Gila Ashtor
Gila Ashtor received her PhD from Tufts University (2016). Her research areas include queer and affect theory, psychoanalysis, trauma and gender studies and twentieth-century American literature. She is currently at work on a book-length project on the metapsychological foundations of contemporary critical theory. She is a candidate in psychoanalytic training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City.

Amanda Armstrong
Amanda Armstrong is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan and a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows. She is currently working on a book project entitled, Between the Union and the Police: Railway Labor, Race and Masculinity in the Second British Empire, 1848–1928.

Melinda Cooper
Melinda Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Life as Surplus (University of Washington Press 2008) and Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books 2017).

Diletta De Cristofaro
Diletta De Cristofaro is Lecturer in English at De Montfort University Leicester. Her main research interests include contemporary North American and British fiction, utopias and dystopias, narrative theory, philosophies of time, literary and critical theory, and the Anthropocene in literature. She has published on Jim Crace, the Anthropocene, and Cormac McCarthy, and is editing a special issue on the Literature of the Anthropocene for C21 Literature: Journal of 21^st Century Writings.

Adam Haaga
Adam Haaga is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he is working on a dissertation on the middle Schelling’s relation to Plato’s dialogical works, focusing on Schelling’s turn to mythic or poetized thinking as a methodological means to address the philosophic limits of conceptual thinking.

Stefan Mattessich
Stefan Mattessich teaches English at Santa Monica College. In 2002, he published a monograph on Thomas Pynchon, Lines of Flight, which was a finalist for the MLA First Book Award. His articles on contemporary literature and culture have appeared in Angelaki, Theory & Event, differences, and New Literary History as well as Postmodern Culture, among other places.

Graham J. Matthews
Graham J. Matthews is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Will Self and Contemporary British Society (2015), Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism (2012), co-editor of Violence and the Limits of Representation (2013), and has contributed to various journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Modern Language Review.

Emily Sibley
Emily Sibley is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Uncivil Tongues: Genealogies of Adab in Modern Arabic Literature,” which examines how satire, protest, and incivility are central to an expanded view of literary practices in modern Arabic literature. Her research interests include print cultures of the Middle East and North Africa and theories of world literature. She received the Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities for 2017–2018.

Emily Sibley (bio)
New York University

A review of Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke University Press, 2016.

The basic premises of Pheng Cheah’s book are encapsulated in its title: first, that any consideration of world literature requires a return to theorizing “world” beyond its spatial dimensions, and second, that postcolonial literature bears a unique relationship to world literature in its ability to challenge hegemonic understandings of what that world is. As a field, World Literature is often criticized for being apolitical—for performing a disingenuous depoliticization rooted in the logic of equivalency, where one text from the Global South is easily substituted for another, and for turning a blind eye to the structures of power that postcolonial theory brings to critical attention. Where inequalities are acknowledged, it is often done with a center-periphery model of a world system in mind, applying an evolutionary logic that has at its core a notion of Eurocentric teleological progress. Cheah is certainly no stranger to these debates, and his contribution critically considers the positionality of world literature vis-à-vis histories of imperialism, global capital, and modes of cosmopolitan belonging.

Cheah’s stated aim is to rethink “world” as a temporal category, and, in the process, to reorient critical thought toward the relationship of literature to the world—a question wholly different from the ways in which literature circulates within that world. He rightly notes that the focus on circulation takes the world as a pre-defined entity, which is precisely what What is a World? questions. Only by first examining the category of “world” can we consider its relationship to literature. Cheah’s position rests on the injunction to think beyond spatial cartographies, instead turning to time as the crucial category by which to define the world. “Before the world can appear as an object, it must first be,” he writes, arguing that philosophical paradigms based on temporality provide important bases for resistance to the globalizing thrust of capitalism (2). He devotes the first two parts of the three-part book to examining the category of “world” in this temporal sense, providing rigorous readings of European philosophies of world. Part Three explores how several postcolonial novels elucidate the openings and closings of worlds beyond the time of global capital.

Cheah thus positions his work as a corrective to the dominant spatial turn in world literature theory. His first chapter critiques the way cartographical models reproduce the capitalist system of thought and valuation. He takes aim, for instance, at Pascale Casanova’s much-debated theory that literature acquires value through recognition by the metropole. In Casanova’s spatial model, circulation is what matters; literature remains reactive in its relation to the world rather than possessing any force of its own. For Cheah, by contrast, literature’s normative force lies in its power to create ethical response and engagement with the world. Ultimately, this is what he aims to theorize: an “ethicopolitically committed world literature” in contrast to one that is market-driven (34).

How can we constitute an ethical ground for literary representation in a secular, postmodern era? The pursuit of an answer to this question takes Cheah through a number of philosophers grouped into three main categories: the spiritualists (Goethe, Hegel), the materialists (Marx, Lefebvre), and the phenomenologists/deconstructionists (Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida). The return to Goethe is inescapable, given his foundational status as the author of the term Weltliteratur. Cheah’s reading highlights three aspects of Goethe’s thought: the connection to cosmopolitanism as universalist intellectual practice; the “sacralization of world literature”; and the conception of world as “an ongoing dynamic process of becoming” (40–41, 42). Hegel brings histories of violence and domination to bear upon the concept of world as spiritual process, where “historical violence is absolved by a theodicy of spirit’s teleological progress towards the actualization of freedom in the world” (55). For Cheah, the conceptualization of world as a “dynamic spiritual whole” and as an objective (rather than idealist) structure constituted by violence are valuable contributions to a theory of “world,” which he decouples from a Eurocentric teleology that legitimizes violence (57). While Marx, Hegel’s materialist inverter, stands as the progenitor of cartographies of capital, Cheah retrieves from his writing a concept of world as “rational-purposive human relationality” that emphasizes a “vital motility in embodied place” and mobilizes people towards self-determination (65, 73). In Marx, the world is defined in terms of social relations. Capital shapes the human subject as that subject becomes part of the production cycle; it creates a “cultivated cosmopolitan human being” as part of its eradication of national barriers (71). For Cheah, the temporal dimension of Marxist theory is found in the circulation of capital. Capital seeks to eradicate time: both time and space must be reduced, even obliterated, for potential value to become actual value. As capital accelerates, it becomes its own barrier, one that will lead to the eventual Aufhebung of the capitalist world. The process of self-actualization set in motion by capital transforms alienated social relations, as the emergent universal proletarian subject reappropriates the production process, and with it time itself.

Cheah’s argument for a philosophy of world rooted in temporality draws heavily on Heidegger, who, like Marx, rejects the idea of world as a spatial container, instead focusing on relationality in concepts such as care, being-thrown, and being-with. For Heidegger, world “worlds”: the active property of “world” inscribes it with a temporal component that makes it a “‘force’ of opening or entry” (96). In contrast to other philosophies that regard the material world as something to be transcended, Heidegger posits a radical finitude that makes “temporality…the movement of transcendence itself” (110). His disavowal of teleological time makes the world necessarily contingent and fragile, a condition of possibility for our openness to nature and the objects around us. Cheah finds that for Heidegger, spatial models obscure the relationality that grants meaningfulness and “deprive us of our proper worldliness” (103). Acts of unworlding stem from the failure “to recognize the structural openness to the outside that is proper to our being” (120). Heidegger criticizes the processes of anthropocentrism and objectification that take over in the age of globalization, seeing it as the flattening of the world to a single plane of representation. The erasure of authentic relations is a loss of world and an abdication of responsibility and care towards others. Such loss is a condition of modernity that exceeds postcolonial realities, though Cheah suggests that the postcolonial text registers this condition most acutely due to global capitalism’s capacity to destroy or fundamentally change the cultures of the Global South.

Derrida elaborates Heideggerian philosophy “by suggesting that time is not proper to human Dasein but comes from the absolutely or nonhuman other” (161). For Derrida, alterity constitutes and maintains the experience of presence, which Cheah reads as both a temporal and an ontological category. Alterity, despite its inability to be appropriated or defined, calls forth an ethical response that elicits the transformation of the world; according to Derrida, writes Cheah, “the normative force of worldly ethical and political action originates in a response to absolute alterity” (170). Alterity opens us up to possible futures, including the future of reason itself; without an openness to alterity that demands decisions, ethics, and action, reason stagnates and dies. Derrida calls this structural openness to the unknown future the “gift of time” found in the openness to alterity (171). In his turn to Heidegger’s philosophy and its Derridean expansion, Cheah shows that conceptualizing the world according to temporality—and in particular, according to the world’s radical finitude and its yet to come (l’à-venir, for Derrida)—is necessary in order to fully access relations to other beings, human and nonhuman, which in turn gives rise to obligation, ethical action, and normative force.

The pursuit of a normative theory of world literature drives Cheah’s work, which relies on the relation of the concepts of teleological time and of worlding to ethics and to the creation of a better world. He argues that in spite of their differences, these concepts illuminate the world as a “dynamic process with a normative practical dimension” that contributes to the rethinking of world literature as that which opens up a particular kind of world (192). According to Cheah,

“Normativity” refers to what ought to be. We conventionally understand norms and their related cognates, values, as ideals that practical reason prescriptively projects onto reality to transform it in the image of human ends or as principles immanent to collective human existence that will unfold and actualize themselves. The force of a norm comes from its universal validity. (6)

With this focus on normativity, Cheah assumes an unapologetically universalist stance. Goethe’s model of a universalizing world literature suddenly seems not so very far off—but neither is the question of who sets the norm and recognizes it as such. Universalist humanism has been beleaguered by this problem due to its complicity with colonialism and, more recently, the politics of global development and human rights. To his credit, Cheah tackles the tensions between universalist ethics of the norm and local modes of being-in-the-world through his readings of postcolonial literature, including works by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo. Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Farah’s Gifts are particularly good examples of the ways in which a globally conceived and administered humanist ethos can conflict with local needs. Ghosh’s novel describes in detail how the international project of creating a wildlife preserve for tigers in the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests of West Bengal, was carried out by the Indian government with exceptional violence against local villagers. It shows how modernization, seen in the forest preserve laws and commercial prawn industry, makes subaltern lives in the Sundarbans increasingly precarious. Farah’s novel shows that international food aid during the Somali famine of the 1990s represented Somali subjects as victims deprived of choice in receiving charitable gifts, whereas local modes of communal support and giving were fashioned on mutual obligation and upheld human dignity. In Cheah’s description, “the ethics of international philanthropy, the novel suggests, is continuous with the capitalist world-system’s exploitative logic of commodity exchange” (279). He suggests that such revelations of violence demand not only an affective response from the reader, but also actions that recognize and preserve other cultures and their modes of being-in-the-world.

Cheah uses the term “normative” to make an ethical appeal. But is normativity the right term? This is not a semantic argument, but rather a question of what and who constitutes the norm. Behind this call for literature to bear normative force is an implicit requirement for those in positions of authority to adjudicate and act as a corrective to the market’s measurements of value. Cheah’s own remarks point to this requirement and the moral force it presumes, particularly in his introductory comments explaining his choice of novels. He alleges that complaints from a graduate seminar reveal a Eurocentric bias that divorces aesthetics and theory from politics, where postcolonial texts are primarily read for political and anthropological information (15–16). Against charges that the novels are uninteresting or simply not very good, he offers this defense: “These comments are disturbing because we read authors who are widely celebrated. V.S. Naipaul is a Nobel laureate, and Farah is rumored to be a perennial Nobel contender. Ghosh, Cliff, and Mo are regarded as strong examples of world literature” (15). The only explicit measure of valuation Cheah mentions is circulation in international prize circles, but Cheah fails to extend the same scrutiny to these bodies as he does to other international bodies operating according to a similar ethos, such as charitable or environmental organizations. In his reading of Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, he offers two examples of “a universalistic humanist cosmopolitanism” for critique: the first a translator representing a bourgeois multilingualism that thrives on multinational traffic; the second an international researcher whose funding comes from the North (261). It remains unclear how prize bodies differ from the cosmopolitanism Cheah critiques, yet the Nobel committee appears to determine normative value. Moreover, it is striking that all of Cheah’s selected novels were published in English. Aside from a few brief discussions of translation —“vulgar,” in Heidegger’s conception of world (104); “ambivalent,” for Ghosh (274); language as indicative of “hybrid creativity” and “cosmopolitanism from below” in Mo (328) —Cheah remains curiously silent on questions of language despite its imbrication in imperialism. Aamir Mufti’s recently published Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures warns against this blind spot, tracing the invisible imperialism of English as the normative language of world literature. Cheah’s work remains ensconced within two canonical frames—European philosophy and English-language postcolonial texts—which raises questions about how the concept of normativity functions throughout What is a World?

Recently, several Western scholars have turned to philosophical and literary traditions outside of Europe in order to put the categories of “world” and “literature” under pressure. In Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, Emily Apter argues that the way “world” translates in various languages demonstrates these languages’ different conceptual underpinnings. In In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt, Michael Allan demonstrates that in some Arab circles, “literature” figures both as the textual object and as the process of becoming canonical linked to modernization. These works, geared toward a categorical rethinking of “the world” outside the Western canon, become crucial if world literature is to respond to the challenges of its Eurocentric and Orientalizing provenance, which, as Mufti uncompromisingly argues, “continue to structure the practices of world literature” (19). Theory must travel, including theories of world. This methodological challenge plays out in the course of What is a World. The only philosophical decentering occurs in the opening chapter of Part Three, “Postcolonial Openings,” where Cheah takes up theories of heterotemporality devised by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe and Néstor García Canclini in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. While Cheah’s portrayal of the normative force of world literature undoubtedly stakes a claim to the importance of the humanities, as academics we must remember our own complicity in circles of power that influence our choices of what we judge worthy of inclusion and how we structure our critical engagements.

It remains unclear why Cheah holds on to the term cosmopolitanism when numerous moments in his book serve to critique the concept, both in theory and in reading how it plays out in the worlds of the postcolonial novel. The introduction demonstrates his determination to rescue a cosmopolitan ethics grounded in humanist idealism: “Cosmopolitanism is about viewing oneself as part of a world, a circle of political belonging that transcends the limited ties of kinship and country to embrace the whole of deterritorialized humanity” (3). Cosmopolitanism remains unsituated, however, as its “optic is not one of perceptual experience” but of imagined belonging (3). In turning to postcolonial novels, that imagining reveals itself as a disconnected idealism that reads as profoundly ambivalent, if not negative. “There is nothing inherently liberating about mobility,” Cheah observes in his chapter on Cliff, discussing her presentation of Jamaican emigration from the colony to the metropole (218). This “cosmopolitanism” is not one of ethical idealism, but one of diaspora, migration, and other patterns of transnational communication and economics. Cheah’s discussion of Ghosh reveals the “transfiguration of cosmopolitan middle-class consciousness by subaltern stories,” and Mo’s novels present a “worldliness from below” (259, 325). Worldliness is irreducible to cosmopolitanism, as Cheah suggests in his reading of Heidegger, because it recognizes and activates the already present relationality of beings in connection (104). Cheah returns again and again to the concept of worldliness in his postcolonial readings, and thus it seems more fitting to abandon the term cosmopolitanism altogether in favor of worldliness, especially given his presentation of that term as more theoretically sound. Worldliness helps to solve the problem that cosmopolitanism becomes bound up in law, as Cheah elucidates in a discussion of the concept’s origins: “Cosmopolitanism worlds the world in the image of humanity and posits the world as a universal fraternal community of human beings. It is identical with humanization.… Cosmopolitan concepts and institutions are thus part of a project of human self-making” (176). These institutions, authorized with the force of law, create a form of normativity at odds with the normativity that Cheah outlines in his turn to the postcolonial: a form of obligation that is other to the laws of global human institutions.

Nonetheless, the redefinition of world literature in What is a World? is a valuable, timely contribution to the field. As Cheah asserts, his work “leads to a radical rethinking of world literature as literature that is an active power in the making of worlds, that is, both a site of processes of worlding and an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes” (2). He ultimately derives four criteria for world literature: 1) it must take the existing world created by globalization as its theme and “cognitively map” how a society is situated within the larger system; 2) it must reconsider nationalism and cosmopolitanism as intertwined instead of in opposition; 3) it must imagine the world as one of dynamic processes, stripped of any form of teleology; and 4) it must carry a principle of transformation and “performatively enact a world,” indicating the possibility of “a ‘perhaps’ or ‘otherwise’ that sets temporalization in motion” (211–12). Cheah’s desire to retain the concept of cosmopolitanism, as seen in his second point, seems rooted in his insistence on the possibility of universal ethics. World literature as redefined discloses and imparts this ethics, and that ethical appeal is of the utmost importance. The questions raised by the framework of normativity—who and what constitute the norm—must be endlessly reexamined, but this does not make ethics impossible—or, rather, it takes the form of Derridean impossibility, the possible impossible, which continues to imagine the world differently and acts as an imperative to bring that world into being through encounters such as those made possible by world literature.

Works Cited

• Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton UP, 2016.
• Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013.
• Mufti, Aamir. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Harvard UP, 2016.

Graham J. Matthews (bio)
Nanyang Technological University

A review of Mandel, Naomi. Disappear Here: Violence After Generation X. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2015.

The idea that the people who make up a generation share certain characteristics dates back to the mid-nineteenth century French lexicographer and philosopher, Émile Littré, whose authoritative Dictionnaire de la langue française (1863–72) defined a generation as all people coexisting in society at any given time. Descended from the Latin word generāre meaning “to beget,” the word had primarily been used to signify the relationship between fathers and sons. However, the concept’s utility emerged later through the process of dividing contemporaries into different age groups; this inaugurated the notion of social generations and led to claims about shifts in aesthetic taste. Robert Wohl wrote: “The division of society into age-groups occurred because the mass of active and productive adults changed totally and regularly every thirty years. With this change in personnel came a change in sensibility” (19–20). The social generation model studies the intangible development of human sentiments and beliefs. Consequently, the term “generation” has come to demarcate the decline of an old culture and the rise of a new one that remains in place for approximately twenty-five years, occurring with a rhythm whose logic is unknown. Nevertheless, when one generation and its dominant cultural norms are replaced with another, it is typically presumed to be for historically specific reasons. For instance, the Lost Generation, named by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), defines a generation of people born 1880–1900 who lived through the First World War. Traditional literary fiction appeared ill-equipped to capture the trauma of mechanized violence on an industrial scale as its audience irrevocably changed; the implication is that the link between a generation and culture is not accidental and that each generation is defined in relation to a seismic event. The G.I. Generation (meaning either “General Issue” or “Government Issue”) was born during the years 1901–1924 and fought during the Second World War. The Silent Generation (1925–1942) grew up during the Second World War, and many fought in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the Baby Boomers were born in the wake of the Second World War and were defined by a substantial increase in the birth rate due to returning soldiers. Generation X was the first generation to be defined not by world wars or other seismic historical events but by the bonds that arise between individuals through exposure to social and cultural change. Karl Mannheim’s 1927 essay, “The Problems of Generations” argues that the rhythm in the sequence of generations is far more apparent in the literary realm than in institutions: “the aesthetic sphere is perhaps the most appropriate to reflect overall changes of mental climate” (279). With its specific aesthetic and moral preferences, Generation X is a generation defined more than any other by an assemblage of media-focused historical and political events, television shows, films, and music that function as common frames of reference.

Naomi Mandel’s Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X develops further the themes of suffering, identity, and ethics explored in her earlier book, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (2007), to demonstrate the ways in which Generation X’s particular attitude towards violence has been formed by developments in home media, personal computing, and reality TV. Typically characterized as anomie, boredom, and supine defeatism, Generation Xers’ fixation on negation, ambivalence and multiplicity is presented by Mandel as a revitalization of the hermeneutics of suspicion that is simultaneously antagonistic towards yet disseminated by popular culture. Rather than amoral and disaffected, Xers’ ethical center is integral to their complex and counter-intuitive attitude towards violence and its representation. Unlike previous generations, Xers’ experience is defined by paralysis, menace, and complicity, surrounded by the blurring of the image and the physical world through the saturation of home media, CNN, reality TV and video games, coupled with a heightened cynicism towards authority, media, nationalism, and utopian ideals. Mandel’s scintillating analysis traverses the works of seminal Generation X authors including Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, and Chuck Palahniuk. Although these writers exhibit a broad range of styles, they are united by the concerns of their generation and linked by changes in politics, culture, and technology in the 1980s and 1990s. Mandel adopts a range of approaches, delivering a historical overview, an author study (on Ellis), a reading of post-9/11 novels, a theoretical critique of violence, and a sustained analysis of one text (Fight Club) that has become a generational touchstone. Each approach offers a partial view on a complex and variegated array of thinkers, writers, and artists, brought together through the central claim that Generation X “refuses traditional fidelities and alliances and points the way to a future, after X” (6). As Mandel traces the vanishing mediators that comprise Generation X across our globalized, media-driven, and connected world, X emerges as an attitude or outlook rather than simply a demographic; one that, superficially at least, is linked to a commitment to creative and critical impulses in society, economics, and ethics.

Fight Club, in both its novel and film incarnations an emblematic text for Generation X, depicts men from a variety of classes and ethnic backgrounds as disaffected, disillusioned, and drawn to the experience of violence. By joining the titular fight club they find community and a sense of affirmation otherwise lost to them within the corporatized, global system of capitalist exchange. In the twist ending, it is revealed that the unnamed everyman narrator and the seductive leader of the fight club, Tyler Durden, are dissociated personalities within the same body, thereby blurring the boundary between representation and reality. For Generation Xers, Mandel notes, “the line between fiction and fact is permeable, fungible; the relationship of violence to action is characterized by complexity, giving pause to ethics; ‘reality’ is produced for television and marketed for consumption, and fiction … assumes an important role in the creation, construction, and preservation of ‘real violence’” (211–12). Whereas Millennial writers have sometimes struggled to articulate the real effects of the virtual and invisible systemic violence produced by the 2008 financial crisis, Generation X writers have long traced the shifting grounds of representation, the distinction between perception and materiality, and the dissolution of reality. Whereas Sam Goodman and I previously argued in Violence and the Limits of Representation (2013) that violence often signals the limitations of representational strategies since it is either too abstract or too concrete, Mandel suggests that violence is subject to representation and hence to misrepresentation, distortion, and denial. We claimed that these distortions are all we can represent of violence —the ripples rather than the impact itself —but Mandel convincingly demonstrates the ways in which representation can operate at a higher level while also delivering a subtle conceptualization of violence’s effects on the distinction between representation and reality: “violence is real, though its reality is hard to find, and is ultimately indistinguishable from fictions” (216). Generation X thinks it needs to determine what is true (while remaining mindful of the contingency of truth) and to act with social and ethical responsibility. Unfortunately, that impulse is not immediately apparent in most Xers’ work, and the ironic delivery favored by these writers, artists, and film-makers lends itself to accusations that cynicism is itself a problematic ideological position; their philosophy is predicated on laying bare the fictive qualities of political statements, emphasizes the limitations of rigid codes of ethics, and threatens to evacuate collective discourse of affect.

Chapter one entitled “Why X Now?” historicizes the literature and culture of a generation defined by the representation of violence without opposition, critique, or remedy. Generation X’s defining sense of detachment, atomism, and disaffection was initially articulated in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), both of which display profound ambivalence towards violence and present characters who ostentatiously distrust commitment and responsibility, valuing instead interruption, fragmentation, and cynicism. These attitudes are reflected by the novels’ form. Nevertheless, Mandel discovers value in the Generation X refrains of “whatever” and “nevermind.” Rather than reading them as the apathetic cries of disaffected youth, Mandel sees in these phrases an important renegotiation and articulation of the complex relationship between violence and the real. Instead of seeing violence and images of violence as things to be avoided, Xers were the first generation to determine their proximity to real violence and its mediated image. Vilified by conservative media outlets, who tended to link the music of Metallica and Marilyn Manson, the novels of Anne Rice and Stephen King, and video games such as Doom (1993) and Grand Theft Auto (1997) to criminality and violence, Mandel’s analysis shows that Generation X’s attitude constitutes a refusal to draw simplistic causal links between the representation of violence and violence in reality. As a consequence, Generation X’s “whatever” and “nevermind” redirect critical attention away from immediate displays of subjective violence towards more thoughtful contemplation of pervasive systemic violence.

