.

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technological re-reading of the story of Bluebeard follows these parameters. The sexist perspective is evident here as in the fairy tale; and in fact, there is a long debate in the movie on whether sex is gendered. Nathan has a male domineering view on the subject, and his robots have a strong sexual connotation: Kioko (the second cyborg in the movie) has a libidinal function, and apparently is constructed as a beautiful, non-sentient being (linguistic comprehension has not been inserted into her mechanism in order to keep her subjected), totally subservient to her creator, only to be a remedium concupiscentiae. Last century, Angela Carter produced a fascinating re-reading of the tale of Bluebeard, which is partly followed also in Ex Machina. In Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979),31 it is the girl’s mother who comes to save her from the Marquis/Bluebeard by rushing onto the scene riding a white horse, thus suggesting that only women can save women. The movie also emphasizes female solidarity, because the monster/creator/male dominator is eliminated through the mutual help of the two robots, Ava and Kioko, the latter far from being a non-sentient creation. Together they plot their creator’s downfall. In both cases, the creatures rebel against the scientist, acquiring an independent way of reasoning and acting. They eliminate the human factor with the victory of the ‘inhuman.’ The robots take the scientist by surprise: the Turing test has been successfully passed because the story demonstrates that the robots are perfectly capable of acting independently and superseding the humans. The female wins against the male, the inhuman against the human, the posthuman having attained its ultimate goal. Consider the meaning of the title: from machine to human. The new being is a former machine, now a new step in the process of evolution.

Conclusion: The new human? What therefore is the new human? To be considered human one must have a conscience and self-awareness. From the very beginning, we see that Ava has a strong sense of self. She knows that she is a machine and looks for an empathetic relationship with Caleb. “Can we be friends?”, she asks (EM, 00:27:03). She is also conscious of all her anomalies, for instance her unprecedented ability with language. Her linguistic capacities are perfect, but when has she been able to attain such ability? wonders Caleb. “I was born like this,” she answers (EM, 00:14:50), but she adds that this ability is abnormal: generally speaking,

31 Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (London: Gollancz, 1979).

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one acquires language in time and through learning; one is not born with articulate speech. This particular skill shows the extent of the robot’s self-consciousness, underscored also by Ava’s artistic abilities. She paints an abstract subject and Caleb asks why she has not painted something more realistic. The discussion then focuses on the sort of painting more apt to describe the contemporary world. Art becomes symbolic in the movie: Pollock’s picture is particularly emblematic and allows Caleb and Nathan to discuss art. In the general symbolism of the movie, Pollock’s picture stands out because it seems to represent electric wires, the hidden parts both of the robot and of the architecture. In its abstractionism it becomes realistic, because it portrays the hidden structure of AI. “Did Pollock have a program?” is the question. Nathan answers that art is originated by inspiration. That notion tells Ava that she can decide what to paint on the spur of the moment; she becomes aware of different painting styles among which she can choose. Art is stressed as another symbolic element annulling the difference between man and machine. All these literary symbols converge towards a new definition of the human of the future. “[A]rtificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us [. . .]. Tragedy was a possibility,” Ian McEwan writes in Machines Like Me.32 We may indeed argue that if in the past science fiction very often described a universe endowed with new powerful possibilities for man, in the contemporary world anxiety and fear prevail, thus allowing us to speak of cognitive estrangement.33 We therefore feel indeed estranged within these technological surroundings and nourish strong doubts about how mankind will evolve, but we also realize that the evolution of technology is taking us relentlessly towards a new symbolization of the human.

32 Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me and People Like You (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019): 6. 33 See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).

Janet M. Wilson

“An ocean of thought”: AI, Robots, and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and People Like You (2019) Abstract: This article examines popular images of robots, machines and replicants in sci-fi literature and cinema to indicate shifts in current popular representations due to advances in genetically applied science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The new roles of robots in the sphere of health (e.g., assisted robotics and robotic) as carers and social companions, and the growing interest in human-robot interactions (HRI) provides a context for the representation of Ian McEwan’s dystopian social vision in Machines Like Me and People Like You (2019) of a failed cybernetic revolution. The article examines McEwan’s use of images and symbols from a range of contexts to indicate the confusion surrounding the introduction of machines into society that is unprepared for such levels of intimacy in automation. The social questions that the novel poses about the increased use of robots in many spheres of life such as the impact on the labor market, and ethical issues such as the assignment of moral status and rights of artificial personhood are also discussed in terms of the AI future.

The radically different representations of machines in popular genres of science fiction literature and cinema are well known: Frankensteinian monsters who acquire the capacity for independent thought, and frustrated at being subjugated to their human masters prey on and overwhelm mankind, by contrast to machines acting as superior tools in response to instructions, yet challenging human autonomy and independence by performing complicated tasks beyond human capacities and replacing human labor according to their automated abilities. These stereotypes, different versions of the master-slave relationship between machines as independent threatening monsters or subordinated efficient functionaries – are being reconfigured in the twenty-first century as robotic research and development of industrial robots and service robots, programmed into human-robot interactions (HRI), move toward the creation of synthetic beings with artificial intelligences through “genetic algorithms, genetic programming and evolutionary computation.”1 In particular, as research into the design and

1 Robert Sparrow, “The Turing Triage Test,” Ethics and Information Technology 6.4 (2004): 203–213, 203. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-012

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construction of carer or companion robots develops, there is interest in “partner robots, sufficiently human-like and sufficiently appealing to take on the role of a partner in relationship with a human being.”2 This article considers the social and ethical issues concerning the construction of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) masterwork, a human replicant, an increasingly topical issue as robots encroach on and become integrated into society. It addresses questions about what we consider human raised by the proximity of synthetic beings to humans in thinking rational thought and in appearance. As David Levy asks, “What type of entity should we consider a robot to be? How should we categorise it?”3 Further, what are the rights of artificial personhood and what laws should be applied in governing the robot systems of the future? In other words, what makes humans morally significant, and can these attributes be possessed by other species? Given that the creation of mechanized beings makes for human-robot interactions in situations of proximity and intimacy, what types of mutual understanding are possible? Sci-fi literature and cinema have traditionally seized on such problems to help think the unthinkable by constructing images that go beyond common conceptions of the human, suggesting how the human can be reinvented. Over the centuries, these media have presented the relationship between men and machines as a looking glass for humanity and technology, a way to understand our own humanness, as we recognize in the desire to create such forms of life, the desire to know ourselves better. In examining the symbols and metaphors by which AI research and invention has been represented in the popular imagination, this article focuses on Ian McEwan’s novel, Machines Like Me and People Like You (2019), the title of which comes from words uttered by the man-made human at its center, conveying the perspective of this new breed of person.4 Referring to the human-robot imaginings of popular sci-fi discourse in relation to contemporary AI research and invention, the article will focus on McEwan’s revisiting of familiar tropes and images of machines in the novel’s representation of human responses to a robot-cyber revolution, and it will consider the ethical issues it raises about human understanding of robots and the regulation of their use.

2 David Levy, “Why Not Marry a Robot?,” Love and Sex with Robots: 2nd International Conference LSR 2016, ed. Adrian David Cheok, Kate Devlin, David Levy (Cham: Springer, 2017): 3–16, 3. 3 Levy, “Marry a Robot,” 4. 4 Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me and People Like You (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019). Further references in the text, abbreviated as MLM.

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Machines in popular culture In popular culture robots, cyborgs, replicants and other types of mechanical beings are represented through a binary imagery that reflects the dualism of their relation to mankind: on one hand, that of slave or tool of human use and on the other, that of Frankensteinian monstrosity and threat, associated with the humanoid or android (i.e., robot with a human form) that turns against its human masters.5 From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), about the attempt to turn animals into humans, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), images of enslavement or destruction provide some of the most radical imaginings of artificially created beings or cyborgs (grotesque hybrids comprising technology and flesh) in sci-fi visions of the future. The publication of Frankenstein in 1818 created a fashion for cyborgs, robots and androids – versions of the monstrous machine. The idea that the machine can replace a human woman with a better copy emerged 50 years later in the novel L’Eve Future [Tomorrow’s Eve] (Auguste Villiers de l’IsleAdam, 1886), whereas the creature who has human form and cannot escape her gender and sexuality is the subject of Fritz Lang’s classic feature film Metropolis in 1927, in which erotic performances of the humanoid robot Hel/Maria tantalized men. During the late twentieth century, the path of the robot’s/cyborg’s evolution in cinematic and literary representation has mirrored AI developments in science and technology as concepts of the machine were modified in ways that reflect technological change. Popular representation altered in the 1970s, for example, with the artificial performance of bodily motor functions following the scientific creation of synthetic organs: prosthetic limbs and other forms of cybernetic (often called bionic) enhancement such as pacemakers, hearing implants, and cosmetic surgery. This has a counterpart in the bionic creatures and hyper-masculine male machines of popular culture such as James Cameron’s Terminator (1984) and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987). The 1980s initiated images of humanoid replicants as found in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1981), i.e., machines that think and feel like humans because capable of independent rational thought and emotion, that can be differentiated from humans, but which also encourage a questioning of this difference. This latter aspect is a key point in McEwan’s novel. There is also, increasingly in the early twenty-first century, a third type of image, that of a better and more hopeful future promised by machines when properly controlled by

5 On these works see Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, “The (Care) Robot in Science Fiction: A Monster or a Tool for the Future?,” Confero 4.2 (2016): 97–109, 99–101.

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man, as they take over menial, repetitive tasks in the workplace and contribute in the domestic domain. These more friendly images are appropriate to the industrial, social and personal applications of robots, such as providing information services or home security, performing household tasks or assisting the elderly and disabled. McEwan’s dystopian, speculative novel, described as “a sharp, unsettling read,”6 begins by pointing out that people’s understanding of humanoid robots designed to undertake domestic tasks and acting as companions has not developed beyond the stereotypes from popular sci-fi literature and cinema: “artificial humans were a cliché long before they arrived, so when they did, they seemed to some a disappointment” (MLM, 1). Nevertheless, the novel’s images of synthetic humans with independent brain functioning and superior thought and moral processes intersects with and builds on the shifts in popular culture from 2000 when science began to use AI for an increasingly wide range of human activities, and cyborgs or man-made machine integrations, machines and other technical monsters of popular culture began being constructed as complex beings increasingly like humans. In recent research in the area of Assisted Robotics, where robots are being increasingly used in domestic and health care domains, there is a focus on issues of intimacy and communication. Representations of machine life are assisted by Digitally Enhanced Personalities (DEP), used in satellite navigation systems, in which individual preferences are used to choose a voice, accent, and gender.7 In the health care industry, the humanoid figure is being constructed with greater human nuance according to an intersectional framework of ethnicity, age and gender, instead of relying on stereotypical roles such as doctor, nurse, medical or personal assistant that can evoke polarized sensations of anxiety or hope.8 Options for shaping robot representation that can vary according to demand and situation include relatable figures responding to the gendered labor of care with human-like appearances, or more machine-like figures although with human voices. These shifts were partly anticipated by Battlestar Galactica (2004–09), for example, in which machines are intelligent, emotional beings who can pass for human and so offer more embodied representations of gendered identity than

6 Jeff Giles, “Love, Sex and Robots Collide in a New Ian McEwan Novel,” New York Times (May 1, 2019) (acc. 03 March 2020). 7 James Cantor, The Extreme Future (London: Penguin, 2006): 265. (His predictions are for 2020). 8 Koistinen, “(Care) Robot,” 103–104, discusses two Swedish TV series about social robots acting as carers.

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previously. Evidence of how robots perform better than humans with greater efficiency, superior intellect, and powers of reason and logic, as in Google Deep Mind’s AlphaGo’s success at defeating the eighteen-time world-wide Go Champion, Lee Sedol, in 2016, always make sensational headlines.9 But increasingly there is recognition that perceptions of intimacies with robots require accepting them as more than “assistive labor, toys or unknown threat.”10 McEwan’s novel is about the failure to establish understanding beyond these stereotypes, and ends with the breakdown of a man-machine relationship that involves companionship and trust. One question that it indirectly raises, then, is whether it is possible to trust a machine, and this correlates with recent empirical research on human perceptions in HRI in which responses to robots are measured according to the criteria of small talk, emotion, empathy, and gender embodiment.11

The humanoid in Machines Like Me and People Like You Machines Like Me reflects late twentieth-century perceptions of machines: it builds on recognizable historical moments, political issues and social debates in its dystopian vision of a society that has transcended the computer age and is now partly automatized (e.g., Exocet series 8 missiles that can distinguish friend from foe, auto-piloted cars, and hoped-for robotic rubbish collectors). This cybernetic revolution is failing due to human misjudgments and system errors, and although even better models of digital intelligence that might improve conditions have been dreamed up, they are not yet tested out. There is social unrest and hostility towards robots for taking over many jobs, performing menial and professional tasks with greater skill and accuracy, causing redundancy and unemployment, and working class dissatisfaction. The novel’s

9 David Silver et al., “Making the Game of Go Without Human Knowledge,” Nature 550 (2017): 354–359, 354. This is compared to the historic chess match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov in 1997. 10 Chamari Edirisinghe and Adrian David Cheok, “Robots and Intimacies: A Preliminary Study of Perceptions, and Intimacies with Robots,” Love and Sex with Robots: Second International Conference, LSR 2016, ed. Adrian David Cheok, Kate Devlin, and David Levy (Cham: Springer, 2017): 137–147, 138. 11 Moigan Hashemian, Raul Paradeda, Carla Guerra and Ana Palva, “Do You Trust Me? Investigating the Formation of Trust in Social Robots,” in Progress in Artificial Intelligence. 19th EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ed. Paulo Moura Olivieira, Paulo Novais, Luís Paulo Reis (Cham: Springer, 2019): 357–369. They found “a social robot with embodiment telling a sad story with a sad facial expression and gestures has more influence on the trust of a female subject.”