In “Nevermind: An X Critique of Violence,” Mandel tackles the paradox of violence —that it is simultaneously self-evident and invisible —and the ways in which it is used to stake a claim on the real. In a world in which many of the old certainties are clouded by irony and cynicism, the idea that there is truth to be found in suffering and that trauma conveys authentic experience has gained critical currency. Mandel explains that violence always appears as a problem or issue of urgent concern and therefore brings with it political value and ethical weight at the level of representation. With the caveat that the nature of reality is tenuous, Mandel focuses her attention on the “reality associated with violence” (42). Generation X is said to offer privileged insight into violence precisely because of its ambivalence towards the relationship between representation and its object within a world saturated by film, media, and popular culture. Rather than reading violence as a trauma to which literature responds, Disappear Here shows that Generation X writers conceptualized violence as a means by which reality is constructed. In place of a direct correlation between things and words, with a dark reality waiting to be discovered beneath appearances, the referent is constructed in the wake of the representation. With the wide availability of filmmaking equipment, Generation Xers came to possess a keen awareness of the ways in which media content can be edited, re-visioned, and revealed, thereby demonstrating new potentialities for the dissemination of both truth and lies, revelation and maleficence. The generation’s knowing attitude and cynical reason are exemplified by Coupland’s novel, which is interspersed with asides that mimic and subvert advertising discourse.

In developing a conceptual framework that situates Generation X’s attitude towards violence and representation, Mandel draws on Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. For Badiou, people must commit themselves to an event, a disruptive excess that erupts from within the current structure and that makes possible new truth-procedures. In Disappear Here, Mandel notes that Generation Xers’ preference for indeterminacy and ambivalence risks leading to the diminishment of facts. However, Badiou’s conception of fidelity, truth, and the event offers a fresh way of understanding the ethics of Generation X writers. Mandel identifies three key points from Badiou’s ontology: fidelity is a way of thinking that emerges from an event, not the subject; fidelity can be identified only in what it produces; fidelity assembles truths rather than reflecting them. Because an event compels the subject to create in previously untrammeled directions, Generation X’s seeming abdication of agency could then be interpreted as a willingness to be faithful to an event when it emerges. In Badiou’s materialist and logical conception of the world, relativity is not an excuse for indeterminacy of meaning, but is both coherent and deducible. Whereas Generation X is frequently characterized as having no cause to fight for, this conception suggests that there is a logic to “whatever” and “nevermind.”

In the chapter on Bret Easton Ellis, Mandel analyzes the major novels, focusing on his depiction of aimless youth and the hazards of unlimited freedom. Mandel identifies in Ellis’s oeuvre a recurrence of negation and an aesthetics of subtraction; characters and events are defined by what is removed or absent in order to foreground Generation X’s sense of loss, anomie, and blankness. Ellis’s fiction treads the fine line between complicity and critique common to many postmodern texts, and his novels, ranging from American Psycho (1991) to Imperial Bedrooms (2010), have attracted criticism for their graphic descriptions of violence. But perhaps the most chilling aspect of these texts is the characters’ cynicism and apathy in the face of such acts. Unable to distinguish between representations and reality, these characters languish in a twilit realm of surfaces and cynicism, unable to commit to their feelings or to each other. Mandel argues that Ellis’s novels “trace the disappearance of the sign of the real and document a subtraction of reality from representation” and consequently convey the exhaustion of this generation (212).

Turning to fiction written in the wake of the September 11 attacks by Generation X authors, Mandel identifies a recurrent fascination with the mediated quality of reality. Through intricate readings of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), and Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006), Mandel explores how events that appeared as if they had emerged from a disaster movie catalyzed reflection on “the relation of reality to image and the preeminence of spectacle in the discursive construction of truth” (116–17). Despite proclamations that the shock of 9/11 would initiate a turn away from cynicism and invigorate the slacker generation with a more concrete identity and sense of purpose, Mandel convincingly shows that Generation X writers remained committed to negotiable definitions, contingent truths, and fluid identities. This section is followed by analysis of Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006) and Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006). Although these authors were born in the 1950s, they feature Generation X protagonists and reflect on the ways in which 9/11 troubled the boundary between representation and reality. Whilst not denying the material reality of the September 11 attacks, all of these writers were stimulated to question the kind of truth claims that surrounded the event. Rather than shoring up certainties and erasing ambivalence, Mandel demonstrates that 9/11 reinforced epistemic uncertainty within Generation X novels and foregrounded the mediated nature of violence and reality.

Mandel treats Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), in a separate chapter alongside his earlier Everything is Illuminated (2002) in order to question the ethics of fictionalizing historical traumas. Mandel sees in the controversial ending, which takes the form of a flip-book of a figure falling from the World Trade Center in reverse, the predilections of a Generation X readership accustomed to the edited, rewound, and manipulated image filtered through Photoshop and the television screen. The images have stimulated a great deal of disagreement regarding their veracity, sentimentality, aesthetics, and ethical import, but for Mandel they attest to the fundamental fragility of reality. Critical responses to the flip-book tend to fall into one of two categories: either an insistence that the images are fictional, thereby maintaining the division between fiction and reality, or a demand that the novel engage explicitly with the causes and consequences of 9/11. Mandel evades this false binary by drawing on the Generation X refrain of “nevermind” to set aside value judgements concerning the novel’s adherence to truth or political utility. Instead, her analysis presents Foer’s oeuvre as a persistent engagement with real, historical violence that is fictional in nature. In the conclusion to this chapter, Mandel highlights the tendency to strive for accuracy in the face of violence but cautions that this approach denies our ability to engage constructively with the mechanisms that produce and sustain the violence of reality and the reality of violence. Her claim is that if violence problematizes our conception of reality, then fiction, which fully embraces its status as untrue, helps us to conceive of the world as a shifting set of fidelities and contingencies. In the light of Mandel’s cogent analysis, Generation X novels safeguard the ability to conceptualize truth in tandem with its fabrication.

Having witnessed first-hand real violence and its very real effects on minds, bodies, buildings, and national identities, Mandel delivers a complex reading of violence as simultaneously affirmed and disavowed, displayed and erased. Disappear Here constitutes a skillful negotiation of the value of X as a time, a style, an experience, and a signature, all united by the sense of multiplicity, erasure, and contingency. Whilst inscribing X as the place of simultaneously crossing out and marking the spot, this book provides thoughtful groundwork for further engagement with a generation’s credo of affectlessness, apathy, and cynicism.

Works Cited

• Mannheim, Karl. “The Problems of Generations.” Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952.
• Wohl, Robert. The Generation of 1914. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979.

Stefan Mattessich (bio)
Santa Monica College

French-born artist Marc Fichou has exhibited an intriguing body of work in a string of shows around L.A.: “Contenant Contenu” at the Robert Berman gallery (January–February 2013), “Ouroboros” at the Young Projects gallery (January–April 2014), “Outside-In” at the Chimento Contemporary (June–July 2016), and, most recently, “Uncertainty,” a group show at the Pasadena Arts Center (October 2016–February 2017). Much of Fichou’s work involves video feedback and looped, interactive projections that recall the inter-disciplinary experiments of Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, the video installations of Num June Paik, and other works by Steina and Woody Vasulkas, Peter Weibel, and Peter Campus. While all of these artists focus on the mediation and displacement of the object, the artist, and the viewer alike, the stakes remain a subjectivity that persists through its various attenuations.

Fichou is a very self-effacing artist. We see this in his installation “Plastron,” with a video monitor that shows, by reverse projection, the artist in close-up as he applies plaster of Paris mixed with black paint to his face. He gradually covers his whole head, including the eyes. Mounted just opposite the projection is the impassive, mineral-like cast that will be (or is already) the result of this process. On an interposed double mirror, its reflection combines with the video image, creating an almost holographic superposition of the face and its mask that confounds relations between before and after, inside and outside, subject and object. The artist fashions his own likeness, but he subtracts himself in it, too. He presents his own disappearance. The installation, containing its production in time, is also penetrated by negativity, volatilized by absence.

Fig. 1. Plastron. 2010.

We sense Fichou touching here on a history of art going as far back as Greek sculpture, which strove to find in the human body the coincidence of material substance and soul that made the person essentially what he or she was. This perfect self-identity came about through the development of qualities, faculties, and talents that lay dormant in the person, as natural potentials made actual and explicit, known to the mind. We still take our cues from this Greek tradition—it still informs the ways we think about identity. Few of us, however, have much practical experience with the self-possession it celebrates. Rather, becoming ourselves implies inner conflict and alienation from a nature that is never quite recovered in consciousness. Autonomy depends on technical supports or prostheses (from writing to digital screens) that decenter the “soul” —if they don’t relegate the notion to some metaphysical past.

Fichou’s interest in subjective dispossession nonetheless engages that past; his work, to be sufficiently felt, asks this engagement of us. French philosopher Catherine Malabou provides a useful framework for this history. Her reading of modern subjectivity turns on the figure of kenosis as a self-emptying of the will that occurs when the subject becomes aware of its own limits in a contingent universe. This Copernican shock has typically been narrated as a withdrawal of metaphysical guarantees but in two senses. God abandons the world (and we feel abandoned by him), but God also abandons himself in it. His kenosis (or death) entails not only a fall into time and mortality (in the person of Christ) but the converse spiritualization of a fallen condition. God in his essence “becoming accident,” as Malabou puts it, affords a template for the modern subject’s encounter with finitude, grasped as a struggle to achieve self-understanding through a “divine” alienation—to achieve what Hegel, on whom Malabou relies for her account, calls “absolute knowledge” (71).

This distinctly Protestant internalization of negativity entails a sublimation of social freedom into moral conscience; as such, it affords the formula, as critics from Marx onwards have pointed out, for an abstract universality that sustains, in resigned acceptance, the irrational social conditions of a bourgeois capitalist order.¹ We see Fichou interrogating this sublimation in another of his installations, “Primer.” It involves two rooms. In one, a chair fashioned of gypsum cement faces a large steel representation of the Chartres labyrinth on a wall. Behind the chair is a steel crucifix, and at the center of the cross a small spy camera has been installed. In the other room, a low-slung, stainless steel chair of modern design faces a square black-and-white television, on which we see what the spy camera records: the backs of visitors’ heads as they sit facing the labyrinth. The austere and organic feel of the first room, with its religious symbols, invites a contemplation that, in the second, becomes an object we view this time as spectators. On one level, what we experience is the anachronism of contemplation, if not also its diminishment into spectacle. The camera in the crucifix, however, suggests, on another level, a surveillance that evokes both an internalized agency (like a superego or a Big Other) and a derivation of spectacle from the Christian symbol itself (or from the Christian tradition tout court).²

For Malabou, “absolute knowledge,” notwithstanding its theological overtones, continues to offer the resource of a transcendental limit for a self-critical consciousness. It does this in that Copernican shock driving the subject defensively into itself, into a pure subjective freedom or “inner being” that is also ineffable and opaque, like a point without dimension. So reduced, the subject finds itself absorbed in an order of objective necessity and governed by inertia and habit; this experience, however, also forces it to reflect upon its own status as an object and to acknowledge its own nothingness. In the process, it contacts something else in itself (the one reflecting) that disturbs a naturalized fear and passivity, thus precipitating a shift from habit-forming to habit-changing practices. In Malabou’s view, this moment of Hegelian sublation signifies less the accomplishment of a substantial being (in its abstract universality) than a specific transformation of human habitus. The subject becomes more itself not by ceasing to be the object it reflects or is in the object world—rather, the object is sustained in that reflection, and the object world persists as a condition through the gain in self-consciousness. The subject of this discourse, for Malabou, discloses a “structure of presence-absence” that puts the “soul” neither within nor outside it: “Moving between the inside and the outside between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior,’ the soul establishes its ‘rational liberation’” (70).

Fichou suggests something of Malabou’s structure, in “Plastron” by including the disappearance of the artist in the artifact, the face in the mask, and in “Primer” by shifting consciousness into its habitus, extended to include a whole tele-technological apparatus and form of life. Fichou thus stages a kind of sublation, which involves, to cite Malabou once more, “the relation the subject forms with itself through the mediation of its other” (119).³ The locus of this self-relation is, again, that mobile point between inside and outside, blurring as much as drawing their separation and signaling a reflexivity Malabou characterizes as “plastic” in two senses of the word: it forms or informs itself, and it receives form from without. It is both creative and receptive to change, active and passive at once.

Fichou’s art turns insistently on the habits of just such a “plastic” consciousness. In “Origami Cube” (one of a series showcased in the exhibition “Contenant Contenu”), he fashions an object from paper, photographs it, and then unfolds it again for the eventual print.

Fig. 2. Origami Cube. 2012.

The cube we see, literally its own support, suggests that it exists inside itself. At the same time, the image of this inside is outside what it depicts, producing cognitive disorientation in us as viewers. Especially if we imagine the cube as empty, and this emptiness as what the image shows us, then its emptiness raises the question not just of what we are looking at but also what we are doing when we look.

In other work, Fichou pushes this “plastic” consciousness even farther towards its own effacement. The “being” it implies is closer to what Hegel might have called a “System” operating the self-determination of its substance outside the will. Malabou sees in such a displaced habitus, not the totalizing drive for which Hegel’s “dialectical machine” has long been reproached, but that drive’s inherent negativity, which, turning back upon itself, or turning itself inside out, opens up in identity (or for a self-identical subject) a “space-between” opposites where differences (and limits) can be held in “reciprocal tension,” neither externalized nor elided (165).

Fichou engages this “space-between” with his video feedback machine, drily called “The Artist.”

Fig. 3. The Artist. 2013. Installation view at Young Projects. 2015.

Consisting of a camera that faces a monitor, it records the empty screen (and whatever light it emits, along with any incident light), then sends this (non)image back to be projected and recorded again, and so on in a loop. The overlay of successive (non)images generates luminous abstract patterns that can be varied with slight adjustments in the camera’s focal point and angle of view. No one exactly produces these patterns—no human hand is involved (at least directly), no representation either. Without a referent in the world, they don’t copy anything, though they derive only from the process of their own reduplication. Nor do they stand as original artifacts, though they are unpredictable and unrepeatable. They suggest purely virtual self-organizing events without depth, substance, or “filiation”—which is why Fichou calls them “Orphan Images.”

Unlike with “Plastron” and “Primer,” there is little existential anxiety in this work. If the feedback system resembles a coffin, its glass panels suggest also a greenhouse, and the alienated impersonality that remains no less a subtext of its operation, combining death and life, points more to the possibilities of a displaced habitus. We feel its “space-between” in the “Orphan Images” when they are projected as separate installations, their status as objects offset by a shimmer that just hints at static. We feel it again in work Fichou calls “Spirals.”

Fig. 4. Spirals. 2015.

These pieces are made by focusing the camera on a canvas covered with random strokes and drips of paint. With the help of an external projector the same feedback process is initiated. The strokes and drips start to scintillate. By canting the lens, Fichou has them trail across the canvas, leaving their own lustrous traces—“footprints of potentiality,” as he put it in an accompanying text. He then takes pictures of the canvas to print. The results are curiously mixed: abstract paintings without texture, photographs but not of something, (an)organic and (im)material objects that resist easy categorization.

We might think of the diagram in Figure 5 (below) as another version by Fichou of “The Artist.” Consciousness is also a feedback process. It converts a perceived object into a memory that, in turn, invests a subsequent perception of the object, again in a repeated loop.

Fig. 5. Untitled. 2013.

With a nod to the psychology of Henri Bergson, future and past moments are compressed in a “present” of instantaneous “duration” that generates in the mind (or the mind as) another “orphan image” (indicated by the purple mandala-like pattern). If a machine still operates here—despite the artist’s presence in the green “4D emotional space,” he still has a “mechanical captor” for an eye—it is because consciousness for Fichou is constituted by the time of its passing, appearing insofar as it disappears. It is, as he writes along the right edge of his diagram, a “retrospective illusion.”

This image hangs on what Fichou calls his “Walls.” Serving as surfaces on which various objects (his own and others) are juxtaposed, they provide a space for working out philosophical preoccupations with time, habit, nature, and artifice.

Fig. 6. Walls, installation view. 2015.

On them, we see staged a mode of thinking that favors context over content, arrangement over elements. One consequence is that the object loses the privilege it would have if displayed in a gallery or museum. But a “Wall,” displayed as an object in its own right, also makes this demotion the point; and the “Walls,” taken together, become meaningful in a network of associations that includes the gallery or museum where they are shown. Fichou thus draws the spectator into his mode of thinking, which unsettles the relations between objects, their valuation, and their institutional location.

Fig. 7. ‘9’. 2013.

This art is structural in character. It involves the world not just as its frame or support but even quite literally as its material. Another case in point for Fichou is his painted drywall cube, an object made from what contains it. The paradox suggests a “space-between” inside and outside that conjures again a displaced habitus, this time in the specific sense given the term by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He writes, “The body is in the social world, but the social world is in the body…. The very structures of the world are present in the structures (or, to put it better, the cognitive schemes) that agents implement in order to understand it” (152). In this light, we might see the installation as a portrait—of the self-effacing artist but, also, of ourselves as viewers, standing in a space that contains us as it conditions how and what we see. Shrewdly, Fichou makes this conditioning the true object on display.

The aim is, finally, ethical. Fichou works right where interventions are most needed in post-industrial societies like our own, which functionalize affective and aesthetic dimensions, turning us into consumers. He draws us away from passive contemplation into an active, investigative relation to aesthetic experience as also a worldly activity. This shift happens in the self’s relation to itself as mediated through its objects, its “artificial organs,” above all its audiovisual or digital extensions of the sensible, affect, self-consciousness.⁴ If such an “originary prostheticity” still entails displacement, loss, even alienation, for Fichou it also offers new creative possibilities, bound up with the individuation of our technical singularity.

Footnotes

1. For Jacques Derrida, this abstract universality or hidden positivity points to a “mystical foundation of authority” that allies belief with knowledge, with science, with a “technoscientific or tele-technological performance” (57).

2. A video of “Primer” can be seen on YouTube.

3. Malabou’s claim for what is essentially a deconstructive dynamic in Hegel’s thought is, of course, arguable. On this, see Derrida’s introduction to her book, where he concedes the usefulness of rereading Hegel, and German Idealism more broadly, in tension with its later critics. For another argument for this “return” (with a Lacanian twist), see Slavoj Zizek, 18–44; see also, Jean-Luc Nancy’s subtle rereading.

4. I follow here, and below, the thought of philosopher Bernard Stiegler, clearly a kindred spirit for Fichou. See his Symbolic Misery, 10 passim.

Works Cited

• Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge.” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Trans. Samuel Weber. New York: Routledge, 2002. 42–101.
• Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel. Trans. Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith and Stephen Miller. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.
• Stiegler, Bernard. Symbolic Misery. Trans. Barnaby Norman. London: Polity, 2014.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Adam Haaga (bio)
Memorial University of Newfoundland

A review of Goh, Irving. The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. New York: Fordham UP, 2014.

Motivated in large part by Jean-Luc Nancy’s question, “who comes after the subject?,” Irving Goh’s book delivers a reply, provocatively arguing in favor of the reject, a figure resistant to the historically and politically contentious concept of the subject. Working among thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, and Cixous, Goh systematically illuminates the suppressed figure of the reject from within current theories of the subject, attempting to drive “contemporary French thought beyond its existing horizons or limits” (23). To be clear, Goh’s proposed figure of the reject is not another concept among others vying to replace the subject, as if it were a substitutable concept. Goh instead prefers the phrase “figure of thought.” However Goh’s analysis balances and trembles between, on the one hand, the call for a decisive break with the subject as concept and, on the other, remaining dependent on it as material for rejection and auto-deconstuction from within the concept itself. Occasionally slipping into a conceptual frame that he intends to evade, Goh defines the reject as “a concept that really knows no boundaries” (180). The reject is Goh’s gesture toward what Nancy claims is “that to which one can no longer allot the grammar of the subject nor, therefore … allot the word ‘subject,’” (Nancy 6), a claim that he will articulate along the axes of discourse enumerated in the title.

Curiously, though, Goh sees no need to address the subject head on. “I will not tarry with the subject here. Neither will I tarry with texts that continue to problematize the subject” (5). In the same collection of essays in which Nancy’s leading question occurs, Michel Henry rightly names Descartes and Kant the two most influential thinkers in the history of modern thought to have “given rigorous meaning to the concept of subject,” such that “any critique leveled against the subject that does not proceed by the light of the foundational analyses of the Meditations and the Critique of Pure Reason would be meaningless” (158). Goh’s decision to forgo the injunction is worthy of concern. We ought to be suspicious of this abstention, for the most we are offered as regards the contestable nature of the subject centers around a nod in the direction of the generic “Eurocentric subject,” as if this is adequately descriptive of the problem, citing feminist and postcolonial literature as having thoroughly rendered the subject “problematic.” The usual critiques raised against the subject are quickly tallied: assertions of certainty and/or presence, capacity to rationalize, affirmations of power, tendencies of appropriation, etc. Despite the veracity of such claims, in an absence of any detailed critique against the subject, Goh makes the cavalier leap ahead to an articulation of the reject as that figure capable of going “beyond” the subject (3).

But even the degree to which Goh accomplishes this move “beyond” the subject, abandoning it completely, remains to be seen. One can certainly make a claim for the necessary reinscription of the subject within the figure of the reject amid the very attempt to overcome and evacuate the subject from its sovereign conceptuality. One could go further and radicalize the conceptuality of the subject by demonstrating the fundamental structures of auto-deconstruction already at work, exteriorizing the subject onto its auto-rejective other. In fact, my reluctance dovetails with my suspicion that what Goh names the reject only reiterates in form and content what Derrida articulated as the law of auto-deconstruction. It is incumbent upon Goh to either specify their affinity or delineate the manner in which the reject is at variance with auto-deconstruction, potentially improving upon it—neither of which is made explicit on my reading. For Goh will rely on an “animal vision” to deconstruct State politics, all the while insisting that the animal-reject eventually be incorporated and participate in the political discourse. Between the questions of gaze and response, on the part of the animal (reject) figure, Goh’s analysis echoes the gap already de-centering the subject in a hetero-affective play of violence, and the result is conspicuously auto-deconstructive.

Throughout the book, the figure of the reject takes many forms, but is reducible to three: the passive, the active, and the auto-reject. Everyone is said to have experienced rejection (passive), to have rejected others (active), or to have turned a force around on oneself (auto-reject), as when one revises one’s thinking or takes a new course of action, rejecting older methods, strategies, and beliefs. The crucial turn of Goh’s analysis hinges on this third figure, the auto-reject, for it is not only said to sustain a critical distance to establish an ethics without the conceptual scaffolding of the subject, but also to prevent any return to the subject and the threat of absorption into the same.

In a chapter on friendship and love (community), Goh raises Bataille as a thinker who comes close to thinking the reject. In Inner Experience Bataille critiques the Hegelian dialectic, renouncing absolute knowledge or the appropriation and determination of everything, “including the thought of community” (Goh 26). Communication and ecstasy, for Bataille, are the undoing and dissolution of the subject; in them “there is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other; the one and the other have lost their separate existence” (Bataille 59). Against the world of work, utility, and a will to eternity and lasting duration, sacrifice for Bataille serves as precisely that attempt to abandon and destroy these subjected ties in what he calls “unproductive expenditure,” characterizing a fusion, or loss of self in the experience of immanent continuity. The notion of an abstract negativity that is inoperative and unemployed in Hegel now situates and informs the role of death in sacrifice as unproductive expenditure for Bataille. But immanence, which sacrifice aims to restore, is a-phenomenal (non-experiential)—sacrifice cannot accomplish immanence, nor can it even hope to accomplish immanence for that would turn into a productive work, and thus a comedy affair.