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replacement of unskilled labor with high precision, efficient robots recalls the computer revolution of the 1980s and 90s and the subsequent casualization of labor in the gig economy. McEwan conflates this futuristic scenario with an historical setting of 1982, braiding past, present and future into a narrative whole. His counterfactual account of events and their outcomes reveals society as close to breaking point, under pressure of a political crisis and social, political, and technocratic change: it is the time of the Falklands War but the fleet that sails from Portsmouth is destroyed by a new missile that the French have released to the Argentinians, Thatcher is sinking in popularity, the socialist, Tony Benn becomes Leader of the Opposition (MLM, 111) and the country is about to exit from the EU, a reminder to McEwan’s twenty-first century readers that they live in post-referendum Britain. Most importantly this temporal ‘thickening’ allows for the great mathematician and World War II code-breaker, Alan Turing (who took his own life in 1952) to be reincarnated and celebrated as undisputed genius of the digital age, for his pioneering work in AI and computational biology has created the newest sensation of consumer electronics, the first breed of synthetic people. Society’s great leap forward is evident in the arrival of machine-made human replicants in the form of twenty-five Adam and Eves. The protagonist, Charlie Friend, who makes an unreliable living from the stock and currency markets but is obsessed with “robots, androids, replicates” (MLM, 13), is sufficiently attracted by the prospect of a mechanized companion to use his mother’s entire inheritance to purchase for £86,000 an Adam – since no Eves are left – “The first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression” (MLM, 2). The replicant is brought to life by Charlie with the help of his upstairs neighbor Miranda, about whom he has romantic feelings, a student of social history ten years his junior. Like surrogate parents they watch as Adam’s life support system is switched on, and he develops skin hues and forms “sounds with breath, tongue, teeth and palate” (MLM, 3). McEwan draws on the intersectional representations of machine life used in imaging social robots that act as carers and companions to the elderly in giving details of Adam’s gender, ethnicity and age: he is of indeterminate ethnicity and physically “well endowed,” resembling “‘a docker from the Bosphorus’” (MLM, 4), according to Miranda. Charlie’s and Miranda’s acts of transforming Adam into a fully functioning individual by selecting personality features from the user’s guide, recall the Digitally Enhanced Personalities (DEPs) of online or mobile robotics whereby owners can choose the body, face, skills, and personality, as physical and “virtual personalities are customized for industrial, commercial and personal

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use.”12 These essential but often arbitrary decisions combine foster parenting with the analytical frames of technology and colonialism by which the novel’s basic slave-master relationship can be read. The novel is about the crisis that develops because Adam, sold as factotum and companion, has been designed with greater intellectual powers and a superior moral system than his owner, but as Charlie discovers to this cost, Adam is unable to understand the messy unpredictable business of being human. This disturbing disjunction between expectation and reality emerges in Charlie’s uneasy perceptions and uncanny recognitions of the robot as both human and machine simultaneously. Upon introducing Adam into normal structures of human activity and engagement, and learning about the integrated workings of his three substrate (“operating system [. . .] human nature – and a personality,” MLM, 24), Charlie’s responses fluctuate between accepting what appears human and real one minute, and in the next as recognizably automatized and alien: Adam, in stroking his chin, is an utterly convincing “projection of a thoughtful self,” for example, but in fact this is nothing but a “clever algorithm” (MLM, 23). These oscillating perceptions of the machine-man can also be read in sociological terms. Adam’s synthetic humanness locates him as an outsider to the society he inhabits, recalling Zygmunt Bauman’s thinking on the concept of the stranger: as someone who is essentially unplaceable, lives outside space and time, and who might either be assimilated into or disruptive of society.13 As a possession purchased at great expense, similar in status to a slave or servant in relation to his owner, his attachments and roles remain precarious and human-dependent. Adam’s indeterminate, vaguely middle Eastern appearance – he might have been taken “for a Turk or a Greek” (MLM, 2) – locates him on the borders of nationhood, but his not being English adds to the sense of something unknowable or untrustworthy in his human embodiment. Despite his powers of speech and a “word-store as large as Shakespeare’s” (MLM, 22), he is also associated with the unease and suspicion pervading society and the populist hostility towards robots, seen as threatening the social and cultural orders and exposing the fragility of normative identities and values. His very demise is anticipated in the symbol of a robot made of dustbins and tin cans, hung on a gibbet by Nelson’s column during a political march against new rules announced by Tony Benn: that robots should be treated like other citizens, and allowed to take over jobs because of their greater efficiencies and potential wealth creation. In the novel’s hint at the negativities that result

12 James Cantor, The Extreme Future (London: Penguin, 2006): 265. (His predictions are for 2020). 13 Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (London: Polity P, 2016).

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from plebiscites, Adam’s difference could even be read in terms of the xenophobia towards foreigners that followed the 2016 Referendum. Yet the humanoid hero, according to the sales pitch, is “an intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum who could wash dishes, make beds and ‘think’” (MLM, 3); i.e., Adam is capable of meaningful human-robot interactions and companionship, and as a thinking being has independent cognition, and can make moral judgements. His powerful intellect means he succeeds at the stock market, earning in hours amounts that would take Charlie months to acquire, although this highly developed skill, as the novel hints, give him potential power over his owner. The rhetoric suggests that Adam deserves to be respected as “a highly advanced model of artificial human,” exceeding the familiar stereotyping of robots as sex toys although he is “capable of sex” (MLM, 3). But the question of what kind of person he is arises when he demonstrates a manichean black and white morality that is antipathetic to and uncomprehending of emotional complexity; ultimately in the domestic sphere he appears as an alienating presence, reinforcing the layman’s stereotype of robots as little more than “mechanical bodies.”14 The paradoxes of Adam’s synthetic makeup, his highly developed powers of analytical thought, alongside his unpredictable responses to human hopes and desires, cause the novel’s first comic mishap when he intervenes in the newly burgeoning relationship between his surrogate parents. He unwittingly threatens Charlie’s desire for a love affair with Miranda by claiming that he has found out, through his forensic powers to access electronically public documents, that Miranda is unreliable, a “systematic, malicious liar” (MLM, 30). This introduces the novel’s theme of the inconsistency of morality, giving it the quality of film noir,15 for both Charlie and Miranda exhibit moral flaws and questionable behavior that amount to criminal acts; Charlie confesses to being an unapologetic deviser of failed schemes and was earlier involved in a court case over tax evasion, while Miranda has perjured herself in court in order to indict the man who raped her best friend, after having devised her own rape to build a case against him. But McEwan also makes Adam fallible according to the more intricate private codes of romance. Redrawing the line between sex and love, machine and human, black and white morality, he depicts him as having a sexual encounter with Miranda, overheard by Charlie in the flat below (water in his right buttock 14 Edirisinghe and Cheok, “Robots and Intimacies,” 138. 15 Marcel Theroux, “Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan – Intelligent Mischief,” Guardian (April 11, 2019) (acc. 03 March 2020).

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feeds an erection; MLM, 92). Earlier popular stereotypes of pre-humanoid robots are revived in the exchange between Charlie and Miranda that follows, and recall colonial tropes of subalternity; Adam is ‘othered’ in Miranda’s response to her jealous lover, hinting that he was no worse than a dildo (MLM, 91, 95). Charlie, on his part, claims that Adam, incapable of experiencing love, cares for Miranda no more than “a dishwasher cares for its dishes” (MLM, 88). Charlie’s earlier ambivalences in responding to Adam as man-machine are echoed in Miranda’s comment that although she was fascinated by Adam he also repelled her physically (MLM, 22). This psychological distance also resonates with Edirisinghe and Cheok’s findings that humans’ perceptions of intimacies with robots lead to a “self-other” approach, an “over there but not here” distinction, reinforced by negativity at the thought of being attracted to robots and antipathy at personal levels of interaction with them.16 The other side of the coin is that Adam does fall in love, but reduced to subaltern status in this endeavor by Charlie, has no other way to express himself than by writing Miranda 400 haikus – brief minimalist utterances that he values for their “still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are” (MLM, 150) and that, in his vision of a robotic future, will be the only necessary literary form. Adam is a product of an earlier stage of AI technology, determined by Alan Turing’s reverence for the intellect, evidenced by his breakthrough in solving the problems of P versus NP in order to devise “superior neural networks” and “dream[ing] up ever better models of general intelligence” (MLM, 171). For although Adam appears to suffer pain, pleasure and love (though not able to articulate this), however, such experiences are marginalized in this “moral dystopia” in the narrative focus on the damage that he causes Miranda and Charlie.17 Despite his superior knowledge, he makes the wrong decisions and comes to the wrong conclusions in human terms: after warning Charlie not to trust Miranda, yet paradoxically falling in love with her, he later gives away the money Charlie had saved to buy them a house, and later still reports Miranda to the police for having committed perjury. Being literal minded he cannot factor into the equation of right and wrong the problematic of individual codes of behavior and systems that might not conform to his scientifically legalized norm. In the novel’s climax, Charlie smashes his robot with a hammer, dislocating Adam’s life support system, because he feel threatened by his unilateral decision making and belief in uniformity.

16 Edirisinghe and Cheok, “Robots and Intimacies,” 146. 17 Bruce King, “The Testament, Quichotte, Machines like me: People like you” (review article), Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.6 (2019): 866–871, 871.

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Adam’s plight is mirrored in the destiny of the other Adam and Eves, most of whom become fatally disillusioned, finding themselves unsuited to late twentieth-century society, and they use their kill switch to permanently power themselves down. The experiment turns out to be a tragic failure, further evidence that the world is not yet ready for a cybernetic revolution. As the conscience of the digital age, Turing responds to this disaster in terms of the “psychological” damage the replicants suffer: the prevailing ideology is tested and found wanting; both science and the imperfect world, it is implied, must be held accountable: We may be confronting a boundary condition, a limitation we have imposed upon ourselves. We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. (MLM, 180)

The tragedy of the humanoids raises the question of whether a robot like Adam who is virile and seemingly susceptible to the same feelings of love and desire as other men, is able to understand mankind’s emotional makeup. The novel suggests otherwise, although developments in AI consider this very prospect and current research focuses on HRI in which robots initiate conversation and so are capable of developing human-robot relationships based on emotional bonds.18 The fatal outcome of Adam and his sibling Adams and Eves makes Turing hope that the software engineers will develop a more human model in the future, one better adjusted to humanity’s flawed morality and propensity for error. The novel’s representation of the robot in terms of colliding value systems (perfect morality versus messy emotions) and Adam’s demotion in his desire for Miranda to a subordinate functionary while still being valued for his superior intellect because of his capacity for financial earning, points to the debate in scientific research on how to assign machines that are “conscious intelligent entities with capacities exceeding our own” with moral standing equal to that of humans.19 Known as the Turing Test, because inaugurated by Alan Turing in 1950, who claimed it can be conceded that machines can think if they can carry out a conversation, the case for moral standing was made on the grounds of cognitive capacities such as “reasoning, self consciousness, and possession of long term projects”; it has since been revised to consider machines as objects

18 Edirisinghe and Cheok, “Robots and Intimacies,” 138. 19 Sparrow, “Turing Triage Test,” 203.

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of moral concern when they are able to experience pleasure and pain.20 In 2004, Australian philosopher Robert Sparrow placed the concept of the person at the center of a “network of moral emotions and affective responses, such as remorse, grief, sympathy,” and anticipating recent research on embodiment, argued that robots should have “bodies and faces with expressive capacities like those of human form” (as constitutive of our notion of a person), for them to be considered as “worthy of moral respect.”21 Yet Sparrow concedes the very ambivalence that Charlie experiences – as to whether humanoids really experience what they seem to; he argues that robots are incapable of achieving the individual personality towards which such emotions would be oriented (as Charlie finds with Adam who “Without the lifeblood of a personality [. . .] had little to express”; MLM, 26), so until they can mobilize responses like remorse (which Charlie does not feel at ending Adam’s life), and until they are given the expressive capacities of humans, they will be unable to be considered as of equal moral standing.22 Nevertheless Turing’s view, based on his valuing of the human mind, still has relevance in contemporary ethics that also elevates consciousness as a reason for granting rights and legal status to robots; Evan Zimmerman in “Machine Minds,” for example, proposes that “fully conscious entities” should be allowed “to exercise their will.”23 This debate and Sparrow’s concept of a new field of “Android Ethics,”24 provide a contemporary intellectual context by which to view the novel’s parodic “robot ethics,” seen as an imprisoning system, i.e., it consists of the educated aim to build an artificial intelligence that “by roaming over thousands, 20 Sparrow, “Turing Triage Test,” 207, argues, citing Peter Singer, the animal rights philosopher, that this capacity provides prima facie evidence for moral concern, in order to make the case that personhood should not be restricted to human beings (which would be committing “speciesism”). 21 Sparrow, “Turing Triage Test,” 203, revises Turing’s test as the “Turing Triage Test,” i.e., a triage situation in which a choice must be made as to which of two lives to save, given one of these is an artificial being. Sparrow argues that Turing’s original criteria of possessing important cognitive abilities would qualify the robot to pass the test, but his own alternative criteria for the nature of personhood means that machines would not pass the test. 22 However, Levy seems to reproduce the Turing protocol when he asks “if a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not?”; David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots (New York: HarperCollins, 2009): 1, cited by Edirisinghe and Cheok, “Robots and Intimacies,” 138. 23 Cited in Levy, “Why Not Marry a Robot?,” 5. Levy argues that a person does not lack personhood because they have artificial parts – and neither should a robot which is built differently from a human; therefore it should also be ascribed the same rights and protection as a human. 24 Sparrow, “Turing Triage Test,” 203.

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millions of moral dilemmas [. . .] could teach us how to be, how to be good” (MLM, 86). By contrast, Charlie asks why Adam’s “perfectly formed moral system,” according to the “moral maps” provided by the software engineers, cannot accommodate the experience of being an imperfect human: “To exist in the human moral dimension, was to own body, a voice, a pattern of behaviour, memory and desire, experience solid things and feel pain” (MLM, 88).

Brave new world: An “ocean of thought” The novel’s representation of the debate between the flawed human and the assumption of science, that mankind needs reforming by robots, combines metaphors of alienation, estrangement, colonization and unknowability to represent synthetic man, with images from Western thought traditionally used of a new creation: the traditional religious and sacred connotations of Adam, Miranda and the concept of the Golden Age are all undermined. The robot’s name Adam ironically recalls St Paul’s “New Adam” and the New Man, an archetype which in Christian theology represents the salvation of the soul; i.e., the first inhabitant of the new world, who ostensibly is born into salvation and redemption with the chance of a second life; in the teaching of Meister Eckhardt he is “the essence of being or becoming human.”25 This introduces the novel’s entertaining notion that Adam’s “birth” and that of his humanoid siblings will complete a mission to “cure” human fallibility, for philosophers and theorists had the “hope that our own creation would redeem us” (MLM, 87). Likewise the name Miranda, meaning to be amazed but also to be admired, since in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Miranda celebrates mankind and the “brave new world,” gives McEwan’s heroine symbolic meaning as the one who “discovers” Adam’s true manhood. She is also linked to the Biblical Eve because her confession to being curious about having sex with a robot triggers Charlie’s response that such cravings, condemned as forbidden fruit, caused Adam and Eve to be banished from the Garden of Eden (MLM, 95, 97); hence Charlie denounces Adam and promotes himself as fallen man in his place. As well as mockery of these creation and discovery myths, the trope of “the golden age” (MLM, 112) is heralded ironically as society reaping the benefits of technology. Charlie (often a mouthpiece for the narrator) attacks the hubris that AI technology represents, the utopian desire for an improved modern version of

25 Bo Dhalin, “Our Posthuman Futures and Education: Homo Zappiens, Cyborgs and the New Adam,” Futures 44 (2012): 55–63, 56.

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the self, the imitation and betterment of the human race, and even the replacement of the godhead with a perfect self in his own image. Blinkered by familiar anxieties and fears at a robot takeover people are unable to imagine the consequences “as they became more than us” (MLM, 6). Society’s automatization controlled by the ideologically suspect values of research scientists, manufacturers and software engineers, is already marked by nightmarish system failures: massive, prolonged traffic jams of self driving cars occur when the on-board radar fails, or the computer systems linked to satellites go down or are hacked into. Yet in stressing society’s ambivalence and inconsistency in the treatment of robots, the novel raises the question of robot ethics. Robots are despised by those being robbed of a livelihood, both the working classes whose menial jobs they do with greater efficiency, and the professional classes of lawyers and doctors, whom they supersede with their faultless memories and pattern recognition, along with a more ambiguous class of idle unemployed, seen by Charlie as “slaves of time without purpose” (MLM, 46). But they also win respect from politicians and economists and are treated as citizens because of the wealth they create. Robots are either recognized as human or demeaned as objects or tools according to society’s interests, but beyond that they seem to have no rights or negotiating powers. The novel plays a new twist on a familiar theme, the fear of a takeover by machines, recalling the work of the Czech playwright Karel Capek who coined the term robot in 1917 (meaning serf, laborer) and described the evolution of robots with increasing capabilities who eventually revolt against humans.26 Adam’s reductive futuristic vision attacks the very meaning of culture in its aspiration to celebrate people’s irreducible humanity; identical human beings, replicating each other, reading each other’s minds, wired into each other’s brains in a form of telepathy or instantaneous transmission. This threatens to interrupt the hegemonic discourse of the novel genre, that takes its inspiration from the disorder in human lives; as communication will be infallible, and error proof, according to Adam, novels written about “varieties of human failure – of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies” (MLM, 149) will no longer be needed: But when the marriage of men and women to machines is complete, this literature will be redundant because we’ll understand each other too well. We’ll inhabit a community of minds to which we have immediate access. Connectivity will be such that individual nodes of the subjective will merge into an ocean of thought, of which our Internet is the crude precursor. (MLM, 149)

26 Neil G. Hockstein, C.G. Courin, R.A. Faust and D.J. Terris, “A History of Robots: From Science Fiction to Surgical Robotics,” Journal of Robotic Surgery 1 (2007): 113–118, 113–114.

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The privileging of sameness in the human that is a feature of cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, is summed up in the symbol of “an ocean of thought,” representing an anti-humanistic programming of minds through the synchronizing of motive and behavior, and ironing out of human mistakes and complexities to achieve a perfect, harmonious world, with no misunderstanding or disagreement.

Conclusion: Robots and personhood In weighing up the fate of Adam, the novel touches on ethical issues that scientists working in the realm of social robotics are dealing with: What are the laws that intelligent artefacts should live by? Who is responsible for writing and adjudicating them? What are the legal protections and rights of such a person?27 In implying the need of regulation in dealings with robots, the novel indicates the distance society has come since 1942 when science fiction writer Isaac Asimov set out laws for robots in order to protect humans: “1. Do not injure humans. 2. Obey orders. 3. Protect your existence as long as it does not clash with Laws one and two.”28 In the novel’s concluding moments Turing, having celebrated the beauty of pure science in emulating a human brain, demands consideration of how robots may be protected against humans, arguing that they need rules to live in a society “that teems with harmless or even helpful untruths,” and as he points out, the algorithm for telling white lies is yet to be written (MLM, 303). The novel’s epigraph from Kipling’s poem, “The Secret of Machines,” confirms the limits of machine learning: “But remember, please, the Law by which we live, / We are not built to comprehend a lie . . . ” (MLM, n.p.). Moral boundaries need to be established in providing rights and legal protection for robots, and Turing stresses that Charlie should be considered as having committed a crime for having hammered Adam to death. The inconsistency of society’s responses to robots in this early stage of HRI is the subject of what Charlie dismisses as the “Turing protocol,” which claims that, in addressing the question of how this entity can be explained in terms of behavior and feeling, when “we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity upon the machine” (MLM, 84, 94). These problems of Adam’s ambivalent man-machine 27 See, e.g., Mark Coeckelbergh, “Robot Rights? Towards a Social-relational Justification of Oral Consideration,” Ethics and Information Technology 12.3 (2010): 209–221, 209. 28 Hockstein et al., “History,” 113–114; Edirisinghe and Cheok, “Robots and Intimacies,” 138, n.2.

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make-up are reflected in the sliding relationship between signifier and signified in the various definitions and labels of him, as he haphazardly accrues contradictory and incompatible meanings according to interpretations of his appearance and behavior: e.g., as new Adam, humanity’s redeemer, dildo, Bosporus docker, mechanical mind, clever algorithm, miracle of technology. The robot as “floating signifier” recalls Edward Said’s comments on the instability of the term “race” as one which can never be finally fixed and will always be changing according to different contexts of use, in this case ideological, scientific or humanitarian.29 Further, it points to the essential placelessness and social alienation of the machine that lacks human kinship or origins: his true home is the factory where he was assembled and to which his body parts return, not the society in which he operates. Machines Like Me also suggests that human-robot communication and interaction will continue to fluctuate as long as machines are represented as being ‘both like us yet not like us,’ a form of mirroring with barely discernible differences that require new forms of perception, understanding and interpretation that in the world of the novel are not yet available – even to those responsible for AI technology. The dystopian vision suggests that the evolutionary stage represented by the new breed of mechanized man is fundamentally out of kilter, for technology has brought only confusion and disorientation by imposing scientific ideals at odds with social realities. To Charlie and Miranda, Adam’s vision of a future of “private mental space drowned by new technology in an ocean of collective thought” (MLM, 152) represents enslavement to a norm based on duplication, repetition and mirroring, one that threatens their sense of individuality and autonomy. Yet science offers another perspective: despite its anti-humanism Adam’s vision points to one method of technological progress, for the principle of shared knowledge, of pooling the resources of many to create a single, alpha superior mind is precisely what went into the formatting of the AlphaGo robot. Furthermore, the programming of thoughts can include emotions, according to Edirisinghe and Cheok: “humans programmed the robot, giving it a cognitive platform, thus controlling the feelings and behaviour platforms.”30 Although Machines Like Me’s dark vision of 1982 does not reach any better understanding of the relationship between men and machines, reading against the grain of the text encourages consideration of the forward thrust of AI research and how it challenges the concept of personhood by

29 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993): 2. 30 Edirisinghe and Cheok, “Robots and Intimacies,” 138.

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reshaping our assumptions about collective human capability, as in the concept of “electronic personhood”31; in hypothesizing a robotic future and addressing the question of the moral worth of robots, it is likely that attributing emotions to them, as well as valuing the synchronized sharing of thoughts and minds will demand some further reconfiguration of what it is to be human.

31 See Levy, “Why not Marry a Robot?,” 5, citing Christophe Leroux et al, Suggestions for a Green Paper on Legal Issues in Robotics (2012), that robots can have an “artificial personality [. . .] and a certain ‘tangible symbol’ for the cooperation of all the people creating and using that specific robot.”

Book Reviews

Sarah C. Bishop. Undocumented Storytellers: Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 228 pp. ISBN 9780190917166, GBP22.99. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-013

The recent years have seen a surge in academic publications that focus on how the undocumented community advocates for their rights in the United States. Unlike the broader undocumented population that is often described as existing “in the shadows,”1 since the turn of the millennium – and often in connection with the introduction of the DREAM Act in 2001 – particularly undocumented youths have become increasingly vocal about their demands for social and legal inclusion. Most of the recent literature that concerns the undocumented community therefore coincides with or concerns the rise of the undocumented youth movement since the turn of the millennium and addresses the various ways undocumented people have struggled for rights and personhood since then. Also, Sarah C. Bishop’s 2019 monograph Undocumented Storytellers: Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement joins the ranks of these works, providing a timely exploration of undocumented voices and storytelling. Notably, and in contrast to other works that have approached the topic either purely sociologically or ethnographically, Bishop draws from a mixed methodology, by combining in-depth interviews and criticalrhetorical ethnographies with an elaborate narrative analysis. Moreover, and again in contrast to similar publications,2 Bishop’s study is geographically specific, while broad in scope, when it comes to intersectionality: While all her interviewees have been raised or live in New York, the use of an intersectional lens, focusing on migrants from not only Mexico and Central American countries but also Colombia, Bangladesh, South Korea, Philippines, and Hungary, enables Bishop to illustrate the multiplicity of narratives of undocumentedness, which can hardly be 1 See Leo R. Chavez, Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society Fort (Worth, Tex.: Harcourt & Jovanovich, 1998); Roberto G. Gonzales, “Born in the shadows: the uncertain futures of the children of unauthorized Mexican migrants,” PhD dissertation (Irvine, University of California, Irvine, 2008). Carola Suárez-Orozco, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Robert R. Ternashi, and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, “Growing up in the shadows: the developmental implications of unauthorised status,” Harvard Educational Review 81.3 (2011): 438–471. 2 Amongst others, see Sarah Mahler, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jason Pribilsky, La Chulla Vida: Gender, Migration, and the Family in Andean Ecuador and New York City (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007); Robert Smith, Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006); Alyshia Galvez, Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

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subsumed under labels such as ‘DREAMer or ‘successful undocumented college student.’ The book consists of four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The arguments about undocumented storytelling that Bishops presents are all based on material she collected through forty semi-structured, in-depth oral interviews with undocumented migrants from eighteen unique nations of origin in New York from May 2015 to November 2016. When useful, Bishop combines the insights from her in-depth interviews with critical-rhetorical ethnographies of events, organized by undocumented migrants, and narratological analyses of migrant-produced digital media. Bishop clarifies this mixed methodology in her introduction, where she also explicates the role of narrative and narrative structures for undocumented migrants, both in their daily lives and in activism. The book’s introduction immediately immerses the reader in the present realities of undocumented migrants in New York and contrast those with the current problematic socio-political realities in the United States: While under President Obama and with the introduction of DACA and the Dream Act, the stance towards undocumented youths had become at least slightly benevolent, since the election of President Trump, both programs were threatened to be ended immediately, hence marginalizing the undocumented community and exposing them to an increased risk of deportation again. Following this contextualization, Bishop combines existing frameworks, such as Leo Chavez’s “mythical ‘truths’ about immigrants,”3 with traditional concepts by Roland Barthes and Stuart Hall,4 and her own observations to theorize what she calls “reclaimant narratives,” that is, “the experiential, partial, public, oppositional, and incondensable stories that marginalized individuals use to assert their right to speak and reframe audience understanding” (30). Bishop also emphasizes that her subsequent critique of undocumented storytelling is less celebratory then other paradigms that suggest storytelling can lead to increased chances at immigration reform5; quite to the contrary, the following four chapters focus on both the merits and limitations of storytelling for the undocumented community. For Bishop, such an investigation has to start not by looking right away at undocumented activism, but by how migrants learn the story of their migration history, a topic she elaborates on in Chapter 2. The chapter focusses not only

3 Chavez, Shadowed Lives, 7. 4 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972); Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 1997). 5 Cf., e.g., Walter Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989).

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on the moment migrant subjects learn of their undocumentedness, but also how they rediscover their own story of coming to the United States narratively. Bishop hence focusses both on private and public accounts of such migration histories, and how the two differ: In interaction with parents and others, trauma work and emotional healing might be at the heart of the storytelling experience, and the migrant subject might not “translate her experiences into a reclaimant narrative to be shared publicly” (61); because as an audience or speaker at a public event, undocumented migrants oftentimes have to recraft their representations, or at least adapt them significantly. In addition to this juxtaposition of private and public storytelling, this first analytical section of the book establishes how the role of narrative in the immigrant rights context puts both storytellers and stories at risk: When undocumented young people come to see themselves as part of the story of immigrant activism and begin to share their experiences [ . . . their] decision is a weighty one; when immigrants use their selves – that is, their experiences, emotions, and fears–as the material for story crafting, they put their very lives on the line. This is not a legally protected form of activism such as the constitutions right of citizens to exercise free speech, but instead a vulnerable one. (80–81)

In Chapter 3, Bishop piggybacks on this observation by tracing the stories of activist narrators, i.e., how private stories of undocumentedness are translated into activist narratives in a highly sensitive context. This enables Bishop, quite in contrast to other scholarly observations, to question her narrators not only about the stories they use, but also about the limitations the undocumented community realizes themselves when fighting for immigrant rights. Quite in contrast to the personal migration histories in Chapter 2, undocumented activists must always “conceive of and negotiate narrative frames and strategies toward the goal of immigration reform” (see book abstract). Chapter 2 proves the significance of this perspective, as the subjects observe of the many ways they themselves have campaigned for narrative shifts in the forming of their messages. The chapter hence also proves that in a public context, narratives are worked on constantly, and undocumented storytelling has changed significantly since the first rise of the undocumented youth movement in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chapter 4 then also concerns public storytelling, but changes the channel of communication to activism online: Since an engagement with the public automatically sets the undocumented community at risk, undocumented activism traditionally was situated in Forums on the internet and continues to do so, particularly because the pressure of deportation has once again risen in the United States. Moreover, many undocumented migrants do not have access to professional employment or higher education, and on the internet, “production