Ultimately, Bataille’s dissolution of the subject is not enough for Goh’s figure of the reject, for Nancy will expose the tendency in Bataille to view the death of the other as simultaneously both a negation and expenditure without reserve as well as resisting that immanence at the risk of putting death to work toward the creation of community. To paraphrase, Bataille was beleaguered by his own excess, for a kernel of working productivity haunted even his thinking of sacrifice. At the moment when Bataille thinks an abstract (unemployed) negativity has resisted the Hegelian system, Nancy asks whether Bataille does not in turn employ this very negativity in sacrifice as the communal project.

Goh adopts Nancy’s position—“thought of community does not depend on such apocalyptic messianism as a necessary condition”—for as he argues, there is always already community before “the teleologic quests for communitarian fusion, communion, closed finality or identity” (27). The figure of the reject will therefore obtain argumentative force in Nancy’s désoeuvrement or unworking, a disruptive suspension of all subjective work or project aiming at the identifiable, definable, or representable community. On Goh’s terms the subject fails as a philosophical construct to help us reject these values and subject-positions, and thus offers the reject as a strong figure to advance political justice.

One line of critique that Goh will take concerns network-centric friendship and capitalist tele-technologies. Goh is intent upon unworking the impulse to conceive of friendship and community as inclusive, that is to say, social appropriation via creating links and building networks, by revealing the reject as integral to the very notion of community—i.e. that community has always consisted of those who have no part in (e.g. Rancière’s sans part) or wish to stand apart from (reject) that community. As Derrida writes, every friend at some point desires an “untimely being-alone” (Politics 55). By existing in contradiction to, yet concurrent with and within a capitalist logic of community, the figure of the reject refuses to operate in conjunction with that logic, threatening to disrupt and displace any common notion of friendship.

Goh will remind us, following Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, of the other who is yet to come, the one who arrives from the future. However, he is equally quick to add that “there is always also the other who does not want to arrive.” He continues, “As rejects in or before friendship, each and every one of us will have the right to refuse to respond, or even the right to walk away, silently, without explanation, and there will be neither rapprochement nor reproach” (46). It is in this sense that we may begin to think beyond an ethics of recognition, turning on its head a certain moralistic compulsion to “view” the other (and in turn, be viewed).

The question of visibility returns to the fore in Goh’s reading of Cixous’s “messianic texts.” Within these texts, Goh argues, we primarily secure for ourselves the opportunity to critique, reject, and thus “discredit the concept of sovereignty” (197) from the viewpoint of certain figures that escape or sidestep the surveillance of the political spectrum. But in terms of where we are to locate such a figure, Goh has recourse to the animal that curiously inhabits religion without occupying it: “the thought of animals is at the heart of the question of religion;” “without animals, religion or religious experience will not have seen itself through” (134, 136). Following Cixous, Goh argues for a reading of religious texts from a point of view that occurs within religion but without falling under its circumspective concern (to use Heidegger’s language). The political upshot to this animal vision is that it has the “potentiality to leave all forms of politics predicated on fraternity and alliance or friendship … suspended, undecided, or undecidable” (196). The intention is laudable; however, Goh leaves himself open to critique precisely in his moment of privileging: when he puts the animal mode of vision at a political advantage over the state apparatus. Certainly the animal inhabits a space that “escape[s] the gaze and capture of politics” (203). Or more keenly, it is the animal’s own vision of the human, “this bottomless gaze offer[ed] to my sight,” as Derrida puts it, that escapes the political gaze (Animal 12). And Goh is right to augment this “escape” by insisting that any “becoming-animal must be vigilant to auto-reject any such desire … for an outside” (204). He names this place of escape an “adjacent space” (205). But are we not obligated to interrogate this shift in viewing power between State surveillance and animal vision? Essentially, what we obtain with Goh’s “becoming-animal” is a seeing-without-being-seen that cannot help but reinstitute a desire for political “self-consciousness.” Although never transpiring into a having–become-animal, becoming-animal for Goh remains watchful and is on the look-out for watchfulness itself —“the State’s surveillance apparatuses” —while escaping the gaze of that watchful entity, slipping toward a space of uncertainty, a blind spot (blind to the state-order surveillance) (212).

Thus, one may detect in Goh’s rejection of sovereign surveillance a strand of thought that secretly hijacks back into its sphere of influence the control of visibility—the privilege and power that accompanies the capacity to see while remaining invisible. What Goh manages to omit is that, much like the “written text that keeps watch over [Derrida’s] discourse” —unable to make out, without certain “oral specifications,” the letters “e” or “a” (I am of course speaking of différe(a)nce) —the auto-rejective potential of the animal’s gaze too harbors its own undecidability as it auto-deconstructively tends toward the invisible (Margins 4). For how does one “keep watch”? Is the “watchful” a threatening excess of power, dominant and oppressive, or is it a protective “looking after”? This very “undecidable” is incontestably not a trivial matter, and it calls for a certain keeping watch of our own part.

Three issues become imminently worrisome to me. First, in shifting the emphasis of vision from the state (anthropocentric, rational, politics of appropriation) to the animal (marginal, rejected, deterritorialized), Goh has merely reiterated a possibility that already lies at the heart of state politics—that power (and specifically vision) is auto-deconstructive. Goh’s notion of the auto-reject is conspicuously analogous with Derrida’s notion of auto-deconstruction, without however holding fast to the necessity of the undecidable. For Derrida will speak of a certain “economy of violence”—i.e., any discourse approaching justice can only do so by “acknowledging and practicing the violence within it” (Writing 117). There is no position in this “economy of violence” from which a watchful entity can be determined as benevolent or oppressive. As Derrida writes: “If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with a certain other light .… This vigilance is a violence chosen as the least violence by a philosophy which takes history, that is, finitude, seriously” (Writing 117). The distinction between State surveillance and the vigilance of the becoming-animal (or the auto-rejective potential of the animal reject) thus echoes what Derrida names a “preethical violence,” an irreducible alterity constituting an indeterminate act of violence from which no side of history can legitimate (Writing 128). Goh comes nearest to conceding this necessary undecidable in an analysis of the Occupy movement, wherein he speaks of the “countersovereign force of the voyou” or the rogue figure (187). However, vacillating between the two reject figures of the animal and the voyou—the one that escapes the political gaze, expelled to the margins, and the other which is entirely visible having “appropriated” public territory—Goh will inadvertently carry out in his analysis the necessary double bind inherent in Derrida’s economy of violence without however making this move explicit.

Secondly, when Goh inclines toward “a future where animals are no longer excluded or rejected from the domain of religious” or political discourse, one wonders how Goh himself conceives the animal reject as a figure of thought precisely when they are “no longer … rejected” (138, my emphasis). In the chapter on friendship and love, Goh routinely stresses the right of the friend to “refuse” friendship, to “walk away, silently, without explanation” (46). In a surprising turn of argument though, Goh also expresses the hope that reject figures will eventually come to be embraced as heterogeneous members of political discourse. A limit is thus constructed around the question of response, a question that is marked by the distinction who can (or cannot) respond and who refuses to respond (but is otherwise capable). In other words, can the animal, in being unable to respond (as per the tradition since Aristotle—e.g., “animal rights” has always been a matter of concern for “human legislation”), actively reject anthropocentric ideologies? Clearly not—and yet, the question of animal response is suspended and preserved in a structure of undecidability. It is thus left to the passive- and auto-rejective potential sheltered within the animal’s purported lack of response to upend and destabilize political injustice.

And this brings me to my third issue, connecting my first two points to Nancy’s question that lies at the heart of Goh’s project (“Who comes after the subject?”). In reading Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am do we not cross an intersection of gaze and response, precisely where it becomes a matter for Derrida of how to follow the animal, of being after the animal, as if in a chase, tracing its tracks, “following the traces of this wholly other they call ‘animal’” (Animal 14 )? “To follow and to be after will not only be the question,” but the question of that very question, “that which begins wondering what to respond means” (10). But Derrida does not exclude the possibility that the autobiographical animal (in this instance, Derrida himself) is both follower and followed, at once after the animal other and after himself as animal. And how would the animal respond if Derrida ever caught up with the animal? Because there is nothing active in the inability to respond, which is attributed to some animals, the question is redirected to “the passion of the animal,” to the passivity with which some animals endure their silence, unable to speak in their own name, subjected to an anthropological decision to speak on their behalf. The animal gaze arrives as if from the outside, interrupting the dominant practice (since Aristotle even) that sets the human apart from the animal, throwing the question of response back on the one who supposedly has the capacity for logos. For the inability to respond does not mark a privative attribute accorded to the animal, but rather deprives the human of any animal response. In actively denying the animal the capacity to speak, the human is condemned to suffer the animal gaze, an interrogative vision composed in the silence of a non-response, imposing a necessary suspension in the order of difference, requiring the one to be after the other.

Is it possible then to recast Goh’s project in light of the terms set forth in The Animal That Therefore I am? I am suggesting that the question “who comes after the subject?” be reframed not in terms of who or what could possibly replace the subject. On the contrary, Goh’s argument makes a lot more sense if we understand that the human-subject is after the animal-reject—and after itself as animal-reject—and discovers itself when, in pursuit of that figure which refuses the subject any determinate response, the mode of auto-deconstruction reveals that a figure of the reject internally fractures the subject, always and already displacing and destabilizing its sovereign moment. When the subject actively rejects the animal, denying it language to the point that the animal passively refuses intelligible response, it falls on the auto-rejective potential of the becoming-animal—which is situated strangely and “all-too-humanly” in a “zone of proximity” to the animal itself—to effect a critique of state politics, and Goh struggles interminably to articulate this limit.

But to his credit, I am wont to think that this struggle was precisely Goh’s success. In the heart of his discussion of friendship, Goh communicates a sentiment to which I am entirely amenable. Courageously attempting to think the unpopular—failure—Goh writes,

[O]ne must dare to think that love does not fully succeed in the crossing toward friendship. One must dare to think that love will fail friendship, precisely in that crossing. With love, there is the chance that there will be no deliverance to a future friendship. (53)

It is the mark of a rigorous thinker to always keep in mind the limit. Minding limits, thinking through the limit, giving oneself to think despite one’s limitation; these are ways in which we radicalize politics and contemporary thought. And I deeply appreciate Goh’s courage to think beyond the limits of the subject. But limits are tricky to negotiate. Despite Goh’s adamant insistence on the non-conceptualizability of the reject, one could easily flout his precaution in a hurried reading and be tempted to worry that the reject in fact falls into the bin of useful concepts for political theory and philosophic discourse—yet another term that we can employ and dispense with in accordance with the demands of our philosophic schemata. But upon further reflection, it seems more the case that the reject “figures” as a name, effect, or phenomenon of experience composed in deconstruction’s unapologetic aftermath; that, in fact, the reject does not do any added work to replace, or come (discursively) after the subject, but offers new language for the hetero-affectivity already at play within the subject. As I read it, the reject stands as a recasting and new branding of the marquee we have hitherto known as auto-deconstruction. It is fruitless to seek reprieve from the authority of the subject in another concept. But the reject will deliver positive justice if it awakens the subject to its disseminative labor and the experience of having already been thrown—“jected”—into this world: the subject re-jected.

Works Cited

• Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. New York: SUNY P, 1988.
• Cadava, Eduardo, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
• ———. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
• ———. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. New York: Verso, 2005.
• ———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Henry, Michel. “The Critique of the Subject.” Who Comes After the Subject? 157–166.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Introduction.” Who Comes After the Subject? 1–8.

Diletta De Cristofaro (bio)
University of Birmingham

A review of Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2016. Print.

McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red is a provocative call for new critical theory – or “new-old” (Wark xii), given its roots in marginalized strands of the Marxist tradition – for the age of the Anthropocene. The “Anthropocene” is a “term widely used since its coining by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 to denote the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities” (“What Is the ‘Anthropocene’?”). Although the term has not yet been formalized as an official geological epoch, the Anthropocene Working Group —tasked with developing a proposal for such formalization to be considered by the International Commission on Stratigraphy —deems the concept as “geologically real. The phenomenon is of sufficient scale to be considered as part of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, more commonly known as the Geological Time Scale” (“Media Note”). Although Wark is wary of the term “Anthropocene,” his book is informed by the realization that the planet has entered a new period of geological time and, thus, that we need new conceptualizations of the relationship between humans and nature. We are now at a conjuncture that Wark defines as the “end of pre-history,” when mankind comes to understand that “the God who still hid in the worldview of an ecology that was self-correcting, self-balancing and self-healing —is dead” (xii).

Drawing on Marx’s notion of the metabolic rift, that is, the rift between production and nature, Wark identifies the Anthropocene as “a series of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself” (xiv). A key and global metabolic rift in the age of the Anthropocene is what Wark, referring ironically to various liberation movements of the past three centuries, calls the “Carbon Liberation Front”: “carbon bound within the earth becomes scarce, and liberated carbon pushes the climate into the red zone” (xv). Wark thus calls for a “low theory,” attentive to the “molecular” order – a notion Wark borrows from Felix Guattari (xvi). In the era of techno-science, in which “life itself has been disaggregated and brought under forms of molecular control,” a molecular theory implies the emphasis on subtle and hidden processes, the flows and becomings of everyday life and, in particular, of labor (151). Wark’s objective in Molecular Red is to suggest ways to reorganize knowledge, in order to construct a “labor perspective on the historical tasks of our time” —addressing the disastrous effects of the Carbon Liberation Front (xx).

At a conjuncture in which apocalyptic pronouncements over climate change are in the news daily, accompanied by equally troubling political and corporate refusals to acknowledge the reality of the dangers, it is no surprise that interest in the Anthropocene is on the rise within the academy and beyond. Broadly speaking, academic explorations of the Anthropocene outside of the scientific realm can be divided into three categories. One, books that consider cultural responses to the Anthropocene, such as Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change and Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Two, studies that problematize the concept of nature, such as Jamie Lorimer’s Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature and Timothy Morton’s studies, from Ecology without Nature to Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Three, books that interrogate the notion of the Anthropocene itself, together with its political, ethical, and philosophical implications, such as Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne’s The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch and Frank Biermann’s Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Wark’s intervention in the field compellingly combines these three strands by considering science fiction (both Soviet and American); the nexus between nature and the human, especially through human labor; and, most importantly, philosophical perspectives that can be helpful in laying the foundations of a low theory for the Anthropocene.

To suggest ways to reorganize knowledge for the new epoch, Molecular Red’s first part, titled “Labor and Nature,” turns to Alexander Bogdanov and Andrey Platonov, both largely ignored Marxist thinkers. To Wark, Bogdanov’s views are useful in our current predicament for three reasons. Firstly, Wark goes back to Bogdanov because his science fiction – Red Star (1908) and The Engineer Menni (1913) – anticipates the Carbon Liberation Front and climate change. Secondly, combining Marx and the theories of the philosopher-scientist Ernst Mach, Bogdanov elaborates his own “worldview,” empirio-monism, which “frees our species-being from external a priori forms” by articulating a definition of nature that is attuned to the labor point of view (28). Nature, to Bogdanov, is simply “that which labor encounters;” the “physical world as we know it cannot be thought as preceding our labors upon it” (4, 26). This deeply resonates with the Anthropocene era, which is, in Wark’s terms, the end of pre-history, when humans realize the imbrication between their labor and nature. Thirdly, Bogdanov’s “tektology, a new way of organizing knowledge,” and his proletkult, “a new practice of culture,” are “key steps toward the practice of a molecular red knowledge of the kind we need today” (13). Tektology is a “metaphoric machine,” as it works through substitution, that is, the application of processes and understandings used in certain fields to other fields (49). Tektology is a low theory of the kind Wark calls for in the Anthropocene because it is not about creating theoretical systems of the molar, abstract order: “There’s no prior unity or ultimate synthesis” (44) to which tektology tends. Rather, tektology is about collaborating collectively to organize knowledge that is always materially and historically grounded in labor’s experiences – what Wark, recalling Michel Foucault’s discourses of power/knowledge, terms “practices of laboring/knowing” (13). This collective collaboration across disciplines is what is required to address Anthropogenic emergencies. Hardly by chance, Wark mentions climate science, “an evolution from discrete fields and technologies to a global climate knowledge infrastructure” (26), as an example of tektology.

Platonov emerges out of Proletkult, that “collaborative production of art, culture, even science, by and for the proletariat itself” (38). To Wark, the importance of Platonov’s work for our times is twofold. Firstly, Platonov’s anti-novellas refine the labor point of view as the point of view of comrades. “Living things are each other’s comrades” because they share life and struggle in the face of a nature which is “recalcitrant, enervating, unpredictable…. It has no necessary tendency to stability or order, no bias towards homeostasis. Its history is a history of metabolic rifts,” thus resonating with nature in the Anthropocene (106–107, 82). Secondly, “Platonov’s détournement of the socialist realism of the 1930s” can serve as guide to challenge the capitalist realism that dominates the twenty-first century, namely, the idea that there is no alternative to the current system (66). In particular, in “Factory of Literature” (1926), Platonov identifies writing from the labor point of view as a form of collective labor – “a distributed network of specialized text-filtering centers with central nodes for the final synthesis of literary works” – that anticipates a variety of forms of late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century cultural production, including the Internet (Wark 167).

“Science and Utopia,” Molecular Red’s second part, builds on the key elements of the first part – the labor point of view on nature, empirio-monism, tektology and proletkult – by imaginatively and persuasively pairing Bogdanov and Platonov with more recent thinkers who work at the intersection of culture and science. In particular, Wark is interested in those who have been critical of capitalist realism’s “California Ideology,” a “feral cross between cyber-culture and counter-culture, where the disruptive power of ‘tech’ is supposed to power the freeing of any and every resource for commodification” (118). First, Wark turns to Donna Haraway, or rather, “Cyborg Haraway,” Wark’s tektological assemblage of Haraway’s work together with the work of her sources (Paul Feyerabend), her colleagues (Karen Barad), and her students (Paul Edwards).

Via Feyerabend, Wark reiterates the importance of empirio-monism as a practice of low, rather than high, theory, a “comradely effort at collaboration through experimental substitution between particular efforts” which rejects ultimate authority for any discipline and theory (130). Through her theorization of the cyborg, Haraway’s work not only queers labor and re-orients it through her feminist standpoint, but also serves to emphasize how, in the age of techno-science, the labor point of view cannot but include nonhuman actors. Haraway, writes Wark, “begins what can only be a collaborative project for a new international – one not just of labouring men, but of all the stuttering cyborgs stuck in reified relations not of their making” (149). Barad’s notion of the apparatus adds another piece to the puzzle of the labor, or rather cyborg, point of view in the twenty-first century by drawing attention to the forces of production of knowledge. An apparatus is “techne, a media” that produces knowledge by constructing a “cut,” a distinction, between object and subject, nature and labor (159). Edwards applies the notion of apparatus to the knowledge infrastructure required in the tektology that is climate science: “The study of climate called into being a whole infrastructure of discrete apparatuses, of distinctive cuts,” gesturing towards “what a comradely, cooperative science could be” (167). “Cyborg Haraway” ultimately allows Wark to challenge a typical “romantic left” response to the Anthropocene, which consists in a “rejection of techno-modernity on a claim to something prior to or outside of it: on being, on nature, on poetry, on the body, on the human, or on communism as event or leap” (180). This regression to nature is not only a fantasy – “We are cyborgs, making a cyborg planet with cyborg weather . . . . It’s a de-natured nature without ecology” – but rejecting techno-science ultimately entails rejecting the means of knowing and understanding climate change (180).

Molecular Red finally turns to Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction as an example of proletkult in the age of techno-science. Wark’s fascinating discussion of Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1993–96) reads the texts as theoretical works that address the era of the Carbon Liberation Front by rejecting both capitalist realism and capitalist romance, namely, the belief that the market will take care of everything as it is a self-balancing and self-correcting natural order. Wark is particularly interested in the trilogy’s utopian response to the Anthropocene, a response embodied in the emergence of a praxis of collective labor out of ideological clashes, as well as in an understanding of revolution as “the accumulation of minor, even molecular, elements of a new way of life and their negotiation with each other” (196). In other words, the utopian dimension of Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is a matter of tektology, a “meta-utopia . . . . made of many utopias . . . but not a synthesis of them. It stages the conflicts; it respects their incommensurability” (211). By “dispens[ing] with the invisible hand, and with homeostatic ecology as a basic metaphor,” Robinson’s texts also gesture towards the need for new metaphors, new language (209). It is to this issue that Molecular Red’s conclusion turns.

Reflecting on the etymology of Anthropocene (anthropos, man, and kainos, “that which is not just a new unit of time but a new quality or form”), Wark writes that he is tempted to reject the term: “I want a name for what the kainos ought to be, not what it is. And in any case, it’s too anthropocentric” (221, 222). But he then considers how Anthropocene is a “brilliant hack,” which “introduces the labor point of view – in the broadest possible sense – into geology” (223). Thus, with a tektological gesture, Wark concludes that “Perhaps the challenge is then to find analogous but different ways to hack other specialized domains of knowledge, to orient them to the situation and the tasks at hand. Let’s invent new metaphors!” (223).

By considering an imaginative selection of thinkers and by creating a productive dialogue between them, Wark’s Molecular Red is a fascinating exercise in tektological assemblage in itself. There are two connected aspects, both related to praxis, that I would have liked Wark to discuss further. Firstly, the idea of meta-utopia, which is a promising critical tool to negotiate and combine different visions of the future, is barely sketched in Molecular Red. It would have been interesting to produce a tektological encounter between Robinson’s meta-utopian writings and theorizations of the notion of utopia, especially those, like Tom Moylan’s concept of critical utopia or Ruth Levitas’s conceptualization of utopia as method rather than dream, that are wary of normative utopian visions. Secondly, while Wark acknowledges that “Organizing praxis calls for a theory of history, a language of goals and objectives, even if only a provisional one. Praxis needs a conceptual space which relates knowable pasts to possible futures” (200), Molecular Red lacks a distinct theory of history. The Anthropocene is, of course, a temporal notion and deep time is usually central to discussions of the new era. Wark alludes to the temporal aspects of the Anthropocene by identifying it as the “end of pre-history,” but what comes after this end is not clear. One can only assume that, after the end of pre-history, history proper begins but the implications of this shift are never fleshed out. This reluctance could be related to Wark’s call for a low theory and his rejection of normative and prescriptive visions: Molecular Red outlines a “low theory approach, moving between scientific knowledges, not a high theory flying high as a drone above to adjudicate, legislate, or police them” (121). Thus, as he puts it, the theory of history needed by praxis “won’t be a teleology. History has no plan. There is no horizon to orient toward, no line from present to future” (200). However, the idea of an “end of prehistory” does outline a teleology, and Molecular Red would have benefited from a clearer negotiation of this tension, as well as from the exploration of the relationship between a “provisional” theory of history, which the book does not provide, and the meta-utopian openness to a variety of possible futures.

Nevertheless, with his rejection of theoretical practices that “adjudicate, legislate, or police,” it is hardly surprising that Wark refuses to be more specific and prescriptive in articulating the concrete implications of his molecular red theory, especially the ways in which this could be applied to address Anthropogenic emergencies. To Wark, it is the task of collective labor to experiment, through comradely negotiation, with the praxis of low theory. Molecular Red thus concludes with a call, addressed to a “Cyborg International” that embodies the labor point of view in the twenty-first century, for these comradely experimentations: “We all know this civilization can’t last. Let’s make another” (225).

Works Cited

• “Media Note: Anthropocene Working Group (AWG).” University of Leicester. Web. 11 Feb. 2017. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013.
• Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986.
• Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2016. Print.
• What Is the ‘Anthropocene’? – Current Definition and Status.” Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. Web. 11 Feb. 2017.

Melinda Cooper (bio)
University of Sydney

Abstract

In the wake of the global financial crisis, a number of high profile economists have sought to revive Alvin Hansen’s Depression-era theory of “secular stagnation” to account for the stagnant tendencies in the American economy, citing Japan as a cautionary tale of combined demographic and economic decline. Following Hansen, it is argued that the long-term stagnation of the world economy can be attributed to a failure of the reproductive will, made manifest in declining birth rates and ageing populations. Although the causal connections between population and price trends are controversial even among mainstream demographers and economists, such arguments date back to the origins of political economy and appear to magically resurface with each major episode of crisis. If the crisis is inflationary, it tends to be ascribed to overpopulation; if it is deflationary, we find a corresponding concern with slowing birth rates. This article seeks to understand the durability of the demographic theory of crisis by examining the punitive and restorative work it performs in periods of capitalist restructuring.