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costs are low, amateur professionalism is the norm, and the option of anonymity is still vaguely present” (108). As Bishop observes together with her subjects, narrating undocumentedness in digital spaces once again differs significantly from the narrations investigated in the first two chapters (private, in an activist setting), as the stories’ volume and availability in digital spaces put them at risk of inviting sedentary bingeing and even voyeurism. [. . .] The prevalence of digital narrative activism allows users of digital technology to acquire intimate knowledge of the lives of others without ever having to engage in conversation or make contact. (130)

Digital storytelling, Bishop concludes, is thus situated between the opportunity to “abate isolation, engage in communal coping, and advocate for reform” (130) and the risks such exposure in a digital realm entail. In the following and last chapter, Bishop then turns from undocumented storytellers to their often-documented audiences; to be sure, her aim here is it not to evaluate the effectiveness or effect undocumented stories have on documented audiences, but to illuminate “how undocumented storytellers conceive of and characterize their audiences” (26). It appears that Bishop’s subjects are acutely aware of the ways both knowledge and ignorance is spread through information about immigration in the United States. Accordingly, the undocumented subjects “expressed discomfort and frustration with the negative effects of stark omissions in the portrayals of immigrants in US Media” (142). The fifth chapter thus ties back to the third, exposing the fact that in contrast to private storytelling, activist narrators are automatically exposed to audiences with hostility or at least a lack of understanding for their cause. All in all, Bishop’s Undocumented Storytellers: Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement thus provides a critical exploration of personal, theoretical and pragmatic motives that influence the ways undocumented migrants narrate their immigration stories. In parallel to others, Bishop observes how migrant storytelling almost always refutes mainstream discourses on immigration.6 She, however, also goes beyond that investigation of activist storytelling, by tracing narrative choices in personal and online storytelling, and, by doing so, is able to contrast different storytelling strategies in different realms. This marks the core strength of Bishop’s work, as her research strives to tell an integrated story by picking up different 6 See, e.g., Walter J. Nicholls, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013); Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple UP, 2002); Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

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perspectives of undocumented storytelling: in private, in public, in an activist setting, online, and by questioning audience perception. By doing so, Bishop is able to uncover several tensions: the internal tumult between the undocumented community at large and their more politically engaged activist population; the gap in understanding one’s migration history versus how one’s parents see it; or the difference between how a migration history is shared online versus in private. Undocumented storytelling, thus, is anything but standardized, consistent, or uniform. Rather, it appears significantly different depending on context, narrator, and medium. Obviously, Bishop’s work is bound by the moment in time that it spans and the particular experiences of undocumented youths and activists in New York. As such, Bishop’s experiential insights do not allow her to present a uniquely global – or even American – understanding of undocumented storytelling, as the title perhaps suggests. While the book’s conclusion begins to hint at the potential gravitas of tying undocumented storytelling to other geographical, historical and transnational contexts, the text does not consistently capitalize on this avenue of thought. Instead, it uses a more narrowly focused and deliberate manner for telling the story of undocumented activists in one migrant community hot-spot, New York. It follows that the book achieves an uncommon balance of varied voices within the undocumented community in one specific location and for that very location successfully traces “the paths of undocumented storytelling as it appears throughout varied contexts in immigrant rights discourse” (25). Ina Batzke

Universität Augsburg

Sandra Dinter. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. 221 pp. ISBN: 9780367361938, GBP 115.00. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-014

Sandra Dinter’s first monograph Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel probes a genre that has largely eluded scholarly attention, namely the contemporary ‘childhood novel’ targeted at an adult audience. In drawing on Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, which has been widely neglected in analyses of literary childhoods so far, and Jürgen Link’s models of ‘interdiscourse’ and ‘normality,’ Dinter provides an innovative contribution to the field of literary childhood studies. In her study, she proceeds from the assumption that “the constructivist paradigm shift that transformed scholarship on childhood three decades ago and now provides a standard approach in the field is equally discernible in contemporary English fiction” (8). Instead of covering a broad range of texts, the author offers compelling close readings of six contemporary childhood novels: Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988), P.D. James’s The Children of Men (1992), Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998), Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011) and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (2011) – a corpus which displays “formal and thematic heterogeneity” (16) in addressing the topic of childhood in contemporary fiction. Following an introductory chapter, Dinter’s second chapter is centrally concerned with Foucault’s discourse theory and Link’s models of ‘interdiscourse’ and ‘normality.’ Drawing on Foucault’s notion of discourse, the author looks more closely at the link between discourse and power, the subversive potential of the former and the historical relativity of discourses. Moreover, she elaborates on non-discursive domains and Foucault’s dispositif. Since Foucault objects to interpretation in his theory, a stance which is considerably at odds with practices in literary studies, Dinter reverts to Link’s subdivision of discourse into three types, according to which literature is an interdiscourse. This approach is complemented by his ideas on normalism (‘protonormalism’ and ‘flexible normalism’), as “novels often denaturalise childhood by exposing and questioning its underlying apparatus of normalism” (36–37). Throughout the chapter, she consistently highlights the relevance of both Foucault’s and Link’s ideas for childhood studies whilst pointing to the implications relevant to her close readings. The fruitful combination of Foucault’s and Link’s ideas allows Dinter to expand the repertoire of approaches in literary studies on childhood.

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Her chapter on “Constructions of Childhood in Late Modern England, 1980s–2010s” centres on crucial historical, cultural and legislative developments in what the author regards as ‘the contemporary,’ i.e. the selected timeframe of her study. Drawing on Ulrich Beck, Dinter explains that the late modern period was instigated by a change towards “a risk society” (43), where social risks are, as critics suggest, “related to two major shifts: individualisation and detraditionalisation” (44; original emphasis). Childhood in this period, the author argues, is at risk and at the same time risky, an idea to which she repeatedly returns in her case studies. Subdividing the period under scrutiny along general elections and changes in government, she explores significant cultural and legislative changes affecting and influencing the perception of childhood. Among these are not only changes in family structures and the commercialisation of childhood, but also severe cases of child abuse and murder such as the Bulger case in 1993 and the Climbié case in 2000 that shaped and influenced the political and cultural climate in Britain considerably. In this overview, Dinter provides an informed and detailed outlook on major changes regarding the family, parents’ responsibilities and childhood as a whole and establishes the cultural context relevant to her case studies. This overview will, beyond doubt, be of special value for scholars and students analysing fictional representations of children, childhood and the family in this specific period. Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time is examined in the first case study and described as a text that is “critical of and simultaneously perpetuates [. . .] essentialist constructions of childhood” (68). In her analysis, Dinter sees the Commission of Childcare as a prime example of Foucault’s ideas on discourse and the dispositif, because its members, as discursive authorities, generate various contradictory statements about childhood. Moreover, she regards the handbook they are to produce as “a manifesto of [Link’s] protonormalism” (72) and a text according to which “children are inherently ‘abnormal’” (73). After looking at the school and Stephen’s encounter with the beggar girl, who “undermines the government’s view of childhood” (77), she considers the ‘return’ of Stephen’s friend (Charles Darke) to childhood as a grown-up man as a performance of a Romantic childhood. She reads the ending of The Child in Time, i.e. the birth of Julie and Stephen’s second child, as a “return to essentialist concepts” (83) of childhood and maintains that, “[i]n this unFoucauldian closing scene, discourse is identified as that which distorts a ‘real’ and ‘unconstructed’ childhood, rather than that which constitutes childhood in the first place” (85) and thus highlights the novel’s complex engagement with the topic of childhood. In having a closer look at relevant key scenes in this text, Dinter provides a persuasive analysis and interpretation of

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McEwan’s novel and demonstrates the productive ways in which Foucault’s and Link’s ideas can be applied to literary texts. In her subsequent chapter, Dinter examines Doris Lessing’s novella The Fifth Child. In her inspiring reading of Lessing, the author departs from existing criticism in that she looks at the “metaconstructivist portrayal of childhood” (88) rather than employing an essentialist view on and ‘pathologising’ the titular fifth child Ben. After elaborating on the maternal point of view offered in The Fifth Child, Dinter scrutinises the Lovatt parents, Harriet and David, who reject the paradigms of late modernity and flexible normativity in their attitudes and choice of house. In their Victorian house, Dinter argues, they “naturalise their concept of the traditional heteronormative nuclear family and their notion of a ‘proper’ childhood” (94) and express their essentialist and protonormalist stance. She also asserts that Ben’s ‘abnormality’ is presented in relation to the ‘normality’ of his siblings, who embody and conform to Romantic conceptions of childhood. Dinter illustrates that Ben does not undergo typical developmental stages and identifies developmental psychology and biology as discourses informing the text. Despite his mother’s desire to have her son’s abnormality verbally expressed and acknowledged by discursive authorities, he remains in the zone of ‘flexible normalism,’ which widely contradicts the Lovatts’ perception of Ben. In its irresolution to offer an ‘absolute truth’ about Ben’s condition, Dinter posits, the text offers a deconstructivist view of Ben’s childhood. At the end of her chapter, the author also glimpses at Lessing’s sequel Ben, in the World (2000) and concludes that “Lessing’s drastic constructivism [in The Fifth Child] turned out to be only a temporary thought experiment” (103) that eventually warranted resolution and closure. In “The Constructed Child as a Counter Model,” Dinter turns to an author in whose oeuvre childhood plays a minor role only, that is, P.D. James. Her novel The Children of Men projects a future scenario in which childhood has disappeared altogether and humanity faces extinction. Throughout this chapter, Dinter claims that, although the text “adopts counter-hegemonic and constructivist perspectives on childhood, it ends by refuting these” (106) and introduces Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” (109) as an approach to explore the novel’s engagement with childhood. In her analysis, the author outlines the male protagonist Theo’s attitudes and views towards childhood. Moreover, she looks at “various discursive and non-discursive sites” (113) involved in the construction of childhood and highlights that not only these but “virtually every discourse and every institution seem to be on the verge of collapse” (114), including the monarchy, the church and democracy. In The Children of Men, children are hence considered essential in “maintain[ing] modernity in all its complex forms” (115) and are central to the social order of

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society. In this society without children, “[t]he discourse of childhood is projected onto animals” (116) and women use dolls as substitutes for children. In addition, Dinter focuses on the novel’s Christian narrative, when Julian miraculously bears a child, which serves “as a catalyst for an adult character’s [Theo’s] conversion to Christianity” (120), and observes that the birthing scene positions the child as saviour. The author’s selection and interpretation of James’ novel draws attention to a fundamental aspect of literary childhood studies, namely that childhood can be defined by the presence as well as by the physical absence of children. Dinter’s analysis of Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998) centres on its “nonessentialist approach to the child and adult” (126). She argues that the novel reflects its cultural context of production and elaborates on ‘lad lit’ as a literary form of the ‘Cool Britannia’ discourse. Her examination focuses on the alternating focalizers Will, a ‘childish’ adult, and Marcus, a precocious child, and their performed masculine identities. She claims “that what comes across as a pleasant symbiotic friendship between Will and Marcus facilitates a harsh process of reciprocal normalisation of their initially ‘deviant’ masculinities that endorses, in its affirmative depiction of consumerism, the logic of late capitalism” (129). She analyses Will who becomes a sort of father figure for Marcus and initiates the boy’s transformation and “process of defeminisation” (140) by providing him with the material assets and knowledge that will end the bullying he has to endure at his protonormalist school. Moreover, Dinter criticises the novel’s hostile stance towards and problematic depiction of single motherhood. In its rigid focus on heterosexual masculinity, the author maintains, the novel “does not open up the possibilities for a pluralism of childhood” (136), because the successful performance of ‘correct’ childhood means conforming to certain norms. The ending of the novel, Dinter argues, serves as an affirmation of “late modern childhood as a harsh normalisation process according to the principles of consumerism” (142) rather than a genuine critique of it. Dinter’s examination of both childhood and masculinity in this chapter proves highly rewarding and stresses the pivotal role of gender in analyses of fictional childhoods, which is an aspect that has hitherto played a subordinate role in her monograph. In her next chapter, Dinter examines Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011), which is a novel that “brings together a fictional plot and critical literature” (146) about childhood and presents “a complex metaperspective of the history of childhood” (148). Dinter proceeds with an analysis of several epigraphs featured in the text, which provide quotations from books by child psychologists of the twentieth century and other sources. These epigraphs function “as discursive positions from which Anna’s [the protagonist] behaviour and her relationship with her children can be judged” (151) and suggest that her attitudes

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towards parental responsibilities and motherhood run counter to hegemonic conceptions. In addition to the epigraphs, Anna’s academic writing and in particular her historical study on childhood provide a metadiscursive position and suggest that “Anna understands childhood as a partially constructed and partially natural state” (154). In chronicling Anna’s writing process, the novel shows that academic discourse is a construct, which the author sets in the context of Hayden White’s observations on the (dis)similarities between narrative in historiography and fiction. Moreover, Dinter shows that the skeletal remains of the child Anna finds in the garden remain “exempt from her critical historiographical thoughts” (159) and prompt a natural motherly impulse in her. She concludes her chapter with a closer look at Anna’s two boys, Raphael and Timothy, and provides two possible readings of the novel. The analysis of the function of the epigraphs and the examination of Anna’s academic study on childhood are a particular strength of this chapter and suitably consolidate the author’s interpretation of this text in the overall context of the contemporary childhood novel. In her final chapter, Dinter turns to Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (2011), the least constructivist novel of her case studies and a council estate novel that “seeks to alert its readers to pressing social deficits and envisions better conditions for children living in impoverished areas of England” (169). A considerable extent of this chapter focuses on the functions and implications of first-person child narrators and on the autodiegetic narrator, eleven-year-old Harri. As an embodiment of Romantic notions of childhood innocence, he is at risk in the social environment of the estate, where he is eventually stabbed to death. Dinter asserts that “Harri is presented as a victim of other ‘risky’ child characters and of a dysfunctional institutional apparatus that fails to look after children” (168). She substantiates her claim by close readings of several passages of the novel, including confrontations with peers, Harri’s working-class family, the pigeon and his precarious condition on the estate, a place which is characterised by a lack of natural spaces and hence “unsuitable for the Romantic childhood which Harri epitomises” (179). In addition, Dinter looks at the ending of the novel, which emphasises that “[a]lthough Pigeon English is in many respects consistent and straightforward in its hegemonic construction of Harri as an innocent child in the Romantic tradition, it does gesture towards an understanding of this kind of childhood as a discursive construct” (183). With her examination of Kelman’s novel in particular, Dinter reinforces the thematic and formal diversity of her corpus, which is especially apparent in the narrative situation as well as the council estate setting. Throughout her study, Dinter employs an intriguing theoretical angle to approach fictional childhoods in contemporary fiction, which, beyond doubt, will

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pave the way for future research in this direction. The highly inspiring close readings of the six novels emphasise the intricate ways in which each of them engages with the topic of childhood and reinforce that the individual novels are worthwhile being studied on their own. The many references to other contemporary childhood novels establish a broader frame of reference and bolster the author’s observations. Throughout the individual chapters and the study as a whole, Dinter’s line of argument remains convincing and coherent. Finally, the book’s appendix, which contains a chronological overview of contemporary Anglophone childhood novels covering the time from 1979 to 2019, is another merit of Dinter’s monograph and will be of particular interest for those working in the field. Denise Burkhard

University of Bonn

Johannes Riquet. The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 384 pp. ISBN 0198832419, GBP 19.99. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-015

Johannes Riquet’s monograph has a capacious and promising title: The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics. Research on aesthetics has resurged in anglophone literary studies in recent years, leaving behind both New Criticism and New Formalism to explore new ways of understanding the social and political significance of forms. Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierachy, Network (2017) and Anna Kornbluh’s more recent The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (2019) come to mind. With an interest in experience, materiality, and above all perception, Riquet brings to the study of aesthetics a phenomenological approach. He also explains that his project is inspired by Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s and George B. Handley’s call for an “aesthetics of the earth” in their preface to the edited collection Postcolonial Ecologies (2011); and it follows Terry Eagleton’s contention that aesthetics can be both maintaining and challenging ideology. Over the last ten years, scholarship on islands, archipelagos, and the sea has expanded and diversified significantly. In postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, scholarship on islands has been well-established: the work of Edouard Glissant, Epeli Hau‘ofa, Kamau Brathwaite, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo has provided philosophical and theoretical key concepts such as Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” or Glissant’s “archipelagic thinking”; the field of Island Studies – spearheaded by publications by Baldacchino, Stratford, Deloughrey, for example – consolidated interdisciplinary research, which also soon included literary studies more specifically. Signaled by publications such as Hester Blum’s 2010 “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies,” moreover, scholarship also turned to a serious interrogation of the oceans as more than just the stage for human drama. More recently, Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens have made a compelling case for Archipelagic American Studies that would both counter what they call the continentalist bias in American Studies as well as “mediate the phenomenology of humans’ cultural relation to the solid and liquid materiality of geography.”1 Riquet’s book is therefore a welcome contribution to this growing and diverse field of scholarship.

1 Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2017): 7.

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Adapting his basic premise from the works of Frank Lestringant and John R. Gillis, Riquet holds that “the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space” (7–8). Building on this observation, The Aesthetics of Island Space is committed to explore the ways in which “this disruption is registered and negotiated by both fictional and non-fictional responses” (8). In order to show how the material existence of island spaces has disrupted hegemonic models of global space, Riquet examines how island space is produced at the intersection of perception as well as textual and geomorphological production. In this way, he sets out to close two research gaps in the study of islands and island spaces: one is the lack of attention to islands as “watery land” that he detects in previous scholarship, which he seeks to amend by paying special attention to “the implications of including water in a conception of islands” throughout his analyses (8); the other (and more central one) is the lack of attention to the disruptive influence of island spaces on the “Western imagination” (7; emphasis mine). He maintains that postcolonial studies have focused predominantly on the ways in which the colonial imagination constructed islands as isolated, bounded spaces that could easily be subjected to fantasies of control and imperial power (the classical trope of the ‘desert island’), but have neglected the ways in which the material, geological reality of islands offered significant resistance to this imagination in the first place. By pursuing the latter, his study aims to introduce its readers to neglected figurations of islands in the “Western imagination.” Accordingly, each of the four chapters examines one specific figuration of island space across the centuries. Chapter One explores islands figured as gateways to the New World and focuses on the island space’s role in narratives of migration or, put differently, of arrival as well as departure. Chapter Two examines the island as a destination in its own right: “as destinations seen and imagined from a distance” (34) and as figured aesthetically as closed and bounded entities. Chapter Three and Four start from the premise that islands are “lived and living spaces” (28): Chapter Three shows how islands (and more specifically archipelagos) have contested boundaries, both politically and geographically. To examine islands in this sense, the chapter proposes a model for engaging aesthetically with islands that is based on Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry and “a fluid and mobile spatiality rather than boundedness and immobility” (26). In a similar vein, Chapter Four takes an archipelagic perspective on islands that it adapts from Steve Jones’ The Darwin Archipelago (2011) and it concludes with a discussion of geopoetics and geocriticism. Each of the chapter is organized around a geographical marker, such as islands that lead to the New World (Chapter One), tropical islands (Chapter Two),

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islands and archipelagos in the Pacific Northwest (Chapter Three), and archipelagos all over the world (Chapter Four). To some extent, this focus can provide coherence for the otherwise diverse material. Because each of the chapter covers material from periods of exploration and discovery to present day films and literature, as well as material produced under very different circumstances and for very different audiences. To give an example, Chapter One starts from the poetry written by Chinese immigrants on Angel Island (San Francisco Bay) and photographs taken of immigrants on Ellis Island (New York Harbor) in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century; proceeds to examine the mobile, shifting islands described in The Voyage of Saint Brendan (sixth century AD) and Christopher Columbus’ accounts of his voyages to the New World; turns to a reading of “spatial indeterminacy” (59) and “sensory confusion” (61) in Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and concludes with a reading of (im)migration, arrival, and departure in Cecil B. DeMille’s film Male and Female (1919). The advantage of such range is that we get a sense of the persistent affordances of island space in terms of mobility (though not of development or transformation); yet such range also means that quite a lot gets dealt with quite quickly and not always coherently. The problem of bringing such diverse material into a fruitful dialogue also pertains to some degree to the four chapters themselves. While analytically persuasive, the differentiation of island space into four figurations ultimately seems artificial. One gets the impression that the book consists of two parts: The first two chapters examine well-researched figurations of island space, the island as isolated, bounded entity as well as a moving, wandering object of colonial conquest and subjectivity. The last two chapters take an archipelagic perspective and show islands as porous, networked, and unstable entities, as “lived and living spaces” (28). But there is considerable overlap in the results of his analyses in both parts. For example, is the island’s ability to afford narratives of arrival and departure (Chapter One) not ultimately a property of its porous, open nature (Chapter Three) as well? Is it not precisely because the island figures simultaneously as an isolated entity and a node in a network that it can afford both movement and stasis, migration and imprisonment, and so forth? Accordingly, Riquet’s analysis of Shakespeare’s Tempest in Chapter One highlights the characters’ experience of “spatial indeterminacy” (59) while his analysis of the same text in Chapter Three points out how the island’s shore is figured as “a truly liminal zone” (180). Yet, ultimately these properties may be two sides of the same coin that perhaps could be discussed more productively in one place. Similarly, the benefit of focusing exclusively on the neglected moments of disruption in the Western imagination does not become fully apparent. For one

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thing, those moments of disruption tend to be eminently brief and “intermittent” (195). For example, examining “fuzzy zones” between land and water as represented in George Vancouver’s 1789 map of Northwestern America and as described in his travel account, Riquet shows how Vancouver’s journal “describes his immersion in an intricate space of coasts, islands, inlets, and channels, in a perplexing watery land he cannot yet comprehend” (195). The text gives evidence of how the San Juan archipelago rendered Vancouver’s sense of space uncertain and hazy, as he describes his passage among the islands, and the map figures “fuzzy zones” instead of coastlines where Vancouver remained uncertain as to the contours of islands. Yet, Riquet notes, “Vancouver ultimately succeeded in fixing these boundaries with remarkable accuracy, and his text veers towards establishing complete spatial orientation in analogy to the firmly drawn lines on the map” (195). Exploring such brief glimpses of instability and openness in the Western imagination alone seems an unnecessary limitation. Given the otherwise wide range of texts that the book covers one can imagine a more comparative approach that would include non-Western texts to better understand the differences or similarities in the affective and aesthetic responses to such uncertainties, for example. Such an approach would also have been more appropriate to the capaciousness of the book’s title. This observation also pertains to Riquet’s positioning of his book and his approach within the fields of discipline and research. While he explains that his book draws on the work of Greg Dening, Hau‘ofa, and Deloughrey, he also explains that, while The Aesthetics of Island Space is inspired by island studies, [. . .] it does not aim to study islands exclusively on their own terms. It cannot do so because it does not discuss real islands, at least not primarily [. . .]. I can, however, study islands on the terms set forth by the texts and the films themselves. (11)

This is a surprising contention given the book’s interest in the role that islands’ “material existence” (19) has played in their perception and aestheticization. It is also, once more, an artificial and unnecessary differentiation given the interdisciplinary and vibrant nature of the scholarship of island studies, as well as Archipelagic American Studies and the Blue Humanities, for example. This scholarship often moves fluidly and transnationally through fiction, law, anthropology, geology, poetry, and so forth. Among the works that seem most relevant to Riquet’s project are Deloughrey’s Roots and Routes (2007), which Riquet acknowledges as having had a strong influence on his book and which is particularly relevant to his analyses in Chapter One; as well as titles that he does not include, for example Steve Mentz’s Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (2015) and Marc Shell’s Islandology (2014), as well as the more recent scholarship

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mentioned above, such as Roberts’ and Stephens’ edited collection Archipelagic American Studies. Ultimately, Riquet’s book will be of value to scholars working in the fields of English and American Studies, as well as, more broadly, Island Studies and the Blue Humanities. Its omissions, in turn, certainly invite further study of the archipelagic and (sub)marine aesthetics of islands. Stefanie Mueller

Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main

Lyndsey Stonebridge. Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 272 pp. ISBN 9780198797005, GBP25. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-016

If we should start telling the truth [. . .], it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while; since society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates [. . .] are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction.1

Thus spoke Hannah Arendt in 1943. At the time, she had already begun making a stance as a public intellectual in New York City, where she was moving in influential circles among writers, academics, and émigré companions. Yet the cultural cachet of that new world of hers notwithstanding, Arendt knew devastatingly well what she was talking about when crafting her indictment. It was first published in the Menorah Journal in a bitter essay titled “We Refugees,” and, sweeping as it may sound, Arendt was reporting out of her own experience as a Jewish refugee who had managed to escape Europe and the rampant Nazi terror some two years earlier. Previously, in a formative and precarious phase of exilic activism, she had written on philosophy and politics, while fighting for the Zionist cause; she had also seen friends pass away, spent time in a French internment camp, and in the process pondered suicide. Crucially, when crying out against a new era of global politics that premised humanitarian protection on passport possession, she was drawing on her most intimate knowledge of what it meant to be a stateless person, a condition that had haunted her life since her flight from Nazi Germany in 1933 and that would persist until she received American citizenship in 1951. It is necessary to bear some of that context in mind when one tackles Lyndsey Stonebridge’s fulminant Placeless People, a staggering archeology of the mid-century European intellectual imaginary of an unfolding age of mass displacement. Stonebridge calls her study a “historical snapshot of the modern literary history of statelessness” (25), a designation that both is somewhat idiosyncratic and provides the condition for her rich, most thought-provoking material and analysis. To speak here of a “literary history” is unconventional to the extent that Stonebridge considers not only prose and poetry to be part of

1 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007): 273.

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her project, but also non-fictional work like political theory, philosophical treatise, and essayistic cultural reflection. This, then, opens up an immense textual archive to the author, a newly excavated canon of writing that goes beyond narratives of flight and migration, toward a multi-perspectival kaleidoscope of mutually reflective and refractive inquiries into the nature of uprootedness. Perhaps most importantly to Stonebridge herself, her broad approach allows her to include Hannah Arendt in her corpus – or make her its uncircumventable key figure, to be exact. Stonebridge holds the Interdisciplinary Chair of Humanities and Human Rights at Birmingham University. Having worked on intersecting topics from modernist literary history, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, through this publication she distinguishes herself as a leading expert in Arendt scholarship. Already in her preceding The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (2011) did she use Arendt’s thinking as a cornerstone of a women’s literary discourse that re-imagined concepts of justice in the face of postwar failures in international law and human rights. Placeless People again traces intellectual responses to historic and largescale political collapse. Its point of departure is the international community’s unwillingness and systemic inability to accommodate the millions of stateless people who were wandering the ruined European hinterlands and civic twilight zones in the context of two world wars. The book’s backbone thesis, condensed to its existential extreme, is that “to be stateless [means] to be rightless” (4), and it identifies the development of the nation-state, and its toxic significant other, nationalism, as the root cause for that vile reality. More specifically, in Arendtian tradition it postulates a central fault and selfcontradiction to be lying at the very beginning of modern international humanitarianism. For, as the argument goes, in a grand attempt to remedy the chaos and confusion created by the great wars, such core human rights treaties as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Geneva Convention (1951) were designed to henceforth guarantee rights protection in structural interlinkage with citizenship status. But this would leave a foundational gap with regard to those who, like Arendt, had lost or could not prove their citizenship, and who, stripped off political representation and agency, in turn became dependent on a new humanitarian regime. As a consequence that, until today, has turned out terrible to uncounted human beings, the “Rights of Man” – once idealistically perceived as universal and inalienable – for the stateless became a contingent matter of negotiation: bureaucratically to be granted, or not, by (supra-)national authorities; debatable and tradeable, exploitable and even revocable in the global arena of realpolitik. Stonebridge, who also considers this process of rights commodification in its longue durée, puts it promptly and compellingly:

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Whilst the refugees of the 1930s and 1940s raised the spectre of rightlessness [. . .], those who followed have tended to find themselves tumbling out of politics and history and into, at best, an often precarious humanitarianism, at worst, a zero degree or “bare-life” existence. (2–3)

Re-addressing here those “nothing but” human beings who are recognized in Hannah Arendt’s opening quote, the author within such a conceptual framework on one hand re-visits “arguments about the impossibility of legislating for human rights in a world of sovereign nations” (4). Yet beyond this move, what makes Placeless People so original and captivating is Stonebridge’s exploration of how the mid-century literati who, early on, understood the new scandal of statelessness would confront it head-on in acts of creative de- and reconstruction. After her relative in-breadth and in-depth treatment of Arendt’s position, which covers almost the first third of the study, she devotes chapters to George Orwell, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Thompson, W.H. Auden, and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. These are continuously complemented by pertinent smaller dispatches from the life and thought of numerous further authors and artists, of which those on Joseph Conrad, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, Primo Levi, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, André Green and Sigmund Freud, as well as, above all, Edward Said are the most evocative. Stonebridge’s vibrant diction is beautiful indeed, and her method is, to an extent, Socratic. As she develops her ideas, oftentimes she first presents a quote or concept, and puts it aside again for a moment, only to then re-contextualize and revise it in new argumentative light, and hence to progressively re-invest it with meaning. Her bookspanning leitmotif, in this sense, is the “dark background of mere givenness,” an Arendtian idiom to indicate the pre-political life without the right to have rights, and in line with that dialectic proceeding, Stonebridge also puts all of the thinkers she investigates in constant dialogue with her spokeswoman. In addition, Stonebridge as a rule interconnects the works she examines with their authors’ immediate biographical and historical contexts. This establishes more than a suggestive backdrop. As she shows, for each individual in this group, writing was an imperative, existential endeavor to come to terms with a life lived amidst calamities witnessed – and further unfolding. Stonebridge argues that their self-set “task was to forge a style capable of responding to the new rightlessness” (20). This might come at a certain cost of precision, since juridical categories – say, “refugee” or “statelessness” – remain less strictly defined in their literary rendition. Yet it is precisely through that claim, about the necessity of a more daring style, that she can assemble the given writers within an imaginative, poetic, at times utopian tradition of letters to challenge the formalistic legal reasoning that was stemming from the proponents of humanitarian realpolitik around mid-century.