For many years, Japan has served as a cautionary tale to other debt-fueled economies around the world. The debt-deflationary spiral that engulfed the Japanese economy in the 1990s was for a long time seen as exceptional, attributed to some deep fault-line in its historical development or some intrinsic weirdness of the Japanese national character. Following the wave of competitive and envious commentary that flourished in the American business press of the 1980s, the case of Japan’s protracted downturn after 1990 was variously analysed with schadenfreude or bemused curiosity, and understood as the consequence of uniquely Japanese perversions. The Japanese state had been too paternalistic all along. Its people had been infantilized by lifelong job security and indulgent government spending. Once feared as mindlessly over-productive, Japanese workers were now dismissed as obsessively deferential, over-regimented, and robotic.

In both the Japanese and American literature, commentary on Japan’s so-called Lost Decade very quickly became inseparable from a reflection on the peculiar demographic trends affecting the country. Relative to the post-war years of accelerated demographic growth, the Japanese population is rapidly aging and declining, combining some of the lowest birth rates in the world with unusually long life expectancy. Japanese women today are less likely to marry than in the recent past and are having fewer children. The secondary literature on the Japanese economic situation has very rapidly conflated these two phenomena of economic stagnation and slowing population growth. Perhaps stagnation was exacerbated or even caused by falling birth rates? Perhaps this signalled a deeper malaise in the reproductive life of the nation, a literal failure to reproduce the future? Or a mortgaging of the future via the burden of unsustainable public debt? Michael Zielenziger’s Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created its Own Lost Generation, an early and influential example of this genre, reflects that “the most ominous aspect of Japan’s stagnation” is the pervasive crisis of confidence that has affected its people. This distress, he confidently asserts, “is reflected in Japan’s plummeting birthrate,” which is in turn made manifest in various diversions from reproductive sexuality, ranging from womb-striking women to infantilized adolescent men who never leave home and shun the active role in sex (9). The conundrum of economic stagnation has generated a seemingly inexhaustible literature on the failures of reproductive sex in contemporary Japan,¹ and inversely, a triumphant literature on America’s comparative success in maintaining both vigorous birth rates and a dynamic economy.

But while this narrative has not diminished in recent years, the certainty that it is somehow unique to Japan has retreated. The protracted stagnation that has beset the American economy in the wake of the global financial crisis – despite several rounds of Quantitative Easing and near-zero interest rates – has compelled even mainstream American economists to ask the unthinkable. Is America becoming the next Japan? Is it conceivable that America might be following Japan, not only down the pathway toward economic stagnation but also toward some deeper demographic malaise that could see population growth falter in the years ahead? Although certainly not dramatic when compared to either Japan or Western Europe, recent figures suggest that the population growth rate in America has slowed down somewhat. Reflecting on this trend, the New York Times journalist Ross Douthat ventures that America has perhaps “lost its demographic edge” (“More Babies”). Beyond economic drivers, perhaps the deeper structural cause behind America’s protracted downturn and anemic growth rates can be found in a “broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage” (“More Babies”). And as if to underscore that orientalist theories of non-Western perversion have always been linked, mirror-like, to fears of Western decadence, he goes on to accuse America of exporting this particular form of reproductive failure to the rest of world: “The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion – a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be” (“More Babies”). In short, the cause of America’s economic stagnation is ultimately to be found in a failure of reproductive sex.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, this largely journalistic literature on population decline has achieved a certain academic respectability thanks to the revival of demographic theories of crisis popular in the 1930s. In a 2013 speech delivered at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers suggested that America’s protracted economic slump could be explained by Alvin Hansen’s long forgotten theory of “secular stagnation,” which attributed America’s Depression-era woes to a dramatic drop in the birth rate (Summers, “Economic Forum”).² Writing in the late 1930s, at a moment when America was plunging back into an unexpected recession, Hansen sought to theorize why the American economy continued to post such disappointing growth rates some ten years after the Wall Street crash, despite government efforts at pump-priming and interest rate reductions. What Americans were witnessing, he argued, was much more than a temporary fluctuation in the business cycle. Deprived of the external drivers that had fueled economic growth throughout the long nineteenth century – high birth rates, territorial expansion, and new inventions – the American economy had entered a period of “secular stagnation” that rendered it impervious to the usual tools of monetary stimulus. “Overwhelmingly significant” in this regard was “the profound change … in the rate of population growth” that was recorded in the 1930s (Hansen 1). The “drastic shift from rapid expansion to cessation of population growth” had irreversibly dampened consumption and was therefore a “basic cause” of America’s secular stagnation (Hansen 2). Hansen’s suggested solution to this state of affairs – like that of Lawrence Summers today – was ongoing fiscal stimulus beyond mere pump priming.³ Unless the government could be persuaded to permanently stimulate private investment through the use of sustained public spending programs, America was destined for a future of stunted growth. “This is the essence of secular stagnation – sick recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment” (Hansen 4).

Lawrence Summers’s secular stagnation thesis has enjoyed extraordinary success among orthodox macroeconomists who have otherwise been at a loss to explain America’s enduring economic woes. Mainstream economists who until recently were convinced that only (wage and price) inflation could be a problem and that monetary policy was sufficient for controlling it are now encroaching on the territory of heterodox post-Keynesian and Marxist scholars in their efforts to understand the magnitude of the current crisis.⁴ Summers’s secular stagnation paper has generated an enormous secondary literature (including a high-profile online debate with Ben Bernanke), variously seeking to confirm, qualify, or offer alternatives to Summers’s analysis of the causal relations at work. Most of this literature duly corroborates the importance of population in explaining America’s poor growth prospects⁵ . Summers himself does not dwell on the demographic issue – he appears to favor an ongoing program of fiscal stimulus (which may well boost population growth) to overt pronatalism. Yet his work has clearly relegitimized the crudest kind of bioeconomic thinking. Writing for the respectable Institute for New Economic Thinking, Coen Teulings and Jason Lu blame the contraceptive pill for precipitating long-term trends toward low-interest rates and secular stagnation. On the political right, the American Enterprise Institute’s in-house demographer, Nicholas Eberstadt, laments what he sees as a “global flight from the family,” pointing to its devastating economic effects in stagnant Japan, while the business media routinely identifies slowing birth rates as the prime cause of secular stagnation (Eberstadt). “Inflation rises with younger people entering the workforce, then wanes after they become most productive in their forties,” writes the popular economic forecaster Harry Dent; “deflation can set in when more people retire than enter the workforce …. Younger people drive innovation cycles, older ones don’t (there are more adult diaper sales in Japan today than sales of baby diapers!)” (Dent 1). This is the reason we may never recover, headlines Time Magazine, in a lengthy feature on the subject (Davidson).

The equation between inflation and rising birthrates, on the one hand, and between deflation and aging populations, on the other, is contested even among mainstream demographers and economists.⁶ Indeed, the credibility of the argument from population is not infrequently called into question by the very theorists who espouse it (thus, aside from the issue of demographic decline, Lawrence Summers offers a plausible account of the role of rising wage and wealth inequality in generating the fault-lines of the current crisis). Yet the equation persists, and appears to magically reappear with every major episode of inflation or deflation, suggesting the need for some deeper political and affective explanation of its staying power. This article seeks to understand the durability of the demographic theory of crisis by examining the work it performs in periods of capitalist restructuring. The theory, I suggest, operates as much through elision and displacement as positive argument, actively working to override the distributional dimension of crisis in favor of a classless narrative of generational conflict or loss. A process of debt deflation that was generated and entrenched by rising wage and wealth inequalities is transposed into the unified arithmetic of national demographic decline and denounced as a crisis of reproduction, common to all classes, but personified in various figures of un(re)productive surplus, from sterile women to pampered pensioners. If people aren’t consuming enough, this has nothing to do with the maldistribution of wealth and income, but can be blamed on the fact that they aren’t having enough children. If profitable businesses are failing to engage in new capital investment, this has nothing to do with their rising share of the national income and its disabling effects on consumption; it is simply that businesses have no incentive to invest in a diminishing working-age population and a depopulated consumer market.

It is important to stress that secular stagnation theory comes from the political left and not the right, if by “left” we simply mean favorable to expansionary fiscal policy and labor immigration. Unlike the more nativist expressions of underpopulation thinking that can be found on the right, the exponents of secular stagnation theory call for an increase in state deficit spending and a relaxation of migration controls as necessary stimuli to renewed growth.⁷ Yet their anti-austerity politics goes hand in hand with a rigorously familial, reproductive vision of the economic future. Beyond mere austerity, the notion that secular stagnation is ultimately caused by dwindling birthrates serves to deflect critique from the fact of inequality and prescribes reproductive nationalism as the natural solution to the insecurities of economic life.

Secular Stagnation: The Challenge to Macroeconomics

Almost a decade after the onset of the Great Recession, conventional macroeconomics is struggling to explain the unusually weak state of the American economy. The response to the crisis included some of the most aggressive monetary policies ever undertaken by the Federal Reserve and impressive although short-lived efforts at fiscal stimulus on the part of the Treasury. Central banks around the world were shocked into action by the failure of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008. Fearing a collapse of the entire financial system, Congress responded to this event by establishing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which allowed the Treasury to purchase or insure over $400 billion in “troubled assets” on the balance sheets of financial institutions, while the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to near-zero, where they have remained ever since. But constrained in what it could now do using the conventional instrument of short-term interest-rate manipulation, the Fed almost immediately embarked on a more unconventional set of operations designed to stabilize the balance sheets of banks and financial institutions, with the ultimate aim of restimulating lending. Between 2009 and 2012, it undertook three rounds of Quantitative Easing, involving mass purchases of long-term assets such as mortgage-backed securities and Treasury Bonds. These and other unconventional monetary policies transferred securities from banks and financial institutions to the Federal Reserve, expanding its balance sheet from around $850 billion to a monumental $4.4 trillion in the space of a few years. In the meantime, despite stiff opposition from Republicans and some Democrats, the Obama administration managed to enact at least some of its proposed fiscal stimulus measures, including an increase in unemployment benefits and tax cuts to low and middle income households.

Yet despite initial signs of recovery, the current state of the American economy is disconcerting. GDP growth has averaged around 2% since the end of the Great Recession, lower than the post-war average of 3% and well below the vigorous rebound rates expected after most recessions. Unemployment remains higher than it was prior to the financial crisis, and much of the registered improvement can be accounted for by workers who have given up seeking employment altogether. The Fed’s aggressive monetary policy appears to have had a paradoxical effect on investment behavior: while corporate profits are at a post-World War II high, businesses are refusing to embark on the sort of new capital investment that might increase job opportunities or bolster wage growth. Instead they are parking their savings in low-risk assets such as Treasury Bonds or engaging in short-term profit-boosting activities such as share buybacks. In defiance of the conventional macroeconomic wisdom, companies are hesitating to invest despite near zero interest rates and vigorous profits. America in fact appears to have entered a strange world of inverted macroeconomic logic very similar to that experienced by Japan over the last few decades, where profitable corporations have for some time refused to take on new debt or engage in new capital investment despite the availability of virtually free credit.

Revising Irving Fisher’s debt-deflation theory of the Great Depression, Richard Koo proposes the more comprehensive concept of “balance sheet recession” to explain the apparent anomaly of the post-crisis American and Japanese economies. Such recessions, he argues, typically occur in the aftermath of asset-price booms sustained by enormous levels of private indebtedness (The Escape 10–13). When the value of these assets plummets, households and corporations are left underwater, saddled with outsized debts on evaporated collateral. In such a situation, borrowers will do everything in their power to deleverage or pay off debt, even if they continue to rake in enormous profits. Thus a corporation that looks healthy in terms of cash flow may be suffering from hidden balance sheet liabilities that render it insolvent. When this is the case, even zero-interest rates will be insufficient to persuade a household or business to take on new debt or embark on new investment, since all income flow is channeled toward the task of paying down debt. Balance sheet recessions are relatively impervious to traditional macroeconomic policies such as monetary accommodation and short-term fiscal stimulus. Quantitative easing, which is designed to boost money creation on the part of banks and thus expand credit, will instead produce a build-up of reserves on banks’ balance sheets, since no one can be persuaded to borrow. Short-term fiscal stimulus will simply be used to pay down debt. Although rational on an individual level, the cumulative effect of multiple borrowers opting to deleverage produces a self-reinforcing “fallacy of composition,” which extinguishes all sources of demand (15). The theory of balance-sheet recession, Koo argues, can also account for the Great Depression: much like the subprime crisis of 2007, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred in the aftermath of an enormous buildup of private credit and inflated asset prices; when these asset prices collapsed, corporations went into protective mode, opting to deleverage en masse rather than risk new debt-financed investment (17). In each instance—America during the Great Depression, America and Europe today, Japan after 1990—balance sheet recession prompted a radical deleveraging of the corporate sector and a faltering of new capital investment, leading to the phenomenon known as “secular stagnation.”

Like Irving Fisher before him, Koo has little to say about the role of wages in the debt deflationary process. Yet even among mainstream economists, there is a growing recognition that falling wage shares in national income before and after the crisis were critical in creating the phenomenon of enduring stagnation, both today and in the Great Depression (Rajan). Thus the historian James Livingston demonstrates that, contrary to the conventional wisdom – inherited from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, and recently endorsed by Ben Bernanke (“Remarks”) – that the Great Depression was triggered by the Fed and its failure to lower real interest rates, wage stagnation was in fact primarily responsible for the prolonged debt deflation of the 1930s. Livingston traces this trend back to the 1920s, when corporations dramatically enlarged their share of profits and national income with respect to labor. The stagnation of wage growth, he notes, occurred at precisely the moment when consumer spending was beginning to serve as the new fulcrum of economic growth, a necessary demand counterpart to industrial mass production (37–38). Flush with rising profits but short on outlets for new capital investment, businesses instead channeled their surplus revenue into financial assets such as stocks and securities, while household consumption was for a short time sustained in the face of falling wages by the extension of consumer credit. But with the collapse of the real estate and consumer credit markets in 1926, followed by the stock market crash of 1929, all sources of demand were blocked and the feedback loop between unemployed surplus profits and stagnant wages became self-reinforcing (39). Businesses that were now saddled with exorbitant levels of debt on devalued assets did everything in their power to deleverage, ultimately laying off workers or compelling them to accept lower wages. And as unemployment skyrocketed and consumer demand fell still further, businesses now had even less incentive to engage in the kinds of capital investment that might create job opportunities and stimulate consumption.

Thus, Livingston concludes, the Great Depression was more than a simple credit contraction that could be triggered and remedied by monetary intervention, as argued by Friedman and Schwartz. The fault-lines of the crisis were to be found in long-term trends toward upward income redistribution, that is, the “fundamental shift of income shares away from wages and consumption to corporate profits” that left businesses with insufficient investment opportunities and workers too poorly paid to sustain demand (Livingston 37). If these fractures could be temporarily papered over by inflating asset prices and democratized consumer credit, the solution was always a precarious one given the underlying weakness of wages and the growing importance of consumption to the emerging economy of mass production.

Many economists, including those in critical conversation with Lawrence Summers, discern a similar dynamic at work in the recent American crisis. Thus Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, although broadly in agreement with Summers’s diagnosis of secular stagnation, take him to task for not sufficiently appreciating the role of wage and wealth inequalities in generating and prolonging the crisis. “In our view,” they write, “what is missing from the secular stagnation story is the crucial role of the highly unequal wealth [and wage] distribution” (“Secular Stagnation”). It is this factor, in their view, not a demographic decline in the working age population, which accounts for both the onset of the global financial crisis and its enduring impact on economic growth. If America was able to sustain consumer demand for so long in the face of stagnant wages, it could do so only by generalizing credit access to the most high-risk households, those with precarious, irregular, and low wages. An entire global market in securitized credit and credit derivatives was thus built out of the income flows of the most insecure workers, and was rendered permanently vulnerable to the smallest shifts in interest rate. When this structure came crashing down in 2007, the ensuing epidemic of deleveraging on the part of households and corporations meant that the American economy was never able to resuscitate sufficient demand to attain pre-crisis rates of growth. If low-income borrowers were made responsible for sustaining consumer demand at the height of the credit boom, the same workers, now intent on deleveraging, are having a disproportionately negative effect on demand in the wake of the crisis. “During the Great Recession, for the same decline in housing wealth, low-income households cut back on spending much more. The spending response of low-income households is twice as large as that for rich households” (Mian and Sufi, “Why”).

A similar role can be ascribed to wage deflation in the Japanese economy. As early as the Maekawa Commission Report of 1986, Japanese policy makers recognized that wages would need to rise substantially if Japan were to overcome its vulnerability to foreign export markets (Katz 89). But for various political and institutional reasons, this solution has never been pursued with enough conviction to represent a sustainable alternative. Instead, Japan turned to debt-fueled corporate investment during the 1980s before resuming its reliance on export-oriented production after the crash of 1990, all the while eluding the option of stimulating domestic consumption led by wage growth. As in the United States, real wages have been declining as a share of national income since 1973, with the significant difference that in Japan this trend has not been offset by expanding access to consumer credit (Batra). The number of non-regular workers, moreover, have been swelling since the 1980s, with many women and younger workers confined to low-paid, irregular employment with few benefits (Kingston 77–92). These already existing trends were intensified when the government further deregulated the labor market in the wake of the financial crash of 1990. All of this has conspired to limit the possibilities of domestic consumption at the very moment when it is most urgently needed as an engine of growth.

In the mid-1980s, Japan succumbed to pressure from the United States to restructure its economy around domestic demand rather than exports. The Plaza and Louvre accords of 1985 compelled Japan to deregulate its credit markets and devalue the yen in an effort to lower its current account surplus. The effects were counterintuitive: although exports fell only slightly as a result of the accords, the liberalization of financial markets and relaxation of rules governing corporate access to credit encouraged Japanese corporations to engage in highly leveraged investments in commercial real estate and stocks. The resulting boom in asset prices sustained corporate profits and economic growth for an entire decade but further entrenched the weakness of household consumption, as profits claimed an ever-greater share of national income. “High nominal wages [shrank] in the face of ever higher prices. As a result, real wages have slumped as a share of national income in the past couple of decades. In price-adjusted terms, the capital share of national income is too high and the labor share too low” (Katz 95). When the Bank of Japan finally resolved to raise interest rates in 1990, bringing the asset-inflationary spiral to a sudden end, Japanese corporations found themselves saddled with enormous debts on devalued assets, while financial institutions were left with a mass of non-performing loans. Thus began the process of debt-deflation – or in Richard Koo’s words, balance sheet recession – that has now become a familiar experience of economies around the world. Businesses that were technically insolvent but still raking in respectable profits now refused to borrow or engage in new capital investment. Declining investment exacerbated existing wage stagnation, which in turn further marginalized any hope that consumption might prove a durable pathway to renewed demand. This weakness became catastrophic after the American subprime crisis of 2007, which greatly diminished Japan’s access to a booming export market.

Thus wage stagnation represents a major fault-line in the Japanese economy, the absent stimulus without which there can be no hope of renewed economic growth. As noted by Katz, it is not that Japanese workers are “saving too much” – a truism, repeated by Bernanke (“Global Saving Glut”), that imputes a special kind of psychological perversion to Asian workers in particular – but that they are earning too little to compensate for faltering demand in other sectors of the economy. Savings rates amongst Japanese households have in fact declined by 50% since the 1970s: thus the “real culprit [is] skewed income distribution between corporations and households,” not miserly consumers (Katz 82).

Despite repeated acknowledgement of the wage factor by Japanese policy markers (including, most recently, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe), a powerful political rhetoric continues to interpret the Japanese crisis as the inevitable consequence of declining birth rates and aging populations. Thus, the well-respected economist Kosuke Motani (1) has described the Japanese predicament as a “non-monetary deflation” whose ultimate causes are to be found in the decline of the working-age population – a diagnosis that is endorsed by the former Governor of the Bank of Japan, Masaaki Shirakawa. In his alternative account of the same events, Koo remarks that the causal relation is improbable: the aging described by Motani was already well under way before the crash of 1990, and in any case, cannot explain the enormous buildup in private credit that precipitated it (The Escape 170–171). But despite such empirical failings, the demographic thesis has proven remarkably resilient and has only become more plausible with the massive levels of public debt accumulated by the government in its efforts to bail out failing banks and carry out fiscal stimulus. This debt, it is often assumed, has been incurred through rising spending on the dependent aged, a burden that is being rapidly amassed at the expense of future, unborn generations. Again, the argument has been amply deconstructed.⁸ And yet it has been plausible enough to persuade successive Japanese prime ministers to increase pension contributions and diminish benefits, a cost-cutting maneuver that is destined to further erode household spending power and thus greatly exacerbate the wage stagnation that is ultimately responsible for Japan’s continuing malaise. In this and other instances, the problem of secular stagnation is transmuted into a demographic register that defines one generation or one part of the population as an un(re)productive surplus and a burden for all others. In what follows, I explore some of the many fantasy-forms that this surplus population can take, both within and outside Japan.

Unreproductive Surplus and the Japanese Stagnation

Zeilenziger’s Shutting Out the Sun is by far the most influential exemplar of a new genre of Japan-focused cultural psychology that emerged after the crisis of 1990. Much of the force of Zeilenziger’s analysis stems from the fact that he simply reverses the valence of a previous generation of widely accepted truisms on Japanese economic life, discerning manic-depressive zeal where commentators once saw unstoppable momentum, and stultifying conformity where others once saw an enviably organized form of flexibility. Japan no longer represents the nation that others strive to emulate, but a distorted mirror image of American vitality: “the decline of a great power like Japan is relevant – or cautionary – to citizens of other great nations who, like Americans, wonder whether their society too, might someday lose its vital gift for reinvention or renewal” (Zeilenziger 10). This gift for reinvention finds self-evident expression in America’s economic and demographic growth, just as Japan’s post-crisis stagnation is reflected in its low birth rates and aging population. “Demographics define destiny,” Zeilenziger observes, before explaining that, thanks to its “rapidly shrinking population,” Japan will soon enter “a ‘zerogrowth’ era when average annual growth is not likely to exceed 0.3 percent” (162).

Extrapolating from the demographic data, Zeilenziger suggests that if post-crisis stagnation has lasted so long, it is because Japan overprotects the old at the expense of the young and burdens the future with the weight of inherited public debt. In Zeilenziger’s narrative, the young represent the entrepreneurial spirit of Schumpeterian innovation while the old are equated with the paternalist weight of economic protectionism, the corporate bias toward seniority and the accumulated burden of state deficit spending. The paradoxical effect of this deference toward the old is the permanent infantilization of the young, who struggle to emerge out of the shadow of their parents to reach full reproductive adulthood. Here, Zeilenziger evokes the stock figure of the hikikomori, adolescent males who retreat to their rooms and refuse the responsibilities of the male breadwinner role. The alleged economic protectionism of the Japanese state finds its intimate counterpart in the stifling paternalism of the Japanese family, which emasculates the son by maintaining him in a state of permanent pre-adulthood:

For just as a hikikomori shuts himself off in his room rather than mediate a society he finds intolerable … Japan chose to ignore the obvious signs that its corporations invested and exported too much, that its webs of closed, protective relationships would never be as dynamic as open ones, and that national investment schemes that relied on government experts to envision the future would never consistently outperform those who summoned the wisdom of independent innovations [and] diverse risk-takers. (Zeilenziger 96)

In the same way that an overly activist central bank chose to “emasculate” the stock and bond markets by bailing out corporations and banks in the wake of the crisis, Japanese parents are somehow responsible for castrating their sons and preventing their emergence into reproductive adulthood (Zeilenziger 100). Inversely, Zeilenziger evokes the female counterpart to the hikikomori, the “womb-striking woman” who lives with her parents well into childbearing age and refuses to bring forth a new generation of Japanese worker/consumers. “Shrinking maternity wards and abandoned kindergarten classrooms across the nation testify to the pitiless impact of the baby boycott” (Zeilenziger 162).