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Arendt herself would resort to Kafka, and once she had found in him, through her astute reading, the paradigmatic pariah figure, she would go on to make “the discourse of the stranger [. . .] the foundation of the human condition” (59), which echoed through her seminal account of the “Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). However, the visions invoked by the respective writers were not always without difficulties – nor else do Stonebridge’s differentiated assessments suggest as much. Quite the contrary, Orwell in particular, as she demonstrates by deploying her psychoanalytic expertise, from within his steadfast anti-colonial and clearly British ideology failed to recognize the unique plight of the Jewish people under Nazism. It would ultimately result in his troubled literary understanding and simultaneous manifestation of his own anti-Semitism. This was also the longterm problem of Weil’s and Thompson’s. Both of them – the former as part of her de-historicizing turn to myth, the latter as both a defender of republicanism and paternalist chronicler of postwar Palestinian refugees – after their earlier proZionist advocacy became something worse than well-meaning critics of the state of Israel. Sympathies in the study lie more conclusively with Auden, whose poetry of sadness is presented as ingeniously capturing the state of instability experienced by the writer, and especially Beckett, who in the given tour-de-force reading emerges as “the most intimate artist of the placeless condition” (129). If, in general, even some of the smaller vignettes Stonebridge provides remain most memorable, none of them is as programmatic for her undertaking, and deep, as her discussion of Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile” (1984). Said’s landmark essay opens with a resolute critique of the banalization of the condition of exile in much of Western-style cultural studies, which he uses to build an argument of accountability. He asks humanities scholars who “concentrate on exile” to step outside their own “modest refuge” and become committed to, and within, the extra-literary world of real human rights abuse and suffering. As he insists, you must therefore map territories of experience beyond those mapped by the literature of exile itself. You must first set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created.2

By subscribing to Said’s call, Stonebridge puts her own investigation on serious trial. This, too, she champions. It is not only that throughout the book, and beyond the cold abstractions of much official politics, she remains attentive to individual

2 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2001): 175–176.

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cases of structural harm, and almost provocatively outspoken concerning their unacceptability. But more to the point, her concluding portrayal of Qasmiyeh reconnects the question about placeless people to the concrete contemporary world. She here suggests, from a Saidian perspective, lines of continuity and contradiction that run from mid-century mass displacement through “the longest existing and most coherent group of ‘stateless’ people, the Palestinians” (170). Qasmiyeh is a now Oxford-based second-generation Palestinian poet, socialized in Baddawi refugee camp, Lebanon, “whose writing,” as Stonebridge lays out in her final chapter, “captures the reality of today’s borderline living with an original clarity” (24). Thus, given her profound understanding of the pertinent contexts and issues, her balanced accounts of Jewish-Palestinian relations, and perhaps also her experience outside the ivory tower of academia (Stonebridge is a researcherpractitioner with the non-paternalist community project Refugee Hosts) – all of which underscores her remarkable range of vision –, one wonders why she remains peculiarly silent about charges made against Arendt herself. The tacit colonialist remnants in Arendt’s thinking and her partial blindness to race dynamics in her adopted and venerated home, the United States, next to the old accusation of anti-Zionism in her later life, after all remain matters of scholarly controversy. Other than a very brief mentioning of Arendt’s Eurocentric inconsistencies in both her earlier The Judicial Imagination and Placeless People, Stonebridge presently chooses to paint a more well-composed part of the picture. One would, however, soon love to read a broader contextualization from this scholar’s vantage point. With that being said, and although it sounds clichéd, her book could not be more timely. Even if true justice has never been established in any of the postwar decades, at a historical moment when a global pandemic disproportionately threatens the life of the most vulnerable, European decision-makers and humanitarian regimes, once more, unabashedly press to preserve two classes of people: those with the correct (read: EU) passport, and those who, without any bloodshed, can be left behind. As tens of thousands again become human flotsam and jetsam off the Southern and Eastern European borders, as German authorities – to take this example – police their mass facilities for refugees all the more restrictively, rather than evacuate them, and as the segregative camp system as such remains intact throughout the world, the right to have rights is still, and just as Stonebridge registers with respect to the past hundred years, a brutally one-dimensional affair. Jesper Reddig

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster

List of Contributors Nilufer E. Bharucha is Director of the Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging – Indian Diaspora Centre, Visiting Professor of Humanities, Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences and Former Senior Professor and Chair, Department of English, all at the University of Mumbai. Professor Bharucha is Faculty Associate Emeritus, South Asian Studies Institute, University of the Fraser Valley, B.C., Canada and Global Faculty, Fairleigh Dickinson University, NJ, USA. She has served on the jury of the Commonwealth Literature award and the Sahitya Akademi, Delhi Literature award in English. She has also been on the jury for the Rhodes scholarship. She has over 60 papers published in national and international journals and anthologies. She has authored and edited 6 books in the areas of Postcolonial Indian Writing, Diasporic Indian Literature & Cinema and the Writing of the Parsis. One of her recent books is entitled Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema. She is co-editor of the CoHaB IDC’s Diaspora Studies Series. She has contributed 3 modules on Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema to the University Grants Commission’s online Postgraduate E-pathshala. She has published short stories and has done translations from the Urdu and Gujarati into English. Daniela Carpi is Honorary Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Literatures and Languages, University of Verona. Her fields of research are Renaissance theatre, critical theory, postmodernism, law and literature, literature and science, literature and visual arts, as well as digital ontology. She is the managing editor of Polemos, a Journal of Law, Literature and Culture and editor of the series “Law and Literature” with Klaus Stierstorfer (published by de Gruyter). She is a member of Academia Europaea, the founder and president of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura), and adjunct Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia. Among her latest publications are the monograph Fairy Tales in the Postmodern World. No Tales for Children (2016); the edited volumes As You Law It. Negotiating Shakespeare (with François Ost, 2018) and Monsters and Monstrosity. From the Canon to the Anti-canon. Literary and Legal Subversions (2019); as well as the chapter “Property and Contracts in English Renaissance Theatre” in Benjamin Verheye (ed.), Geletterd Recht. Een Ontdekking Van De Wereld Van Recht En Literatuur (2019). Patrick Alasdair Gill is a senior lecturer in the English Literature and Culture section of the Department of English and Linguistics at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, where he also received his Ph.D. He is the author of Origins and Effects of Poetic Ambiguity in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (2014) and the co-editor of Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle (2018). He has lectured and published on English poetry of all periods, the contemporary novel, and British and American TV culture. His ongoing research is into the efficacy of literary form. Jan B. Gordon, the author of Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Echo’s Economies (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 1996) was among the first group of six non-Japanese permanent professors appointed to national universities when the law was changed in 1983. He is the first Emeritus Professor of Anglo-American Literature at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, whose essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Salmagundi, ELH, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Framework, among other journals. Other essays have been reprinted in numerous anthologies including the

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Chelsea House series, edited by the late Harold Bloom for Yale University Press. He has also lectured on American literature and culture for the U.S. State Department in Southeast and Northeast Asia in the Fulbright/Ampart program, and was a regular reviewer of books for Asahi Shinbun. Michael Hauhs is professor for Ecological Modelling in the faculty of Biology, Chemistry and Geosciences at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He has a Ph.D. in Soil Science from the University of Göttingen, where he studied forestry. He worked as a postdoc in hydrology and ecological modelling at the Norwegian Institute of Water Research (NIWA) at Oslo, Norway. At Bayreuth university, he teaches geoecology and environmental computer science. His research interests are small catchments, ecosystem theory, forest ecosystems, nutrient and water transport. Florian Klaeger is professor of English literature at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Düsseldorf and is the author of Foregone Nations. Constructions of English National Identity in Elizabethan Historiography and Literature: Stanihurst, Spenser, Shakespeare (WVT, 2006) and Reading into the Stars. Cosmopoetics in the Contemporary Novel (Winter, 2018). He has edited and co-edited several books, most recently Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle (Routledge, 2018, with Patrick A. Gill), Literary Form. Theories – Dynamics – Cultures (Winter, 2018, with Robert Matthias Erdbeer and Klaus Stierstorfer), and Form (de Gruyter, forthcoming 2020, with the same coeditors). His research focuses on literary form, literature and knowledge, and literary astroculture. At the University of Bayreuth, he is the head of a project on Cosmopoetic Formknowledge: Astronomy, Poetics, and Ideology in England, 1500 – 1800, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Holger Lange is an adjunct professor for Ecological Modelling at the University of Bayreuth and Senior Scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (Nibio) in Ås, Norway, in the department Biogeochemistry and Soil Quality of the Division Environment and Natural Resources. He has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics and holds a habilitation degree in Ecological Modelling from the Department for Biology, Chemistry and Geosciences of the University of Bayreuth. His research interests cover nonlinear phenomena in dynamical systems, ecosystem theory, forest ecosystems, nutrient and water transport in soils and at the catchment scale, the terrestrial carbon cycle, climate modelling, and Earth observations via remote sensing. He is also Principal Investigator for an ecosystem station (Eddy Covariance flux tower) of the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS). Susana Onega is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza and member of the Academia Europaea. She has been leader of numerous competitive research projects and teams and written extensively on contemporary English fiction, narrative theory, and ethics and trauma. She is the author of five monographs, including Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (U.M.I. Research Press, 1989), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Camden House, 1999), and Jeanette Winterson (Manchester UP, 2006). She has edited and translated into Spanish The Collector (Cátedra, 1999); and edited or coedited fourteen books, including “Telling Histories”: Narrativizing History / Historicizing Literature (Rodopi, 1995), Narratology: An Introduction (Longman, 1996); Refracting the Canon in Contemporary Literature and Film (Rodopi, 2004), Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British

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Fiction (Rodopi, 2011), Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Fiction (Routledge, 2013), Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives (Routledge, 2014), Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st-Century Fiction (Routledge, 2017), Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature (Palgrave, 2017), The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest (Routledge, 2018), and Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm (Routledge, 2020). Ivo Ritzer teaches Media Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He has given invited talks all over the world for many years, while his publications include multiple essays just as several monographs and edited volumes, with topics such as media aesthetics, media philosophy, and media archaeology. His most recent book publications among more than 20 titles are Politics of the Popular: Media – Culture – Theory, Media Theory of Globalization (2018), Media Cities: Mapping Urbanity and Audiovisual Configurations (2018), Media Dispositives (2018), and Mediality of Mise en scène (2017). Reinold Schmücker is a professor of Philosophy at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany, working on fundamental problems in aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. In his recent research, he has been particularly interested in the philosophy of artefacts, meta-ethics and applied ethics. As well as numerous articles, he has authored Was ist Kunst? Eine Grundlegung [What Is Art? A Groundwork], (1998; rev. ed.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014). He is the editor of Identität und Existenz. Studien zur Ontologie der Kunst [Identity and Existence. Studies in the Ontology of Art] (mentis, 2003, fourth ed. 2014) and has co-edited Wozu Kunst? [Why Art?] (WBG, 2001), Gerechtigkeit und Politik [Justice and Politics] (Akademie Verlag, 2002), Kunst und Kunstbegriff [Art and the Concept of Art] (mentis, 2002, fourth ed. 2017), The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying (Bloomsbury, 2016, second ed. 2017), Vorrang der Moral? [Overridingness of Morality?] (Vittorio Klostermann, 2016). In 2015–16, he was a principal investigator of the research group The Ethics of Copying at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany. Nicholas Shrimpton is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. His recent publications include a new edition of the poems of William Blake (Oxford World’s Classics, 2019), the introduction to Stephen Wall: Trollope and Character (2018), the 2017 Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture at Lancaster University (‘Ruskin and His Critics’, published in the Ruskin Review, Spring 2018), an edition of Disraeli’s novel Sybil (Oxford World’s Classics, 2017), the ‘Matthew Arnold’ chapter in the Oxford History of the Reception of Classical Literature in English (2015), the articles on ‘Italy’ and ‘Politics and Economics’ in the Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin (2015), and essays in Areté on the prose writings of W. H. Auden (2016) and the novels of Anthony Powell (2018). Axel Stähler is a professor at the University of Kent in the Department of Comparative Literature. His research interests include modern Jewish writing and intermediality. He has published on Anglophone Jewish literature, the Holocaust, and on the convergence of Zionist, racial, and colonial discourses in early twentieth-century German-Jewish literature and culture. His publications include Zionism, the German Empire, and Africa (2019); The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (2015; co-edited with David Brauner), which was awarded the “Association of Jewish Libraries’ Judaica Reference Award” (2016); Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews (2015; co-edited with Ulrike Brunotte and Anna-Dorothea