Zeilenziger’s work lies squarely within a popular tradition of prurient commentary on the peculiarities of Japanese economic and cultural life. But even the critical academic literature presents the relationship between declining birth rates and economic stagnation as a matter of fact. Thus, Anne Allison, in her Precarious Japan, bluntly asserts that the country’s demographics are “complicit in its troubled social condition” and points to the sheer mass of aging, nonproductive bodies and aborted infancies as material proof of this predicament (34). “Amassing population at the upper, rather than lower, end of the age demographic chart,” she asserts, “puts obvious strain on the economy in terms of both productive output (a shrinking workforce and decrease in those contributing taxes) and social reproductivity (a rise in those needing care in comparison to those who can, or are willing to give it). . . . There are fewer workers today to support the elderly: a decrease in what is called the ‘dependency ratio’” (Allison 35–36). The idea that public finance is fatally threatened by a skewed “dependency ratio” in favor of the elderly has been amply critiqued – it ignores the fact that rising numbers of young people present an equally large dependency burden; assumes that all working age citizens are actually employed; and elides the fact that pension funds are invested, not simply amassed⁹ – yet it is presented here as a self-evident recipe for declining growth and productivity, rendered unanswerable by the surfeit of aging over newborn flesh. Sliding between the metaphorical and the causal, Allison presumes that demographic shortfall and economic deficit are functionally equivalent:

Tending to the health and health care of the nation increasingly means shifting focus from a red-cheeked new-born to aging flesh. The implications in terms of outlay (of national resources) and output (of productive yield) are tremendous. If the child signifies potential – a forthcoming of growth, productivity and futurity – the elderly signifies deficit, the progressive decline of vitality whose fullness is past. Not only does the temporality of life differ here, so does its economics: what one requires and extracts in order to live and what one produces or yields in the course of living itself …. National coffers are getting eaten up by the costs of keeping so many elderly alive, a slow (economic) death brought on, at least in part, by the country’s slowly dying elderly, and so many of them. (36–37)

The implicit reference here is to Lee Edelman’s No Future and although her tone is melancholic rather than transgressive, Allison is more faithful to Edelman than at first appears inasmuch as she presents the reproduction of the national future as a structural condition of economic hope (Edelman, for his part, is indebted to Lacan’s linguistic structuralism and as such sees heterosexual reproduction as an inescapable referent of desire, one that can be transgressed but never abolished). “Even with one of the lowest infant mortality rates,” Allison writes, “human life in the biological sense has a harder time actually coming into existence than surviving into old age in the country. Human life is dying slowly, and just as slowly, getting (re)born – a reality that confounds reproductive futurism” (35). Although Allison sometimes qualifies the overwhelming momentum of her argument from demographics with the acknowledgement that things might be imagined otherwise, her default mode of address is a kind of discours indirect libre that tends to confirm and endorse the truth of reproductive nationalism rather than question it.

This genre of angst-ridden reflection on Japanese demographics is by no means a simple projection from the outside. Indeed, both Zeilenziger and Allison are in close conversation with a burgeoning literature on population crisis produced from within Japan, and widely disseminated in the popular media.¹⁰ One scholar who has done more than any other to popularize the demographic theory of economic crisis in Japan is the sociologist Masahiro Yamada, of Tokyo Gakugei University. Yamada, who famously characterized Japan’s post-crisis stagnation as a “low-birth-rate recession” (“Why”), identifies the figure of the so-called “parasite single” as the primary cause and symptom of this state of affairs (The Era; “Parasite”). The term “parasite single” refers to young, single, often highly educated women who earn a wage but choose to live at home with their parents, and who engage in sexual relations but refuse to marry or have children.¹¹ These figures encapsulate both aspects of the Japanese crisis as Yamada understands it: the failure of consumer demand to catapult the economy out of its lingering post-crisis stagnation; and the failure of young women to sustain the reproduction of the Japanese nation. In his more sympathetic moments, Yamada understands this failure in structural terms, as a symptom of a modernization process that was both hyper-accelerated and hopelessly retarded (“Parasite” 10–11). As women have entered the workforce in growing numbers, Japanese gender relations and welfare institutions have not evolved fast enough to relieve women of some of the burdens of caring for young children; yet they can no longer expect young men to earn a wage sufficient to maintain them as housewives at home. Young women are well aware that marriage and childbirth signal the end of their chances at earning a living wage and their relegation, post childrearing, to low-paid, precarious work at the margins of the Japanese workforce. It is perhaps understandable then, Yamada notes, that many young women choose to delay or avoid marriage and childbearing altogether (“Parasite” 10–11).

Yamada nevertheless sees these women as ultimately responsible for Japan’s state of enduring stagnation. After all, these women often earn a good wage, but refuse to spend it on productive forms of consumption that might support Japanese GDP growth. Instead of establishing a new household and purchasing Japanese consumer goods, they engage in the most frivolous forms of unproductive consumption. Citing a 1998 survey conducted by the Nikkei Research Institute, Yamada remarks that even with low salaries, parasite singles are able to spend lavishly on foreign luxury goods because their parents are supporting them: “You might have seen young Japanese women travelers all over the world, staying in luxury hotels and buying expensive designer-label bags, accessories, clothing and other items” (“Parasite” 12). By continually diverting their wages away from the national consumer market, these women contribute to the weakness of domestic consumption and thus serve to prolong the Japanese crisis: “Since parasite singles do not spend money for basic needs such as housing, appliances and furniture, they hinder the nation’s recovery from recession” (“Parasite” 16). But beyond their predilection for nonproductive consumption, single women also stand accused of indulging in non-reproductive sex thanks to the proliferation of “love hotels” that allow unmarried couples to meet outside the family home. It is not that young women do not consume, then, it is that their forms of consumption (of commodities and sex) work to undermine the (re)production of national economic life, constantly diverting the fruits of productive labor into various types of “surplus” or non(re)productive enjoyment.

Here Yamada performs a conceptual maneuver that is emblematic of the conservative critique of capitalism: one particular social demographic is singled out as a rentier class of unproductive aristocrats, living parasitically off the productive energies of the nation and undermining its vital force, and thus blamed for the recurrent crisis tendencies of capital itself. In this instance, young women are made to personify a form of capital identified as un(re)productive, sterile and cosmopolitan – thus “financial” – and opposed to a form of capital presumed to be productive because it is oriented toward national economic and demographic growth. “In a way,” Yamada explains,

parasite singles represent an affluent class that can live like Japan’s ancient aristocrats. In many countries in the West, being young and single usually means living a life of austerity if not poverty. In Japan, however, as long as young people can parasitize their parents, they have a kind of affluence, even if they earn very little or even if they don’t work. (“Parasite” 12)

In this way, the forms of unemployed surplus (labor or capital) that are recurrently generated by capitalism’s crisis tendencies are personified in some figure of social surplus, who can then be exorcized or disciplined into a more (re)productive way of life. Once this logic has been established, the elimination or reform of this surplus persona presents itself as the obvious solution to economic crisis.

Unreproductive Surplus and the Demographic Theory of Crisis

Demographic theories of economic crisis have a long intellectual pedigree dating back to the beginnings of political economy and can take both underpopulationist and overpopulationist forms. Thomas Malthus, writing at the very origins of the discipline, notoriously argued that bioeconomic laws governing food production and human fertility would inevitably lead to periodic crises of overpopulation, hence excessive consumption, plummeting wages and misery among the poor. Malthus’s early work on the principles of population proposed an essentially exogenous theory of economic crisis, where the natural rate of reproduction was seen as posing an extrinsic limit to the rate of economic growth. Population tended to grow at a geometrical rate; food production could increase only in arithmetical fashion. If left unchecked, the disjuncture between the two would recurrently generate a surplus of underemployed workers incapable of reproducing their own means of subsistence (Malthus, An Essay).

We owe the term “Malthusianism” to this very early phase of Malthus’s work. Yet as recognized by his great admirer, John Maynard Keynes, Malthus’s original thesis on overpopulation gave way in his later work to a theory of underconsumption, which seemed to suggest exactly the opposite conclusions on the question of population (Keynes, “Some Economic Consequences” 522). In the years following the Napoleonic wars, Malthus was confronted with a set of economic circumstances very different to those that prevailed at the turn of the century: contrary to his own predictions, grain prices declined dramatically in this period, leading to an accumulation of unused grain stocks that could find no profitable outlet in the consumer market. In what appeared as the ultimate contradiction in terms, overproduction and unemployed capital existed side by side with unemployed labor and faltering demand. Malthus accordingly shifted his attention from the question of overconsumption (and underproduction) to that of underconsumption (and overproduction [Principles]). Implicit here was the idea that underpopulation had replaced overpopulation as the most urgent issue confronting the English economy. Despite the popular currency of the term “Malthusianism,” it is this later work that has left the most enduring mark on the discipline of economics in the form of the underconsumption theory of crisis.

The same tension can be found in the work of Keynes. Having devoted considerable energy to reviving the reputation of the early “Malthusian” Malthus at the end of World War I (The Economic Consequences and “Is Britain”), Keynes abruptly reversed his position in the 1930s to warn that the most pressing problem facing Britain and the United States was in fact plummeting birth rates, which could well lead to a protracted crisis of underconsumption.¹² Keynes first raised this possibility in passing in The General Theory of 1936 (220–221), then dwelt on it extensively in a paper published one year later in The Eugenics Review (“Some Economic Consequences”). Had Keynes abandoned the “Malthusianism” of his early work? No, he insisted, it was simply the case that the historical conquest of the population problem (signified in England by the recent legalization of birth control advice to married couples [Hoye 186]) meant that new, previously undreamt of problems had now emerged to confront the modern nation-state. In spite of all its dangers, an

increasing population has a very important influence on the demand for capital. Not only does the demand for capital – apart from technical changes and improved standard of life – increase more or less in proportion to population. But, business expectations being based much more on present than on prospective demand, an era of increasing population tends to promote optimism, since demand will in general tend to exceed, rather than fall short of, what was hoped for. … But in an era of declining population the opposite is true. Demand tends to be below what was expected, and a state of over-supply is less easily corrected. Thus a pessimistic atmosphere may ensue …. The first result to prosperity of a change-over from an increasing to a declining population may be very disastrous. (Keynes, “Some Economic Consequences” 519)

Having thus established a causal relationship between economic and demographic expectations. Keynes went on to express his own pessimism about the situation of the world economy in the 1930s, where anemic demand appeared to combine with plummeting birth rates to augur a new era of perpetually disappointing growth prospects.

These reflections would soon be transformed into a fully operative thesis of secular stagnation by Keynes’s disciples on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, John R. Hicks seized upon Keynes’s remarks in The General Theory to deduce an elaborate demographic theory of falling demand: “With increasing population, investment can go roaring ahead, even if invention is rather stupid; increasing population is therefore actually favorable to employment. It is actually easier to employ an expanding population than a contracting one, whatever arithmetic would suggest.” But when population is falling, “investment will proceed only with great difficulty, and employment will be low, in spite of the fact that population may have already declined in the past” (Hicks, “Mr Keynes’s Theory” 16). Hicks, who was among the most influential popularizers of Keynes’s work, placed even greater emphasis on the population factor than Keynes did, noting that the “population point is enough in itself to establish the high significance of Mr. Keynes’s theory of long-period unemployment” (16). In his monumental Value and Capital, he noted in passing that the “whole industrial revolution of the last centuries” had perhaps been “nothing else but a vast secular boom, largely induced by the parallel rise in population” (302).

Alvin Hansen too thought that the debt deflation of the 1930s signaled a phase change in long-term growth trends – hence the term “secular” as opposed to “cyclical” stagnation.

The economic order of the western world is undergoing in this generation a structural change no less basic and profound in character than that transformation of economic life and institutions which we are wont to designate loosely by the term “Industrial Revolution.” We are passing, so to speak, over a divide which separates the great era of growth and expansion of the nineteenth century from an era which no man, unwilling to embark on pure conjecture, can as yet characterize with clarity or precision. (Hansen 1)

This secular transition from high to low economic growth could ultimately be ascribed to the cessation of those external forces that had provided such spectacular and abundant investment returns throughout the nineteenth century – chief among them rapid population growth.

These Keynes-inspired secular stagnation theories took root in a context of declining birth rates and general pessimism about the future of demographic growth. The work of Keynes, Hicks, and Hansen was of a piece with the apocalyptic tone of professional demographers such as Enid Charles, who in her contemporaneous work on The Menace of Underpopulation, evoked the “spectacle of a society that has lost the power to reproduce itself” (qtd. in Peterson 238).

It was not until the 1970s, as advanced economies found themselves confronted with the combined problems of inflation and unemployment – or so-called stagflation – that the old Malthusian theories of overpopulation made a comeback. In a context where public spending on welfare was rising alongside inflating wage and consumer prices, commentators of the period routinely interpreted stagflation as a crisis of overconsumption or excessive demand, which was in turn linked with the phenomenon of rising birth rates. American neoconservatives such as Daniel Bell theorized inflation as the inevitable effect of excessive distributional demands pressing on the limited fiscal powers of the state and distorting the price of money. Monetarists such as Milton and Rose Friedman reversed the causal relationship and instead saw inflation as the direct expression of an excessive increase in the money supply, prompted by overspending on the part of the state. But both neoconservatives and neoliberals were convinced that state spending on welfare programs to unmarried, mostly African American mothers seemed to be subsidizing the over-reproduction of a future surplus population of welfare dependent children (Cooper, Family Values 25–66). Overconsumption signified excessive, unprofitable reproduction that would inevitably lower the profit margins of business. In this context, lower-class minority women were predictably imagined as unproductive rentiers living off the unearned income of welfare benefits – welfare queens as opposed to productive workers and non-dependent reproducers.

At first nurtured in the context of the national economy, the diagnosis of overconsumption was soon extended to the global economic space, where various postcolonial states were rapidly increasing their rates of consumption while also asserting their newfound powers to push up the costs of first-world consumption by demanding higher prices for oil. As demographers contemplated the likely economic effects of rising consumption in the developing world, they warned of the imminent disaster of overpopulation (Ehrlich; Meadows, et al.). Without proper limits to consumption and population growth, it seemed that the world would soon be faced with a series of systemic crises implicating the runaway effects of greenhouse gases on the earth’s biosphere, the toxic residues left behind by petrochemical production, and conflict over the earth’s diminishing food and energy resources.

Although typically championed by very different constituencies, it is important to recognize that theories of under- and overpopulation subscribe to the same logic and therefore demand an overarching critique.¹³ In each case, a protracted episode of inflation or deflation is attributed to a literal inflation or deflation of reproductive desire, which in turn is assumed to be confirmed by rapidly escalating or waning birth rates (sex is only ever reproductive within these narratives). When prices and wages are rising with respect to profits, as in the 1970s, it is assumed that women are reproducing too much. Their excessive fertility is responsible for a surplus population of unproductive, unemployed, or underemployed youth whose outsized consumption needs are placing unsustainable fiscal demands on the state. Economic growth may be accelerating thanks to the sheer number of new workers entering the labor market, yet productivity is slacking off as workers enforce rising wages or find alternative sources of income in overabundant welfare provisions. Alternatively, when prices and wages are declining with respect to profits, and when this decline is strong enough to undermine economic growth itself, it appears that women are not fertile enough. Their refusal to reproduce is creating a surplus of unproductive old people, who in turn are unfairly burdening both the state and future generations with their excessive consumption needs. Productivity amongst employed workers may remain high, but economic growth itself is slowing down thanks to the absolute decline in the number of people entering the workforce. In each case, an endogenous cycle of inflation or deflation (endogenous because its cause lies in the structural antinomies of the capitalist mode of accumulation) is attributed to the exogenous causality of reproductive failure. With each iteration of this narrative, we are invited to identify some figure of un(re)productive surplus who is thereby made to personify the failure of economic growth itself, its unemployable and unprofitable excess.

Karl Marx is one of the few to have mounted a serious critique of the demographic theory of crisis. What the classical political economists (from Malthus to Ricardo and John Stuart Mill) understood as external limits to an increasing rate of profit, Marx theorized as a limit internal to the capitalist mode of accumulation itself (Capital: Volume III 350, 358). That is to say, when any particular historical regime of capitalist accumulation experiences a crisis of under- or overconsumption,¹⁴ what it has come up against is not a bioeconomic limit to its further expansion but rather an inability to increase the exploitation of labor (hence productivity) without destroying its own raison d’être – an ever increasing rate of profit. At a certain point, the threat of under-consumption and unrealized demand can only be resolved by increasing wages; inversely, the threat of overconsumption and excessive demand can only be remedied by decreasing labor productivity; but to take either path would mean abandoning the need to deliver ever higher rates of profit. In simple terms, the capitalist process of accumulation is perpetually hampered by the drive to maintain and indeed exacerbate a certain structural inequality, not only between wages and profits, but also among wage earners themselves.

Marx thus reinterprets the ostensibly natural limits to growth, identified by the classical political economists, as so many endogenous limits specific to the capitalist mode of accumulation. What looks like a natural surplus of un- or underemployed workers, excluded from a living wage by sheer weight of numbers, reflects an internal necessity of capitalism itself – the need to marginalize a certain section of the population from the core of the waged workforce in order to maintain wages as low as possible. And what look like natural demographic divisions within the workforce – divisions between women and men, adults and children, migrants and residents – are strategic borders that serve to differentiate a core workforce from a proliferating surplus of ever lower-paid workers, keeping wages as low and productivity as high as possible for all (Marx, Capital: Volume I 788). Yet this constant drive to produce a portion of under- or overemployed workers ends up sabotaging the capitalist accumulation process itself, periodically preventing it from realizing the full value of expected profits.

Unlike the classical political economists, Marx understands the problem of realization (hence demand) as a function of wage and wealth distribution, not demographics: wages in turn are “not determined by the variations of the absolute numbers of the working population, but by the varying proportion in which the working class is divided into an active army and a reserve army” (Capital: Volume I 790). It follows that crises of over- or under-consumption are generated endogenously to the capitalist mode of accumulation; they are the counterproductive fallout of its driving logic, the need to push wage and wealth inequalities as far as possible. If the “labor market sometimes appear[s] relatively under-supplied because capital is expanding, and sometimes relatively oversupplied because capital is contracting,” it would be “utterly absurd, in place of this, to lay down a law according to which the movement of capital depended on the movement of the population. Yet this is the dogma of the economists” (Capital: Volume I 790).

Marx’s critique of the demographic theory of crisis has rarely been surpassed. His analysis helps explain the way that capitalist failures of realization are repeatedly personified in a surplus population of unproductive, devalued humanity and thus attributed to natural laws external to capital itself. Yet Marx never quite captures the gendered and sexual dimension of this sleight of hand – the fact that unproductive surplus is also necessarily configured as un(re)productive surplus – and at times succumbs to the very fantasies he denounces elsewhere. Thus in his essays on The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850, Marx equates the sterile accumulation of financial capitalism with the unproductive character of the non-industrial lumpenproletariat: “In the way it acquires wealth and enjoys it the financial aristocracy is nothing but the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society” (“The Class Struggles” 39). Both, he claims, are animated by a perverse appetite for luxurious consumption, a desire that is “in permanent conflict with the bourgeois law” of productive labor and reproductive desire, the “same unbridled assertion of unhealthy and vicious appetites … , appetites . . . in which pleasure becomes crapuleux, in which money, filth and blood commingle” (39). Elsewhere, and more ambiguously, he contrasts the finite, reproductive development of organic life and labor with the strangely self-referential, self-regenerative, and proliferative logic of capital, where desire begets desire beyond the demands of natural reproduction – a distinction that is richly informed by Thomist and Aristotelian denunciations of usury, sodomy, and prostitution.¹⁵

It is ultimately this equation between the nonreproductive logic of financial capital and the non- (or over- or under-) reproductive desire of the surplus population – openly endorsed in Marx’s early political writing – which lies at the heart of the demographic theory of crisis. It is this equation which drives the revival of secular stagnation theory today and this equation which must be destabilized if we are to avoid the idea that reproductive nationalism is our only answer to economic crisis.

Footnotes

1. The English-language journalistic literature on the subject of “why the Japanese aren’t having sex” is too vast to reference.

2. An early and highly prescient analysis of this conjuncture can be found in Gopal Balakrishnan’s “Speculations on the Stationary State,” which predates the current revival of secular stagnation theory. Balakrishnan’s reflections on current tendencies toward deflation return to the problematic of the “stationary state” in classical political economy. In her essay “The Culture of Secular Stagnation,” Annie McClanahan also discerns a rich conceptual history behind contemporary secular stagnation discourse, one that is concerned as much with biological as with economic narratives of renewal and decline.

3. Rosenof drives home the point, noting that

[c]ritics often lambasted Hansen and other secular stagnationists as pessimists who were resigned to a no-growth economy. Hansen and others responded that they were in fact optimists, given the correct remedy to the diagnosed condition. That is, Hansen was not arguing that growth had come to an end but that growth based on a certain set of exogenous forces had stagnated. The key, of course, was not passive acceptance of stagnation but vigorous efforts to develop new stimuli to investment and growth to replace those in decline. The unprecedented nature of this era of secular stagnation required an unprecedented response: massive public investment. (59)

4. By mainstream macroeconomists I refer to both New Classical and New Keynesian economists. New Classical economics emerged in the aftermath of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s and in response to the failure of Keynesian economics to explain it. It is associated with the names of Robert Lucas, Thomas J. Sargent, Neil Wallace, and Robert Barro, who sought to reestablish macroeconomics on Walrasian microeconomic foundations. Their macroeconomic models were built on the assumption of rational expectations and perfectly competitive, self-equilibrating markets free of “stickiness” or rigidities. The New Keynesians accepted many of the microeconomic principles advanced by the New Classicals but rejected the notion that labor and commodity markets could be assumed to be perfectly competitive. Instead they introduced the notion of market rigidities and coordination problems into their models and recognized a place for limited fiscal intervention to correct these failures. New Keynesian economists must be distinguished from post-war neo-Keynesian economists, such as Paul Samuelson, John Hicks, and Franco Modigliani, who engineered the so-called neo-Keynesian synthesis between neoclassical economics and Keynesian theory, and in general accepted a strong role for government intervention in markets. They must also be distinguished from the post-Keynesian economists, who remain committed to a heterodox, non-neoclassical view of Keynesian economics, often combined with the insights of later heterodox economists such as Hyman Minsky.

Raghuram Rajan is the most prominent of the New Classical economists to have invoked the Keynesian concept of secular stagnation and its relationship to inequality. Among the New Keynesian economists who have written on secular stagnation theory are Lawrence Summers, Paul Krugman, and Robert Gordon. For an alternative, post-Keynesian view on the global financial crisis, see Stockhammer. The post-Keynesian economist Thomas Palley has written an extensive critical overview of mainstream macroeconomists’ newfound interest in the classically Keynesian issues of secular stagnation, demand, and inequality.

5. See Goodhart and Erfurth; Teulings and Baldwin; Gordon.

6. Although the equation between deflation and demographic trends has become seemingly ubiquitous in the wake of the financial crisis, with Japan persistently cited as incontrovertible proof, a number of mainstream voices point to the absence of any serious causal relationship. Richard Koo is certainly amongst the most well-known critics of the demographic theory of deflation, as is the current Governor of the Bank of Japan, who openly challenges his predecessor on this issue. See Warnock and Frangos. For their part, demographers have often been more circumspect than economists about the links between macroeconomic and population trends. See Bloom et al.; Herrmann. My own view, informed by Kalecki’s “The Political Aspects of Full Employment,” is that price movements, whether inflationary or deflationary, are mediated by the distribution of wealth and income, and are therefore inevitably reflective of political rather than demographic processes. Price deflation is shaped by wages, investment decisions, the proportion of employed to unemployed people, and social spending decisions, and cannot be deduced in numerical fashion from simple demographics. In the most obvious sense, the “working age population” is very rarely equivalent to the actual waged population and therefore represents a politically flexible (as opposed to natural and irreducible) limit to demand. To lament the dwindling of the working age population in the United States is to ignore the fact that a significant proportion of this population (African American men, for example) are very deliberately quarantined outside of the formal labor market as a political imperative of US capitalism. If US economic growth is suffering from a shrinking of the working age population, why not reintegrate them into the workforce? At this point it becomes clear that the driving force behind price deflation is the production of (class-based, racial, and gendered) inequalities, not numerical demographics. The same qualifications must be applied to inflation, which in the 1970s was closely correlated with the growing political power of the working class to demand higher wages and (in the case of women) to exchange unwaged for waged labor. Inflation was never simply a question of rising birth rates, but rather the effect of increasingly powerful political movements from below. Wage inflation represents the power of political movements to diminish inequality and push up demand, just as wage deflation derives from the increase in inequality and resulting contraction of demand.

7. Even a commentator such as Douthat takes Japan to task for its tight immigration controls, citing them as evidence of its cultural and economic stagnation, while attributing much of America’s demographic dividend to its relaxed migration policies and relative cultural liberalism. “Our family structures are weakening, but high out-of-wedlock birth-rates may be preferable to no births at all. We assimilate immigrants more slowly than we should, but at least we’re capable of assimilation.”

8. See Campbell; Kingston 42–43.

9. See Burtless.

10. See Driscoll for a richly detailed account of this discourse and its close imbrication with the question of public debt. Driscoll demonstrates just how influential this discourse has been in shaping recent social policy in Japan.

11. For a critical overview of the literature on “parasite singles” in Japan, see Lunsing.

12. See Peterson for an extensive discussion of the population question in Keynes’s work.

13. Recent feminist critiques of demography tend to focus exclusively on theories of overpopulation, sometimes pointing to the ways in which feminists have colluded with eugenic projects of population control in the past. Yet this focus neglects the fact that underpopulation theories are equally common in the history of demography and indeed equally popular among historical feminists (Enid Charles is a case in point). The silence on this history is striking. My contention here is that a comprehensive critique of the demographic theory of crisis must capture what is common to theories of underpopulation and overpopulation. Failing this, feminist theories run the risk of proposing an alternative pronatalism or an alternative reproductive nationalism – one that is more often than not displaced onto the postcolonial nation or racial minority and thus, it is assumed, redeemed.

14. I am in agreement with Desai, who argues that Marx was equally attentive to crises of overproduction and underconsumption, contrary to a certain Marxist orthodoxy that insists that underconsumption is a strictly reformist Keynesian problematic and was not of interest to Marx. This orthodoxy has proven particularly harmful in the current crisis, which is quite obviously connected to the questions of consumer credit and wage stagnation.

15. See Marx, Capital: Volume I 254–257; Cooper, “The Living and the Dead”.

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Amanda Armstrong (bio)
University of Michigan

Abstract

This article deploys a genealogy of looting to mark out a history of the present. Looting entered the English language in the mid-nineteenth century. During its first decades of use, the term helped naturalize racial violence enacted along imperial infrastructures. Looting’s early history not only gives us insight into the lineaments of imperial liberalism, but also provides ways of reconceptualizing neoliberal racial capitalism. Insofar as we see the afterlives of imperialism at work in the present, we can better grasp the racial structuring of circulation – a sphere of accumulation that has, since the 1970s, gained a renewed centrality.

We can begin with two images of the recent past. In the first, a sixteen-wheeler idles on California’s I-880, having been blocked by a crowd of people who now sit on the road. A message is projected onto the side of the truck: Black Lives Matter. In the second, a different perspective: a news helicopter looks down on a Charlotte highway, whereupon protesters have opened the rear doors of a tractor trailer and are emptying its contents onto a fire in the middle of the road. Both images were captured during 2016 protests against anti-black police violence. Together, they allow us to see supply chains and police violence as parts of a whole, the blockades entailing mediated confrontations with securitization in its various senses.

The rise of the highway blockade, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, combined with the emergence of cognate tactics across various movement contexts, suggests the need for theories of the present capable of conceptualizing together dynamics of race, accumulation, and carcerality. Exemplary in this regard is Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007), which considers the expansion of incarceration in 1980s California in terms of the way that the prison construction boom allowed those managing capital to address surpluses of capital, labor, and land that had emerged from the economic stagnation of the 1970s. In the making of mass incarceration, more intensive techniques of policing were developed, particularly in the Los Angeles area, and revised ideologies of race came to naturalize emergent forms of criminalization and intensities of police violence. In From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016), Elizabeth Hinton draws the story of mass incarceration back two decades to the 1960s, when, in the wake of urban uprisings, state officials introduced into anti-poverty initiatives a series of policing and surveillance devices, which over the 1970s would emerge as dominant features of state intervention in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods. Such was the context for the racially disproportionate and exponential growth in prison populations beginning in the late 1970s. Hinton’s work thus shows some of the concrete mechanisms by which the postwar welfare state was converted into a carceral apparatus. The history of this carceral turn tracks fairly closely with historical narratives of postwar political-economic restructurings, which generally hinge around the 1971 collapse of profitability in metropolitan industries. This drop in profitability sparked a management offensive, the effects of which would be codified by the 1980s in neoliberal state reforms and in new strategies of circulation-oriented accumulation, including financialization, the privatization of transit infrastructures, real estate development (including in prisons), and globally distributed just-in-time production.

An August 1977 Time cover article, “The American Underclass,” signaled the combined carceral and circulatory turns outlined above, while also molding for its readers an ideological relation to such historical transformations:

The barricades are seen only fleetingly by most middle-class Americans as they rush by in their cars or commuter trains—doors locked, windows closed, moving fast. But out there is a different world, a place of pock-marked streets, gutted tenements and broken hopes. … Behind its crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables: the American underclass…. If you keep giving people stuff, that’s why they loot when the lights go out. Working is out of their minds. They think everything must be taken. (Qtd. in Mitchell 250–1.)

In opening with a reference to the barricades, the article gestures back to Watts, Newark, Detroit, and other uprisings of the 1960s, as well as to the more immediate, widespread looting of July 1977, which took shape in the midst of an electricity blackout in New York City. This opening figure of the barricade, a technology for stopping up circulation, also sets off the figures of mobility that follow: the “cars or commuter trains—doors locked, windows closed, moving fast,” which allow “middle-class Americans” to see, fleetingly, the signs of the underclass. The magazine’s readers are assumed to rely for their safety and mobility on such motorized vehicles and transit infrastructures, whose smooth operation, the essay implies, is threatened by barricades, blackouts, and looting alike. The article’s reference to cars is particularly notable in the context of the 1977 blackout, as a widely reported tactic of those lifting goods from stores was to hitch cars to metal security grates and then to drive forward and drag the grates off storefronts, thereby freeing up what was inside.

Following Gilmore’s account of racism as the “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” we can read the August 1977 Time cover article as helping remake racist ideology at a moment of historical transition. The article naturalizes racialized populations’ vulnerability to premature death in a number of ways, including by crafting an imaginative grid that allows acts of direct appropriation– “looting” – to appear worthy of criminalization and violent repression; by recoding surplus populations’ separation from the wage and state-mediated social goods as a failure of personal responsibility rather than an effect of structural dynamics and political choices; and by suggesting that lives worth regarding (those whose perspective the article takes up) are sustained by a system of circulation that operates at some remove from racialized populations. The article associates life-worth-living with infrastructures of circulation, while suggesting that those who would barricade, block-up, repurpose, or take from circulatory networks are threats to the health and well-being of those whose lives are worthy of regard. In this way, the criminalization and even police murder of racialized individuals can appear not as an attack on lives that matter, but rather as force exerted for the protection of life.

In what follows, I am interested in thinking genealogically about the contemporary ideological complex – apparent in “The Underclass” – that is stitched together in part through the notion of looting. The origins and early history of the term looting perhaps hint at a structural similarity between the second British Empire and the post-1970s US carceral state. Across the second British Empire, and particularly in colonial India – where looting entered the English language in the 1840s – dynamics of circulation-oriented accumulation, racialization, and carcerality were woven together and helped constitute a contradictory imperial liberalism. As Lisa Lowe shows in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), imperial liberalism, justified on the basis of the purported capacity of the British to oversee global circuits of trade and migration effectively, involved the making of new mechanisms for regulating and hierarchizing the movements of populations. Under British rule, so-called free trade and liberty of movement were materialized through racializing technologies, including pass laws, labor market segmentation, the cordoning of urban space, the recrudescence of indentured labor regimes, differential modes of policing and border enforcement, and the segregation of rail stations and carriages. Emergent racial regimes in the era of imperial liberalism thus were effects in part of the spatial delineation of populations realized on and through transit infrastructures.¹ The category of looting was suited to these racial regimes, as it marked a range of acts, often undertaken on or near transit systems, that appeared to contravene the racially hierarchizing imperatives of imperial circulatory networks. The category not only offered a way to grasp disparate acts that unsettled prevailing regimes of circulation and racial hierarchies, but also, as I discuss, was instrumental to the violent repression of such acts and their agents.² By tracking looting’s early contexts of use, we see how this colonial keyword was variously made to act in concert with other technologies of imperial power.

This journey through the archives of looting’s early life not only gives us insight into the lineaments of imperial liberalism, nor does it merely offer a case study with which to think through relations between language and other technologies of power; rather, above all, this study also provides ways of reconceptualizing neoliberal racial capitalism. Insofar as we see the afterlives of imperialism at work in post-1970s conjunctures, we are able more clearly to grasp the carceral underpinnings of contemporary circulatory networks and the racial structuring of circulation – a sphere of accumulation that has, since the 1970s, gained a renewed centrality. With respect to the state, circulatory networks have undergone an apparently contradictory set of transformations since the 1970s: on the one hand, they have been restructured to more directly align with the interests of capital, often by being sold off to private corporations; on the other hand, they have been further securitized, both by state and non-state agencies. As they have become more central to processes of accumulation, transit infrastructures have also become more salient as sites of racist state violence.

The history of looting helps bring into view the racial logics sedimented in, and reproduced through, the infrastructures that daily undergird the movements of the present, showing how biopolitical and necropolitical modes of governance have been built out of, and maintain integral links to, infrastructural imperatives. This history also suggests the importance of situating accounts of nineteenth-century racial regimes and their aftereffects within a transnational and imperial frame – as modeled by Saidiya Hartman’s work on the afterlives of slavery in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008). Hartman’s work links up with a body of research, at once emergent and longstanding, that studies the ways that legacies of racial slavery continue to shape regimes of governance and/as carcerality, particularly in the US (Hartman, Scenes ; Davis; Dillon). This research has shown the ways that carceral systems were built from technologies of surveillance and control associated with chattel slavery, and thus the ways that policing and prison systems have been conditioned, up through the present, by histories of racial slavery and its co-implicated anti-black discursive formations. Such a historical perspective helps clarify the inadequacy of reformist strategies that rest upon a distinction between the excesses of racist police violence, on the one hand, and an imagined, non-socially hierarchizing essence of policing that could be recuperated through legislative or judicial intervention, on the other hand. Research on the afterlives of slavery shows that policing can only be other than white supremacist if it is abolished. A similar effort to show the constitutive imbrication of circulatory systems and regimes of racial subordination animates this essay.

In this, the essay builds upon Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), which argues not only that circulatory networks are integrally bound up with racial subordination, but also that the sphere of circulation (as opposed to production) has, since the 1960s, come to form the central terrain of social struggle, which cannot be other than struggle for black liberation, which in turn cannot be other than struggle against state violence – violence that is at once ubiquitous, devastating, and normalized across such circulatory networks. Clover’s account of recent dynamics of capital accumulation and social antagonism is undergirded by an ambitious periodization of the history of capital – a periodization that marks out shifts in the leading spheres of accumulation (production versus circulation), in the prevailing modes of class struggle (strikes versus riots), and in the relative proximity of the state to proletarian social reproduction. With respect to the first two, Clover tells a story of the rise and fall of production-centered accumulation between 1840 and 1970 that is linked to a story of the emergence and decline of the strike as a central oppositional tactic. In this account, the 130-year phase of productioncentered accumulation appears to have been bounded by stretches of circulation-oriented accumulation and by the oppositional tactic tailored to regimes of circulation – namely, the riot – such that the eighteenth-century waves of export and grain riots appear to rhyme with cycles of anti-racist rioting that have unfolded since the 1960s. These cycles have not dissipated up through the present, as rioting and cognate tactics appear to hold priority in struggles against the nascent far right: from Berkeley to the Parisian banlieue, riots against the right have shaped this most recent Spring.

Against this framework of the rhyming early modern and postmodern eras, Clover overlays a linear account of changes in the relative proximity of the state to proletarian social reproduction, in which an early-modern non-invasiveness of the state (revealed most starkly in the absence of standing police forces) gives way over time to a ubiquitous presence of the state (revealed, again, in the ramification and militarization of racialized policing, but also in the management of education, healthcare, and other socially reproductive spheres). This narrative of the becoming-ubiquitous of the state helps explain why recent riots, despite their determination by the dynamics of accumulation, appear responsive to forces typically understood as political rather than economic: above all, racialized policing. Taking a cue from Stuart Hall’s assertion that “race is the modality in which class is lived,” however, Clover argues that the racialization of surplus populations in an era of circulation-centered accumulation creates a situation in which class antagonism appears most starkly in the riotous confrontation, on the ground of circulatory systems, between black populations and the police. Reading a passage of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “Riot,” Clover asserts:

Insofar as riot is a category recognized by state, law, and market, blacks coming down the street will always be a riot, or the moment before, or the moment after. Both socially and economically, blackness here is surplus – to the state, to the law, to the market. It promises always to exceed order, regulation. The riot is an instance of black life in its exclusions and at the same time in its character as surplus, cordoned into the noisy sphere of circulation, forced there to defend itself against the social and bodily death on offer. A surplus rebellion. (122)

This essay engages genealogically with the surplus rebellions of the present, and in doing so offers some critical revisions to periodization such as Clover’s of modern histories of capital, race, and state violence. By considering the early history of looting, we see how a significant intensification of racialized policing took shape in the context of late-nineteenth-century imperial relations, particularly in colonial sites where circulation was central to dynamics of accumulation. While Clover generally restricts his analysis to the capitalist core, and is careful to acknowledge that his periodizing claims likely do not hold up for colonial and post-colonial contexts, he does allow that the surplus rebellions of the present bear a genealogical relation to colonial histories, noting that the “arrival of riot to the deindustrializing west” is a double arrival, having “come down from the export and marketplace riots of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and come inward from periphery to core (167). My reading of looting’s early history shows the way that aspects of carceral regimes, built up around colonial systems of circulation, “came inward” from periphery to core at the fin de siècle, and more generally the way that social antagonisms around circulation crisscrossed core and periphery during the period that Clover casts as the heyday of production-centered struggles. This inquiry helps clarify how the state, and particularly the policing power of the state, ramified through circulatory networks and thus came to play a more central role in orchestrating the lives and premature deaths of proletarianized and racialized populations at the dawn of the twentieth century – a role that such power has not ceased to play up through the present.

A Genealogy of Looting

“Looting,” the English gerund, derives from the Hindi verb lut (to rob). The word entered the imperial archive during the Anglo-Sikh wars, clothed in the anxious, belligerent tones of British colonial administrators. An 1845 London Times report from India records General Napier’s reply to insurgent Bijar Khan’s proposed terms of surrender: “Let him and his followers all come in and [lay down their arms]. I may then spare his life and grant him, perhaps, some land on the other side of the Indus – but if I hear any more of looting and murder, I’ll hang every one of them” (“India,” 21 April 1845). Elsewhere in the same report, we read that Napier’s war strategy had been to “drive [Khan] gradually to starvation.” This early archival appearance of looting anticipates the keyword’s mature colonial career. Late-nineteenth-century British administrators in India responded to recurrent, devastating famines—themselves exacerbated by colonial enclosures and trade policies that encouraged the export of grain via rail systems—by shoring up the capacity of the state to repress grain riots. Reports from British India register acute anxiety at the looting of food stores: “The second grain riot at Kurnool appears to have been more serious than the former one. The looting of shops went on for six hours” (“India,” 23 Nov. 1891); “Prospects considered serious in Behar. Grain riot at Sholapur; Bombay police fired, killed one, wounded two” (“Latest Intelligence”).³ In the 1890s, armed guards regularly accompanied grain shipments by rail, and colonial administrators established a system of work camps to incarcerate those suffering from famines (M. Davis, 120–170; Guha and Gadgil, 141–177; Premansukumar; Arnold).⁴ In this way, late-nineteenth-century British imperial responses to famines—characterized by measures that kept hungry people from accessing grain stocks, including by threats of violence, and more generally by the ramification of carceral technologies—echoed Napier’s 1845 acts of war. While imperial efforts to discipline looting thus resonated across historical distance, such efforts were materialized through discrepant practices, protocols, and institutional contexts of rule, and were imbricated with non-identical discursive complexes, such that the martial associations of looting evident at the midcentury gave way, by the end of the century, to discursive complexes conditioned by infrastructural imperatives. The vignettes to follow track this transformation, while also demonstrating how the notion of looting acquired layers of meaning as it moved across colonial contexts and from colony to metropole up through the First World War.

Over its first decades of use, looting was made into a civilizational marker. While British writers would occasionally concede that their soldiers had engaged in looting campaigns (the “scenes of the Crimea” were sometimes referenced in this regard [“China,” 26 Feb. 1858]), they would nevertheless find some way to shield British soldiers – “their boys” – from the stigma of the act, often projecting it onto rival imperial armies, colonial forces, and/or colonized subjects.⁵ Letters and parliamentary transcripts published in the Times concerning the 1860 Anglo-French looting of the Summer Palace, for example, are unanimous in asserting that French soldiers had acted first, British men having only then reluctantly taken part in their own, more orderly sort of pillage.⁶ While French soldiers’ having broken ranks to loot the Summer Palace was seen as a strike against the otherwise well-developed state of civilization across the Channel, looting enacted by sipahis (colonial Indian soldiers) was viewed rather differently, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the 1857 uprising led by colonial Indian soldiers working for the East India Company. Reporting on the 1858 occupation of the port city of Guangzhou (Canton), a Times special correspondent notes that recently arrived sipahis “addicted themselves to looting.” The correspondent then devotes a few sentences to exculpating French guards for having shot three of these newly arrived colonial Indian soldiers:

The evidence upon the court of inquiry which followed was very contradictory; but that they were looting and that they resisted the police were two uncontested facts. Perhaps the French were hasty; but a Sepoy in his undress is undressed in the literal sense of the term, and it is not quite to be wondered at that the Frenchmen had recourse to their arms to rid themselves of the blows and brickbats of a crowd of half-naked black ruffians. No two human creatures can be more different than a Sepoy dressed in his red coat and faultlessly clean belt, and the same animal stalking about on his long, lank shanks with a white girdle round his loins. (“China,” 30 Mar. 1858.)

Colonial Indian soldiers’ looting is read here through a white supremacist ontological grid. The act appears to nullify sipahis’ conditional inclusion in the order of humanity, the latter indexed by the red coat and clean belt of the service. We see a similar process of racialization at work in an article published a few months later, which suggested that “the Sikhs” are “versed so far in looting that it is said one of them can appraise the value of articles in a house by walking past the hall-door, and that they can ‘smell’ gold, silver, and precious stones” (“The British Army”).⁷ Here, a propensity to loot is figured as a group trait, cultivated in the sensorium over generations. This racialized association of looting with Sikh soldiers functioned variously within colonial discourse. First, it projected onto a subordinate group in the colonial army practices of looting that were sanctioned for, and widely practiced by, British officers and troopers: the ubiquitous disavowal of the latter groups’ looting (“we know our boys loot, but …”) was enabled in part by the insistent condemnation and scrutiny of the former group’s looting. The racialized association of Sikh soldiers with looting also contributed to a discourse of masculinity in late-nineteenth-century colonial India that sharply distinguished between so-called “martial races” (including Sikhs) and purportedly effeminate groups of educated men, particularly Bengali men. As Mrinalini Sinha has shown, this colonial discourse of masculinity worked to exclude Indian men from posts in the colonial bureaucracy, from volunteering regiments, and from work in the higher grades of the railways (69–99). Insofar as looting was framed as a group trait cultivated over generations, the racialized polarity of essentially martial and non-martial groups, along with the forms of exclusion and subordination enabled by this polarization, could be maintained.

Up through the 1870s, looting almost invariably appeared in a cluster of martial terms, even where the event at issue did not involve armed men or battlefields.⁸ An 1879 “Letter to the Editor,” for example, uses martial metaphors in arguing for the abolition of the English county fair:

I live in East Grinstead, a sort of hobbledehoy village through which runs the high road between London and Lewes. Twice a year the street is blockaded by the undiluted offscouring of the home counties. Neither your carriage nor your wife can pass through it. A state of siege is proclaimed, and we endure it as best we can. The great majority of the respectable inhabitants are against it—as well they may be—for their horses are stolen, their hen-roosts robbed, their pockets picked—while our railway offers great facilities to London thieves to pay for their return ticket by contributing their talents to the process of general looting. (Quousque Tandem?)

Here, the county fair—a “public nuisance and anachronism,” insofar as transit improvements, “monthly stock markets, and other results of civilization have entirely superseded the necessity of congregating spavined horses and half-starved cattle in a public thoroughfare”—appears as the site of a pitched battle, involving a blockade, a state of siege, and general looting. This “Letter to the Editor” is, notably, the first piece in the London Times wherein “looting” is used to describe actions taken by Britons in Britain. Such a leap to the metropole appears to be enabled by the discourse of criminality. The antagonists in the battle of East Grinstead are described as “thieves” and as the “undiluted offscouring of the home counties”—as a criminal underclass that ironically utilizes the above-mentioned transit infrastructures (“the rail, macadam, the improved communication between this place and that”) to congregate, blockade the street, stop up carriages, and make off with the wealth of respectable villagers.

The link drawn here between looting and modern transit networks appears in a range of contexts over the 1870s and ’80s – a transitional period, as far as the discourse of looting is concerned. In April 1885, telegrams from Panama to London warned “that communication across the isthmus remains interrupted, and that there are rumors that looting is going on along the Panama Railway lines” (“Central America”). The uprising in Panama shortly thereafter faced repression by US marines acting in the name of a treaty the US government had signed in 1846 with the Republic of New Granada:

The United States are not concerned with insurrections or civil wars in Central America, but they have guaranteed by treaty free and uninterrupted transit across the isthmus. For the present this is at an end, since, notwithstanding the defeat of the insurgents with great loss at Aspinwall (Colón), their marauding bands are looting the places along the line and constantly cutting the telegraph wires. (“Central America, Although”)

The counterinsurgent violence enacted by US forces was directed in particular against black people:

Several negroes engaged in looting premises which were burning were shot down by the marines who had been landed from the Galena. … It is said that 150 Jamaicans were shot. The general feeling expressed by the sufferers is that, had the Jamaicans not joined the rebels, the city would not have been fired. (“The Insurrection”)

Gratuitous anti-black violence is here retroactively justified through the racialization of particular insurgent tactics (looting and burning infrastructure, above all).⁹ The tactic of destroying rail and telegraph lines in the context of nationalist or anti-imperialist uprisings was widely deployed over the 1880s and ’90s, following a burst of imperial rail investment and construction across the global South. In 1895, insurgents in Cuba, for example, looted and sabotaged rail lines upon which Spanish reinforcements were travelling (“The Revolt”). Attacks such as these spurred imperial powers to seek out new ways to secure transit infrastructures and nodes (as well as, ultimately, means for making imperial forces less dependent upon such vulnerable infrastructures, i.e., via aerial transit and bombing¹⁰). The securing of strategic transit corridors had been a longstanding imperial priority, as evidenced, for one, by the treaty signed between the US and the Republic of New Granada in 1846, a few years prior to the construction of the Panama Railway.¹¹ Lauren Benton has argued that over the long span of 1400–1900, European imperial rule tended not to be organized in terms of a logic of territoriality, but rather to involve a somewhat more patchwork effort to secure corridors of control: “Enclaves such as missions, trading posts, towns, and garrisons were strung like beads along interconnected corridors” (10). But with the construction of new ports, railways, and telegraph lines over the late nineteenth century, which both ramified key transit networks and involved the dispersal of valuable fixed capital, imperial administrators felt the need to experiment with novel techniques for controlling these ever-expanding networks, above all through the establishment of standing police forces throughout a given territory. As Carolyn Steedman’s work on the history of policing in Victorian Britain has shown, the establishment of standing police forces in every British county and borough did not occur until the mid-1850s, when rail lines had begun to link previously isolated regions into a national network (21–26). Meanwhile, in colonial India, as massive construction projects laid rail networks across much of the subcontinent following the uprising of 1857–58, higher grade railway employees – uniformly British or Anglo-Indian in origin – were deputized and armed by the colonial state to police segregated railway carriages, stations, and lines (Das and Verma; Goswami). Thus, the quantitative increase in track mileage across the second British Empire was linked with qualitative changes in the modes of imperial governance, including more concerted turns to logics of territoriality, materialized through dispersed, standing police forces.