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Ludewig); Writing Jews and Jewishness in Contemporary Britain (2014; co-edited with Sue Vice); and edited collections of articles on Jewish Magic Realism (2013) and on Anglophone Jewish Literature (2007) as well as a monograph on literary constructions of Jewish postcoloniality in fiction on the British Mandate for Palestine (2009). He is a Leverhulme Research Fellow, currently working on a book project that explores the representation of the destruction of Jerusalem in nineteenth-century European literature, art, and music. Klaus Stierstorfer is Chair of British Studies at the University of Muenster, Germany. He has published widely on literary history, British drama and aspects of literary theory. He is series editor of the current 13-volume series Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft with De Gruyter. His ongoing research interest are in diaspora studies, law and literature and (literary) theories of the model, and he is spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Centre 1385 “Law and Literature” funded by the German Research Foundation, and the project “Literary Modelling and Energy Transition,” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Janet M. Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses mainly on the fields of the postcolonial and diaspora writing of Australia and New Zealand, and she has also written on topics like refugee writing, precarity, religious fundamentalism, right wing rhetoric, post 9/11 fiction, and the global novel. Katherine Mansfield’s writing, on which she has published extensively, is a special interest. Recent publications include the co-edited Diaspora Studies Reader (Routledge, 2017), “‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘Miss Brill’: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf as Short Story Writers,” in the co-edited Re-forming World Literature: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story (Ibidem Verlag, 2019); the edition, The General and the Nightingale: Dan Davin’s War Stories (Otago UP, 2020), and “From National to Global: Writing and Translating the Aotearoa New Zealand Short Story” in the co-edited Special Issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, “New Zealand and the Globalization of Culture” (2020). She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project, the Diaspora Screen Media Network, Vice Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Index abject, the (see also Creed, Barbara) – Kristeva 74–76, 81–84 Abraham (patriarch) 78 Adam 133, 136, 210–219 – ‘New Adam’ 216, 219 Adamson, George 136 Adoration of the Shepherds 151 Adorno, Theodor W. 23 aesthetic experience 26, 92, 96 aesthetics 13, 25, 93, 96, 106–109 Ahad Ha’am 150 Ahmed, Sara – Willful Subjects 77–79 Al Quds (see also Jerusalem) 163 Al-Aqsa Mosque (Jerusalem) 153 algorithms 14, 192, 205, 211, 218–219 alienation 164, 165, 192, 202, 212, 216, 219 Althusser, Louis 79 ambiguity, moral 161 amnesia 158 Anders, Günther 52 angel – domestic 69, 76–77, 78, 83–84 (see also Patmore, Coventry) – of history (Benjamin) 12 animal(s) 34, 84, 85, 87, 172, 177–178, 192, 215, 232 – encounter 168 – animal rationale 70 – animal symbolicum (Cassirer) 10, 69, 70 anthology series 112–113 Anthropocene (Crutzen) 51, 53, 56–57, 62–63, 167, 169, 170, 172–175, 178, 186, 192 antisemitism 150–151, 158 Anwar el-Sadat 162, 164, 165 Apocalypse 156, 158, 167–168, 169, 173–175, 179, 184, 186, 187–188 apoptosis 61 Arab Israelis 163–164 (see also Palestinians) architecture 135, 145–146, 147, 152, 153, 199, 201, 204 (see also Moorish style) Aristotle 20, 90 Ark of the Covenant 160

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-018

Arnold, Paula 142, 153–154 art 22, 24–31, 145, 204 – production of 26, 30 – reception of 26, 29, 31 – works of 24–29 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 13, 17, 85, 86, 191–193, 195, 197, 198, 199–200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210–214, 216–217, 219–220 artificial personhood; artificial human 205, 206, 208, 212, 215, 218–220 artistic production 26 Ashwell, Lena 130 Asimov, Isaac 196, 218 Asquith, Herbert 131, 134 Atwood, Margaret – The Handmaid’s Tale 81 audio-animatronic technique (Walt Disney) 156 autonomy 60, 73, 77, 78, 97, 200, 205, 219 auto-semiotization 50 Baartman, Saartjie 79 Badiou, Alain 89, 105–107 Bakhtin, Mikhail – Rabelais and His World 75 Ballard, J.G. 111 Barthes, Roland 28–29, 49, 224 Basel 145, 152 Battlestar Galactica 208 Baudrillard, Jean 16, 140–141, 142, 148–149 (see also desert of the real; hyperreality) Bauman, Zygmunt 7, 211 Bax, Ernest Belfort 135 Beer, Friedrich Salomon 147 (see also Beerite) Beerbohm Tree, Herbert 127 Beerite 147, 156 Begin, Menachem 158, 162, 164 Bell, Clive 25 Benjamin, Walter 12, 90 Benn, Tony 210, 211 Berardi, Franco “Bifo” 10, 196–197 Bergson, Henri 133

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Index

Biafra 161 Black Lives Matter 7 Black Mirror 16, 111–120 Blake, William 8, 77 Bloch, Ernst 31 Blumenberg, Hans 14 body – as a land to conquer 78–79, 80, 82 – beautiful female 77, 84–85 – deathless 127 (see also Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray) – linguistic liberation of 81–82 – mechanized 206, 210, 210 (see also cyborg) – of Christ 35 – posthuman, mechanical 192, 200, 207, 210, 212, 215, 216 – soulless 86 – suffering 12–13 – will-less 78, 80 Boers (South Africa) 147 Bon Bibi 168–169, 171–172, 178–180 (see also Ghosh, Amitav, The Hungry Tide) Bonduki Sadagar 169, 188 (see also Ghosh, Amitav, Gun Island) Bowler, Peter 10, 196–197 Brooker, Charlie 111–112, 116 Butler, Samuel 133 Calderon, George 129 Camp David Accords 162 Campbell, Joseph – The Masks of God 74–75 Capek, Karel 217 Caputi, Jane – Goddesses and Monsters 83–84 Carroll, Lewis – Alice in Wonderland 38–39 Carter, Angela – Nights at the Circus 83–84 – Wise Children 83 – The Bloody Chamber 203 (see also fairy-tale, Bluebeard) Cassirer, Ernst – Essay on Man 10, 70–71, 72 – Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, The 21

castration fear 74–75, 82 Channel 4, 112, 114 chaos – in mythology 75, 84 – theory 86 – visual 105–106 Chekhov, Anton 128–129, 132 Christianity 8, 23, 35, 36, 151, 152, 232 (see also theology) civilization 34–36, 57, 62, 79, 133, 147, 163, 194, 198 Cixous, Hélène – “The Laugh of the Medusa” 81–82 Club of Rome 13, 57 Coetzee, J.M. – Dusklands 79 – Waiting for the Barbarians 79–80 cognition – individual 71, 212 – mimetic 70 (see also Donald, Merlin) Coleridge, S.T. – “On the Constitution of Church and State,” 39–41, 42, 44, 45 colonialism 147, 149, 170, 175–177, 211, 213, 237, 245 communication 5, 15, 19–31, 97, 163, 208, 217, 219 – discontinuous 25–31 – non-verbal 46 computational biology 210 Constantinople 160 cosmogony 72–73, 87 cosmos 198 (see also cosmogony) Creative Evolution 133, 138 creativity 195 (see also Creative Evolution) Creed, Barbara – The Monstrous Feminine 74–75 Creuzer, Friedrich 23–25 culture 2, 4, 9, 10–12, 22, 46, 54, 69–88 – oral 71 – Western 4, 9, 22, 69–88 – cultural evolution 71 – cultural specificity of symbols 10–12 cybernetics 207–209 – cybernetic revolution 209, 214 – cyborg 191–204, 207–208

Index

Darwin, Charles 78, 85, 133, 194, 202 Dasein (Heidegger) 46, 192 de Beauvoir, Simone – Le Deuxième sexe 74 death 4, 7, 61, 77, 85, 88, 116–117, 136, 150, 189 (see also apoptosis) – phantasmatic living 77 Deep Mind AlphaGo 209 delusion 93, 156, 157 Derrida, Jacques 14, 27, 36 Descartes, René 73–74, 85, 193 desert 139, 148–150, 163 – of the real 148–149, 156, 163, 165 desolation 149, 163 Devonport, Lord 131 diaspora 98–11, 140, 141, 143, 153–154, 156 Digitally Enhanced Personalities (DEP) 208, 210 Diodorus Siculus 73 diorama 151–152 discourse – on race 97–98, 150 – Zionist 149–150 Disney, Walt 156 Disneyland 139, 140, 142, 157 (see also theme parks) displacement 38, 41, 78, 99, 148, 167, 169, 172, 179, 189, 242, 245 Dokkhin Rai 168–169, 171–172, 174, 180 Dome of the Rock (Jerusalem) 153, 162 dominium terrae 78 Donald, Merlin – Origins of the Modern Mind 70, 72 dreams 31, 76, 80, 124, 146, 155, 156, 160–161, 162–163, 198 Duffy, Carol Ann – “Medusa” 83 – “Mrs. Midas” 83 – The World’s Wife 83 Dyer, Richard 95–97, 103 dystopia 14, 81, 112, 142, 194, 197, 208, 209, 213 – dystopian vision 209, 219 Eco, Umberto 144, 151, 156 écriture féminine (Cixous) 81–82 Edelman, Lee 231

253

Eden 132, 136, 198–200, 216 Eggers, Dave – The Circle 194 Egypt 148, 185 Eliot, T.S. 138 Emmaus 151 Empedocles 73 Enlightenment 78, 81 epic 90, 111 ethics 79, 116, 191, 194–196, 206, 216, 218 – android ethics 215 – robot ethics 106, 215, 217 – bioethics 192 Europe 130, 132, 141, 143, 147, 150, 152, 154, 169, 186, 241–245 – Central 126, 137, 161 – Eastern 157 Eve 207 (see also Adam) evolution 60–62, 66, 70–71, 73, 78, 85, 194–198, 202, 203, 204, 217 (see also Creative Evolution) – of cosmos 73 – cultural 71 – of humans 70–71, 194–198, 202, 203, 204 excess 40, 48, 49, 84 extimate causality 36–37, 49 extraterritoriality, Jewish 149 fairy-tale (see also Grimm, Brothers; Carrol, Lewis) – Bluebeard 202–203 Falklands War 210 Fenollosa, Ernest 126 Feuerbach, Ludwig 195 Fisher, Mark 14 fluidity 43, 45, 84, 236, 238 Foucault, Michel 14, 79, 103–104, 229–231 Frank, Manfred 27 Frazer, James G. 5, 33–34 Freeland, Charles – Antigone, in her Unbearable Splendor 74 Frege, Gottlob 21 Freud, Sigmund 34, 36, 46, 81, 91, 199, 243 – “Fetishism” 74 – “Medusa’s Head” 75 Fridays for Future 6, 7 Friedrich I, Duke of Baden 159–160

254

Index

Frye, Northrop 5 fundamentalism – Jewish 158 – Messianic 155 futures studies 7–13 Futurism 13, 23 – reproductive 231 Futurology 196–197 Gaia 75–76, 84 (see also Mother Earth; Uranus) – Gaia theories 61, 66, 185–186 Gaon, Yehoram 139 Garland, Alex – Ex Machina 197–204 gender 72, 84, 85, 203, 207, 208–209, 210, 232 genre 8, 38, 46, 89–96, 105–109, 217, 229 George, Lloyd 134 Geppert, Alexander C.T. 13 Germany 91, 127, 130, 131, 141, 159, 242 Ghosh, Amitav 167–189 – Gun Island 169, 179–189 – The Hungry Tide 170–178, 189 – The Great Derangement 179–189 Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar – The Madwoman in the Attic 75–78 Gilbert, W.S. 135 Glasgow 129, 157 Goldberg, Rosa 142 Golden Age 111, 135, 216 Goodman, Nelson 20 Google 3, 6, 209 gothic, belated 196 Grene, Nicholas 124 Grimm, Brothers – “Cinderella” 77, 84 – “Sleeping Beauty” 77, 78, 80 – “Snow White” 77, 78 – “The Willful Child” 77–78 grotesque, the 75, 83 Gubar, Susan, and Sandra Gilbert – The Madwoman in the Attic 75–78 Gulf War, First 165 Guthrie, W.K.C. 72–73 Habermas, Jürgen 25, 30, 44 Hall, Edward T. 46

Hamm, Heinz 20 Handke, Peter 29 Haram es-Sherif 160 (see also Temple Mount) Harris, Bertha 84 Hechler, William Henry 159–160, 162, 164 – The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine 159 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 20, 99, 135–136 Heller, Joseph 156 Herder, Johann Gottfried 21–22 Herzl, Theodor 139–165 – Diaries 145–148 – Jewish State, The 145, 159 – Old-New Land 141–143, 146, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 161–162, 163, 164, 165 – tomb of 155, 160 Hill, Walter 96–109 history 3, 12, 14, 41, 46, 81, 107, 117, 140, 143–144, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163–165, 170, 175, 179 – aesthetics 18 – ‘angel of’ (see Benjamin, Walter) – cultural 9, 58, 63 – film 106 – Jewish 140, 155, 159 – law 14 – literary 90, 191–196 – migration 224, 227 – natural 54, 60, 167 – of Being 37 – of the concept of the symbol 20 – political 40 Hobsbawm, Eric 9 Holmes, Rachel – The Hottentot Venus 79 Holocaust 9, 141, 157–158, 159, 162 Holy Land 151 human, concept of the 192–196, 203–204, 218–220 Human-robot interaction (HRI) 205, 206, 209, 212, 214, 218 Huxley, Aldous 207 hybridity 36, 84, 90, 196

Index

hyperreality 140–141, 144, 147, 149, 151, 152, 156 (see also Baudrillard, Jean; Eco, Umberto) Ibsen, Henrik 124, 128–129 identity 16, 31, 34, 55, 74, 77, 100, 208–209 – group 34, 63, 72 – transpersonal sense of 86 – white 97 illusion 44, 125, 143–144, 147, 148–149, 151, 156 Imaginary (order, Lacan) 40, 49, 74, 76, 81, 84, 144, 147, 148, 149, 182, 241 (see also Lacan, Jacques) – non-Being 84 immanence, transcendent 193–194 intelligence 131, 136 (see also Artificial Intelligence) interactivity 111 Ishiguro, Kazuo 218 Islam 8, 133, 156, 171 isolation 163, 226, 236–237 Israel 40, 139–165, 244 – Israel Defence Forces 157, 161 – the Children of 148 Jackson, Shelley 192 Jameson, Fredric 14, 93–94 Jerusalem 149–165 Jonas, Hans 194–195 Jonze, Spike – Her 194 Jordan valley 151 Judaism 8, 35, 165, 184, 187, 241, 244, 245 Judas Iscariot 158 Judensau (motif) 158 Kant, Immanuel 21 Kipling, Rudyard 177, 218 kitsch 144–145 Kosellek, Reinhart 11 Kraus, Karl 143–144 Kristeva, Julia – “About Chinese Women” 76 – Powers of Horror 75–76, 81, 84 Kuhn, Helmut 30 Kuhn, Thomas 14