A particularly striking illustration of the way that territorial logics of rule were associated with late-nineteenth-century railway imperialism appears in a correspondent’s report from Egypt in 1884:¹²

It was most unlikely, indeed well nigh impossible, that in the event of a rebel advance on Upper Egypt Halfa would be in the enemy’s line of march, and the poverty of the village rendered it secure against the raids of looting parties. The railway stores, however, needed protection, against foes, as was then thought, nearer to us than the Mahdi’s declared leaders …. Along the bank, between the station and the village, lies scattered nigh £1,000,000 worth of railway material of every kind …. The arrival of English troops has worked numerous and rapid changes in the appearance of Halfa. The hitherto slumbering railway workshops are now lively and hideous with the grating of saws on metal, the squeaking of steam drills, the clatter of hammers, and all the thousand sounds attendant on active labour. (“The Nile”)

The first two lines here recall the “Letter to the Editor” on county fairs, insofar as they suggest that the threat of looting along the railways comes not only from armed forces, but also from more dispersed, anonymous populations, the “offscouring of the home counties” in the letter’s version. The report on Halfa’s rail station eschews such colorful language, opting instead to mark the threat more obliquely, as “foes … nearer to us than the Mahdi’s declared leaders.” With this line, the report’s author alludes at once to a generalized threat of brigandage and to the local context (and to earlier reports on Egypt published by the Times), insofar as British officers had blamed the looting of Alexandria and adjacent cities in 1882 on troops opposed to European rule, who purportedly had disguised themselves as local residents.¹³ In any case, the underlying view is that railway infrastructures are perpetually vulnerable to looting, whether by armies or by local, non-insurgent populations.¹⁴ As the dispatch from Halfa tells it, British officers’ recognition of this generalized vulnerability spurred them to occupy the rail station and to compel Egyptian men to work on the materials ready to hand—a decision also explained in terms of a desire to overcome the forces of rust and idleness. Given their capital-intensity and propensity to fall into disrepair, railway infrastructures thus seemed to call for the establishment of territorially dispersed forms of governance and labor discipline. The emergence, during the era of high imperialism, of such territorial logics of rule, linked to the ramification of capital-intensive circulatory systems, thus marked a key shift in the relation of the state to proletarianized and colonized populations. To use Joshua Clover’s language: with the fin de siècle turn toward territorial logics of rule, the state moved nearer to such populations, orchestrating in more intimate ways their lives and premature deaths.

From Colony to Metropole

In the parade of nineteenth-century references to looting reproduced above, we’ve seen that certain periodizing distinctions can be made with respect to patterns of usage. In the decade or so after the 1857 uprising of colonial Indian soldiers, questions of military discipline were centrally at issue in most of the references to looting that appeared in the Times of London, the primary source base for this study.¹⁵ By the 1880s, while such issues had not fallen out of looting’s discursive field, the problem of anonymous expropriations along trade infrastructures had come to the fore. Cutting across these broad, temporally defined clusters, though, were certain persistent demarcations, some of which come into focus insofar as we consider looting’s recognized agents and legitimate punishments. With respect to the former, there was a persistent tendency to racialize looting—that is, to assume that racialized populations were prone to looting, while unseeing the systemic looting perpetrated by white Europeans. Some seepage between these racial demarcations occurs, however, through discourses of criminality and, secondarily, of class.

In 1879, a letter writer could express anxiety at looting perpetrated by the “undiluted offscouring of the home counties.” The Times also ran stories on Italian railway workers’ looting of respectable passengers’ bags (“Luggage”), and participated in the general uproar following an 1886 unemployment demonstration held in London by the Social Democratic Federation, which turned by late evening into a window-smashing and goods-taking affair along West End boulevards. At the conclusion of unsuccessful legal prosecutions of SDF agitators, official opinion and the public discourse of the radicals were in consensus that the looting had been perpetrated by an incorrigible criminal element that had opportunistically attached itself to the demonstrations, and thus had little if anything to do with the properly political concerns over unemployment articulated by those who stood before the crowd.¹⁶

The riot of 1886 also sparked a debate over municipal policing. While at least one “Letter to the Editor” criticized police use of force against demonstrators, the overwhelming majority of pieces published in the Times expressed outrage that the police had not acted more effectively to prevent or repress rioting. Hearings were held and reforms were announced. The Metropolitan police force was to be expanded, communications and coordination between different divisions of the force were to be improved, and the use of mounted police was to be considered for crowd control situations. While such debates about policing were peppered with references to the policing of colonies, and while coordination between the cavalry and mounted police forces was proposed,¹⁷ participants generally took for granted that the use of force against looters and rioters in the metropole should be restrained, and that, except in extreme cases, lethal force should remain out of bounds. This shared view would be tested in 1893, when two miners in Featherstone were shot and killed by soldiers called out to repress a riot at the colliery. Public outcry compelled parliament to hold an inquiry into the shootings, which resulted in the imposition of restrictive conditions on the domestic deployment of military forces—conditions that, as we will see in relation to the mass strikes of 1910–12, were evidently subject to certain unstated exceptions.

Meanwhile, in the colonies, norms concerning legitimate repressive violence were less stringent and in some ways haphazard. At times, British soldiers faced military discipline for unauthorized forms of looting; at other times, superiors looked the other way, or retroactively authorized the looting that had occurred.¹⁸ In contrast, when looters were construed as insurgents or military antagonists, imperial administrators sanctioned the use of fatal violence against suspected looters. In 1886, the same year as the Times was hosting debates about the use of force against London rioters, a series of reports from Burma matter-of-factly noted the number of looters shot and killed by military police: “Colonel Middleton came upon the dacoits while looting a village, and gave them a severe lesson, killing and wounding 30, nearly all Shans” (“Burmah”).¹⁹ As we have already seen, logics of race were reproduced by, and enabling of, these discrepant norms of sanctioned violence. Racialized populations—particularly those read as black—were seen by imperial administrators as predisposed to looting, just as their unauthorized acts of taking—that is, their efforts at social reproduction—were more likely to be seen as acts of war, whether or not those doing the taking understood themselves to be insurgent subjects.

The tensions and racializing fissures of this late imperial discourse of looting were activated and set dramatically in motion following an early-twentieth-century wave of mass strikes in Britain. From 1910 to 1912, British miners, transit employees, and their working-class supporters led a wave of mass strikes that threw key industries of the metropolitan economy into crisis and that brought about pre-revolutionary sequences in a number of British cities and regions, from Liverpool to South Wales. This sequence of class struggles and the aftershocks it registered in parliament can help us see how the late colonial discourse of looting reshaped the discursive terrain of the metropole, but also how discussions of looting in the metropole became occasions for relatively privileged actors to re-articulate discrepant norms of sanctioned violence, or, in Gilmore’s terms, to produce and exploit “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In response to the mass strikes of 1910–12, Winston Churchill and other representatives of Westminster infamously called the military against mass picketers, first during the 1910 Rhondda riots in the South Wales coalfields, and then again during the transit strikes of 1911. In the small South Wales city of Llanelli, soldiers deployed to ensure the continued operation of railway systems shot and killed two picketers in the summer of 1911. The attack followed bayonet charges against mass picketers, who had gathered at the central rail crossing in order to prevent trains from passing. After the shooting, soldiers retired to the safety of the station, while enraged working class residents looted and burned a hundred or so railway carriages, as well as the warehouse owned by a local notable seen as having encouraged the deployment of soldiers.

Around the time of the shooting in Llanelli, national railway unionists agreed to state-mediated settlement terms with rail owners, winning little more than a government inquiry into the question of union recognition. The close of the strike was followed by protests in London against military repression, by a wave of anti-Semitic looting in South Wales (which followed the anti-Chinese riots that had occurred in Cardiff around the time of the strike [Greenberg; “Renewed Riots”; Cayford]), and by parliamentary debates on the legitimacy of Churchill’s decision to deploy troops. Keir Hardie, an Independent Labour representative from Methyr Tydfil, took up the case against the Home Secretary.

In attempting to justify the deployment of troops, Churchill portrayed the national railway strike as a threat to the survival of working class British populations, insisting that, “had the stoppage continued for a fortnight, it is, I think, almost certain that in a great many places to a total lack of employment would have been added absolute starvation. … I do not know whether in the history of the world such a danger has been known” (“House of Commons”). Given the threat of mass starvation, Churchill implied, two working class deaths at the hands of military forces acting to ensure the circulation of trains should be weighed as relatively minor, justifiable losses. In suggesting that the strike threatened mass starvation to an historically-unprecedented degree, and that the smooth circulation of transit infrastructures ensured the proper distribution of food to subordinate populations, Churchill at once repurposed an ideological complex about the salvific effects of rail circulation for starving populations that had been built up by imperial administrators in response to recurrent famines in the Indian subcontinent, and sought to draw his audience toward a shared forgetting of these same recurrent, devastating famines in late-nineteenth-century South Asia—famines that British imperial efforts, including the expansion and securitization of railway networks, had exacerbated and prolonged. With respect to both colonial and metropolitan contexts then, imperial administrators came to maintain a fantasy that the smooth circulation of transit infrastructures indexed the health of local populations. Looting, the direct appropriation of enclosed goods by racialized, subaltern, and/or working-class populations, threatened to puncture this fantasy, suggesting possibilities of taking, sharing, and reproducing life beyond the commodity form or imperial order.

While Churchill’s overheated defense of his decision to deploy troops involved the active forgetting of British imperial responsibility for famines in South Asia, Keir Hardie’s polemics entailed disavowals of their own. Much more than Churchill, Hardie found use for colonial comparisons. In attempting to downplay the significance of working class looting in South Wales, for example, Hardie noted: “Some working men’s wives had carried away some clothes. Did the right hon. gentleman put that forward as a justification for the employment of troops? Did he forget that during the Boxer rising at Peking, Ladies of title and of presumably good character looted the Palace to an extent that would shame a working man’s wife?” (“House of Commons”. Then again, in defending Llanelli strikers’ efforts to stop trains, Hardie insisted that those on strike

did not go and shoot the driver or pelt the train with stones. They planted themselves on the rails. There was no finer example of British heroism in history than that of these men placing their lives in peril to advance the cause. (Laughter.) Had that same thing been done on the field of battle hon. members on both sides of the House would have shouted about the courage of the British bulldog. But it was done in a battle which would have far greater consequences for our country than any battle against foreign enemies. (“House of Commons”)

Hardie attempted in these two moments to cast strikers’ actions in a favorable light by comparing them with the sanctioned—if not, in the former case, widely celebrated—activities of imperial civilians and soldiers. Perhaps in aligning syndicalist and imperial violence, Hardie was seeking to avoid the sort of backlash he had faced in 1908 from settlers in South Africa and from public opinion in Britain for having criticizing British policy in India while on a colonial tour (Hyslop 349–50). In any case, his efforts appear to have been met with scorn in the chamber. Presumably other members of parliament found it absurd to compare working class radicals with imperial soldiers or with Ladies of title; perhaps they also saw in his remarks an implicit challenge to the colonial unseeing of white looting. But more was at stake in Hardie’s colonial comparisons than a challenge to imperial bad faith: his comparisons can also be read symptomatically, as efforts to disavow forms of racial violence in which he, as a representative of Labour, was implicated. As mentioned in passing above, the 1911 Seamen’s strike in Cardiff was characterized by anti-Chinese riots, in which strikers attacked all of the laundries in town owned by Chinese immigrants. Hardie’s attempt to compare looters favorably to the “Ladies of title” whose looting of the Forbidden City would have “shamed a working man’s wife” ironically invoked the specter of more immediate and embodied anti-Chinese violence in South Wales, perpetrated by those whom Hardie sought to defend.

The case of Keir Hardie in 1911 opens up the matter of European class radicalisms’ historical complicities with empire and white supremacy, in this way complicating a too-easy alignment of metropolitan working class expropriations with anti-colonial and anti-racist insurgencies—an alignment implied in the above paragraph’s reference to the possibilities of taking, sharing, and reproducing life glimpsed in histories of looting. In his debate with Churchill, Hardie drew upon colonial frameworks in order to insist that white working class British subjects should be granted certain prerogatives, including to acts of direct appropriation and to embodied violence in defense of their interests – prerogatives denied as a matter of course to colonized and racialized populations. In this way, his class radicalism was bound up with a defense of imperial whiteness. The coloniality of Hardie’s justificatory discourse of looting should give those of us interested in recuperating this tactic for ongoing struggles occasion for critical reflexivity. For if, as Joshua Clover notes, the riot has “come down” to the deindustrialized West from a long history of class radicalism, and has “come inward” from periphery to core, part of what this historical lineage presents to us is a history of the white riot, or a history of imperial looting. An adequate theory of looting – including a theory attentive to the potentials of this tactic in the present – should thus account for the coloniality of the category. Any emancipatory recuperation of looting as a tactic of class struggle must contend with the category’s longstanding co-implication with colonial relations of power, passing through this history rather than attempting to articulate, sui generis, a politics of looting for our deindustrialized, post-colonial present.

The notion of looting entered the English language in nineteenth-century colonial India, a deindustrialized carceral society, and was carried across the second British Empire by telegraph lines, trains, and steamships, which were at once infrastructures of circulation, media of communication, and technologies of war. The term was integral to emergent discourses of race, as it worked to naturalize group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death: pervasive white looting was systemically naturalized and disavowed; acts of direct appropriation by racialized populations, particularly on and around transit infrastructures, were seen as looting and formed a pretext for state murder. These historical realities continue to weigh on the present. The early history of looting helps us see the ways the (discursive, infrastructural, and other) technologies of circulation that daily animate the present are form-determined by the racial necropolitics of (post)modernity.

Footnotes

1. The formulation here concerning the racializing effects of transit and other infrastructures in colonial contexts is indebted to Nemser.

2. Another such category, instrumental to the East India Company’s policing of road systems in 1830s India, was “Thuggee” (an etymological predecessor of the contemporary anti-Black category, “thug”), which referred to an alleged cult whose members were said to engage in highway robbery and murder.

3. See also Our Correspondent.

4. On the guarding of food stores, see also FB.

5. The family metaphor here is not accidental. British fathers not infrequently composed Letters to the Editor defending their sons from charges of looting. Thomas Cape, for example, wrote the Times in 1858 to note that he had

seen private letters and Indian newspapers with reference to this sad affair, but more immediately connected with my son, and I feel assured that nothing was further from the thoughts of those two young and gallant officers than ‘looting.’ One letter was from my son’s superior officer, who speaks in the highest terms of his good conduct and soldierly bearing. It appears to me, from the concurrent testimony of many persons, that there is not the slightest ground for such a charge. It is very hard upon a bereaved father, having lost a brave and beloved son, only 19 years and a half old, to see his character thus reflected upon.

See also The Father of a Soldier.

6. See, for example, “House of Commons, Friday, May 27”; D et al.; One Who Was There; Foley.

7. On the racialization of looting, see also “Holborn”; “The Rebels.”

8. An interesting exception, from 1861:

The Presidency of Bengal, as will be seen by the letter of our Calcutta correspondent, is in a very angry state. From the largest to the smallest every pot is bubbling away at boiling point. There is not a contented mind or tranquil tongue in all the province. In the rural districts the Indigo manufacturers have shut up their factories for lack of labourers, and are crying aloud to be delivered from Mr. Grant, to whom they attribute that their Ryots have turned out upon the “strike,” looting and pillaging and blockading the factories against all who were willing to labour. (“London”)

9. On gratuitous anti-black violence, see Wilderson; RL.

10. Cf. Lindqvist.

11. The railway was constructed between 1852 and 1855. Something like 12,000 workers died over the three-year construction process.

12. On railway imperialism, see Davis et al.

13. See, for example: Our Correspondents, “The Destruction”; “Egypt,” 17 July 1882; “Egypt,” 24 Aug. 1882; “(By Eastern Company’s Cable”; and “Egypt,” 22 Sept. 1882; “House of Lords.”

14. An illustration of this perennial exposure of rail infrastructures to minor acts of appropriation can be found in recent reports of organized efforts to take goods from train cars stationed overnight along Chicago’s rail lines and in yards. See, for example, Delgado.

15. As is probably evident by now, the research process underlying this essay began with a keyword search for “looting” in the digitized archive of the London Times – a research technique that has only become possible in the last decade or so. Such an approach is not without its problems: aside from the scanning technology’s inevitable misapprehensions (so many references to “a proper footing” and to “Tooting, London”…), more consequentially, as Lara Putnam has argued, it offers merely a window into the ways the empire talked publicly to itself about its everyday incidences of violence (377–402). While this archive, as sorted by the keyword search, is marked by at least occasional dissonances and counter-imperial voices, its critical potential lies more in the possibilities it offers for tracking official histories of concepts, and for attending to the chance encounters of seemingly unrelated, though nearly simultaneous news items, reports from the colonies, parliamentary transcripts, and letters to the editor. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, drawing upon Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, suggested that newspapers and novels have been organized above all by the temporality of meanwhile: “The structure of the old-fashioned novel,” he writes, “is clearly a device for the presentation of simultaneity in ‘homogenous, empty time,’ or a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile’” (25). In tracking references to particular keywords in the Times, it is possible to see the ways that similar discursive complexes were mobilized simultaneously in disparate settings, or the ways that differences in setting (i.e., colonies versus metropole) correspond with differences in usage. Tracking references over time also allows us to trace the way that a category makes the jump from one colonial context to another, and from colony to metropole. Thus, the research method employed here offers a way to see the simultaneities and chance encounters of the imperial paper—to traverse Anderson’s meanwhile—while also opening onto historical questions concerning change over time. Anderson himself takes up a similar project in Under Three Flags, which charts the trajectories of repressive technologies and of anti-colonial and anarchist politics as these forces circulate between Cuba, Spain, the Philippines, and other sites within and beyond the late Spanish Empire.

16. “The Unemployed”; “There”; “The Social Democrats”; “The Monster Meeting”; “We”; “House of Commons, Friday, Feb. 26.”; “Central Criminal Court.”

17. See A Well-Wisher and West-End; “The Police.”

18. Cf. “China,” 26 Feb. 1858.

19. See also “Upper Burmah”; Hallett.

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Two Girls²: Sedgwick + Berlant, Relational and Queer

Gila Ashtor (bio)
Tufts University

Abstract

This essay asks what relationality has to do with self-transformation by analysing Lauren Berlant’s reading of Mary Gaitskill’s novel, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” an essay in which Berlant reads her own relationship to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick through the novel’s lens. This essay explores the limitations of queer and affect theory to challenge the conventional psychoanalytic interpretive regime. It problematizes the Lacanian foundations of contemporary critical theory by demonstrating the failure of existing explanatory paradigms. Through a sustained engagement with Jean Laplanche, this essay elaborates an alternative metapsychological account of transformation and queer relationality.

This essay asks what does relationality have to do with self-transformation. This essay poses this question by first exploring the ways that efforts in contemporary critical and literary theory to explain complex relational psychic experiences can be traced back to an unreflective reliance on applied Lacanian psychoanalysis. The essay ends by drawing on Jean Laplanche’s radical innovations in metapsychology to develop new narrative trajectories for the ways that knowledge is, relationally, transmitted and transformative. At the essay’s center is my encounter with Mary Gaitskill’s novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and with Lauren Berlant’s essay on Gaitskill’s novel by the same name, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin.” And because I first discovered this text while Berlant was my teacher and I was her student, my critical encounter with Gaitskill is also about my pedagogic encounter with Berlant.

The particular “girls” named by the dyad vary depending on whether it is Gaitskill’s novel (Dorothy/Justine), Berlant’s essay (Lauren/Eve), or my paper (Gila/Lauren); in every iteration the “two girls” functions as a formulation of the relationship between two girls in the moment of some kind of learning. Although Gaitskill has a distinctive place in contemporary American literature as an author of sexually and psychologically subversive fiction, and Berlant is unique in her prominence as an influential critic in both queer and affect theory, Two Girls is unusual among Gaitskill’s works for using each girl’s different relationship to a transformative teacher as the context for drawing out whatever intimacy they already or eventually share, and Berlant’s essay is not an intervention in Gaitskill’s critical reception so much as an occasion to reflect on the relationship between trauma and history via her own intimacy with, and juxtaposition to, fellow queer/affect theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. That is, rather than being exemplary of each thinker’s abiding formal or thematic interests, “two girls” has the status of being unusual in each thinker’s repertoire (Gaitskill has two protagonists, instead of one, who take turns narrating the story, and Berlant, who avowedly resists the tropes of self-experience, threads her close reading through autobiography). My choice of these atypical texts magnified the curiosity of my own critical agenda: after all, even though I might find a clever way to justify these object choices, there is, perhaps, the crude arithmetic embarrassment that by the time one counts my own trauma/history as well as my own pedagogic relation to Berlant, there are enough traumatized girls in any given sentence to feel uneasy and discouraged about the chances that critique can be anything other than a feat of extraordinary sublimation. In the name of high theory I often found myself wondering: how many “two girls” is too many girls?

By this I mean that I was suspicious of my motives. After all, isn’t it unequivocally the case that nothing quite screams Oedipal rivalry like a younger thinker writing critically about an older one? In fact, for months the ostensible obviousness of this rhetorical/interpersonal act deterred me from approaching these texts. All I could think was that in my endeavor to problematize existing models of pedagogic transformation, I was challenging my own teacher’s explanatory paradigm, and in so doing, didn’t my radical critique of anxious influence sink before it ever sailed? Harold Bloom has most forcefully linked these terms together in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a text that suggests that all relations between younger and older writers could be explicable as some version of the paternal drama and all creative difference as agonistic overthrowing. Maternalizing this dynamic hasn’t done much to radically challenge the explanatory hegemony of Freud’s metapsychological account, even imagining a softer, daughterly push between women – insofar as it presumes the familiar psychoanalytic teleology of transformation – invariably retains the symbolic coordinates of an Oedipal showdown.

Naturally, I bristled at the reduction of critical thought to such primitive psychological gestures, as if the need to compete, defy, or overcome my teacher offered an appropriate explanation for my argument or object choices. I grew sometimes weary, sometimes hysterical upon noticing how defensive my self-justifications seemed (there’s no such thing as objectivity! critique is hardly the most efficient means of differentiation! difference is a tribute, not a method of retaliation!). It wasn’t difficult to concede that I was probably squeamish about my ambition, and aggression, but even when I allowed that this was something I probably needed to work through, a theoretical problem nagged at me: what was the distinctiveness of pedagogic relationality if self-transformation was always and only a reaction to the parental bond? And then I realized: what kind of motivational paradigm situates the relationship before the psychic events it enables? Wasn’t the incoherence of these tropes, and critical theory’s uncritical deployment of them, precisely the object of this critique? By using an idea of paternity as the template for all development, the Freudian/Bloomian topos of transformation generates a confused model of psychic motivation that somehow treats all the contortions of becoming as a reaction against relating rather than as emblematic of the way the pedagogic form is itself already the response to a constellation of common, overlapping questions. Enforcing linear causality belies the distinctiveness of transformational phenomena. As a result, equating each figure in the dyad with its ostensibly transparent chronological position arrantly and incongruously misplaces the way the motivation to relate comes from the experience of having one’s own knowledge challenged and provoked by its dynamic relation to the knowledge of another.