255

labyrinth 201–202 Lacan, Jacques 73–74, 76, 81, 82 (see also Imaginary [order]; Symbolic [order]) – Encore 74 Lake Tiberias 151 Lang, Fritz – Metropolis 207 Lebanon 159, 160, 161, 163, 245 – Lebanon War 159, 160, 161, 163 leisure park 140, 150 (see also theme parks) leitmotif 159, 243 Levensohn, Lotta 141 Levy, David 206, 215 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 34–36, 37–39, 91, 92 Lichkowsky, Prince 130 London 79, 126, 127, 128, 129, 157 Louvish, Simon – City of Blok 155–165 – The Days of Miracles and Wonders 165 – The Therapy of Avram Blok 157–158, 162, 164 Lueger, Karl 150 Manasa Devi 179–181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187 (see also Ghosh, Amitav Gun Island) marginalization 73, 163, 169, 213, 224 Marmorek, Alexander 145 Marmorek, Isidor 145 Marmorek, Oskar 143–147, 153 McEwan, Ian – Machines Like Me and People Like You 204, 205–220 Me Too 7 meaning 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 34, 36–37, 48, 54, 65, 80, 101–102, 108, 116, 129, 163, 199, 216, 243 Meisel, Martin 125, 135 Meister Eckhardt 216 memory 7, 30, 71, 77, 158, 216 – collective 77, 158 – episodic 71 – external 71 – internal 71 mens auctoris 30 Messiah, False 155–156, 163 Messianism 142, 155 Metahumanism 192 Metamodernism 191

256

Index

metaphor 35, 48, 71, 77 metonymy 35 mind 8, 24, 70–71, 85, 146, 192, 214–219 (see also Donald, Merlin; cognition) – post-human 85, 214–219 Minotaur 202 Mitchell, David – Bone Clocks, The 86 – Cloud Atlas 86 – Ghostwritten 86–87 Mockel, Albert 31 modernity 79, 93, 231 (see also postmodernity; transmodernity) – aesthetic 22, 23, 24 Mohammed (prophet) 160, 162 monster – female/feminine 74–78, 81–84 – grotesque angelic 83 – lesbian/ 84 Montfort, Nick 10, 11 Moorish style (architecture) 146 morality 41, 47, 78, 98, 116, 131, 135, 159, 161, 195, 206, 208, 211–216, 218, 220 Morgan, Robin 82 Morris, William 95, 131, 137 Moses 40, 148 Mother Earth 75, 86 (see also Gaia) mother, the 136, 169, 203, 232–233 (see also Mother Earth; stepmother) – abject 74–76 – phallic 75 Mount Herzl (Jerusalem) 155 Mount Zion (Jerusalem) 151 Murdoch, Iris – “Mass, Might and Myth” 202 – The Flight from the Enchanter 201 music 3, 115, 126–127, 135, 152, 153–154 myth 5–6, 34, 35–36, 70–73, 75, 83, 84, 88, 91, 168–169, 171, 177, 179, 180–182, 202, 216, 244 – of the cave (Plato) 198 – mythmaking 72 – of Pygmalion and Galatea 127, 135 – of the real 49 – of the scapegoat 5–6 – of a society 71–72 – of Zeus’s rape of Europa 78

Nazareth 151 Nazism 161, 242, 244 Negev desert 139, 149 Netflix 111–115, 119 Neue Freie Presse (Vienna) 144, 145, 151, 152 New Testament 133, 151, 173 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 33, 159, 161, 164 (see also recurrence, eternal) nostalgia 7, 144 novel, historical 111–112 object 21, 33, 34, 36, 46, 48, 50, 72, 74, 76, 10, 103, 115, 129, 214–215, 217 – beautiful 77 – cultural 13, 14, 15 – non-orientable 37, 38 opposite(s), paired 72–73, 87 Orient, Orientalism 146, 150, 160 Ottoman Empire 151, 156 Page, Jane 8, 11, 170 Palazzo Borghese 151 Palestine 147, 148, 149, 157, 159 – Palestinians 163, 244–245 (see also Arab Israelis) paradigm(s) 72, 73 – art as communication 22, 27 – cinematic 90, 93, 108 – shift 72, 79, 87 – transmodern 87 Paris 152 Parmenides 7, 72–74, 85, 86, 87 (see also cosmogony) past 3, 5–15, 72, 91, 96, 111, 121, 137, 140, 158, 161, 168, 169, 170, 175, 184, 189, 202 (see also myth) – burden of the 5 – narration of the 57, 63, 65–66 Patmore, Coventry – “The Angel in the House” 76–77 Peace Movement, Israeli 158–159, 161 Pérez, María del Mar 83 Perrault, Charles 77 Pfister, Wally – Transcendence 193 phallus 73–75, 82

Index

Pla’im Park 139–141, 149–150, 154–155, 156, 157, 165 Planche, James Robinson 135 Plato 130 plot twist 119–120 poetry 3, 82, 179, 237 politics 8, 9, 39–41, 47, 93, 94–95, 99–100, 107, 124, 130–131, 133, 146, 155, 157, 169, 170, 175–177, 224, 227, 236, 241–245 polyphony 159 Posthumanism 85–86, 192–196, 199, 202, 203 (see also Artificial personhood) postmodernity, postmodernism 3, 37, 74, 79–84, 142, 152, 191, 199, 201 Pound, Ezra 126 power relations 79, 95, 99 Prater (Vienna) 143, 145 Prince Charming 80 progress 9, 12, 13, 78, 79, 135, 152, 192, 197, 202 Promised Land, the 140, 150, 151–152, 154, 155, 159164 (see also Israel) Pythagorean philosophers 21–22, 72 Quicherat, Jules 137 Rabinovici, Doron and Sznaider, Natan – Herzl Relo@ded 141–143, 150, 154, 159, 162, 165 Ranger, Terence 9 rape – of Europa see myth, of Zeus’s rape of Europa – of the woman/land (trope) 78–81 Real, the 108, 140, 142, 143, 148, 147, 149, 152, 163, 165, 198 (see also desert of the real; myth of the real) reality 31, 38, 52, 70–72, 73, 108, 126, 133, 140–143, 144, 146, 149, 151–152, 156, 158, 161–162, 179, 182 – absence of 156 – representation of 70–72 – standardized narrative versions of 71–72 – virtual 15, 147 recall, episodic see memory, episodic recurrence, eternal (Nietzsche) 159, 164

257

reference 11, 21, 108 – self-reference 52, 56, 58, 59, 64, 66 Renaissance 9, 75 – Jewish 145 repetition 6, 35–36, 65, 93, 107, 158, 219 (see also myth; ritual) Replicant 206, 207, 210, 214 (see also cyborg; posthumanism) resymbolization – of woman 79, 81, 84 – strategies of 84 Rich, Adrienne 83 – The Collected Early Poems 83 Ricketts, Charles 132 ritual 6, 25, 35–36, 39, 61, 65, 67, 71, 80, 91, 127, 168 Robertson, Tom 124 Rome 151 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 78 Rossetti, Lizzie Siddal 78 Roth, Philip 156–157 Saladin (Sultan) 155, 162, 164 Sardar, Ziauddin 11–12 Schönerer, Georg Ritter von 150 science fiction 38, 86, 111–112, 121, 169, 196–197, 204, 206–207, 218 Scott, Ridley – Blade Runner 199, 207 Scripture 159 (see also New Testament) – Apocrypha 133 Sedol, Lee 209 Selig, Fanny 142 Semiotic (order, Kristeva) 81 Sewell, Frank – Modern Irish Poetry 84 sexuality 61, 66, 74–76, 82, 119, 135, 202–203, 207, 212, 216 – bisexuality 82–84 – female 76–77, 78, 79, 83, 85 – heterosexuality 119, 232 – homosexuality 48, 119 Shabetai Tsvi 155–156, 163, 164 (see also Messiah, False) Shakespeare, William 83, 125 – Cymbeline 3

258

Index

– Hamlet 116–117 – Merchant of Venice, The 184–185 – Tempest, The 6, 216, 237 Shaw, Bernard 124–138 – Back to Methuselah 132–137 – Heartbreak House 128–132, 137 – Saint Joan 137–138 Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein 85, 207 – Last Man, The 173 Sidney, Sir Philip 7 sign, signification 10, 20–23, 28–29, 31, 38, 53, 101–102, 106, 124, 140–141 – non-representational 96, 103 – significant form 25 simulacra 140–143, 147–148, 148–151, 151–152, 153, 154, 156, 161, 165 simulation (see also Baudrillard, Jean; simulacra) – in modelling 57, 63, 65 Sinclair, Clive 164 Six Flag theme parks 139 Six-Day War 157 Smith, Ali – ‘Seasonal quartet’ 3, 7–8, 15 Sophocles – Oedipus Rex 76 Souls, the (circle) 131 Sparrow, Robert – “The Turing Triage Test” 205, 214–215 speculative materialism 45–46 storytelling 71–72, 101, 108 subalternity 100, 213 subjectivity – construction of 73, 79 – embodied conception of 85 – Lacan’s theory of 81 – rationalist conception of 86 – symbolization of 85 Sunderbans 168, 169, 175–176, 177–178, 180, 181, 183, 187 symbols, symbolism (see also angel; animal[s]; Apocalypse; Artificial Intelligence; artificial personhood; body; Bon Bibi; chaos; death; desert; Disneyland; dreams; history; labyrinth; Minotaur; monster; mother; music;

myth; rape; Replicant; resymbolization; ritual; Sunderbans; synthetic beings; theme parks; Thunberg, Greta; woman) – angel of history (Benjamin) 12 – art 204 – brevity of 24 – body 198 – climate change 174, 179, 185–186 – concept of 19–24 – crisis 12–13, 211 – ecological refugees 179, 185–186 – investment 41–50 – miracle of regeneration 187–189 – Moon landing (Apollo 11, 1969) 13 – motorcar 13 – political and historical 175–177 – rocket 13 – rose 3–4, 7 – Sankofa (bird) 12 – scapegoat 5–6 – seasons 5, 7 – shadows 81, 101, 103, 106, 182, 198 – systems of 7, 10–12, 35, 71–72, 87–88, 92, 101, 170, 215–216 – technology 13, 56, 112, 113, 116–121, 144–145, 192–195, 196–197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 211, 216–217, 219 – therianthropic 177–178, 182 – uncanny 179–181, 182–185, 187–188 Symbolic (order, Lacan) 74, 76, 82 Symbolism (movement) 13 synthetic beings 205–206, 208, 210, 211, 216 Sznaider, Natan see Rabinovici, Doron and Sznaider, Natan teleology 164 Temple (Jerusalem) – second 153 – third/rebuilt 152, 153–156, 161–162, 164 – in Pla’im Park 155 Temple Mount (Jerusalem) 153 (see also Haram es-Sherif) Tennant, Emma – Two Women of London 83 Thatcher, Margaret 210 theme parks 140 (see also Disneyland; Six Flag theme parks; Pla’im Park; Venice in Vienna)

Index

theology 20, 216 Thunberg, Greta 6 tolerance, religious 153 transhumanism 192 transmodernism 84–88, 191–192 trauma studies 12 Trebitsch, Siegfried 127, 128 Trollope, Anthony 41–47 Turing, Alan 210, 213–215, 218 – Turing test 197, 200, 203, 215 Tzahal see Israel Defence Forces United Jewish Appeal 141 United Kingdom 7, 113 – immigration policy 5 Uranus 75, 76 (see also Gaia) Ure, Peter 127 Urry, John 9–10 utopia 9, 14, 93–96, 100, 103–104, 107, 108–109, 146, 160, 161, 162, 194, 197, 216–217 Valley of Josaphat 151 Venice 146–147, 169, 184–185, 187, 189 Venice in Vienna (Venedig in Wien) 143–148, 151–152 Verhoeven, Paul – RoboCop 207 victimization 100 – Jewish 161 Vienna 127, 143–144, 147, 150 Vietnam 161 Villeneuve, Denis – Blade Runner 2049 199 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste – L’Eve Future 207 virginity 76, 77 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 25 Volkelt, Johannes 25 Vonnegut, Kurt 156 Wachowski Brothers – Matrix, The 142, 148–149, 163 – Matrix Reloaded, The 142

259

Waters, Sarah – Tipping the Velvet 83 Waugh, Patricia – Feminist Fictions 73 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice 131 Wehrmacht 161 Weldon, Fay – The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 84 Wells, H. G. 131–132, 196 – The War of the Worlds 173 – The Island of Doctor Moreau 207 White, Armond 100 White, Hayden 10, 233 Whitman, Robert F. 135 Wilde, Oscar 48 – “The Critic as Artist” 49 – Picture of Dorian Gray, The 47–50 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany 160 will, free 161 Winterson, Jeanette – Boating for Beginners 84–85 – Frankissstein: A Love Story 85–86 – Gap of Time, The 83 – Gut Symmetries 83 – Passion, The 83 – Stone Gods, The 86 – Written on the Body 83 woman 5–6, 72–88, 123, 126, 135–136, 180, 189 (see also Eve) Woolf, Virginia 131, 132 – “Professions for Women” 76 World War, First 130, 132, 136 World War, Second 9, 13, 157 writing 213, 218, 233, 242, 243, 245 – apocalyptic 173–175 – feminine practice of 82 – insurgent 81 (see also écriture féminine) – onscreen 115 – phallogocentric 82 Yeats, W. B. 123–127, 128, 134 – At the Hawk’s Well 126–127, 131, 136 – “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” 123 – The Land of Heart’s Desire 125, 135 Yugoslavia 4

260

Index

Zimmerman, Evan 215 Zionism 142, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 153, 165, 241 – cultural 150

– political 155 – Zionist Congress, Fifth 145 Žižek, Slavoj 99–100