And so, what if intellectual filiation did not need, necessarily, to culminate in the declared supersession of someone else’s thought, but could become instead the occasion for elaborating impact and relation? I want my way of reading to be a practice in the relating I seek to describe. That said, reading and relating are not in opposition here. This essay is an argument that uses style to put pressure on the way kinship is conceptualized. Throughout, I want what I’ll be calling “resonance” – the kinetic force that registers relation – to appear legible yet apart from relationality’s existing tropological forms. This is, I believe, the dehiscence that Berlant shows us Gaitskill enables, and that Berlant uses Lacan to stitch closed.

Reading Berlant Reading Two Girls

Lauren Berlant’s essay, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” is a powerful account of the connection between imagining alternative relational modes that are not reducible to conventional plots of desire and belonging, on the one hand, and understanding psychic subjectivities as too functionally incoherent and structurally inconsistent to be assimilated into dominant paradigms of attachment, history, and sociality, on the other.¹ The novel tells the story of two girls who, in different but formally similar ways, are each abused by those entrusted with loving them; embody their damaged psyches through an array of compulsive fixations; and in varying degrees of rage, lethargy, and disappointment, negate psychic itineraries that promise either redemption or cure. Summarizing the book’s psycho-affective landscape, Berlant writes:

Justine’s response to Dorothy is at first like Dorothy’s to her – a desire to tell a hard story to a stranger to whom she feels averse, followed by confusion about that impulse lived as ambivalence toward the person who animates it. Far more impersonal than Dorothy, Justine has a slower emotional metabolism (yet Dorothy is the fat one, Justine the thin), but eventually she returns to Dorothy, sensing that Dorothy knows something that Justine cannot bear to know on her own. This meeting and return frame the book. … We witness them growing up paralyzed by fear and at the same time launching into madnesses of thinking, reading, eating, masturbating, attaching, and fucking. … If she wants a good life, what’s a girl, or two girls, to do? When does the doing matter? (Cruel Optimism 128–9)

The two girls of the novel meet through a shared interest in Anna Granite, the once famous and hypnotic Ayn Rand-like leader of social and intellectual movement/cult called Definitism. Dorothy was infatuated by her and left college to work for her, and Justine is now writing an article about her. With the prospective article as the novel’s organizing center, the story traces the awkward conversations between these two girls, who, except for a common investment in Granite, are strangers to each other. The girls keep meeting to discuss Dorothy’s firsthand experience of Granite as a teacher/leader and repeatedly find themselves instead, or in parallel, swapping stories about their lives. But rather than eventually maturing into a more typical or recognizable kind of relating, the intimacy between these girls extends without ever quite graduating into a “normal” form. Much like the “fat” and “thin” of the novel’s title, each girl seems to retain her essential size and shape throughout the novel, as if to literalize that they never merge into a unit/couple, and that neither girl ever loses or gains any weight from having taken in the other. This homeostatic situation threatens to buckle under the pressure of the novel’s end, when Dorothy feels betrayed and enraged by the scathing article Justine has written on Definitism, goes over to her house intending confrontation, but instead interrupts a dangerous S/M encounter, scares the guy away and rather than unleashing her meticulous diatribe, takes Justine’s naked, wounded body into her arms. But then, instead of climax or a breakthrough, they rest together and fall asleep.

Berlant describes the novel’s ending as “not a lesbian ending, exactly, since exhaustion is neither sex, love, nor object choice” but at the same time is “not nothing, it’s something else” (“Two Girls” 152). This is just one example of Berlant’s indefatigable commitment to protect the possibility of perplexing subtlety in strange and sometimes bewildering personal and interpersonal moments from the critic’s interpretive overreach. One way that she navigates this critical project is by continually breathing air into dominant explanatory frameworks, coaxing her peers to try (at least once?) trading their attachment to certainty for thought-experiments with non-coherence. In another such characteristic moment, Berlant writes:

In this habit of representing the intentional subject, a manifest lack of self-cultivating attention can easily become recast as irresponsibility, shallowness, resistance, refusal, or incapacity; and habit itself can begin to look deeply overmeaningful, such that addition, reaction formation, conventional gesture clusters, or just being different can be read as heroic placeholders for resistance to something, affirmation of something, or a transformative desire. (“Two Girls” 99)

For Berlant, it could never be critically responsible to merely impugn people for trying, in her words, to “stay afloat” in the world under conditions of precarity and near-chronic oppression, nor could the epistemological comfort of any simple anti-formalism explain with any generosity or ingenuity how a subject can be something other than “performatively sovereign” or not “deeply overmeaningful,” and how a subject’s ways of being may be something other than “heroic placeholders for resistance to something, affirmation of something, or a transformative desire.” Berlant unrelentingly deshames the value (and necessity) of binding oneself to a life raft by insisting that any analysis involving what people do to survive must seek out language that strives to capture the infinite subtlety of experiential encounters. In this way, Berlant keeps showing that no matter how sophisticatedly posed, assailing attachment for being “ideological” leads too automatically to judging people’s efforts to manage their lives – and thereby bolsters the ideological apparatus that is meant to be critiqued.

Perhaps because of the idiosyncratic way that the personal/psychological and the social/ideological are inextricably interdependent in Berlant’s analysis, her work is among the closest that contemporary critical theory comes to using the close-reading of a text in order to endeavor a defense of what motivates people to do whatever weird and confusing things they do, in the paradoxical and inexplicable ways they do it. Berlant’s wariness of the “overmeaningful” and “performatively sovereign” subject challenges the way psychology is typically deployed, where “a manifest lack of self-cultivating attention can easily become recast as irresponsibility, shallowness, resistance, refusal, or incapacity.” In so doing, her work can be seen to compliment and powerfully extend the range of queer and affect theory’s critical mission to unhinge psychological acts and identities from habituated tropes of a normativizing interpretive determinism. But what I show in reading the two readings of Berlant’s essay – her reading of Gaitskill’s novel and her own relationship to Sedgwick – is that, although Berlant’s analytic practice is rigorously less deterministic than conventional mobilizations of theory, the version of psychoanalysis it uses renders it ultimately no less relationally determined.

I explore the way Berlant’s essay simultaneously elaborates the superabundance of what connects people to each other, and refuses to allow the specificity of those connections to matter. Throughout its tour de force dilation of the ways all four girls are brought into relation, Berlant’s essay performs being transformed by particular others while at the same time insisting on transformation as the formal effect of non-relational encounters. Given her singular purchase on the way interiority and ideology are inextricably linked, Berlant wants to emphasize that relationships can be powerful without being over-determined. For example, the way Berlant describes meeting Sedgwick (“She gave a paper, and we talked about it. Years later, I gave one, and she listened to it. She wrote another book, and I read it”) versus her account of being impacted by her (“For me, though, the luck of encountering her grandiosity … is of unsurpassable consequence”) seems deliberately to choreograph as a tension how little you can know the other person versus how transformed by them you can become (“Two Girls” 126) Dedramatization as a stylistic device is a powerful antidote to the inflated narratives of true love and true selves, love that occurs at first sight and the kind that completes you. But whereas Gaitskill amplifies the girls’ entanglement to intensify epistemological pressure, Berlant collapses indeterminacy and structuralism to abrogate the question of what brings and holds these girls together.

Applying Lacan and the “poetics of misrecognition” (“Two Girls” 122), Berlant turns each girl into a “placeholder” (99) that both “take personally but that has, in a sense, nothing to do with anything substantive about each other, except insofar as each woman functions formally as an enigmatic opportunity for something transformative” (127).² Indeed, only a paragraph earlier Berlant points out that the girls’ names, Dorothy Never and Justine Shade, are “shades of The Wizard of Oz, Pale Fire, and Justine” (127), and in the accompanying footnote, that the novel’s literary history “requires a story of its own” (286). But this reference to Nabokov and the repetition of “shade” might signal more than just the novel’s general literariness and indicate instead a more substantial connection between Gaitskill’s and Nabokov’s fictional projects. It is, after all, with a passage from a different Nabokov text (Speak, Memory) that Gaitskill’s own novel begins:

All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour. (qtd. in Gaitskill, Two Girls 10)

We are reminded here that Nabokov’s technical virtuosity is singularly focused on tracking his obsession with the occult underpinnings of human behavior. Not only is Nabokov’s oeuvre distinguished by its experimental preoccupations with doppelgängers (a pair of Nabokovian “two girls” might really be “one”?), but this prefatory passage also expressly establishes the provocative dissonance between what we see and what we follow.

Therefore, although Berlant’s essay captures and recreates the rich panoply of relational dyads and dynamics, it does so in order to repeatedly hollow out the relational mechanisms of any meaningful content, and to insist systematically that what underlies relationality must be either determinable or “hav[e] nothing to do with anything substantive about each other” (“Two Girls” 127). This repudiation of “anything substantive” is an extreme alternative to exegetic density; the choice between a claustrophobic hermeneutics and a permissive one is an ultimatum that prefigures Berlant’s conflation of biography with psychology in the context of a text that seems so deliberately and with such virtuosity to crank up the tension between “everygirl” and peculiar ones, oracular forces and the mundane. The Marxist observation that even generic types can have eccentric variations seems insufficiently able to explain the novel’s experimental logic, because instead of recuperating agency, it dramatizes the powerlessness, awkwardness, and erotics with which people are moved towards each other for reasons that are strong and yet just out of perceptual reach. Berlant’s reading is exemplary of the limited critical imagination with which contemporary theory, and affect/queer theory specifically, approaches relationality. Although I mostly treat affect/queer theory as a homogenous discourse in relation to these questions, this essay traces a fundamental difference between Sedgwick and Berlant that is both addressed and absorbed by Berlant’s use of “two girls” as a narrative frame. Specifically, I show that in the name of resisting a kind of pre-structuralist psychoanalytic determinism, relationality, as a mechanism, has been drained of any material and psychological force and diffused instead into an empty “happening” that can determine everything that transpires around it without ever being accessible or worthy of curiosity and definition.

Theorizing Relationality in Queer/Affect Theory

If any discourse has seemed interested and equipped to offer a corrective to the limitations of a conventional, and conventionally deterministic, psychoanalytic interpretive regime, affect theory has been the most promising – not least because it uses as its founding text the essay by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” in which Tomkins’s research on “affect” is hailed as the much-needed alternative to critical theory’s overly-psychoanalytic, insufficiently nuanced paradigms of human need and action. Indeed, among queer theorists, Sedgwick has arguably done the most to try to unmoor sexuality studies from its Trieb-centered Freudian base. In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick interrogates

the post-Romantic “power/knowledge” regime that Foucault analyzes, the one that structures and propagates the repressive hypothesis, follows the Freudian understanding that one physiological drive – sexuality, libido, desire – is the ultimate source, and hence in Foucault’s word is seen to embody the “truth,” of human motivation, identity and emotion. (17–18)

Sedgwick and Frank argue that Tomkins’s affect theory dislodges the “one physiological drive”; as a fierce critic of Freudian drive theory, Tomkins long ago insisted on untying the knots made by confusing biological needs with emotional ones. As Tomkins writes,

in the concepts of orality, the hunger drive mechanism was confused with the dependency-communion complex, which from the beginning is more general than the need for food and the situation of being fed. In the concept of anality, the elimination drive mechanism had been confused with the contempt-shame humiliation complex… While it is true that oral, anal and sexual aspects of these complexes are deeply disturbing and central to the psychopathology of many individuals, aspects not emphasized by Freud are more disturbing and more central to the psychopathology of others. (Shame 34)

Although Tomkins does not directly address “relating” as a distinctive psychological mechanism, his work is groundbreaking in part due to its reorientation away from the tendency to theorize the subject in isolation and toward its imbrication in affective states, the environment, and others.

Sedgwick’s use of Tomkins to insist on a new and different motivational structure avowedly compels a reevaluation of dominant explanatory models. While this call for nuance is not aimed at relationality specifically, the critical exasperation with “over-meaningful” accounts of psychic action, and with interpretive limitedness more generally, promises fresh attention to dimensions of experience that have until now been systematically neglected. In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth write:

Almost all of the tried-and-true handholds and footholds for so much critical-cultural-philosophical inquiry and for theory – subject/object, representation and meaning, rationality, consciousness, time and space, inside/outside, human/nonhuman, identity, structure, background/foreground, and so forth – become decidedly less sure and more nonsequential … . Because affect emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness and not in some dialectical reconciliation of cleanly oppositional elements of primary units, it makes easy compartmentalisms give way to thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs. (4)³

As both the writing and thinking in this passage illustrate, affect theory is characterized by a language of sensation, of “thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs,” that eludes dominant critical “compartmentalisms” and that, in doing so, insists upon the “muddy, unmediated relatedness” of belonging in the world. This is an incredibly powerful framework, or slipping out from under what with a capital “F” becomes a “framework’s” noose, that testifies to the imaginative and pragmatic opportunities made possible by having “no single, generalizable theory of affect” (3).

In keeping with its multidisciplinary resources and commitment to expanding the critical and perceptual range of our interpretive practices, affect theory presents a strong theoretical apparatus for reconceptualizing the relational context. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy exerts one of the most crucial influences in this discursive landscape. Not only did Merleau-Ponty seek to undermine Cartesian mind-body dualism by demonstrating that all knowledge was necessarily “embodied,” but his work on perception and psychology further demonstrates that all knowledge is not representational. Teresa Brennan’s “transmission of affect” is extraordinarily helpful in further elucidating the conceptual consequences of reorienting our dominant physiological-psychological divide. Brennan writes that “the taken-for-grantedness of the emotionally contained subject is a residual bastion of Eurocentrism in critical thinking” (2); what “the transmission of affect means [is] that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment”(6).⁴ This insecure distinction “between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’” is important for Brennan because it opens up a new language for tracking embodied experience; “rather than the generational line of inheritance (the vertical line of history), the transmission of affect, conceptually, presupposes a horizontal line of transmission” via “olfaction and the circulation of blood,” hormones, facial expressions, touch (9).. One major claim resulting from this project is that perception is not contingent on representation; or put another way, what we sense of our/another’s affect or experience does not need to be representable in order to be perceptually operative.

Although opening the door to materialism can often sound like slamming the door on language, in this essay I contend not that affect gets us away from discourse, but that affect theory diversifies our analytic tools by focusing on a world of forces and impacts that are not reducible to, or identical with, those thematized by the structuralist paradigm.⁵ This intellectual development seems to me like an especially promising innovation for theorizing subjectivity, and metapsychology generally, since it puts back at the center of analysis a rigorous respect for the singular dimensions of experiential life that are necessary to elucidating why people become the people they do, and how that happens. A narrow conceptualization of materialism (one that derogates psychology to immateriality and focuses only on such topics as capitalism or the ecology) or a narrow conceptualization of subjectivity (one that does not consider the conditions for transformation to be material in nature or effect) limits the radical potential of realist philosophy to change the ways that existence in the lifeworld is thought and lived.

Coextensive with my conviction that metapsychological questions are integral to any materialist philosophical system is my interest in literary criticism as a “practical psychology.” By this I mean that because the exercise of close reading is charged with the task of interpreting human action as it occurs in narrative form, a psychology of the subject is never abstract, or incidental to the explanatory power of hermeneutic engagement. Throughout, I draw upon Jean Laplanche’s theoretical interventions in psychoanalysis to consider the ways that the models of subjectivity currently in use are not inevitable and are open to revision. It follows from this avowedly idiosyncratic use of literary criticism that I do not begin with an established theory of the subject but rather read closely, trying to find one. This methodology is a feature of my project’s commitment to a speculative psychology⁶ and informs my interest in the ways that affect/queer theory might reimagine new possibilities for understanding subjective life.

“Textuality” and Relationality

Dorothy’s account of how she met Justine opens the novel:

I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers. “Writer interested in talking to followers of Anna Granite. Please call -.” It was written in rigorous, precise, feminine print on a modest card displayed amidst dozens of cards, garish Xeroxed sheets, newsprint, and ragged tongues of paper. (11)

“Textuality” is a literal feature of their relationship and is linked, from the novel’s first words, with a dual sense of casualness and fate; an eleven-word ad “displayed amidst dozens of cards” hardly seems to augur a life-altering event, but then again, what are the chances that the writer of the “index card” and the writer in the index card will be read by someone who both reads index cards in laundromats and happens to be among the former “followers of Anna Granite”? Dorothy draws out the connection between fortuity and accident by saying, somewhat crankily, that “the owners of this laundry establishment seem to have an especially lax policy when it comes to the bulletin board, and upon it any nut can advertise himself” (11). For a moment it doesn’t matter that Dorothy happened upon the “modest card,” it only matters that she almost didn’t. Bemoaning the clutter of idiosyncratic longing, Dorothy’s indignation reflects her discomfort with offhanded characterizations of Granite and meaningfulness generally. However, whereas Dorothy is overwhelmed and indignant that intimacy is mediated by “index cards” and “bulletin boards,” Berlant is buoyed to find that getting to know Sedgwick by reading each other’s books is “one place where the impersonality of intimacy can be transacted without harm to anyone” (“Two Girls” 126).

Elaborating on Berlant’s formulation, I consider how “textuality” is not only a pattern of interacting through texts but also a model for relating to each other as texts. Here the term “textuality” provides a non-hermeneutic account of psychological engagement. Instead of using “textuality” as a paradigm for all interpretive activity (as, Shaun Gallagher notes, some branches of hermeneutics have),⁷ I suggest that relationality is amplified when we consider that interpretive reading is not the only way to engage a text. For this speculative rubric I draw on Laplanche’s radical revision of psychoanalytic metapsychology.

Where Laplanche is cited in queer theoretical discourse it is typically as the author, with J. B. Pontalis, of The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1973), whose ideas were consonant with Freud and Lacan. But for the remainder of his later work, which was extensive, Laplanche vigorously and systematically renounced the concept of “leaning-on” that was so central to his earlier work, and sought instead to develop what he called New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. According to Laplanche, “the connection between the self-preservative, instinctual relationship” and “the sexual drive” has been the dominant question of psychoanalytic theory (Temptation 4), but whereas “leaning-on” posits “a sexuality that emerges by supporting itself or leaning on self-preservation,” (Temptation 27) Laplanche shows instead that this desperate attempt to “save the Freudian hypothesis” (Temptation 5) relies, for its cogency, on the notion that self-preservation can somehow morph into sexual desire. Dominique Scarfone writes that “leaning-on gives the impression that sexuality ‘arises’ from self-preservative situations a bit as the flower blossoms forth from the bud,” and it suggests that if “an instinctual adaptive function persists long enough, the sexual sphere will kick in” (21).⁸ Laplanche explains:

I have frequently, and for a long time, criticized such a “creativist” and “illusionist” conception of human sexuality. In Freud these conceptions find their apogee in the theory of the “hallucinatory satisfaction of desire,” which I reject. Indeed, the first real satisfaction can only be the satisfaction of a need; and its reproduction … can only be the reproduction of an alimentary satisfaction. There is in Freud and his successors … a veritable sleight of hand: if the sexual is not present within the original, real experience it will never be rediscovered in the fantasmatic reproduction or the symbolic elaboration of that experience. (Temptation 46)

Laplanche locates infantile “creativity” in “the ‘drive to translate,’ which comes to the child from the adult message ‘to be translated.’” Laplanche writes: the child’s “creativity … does not in fact go so far as to create sexuality: this is in reality introduced from the earliest intersubjective experience, and introduced by the activity of the adult rather than the infant.” (Temptation 50)

Laplanche shows why this meticulous differentiation between “instinct” and “drive” is the urgent corrective to Freud’s “biologizing going-astray.” For our purposes, Laplanche’s insistence that a “need” cannot set a “drive” in motion (because they have categorically different economies, sources, and aims) offers a genuinely alternative way of thinking about psychological development because it proposes different motivational lines (self-preservation vs. pleasure) whose relationship to each other is “not one of collaboration or of harmonious blending, but a deeply conflictual relation” (44). Dismissing “the sequence of infantile stages described by Freud [as] a barely credible fiction,” and prying apart “two respective modes of functioning – ‘the pursuit of excitation’ and ‘the pursuit of pleasure in the object,’” Laplanche outlines the profound and original hypothesis that what propels psychological becoming can be simultaneously forceful and enigmatic, external and nowhere we could know. This depiction of the subject’s constitution by its necessary response to an-other’s desire is crucial for what I call “questions.” By “questions,” I refer to the force of the “messages” a subject bears within himself but cannot access, or encounter, on his own.

If having one’s “questions” reactivated by someone else’s “questions” sounds like science fiction, that isn’t incidental to Nabokov’s effort – through webs of fortuities that stretch realism’s range – to complicate the representation of reality’s operation. We can observe a similar project at work in Gaitskill’s text in the form of Dorothy as someone whose hyper-vigilance about connections and deeper meanings often seems desperately superstitious and vaguely paranoid. For example, after discovering the fateful “index card,” Dorothy says: “When I woke in the afternoon, I called ‘writer’ again. Again, no response. Instead of relief, I felt irritation. Why had this person put his/her number on a bulletin board if he/she didn’t have a machine to take calls? . . . ‘Writer’ had sent a quivering through my quotidian existence, and now everything was significant” (15). Even though Dorothy’s exaggerated responses threaten to undermine her narrative credibility, Gaitskill’s text instead consistently frustrates and disorients the distinction between Dorothy’s acuity and her self-deception. Reaching Justine and arranging their first interview, Dorothy says, “I invented possible scenarios daily, growing more and more excited by the impending intellectual adventure” (17). This sounds like the kind of inflated imaginative reverie we come to expect from Dorothy, until suddenly Dorothy’s description aligns exactly with the story the novel will tell:

My wildest invention, however, didn’t prepare me for what actually happened … I had thought of Anna Granite as the summit of my life, the definitive, devastating climax – and yet perhaps she had only been the foreshadowing catalyst for the connection that occurred between me and Justine, the bridge without which our lives would have continued to run their spiritually parallel courses. (17)

By positioning Dorothy as the indefatigable apostle of life’s mysterious underpinnings (and not just the deluded counterpart to Justine’s jagged skepticism), the novel appoints Dorothy as the occult’s eccentric beholder, whose perspicacity accurately captures the strange-yet-ordained quality of transformation.

Transformation and Relating

Dorothy’s vivid depictions of her encounter with Granite are especially striking for their contrast with the scripted, impatient manner she has for talking about anything else. Consider the juxtaposition between the matter-of-fact style in which she reports having “been forced to have an incestuous affair with my father, starting at age fourteen” (26) with her recollection of first discovering Granite:

I read Anna Granite and suddenly a whole different way of looking at life was presented to me. She showed me that human beings can live in strength and honor … And then the rest was just … the sheer beauty of her ideas … She held up a vision for me, and her vision helped me through terrible times. I mean, by the time I discovered Granite, I had just about given up. (28)

Unlike the other moments where Dorothy dutifully and begrudgingly itemizes her traumas, this description of Granite is the first time Dorothy sounds narrative. Whereas trying to answer the interview questions felt coarse and unintuitive – at one point Dorothy even says, “I regarded Justine with dislike and awaited her next prepackaged question” (32) – talking about Granite recreates the aura of romance and transformation.

In her descriptions of discovering Sedgwick, Berlant imitates Dorothy’s narrative arc when she says,

Eve Sedgwick’s work has changed sexuality’s history and destiny. She is a referent, and there is a professional field with a jargon and things, and articles and books that summarize it. For me, though, the luck of encountering her grandiosity, her belief that it is a good to disseminate the intelligent force of an attachment to a thing, a thought, a sensation, is of unsurpassable consequence. (Cruel Optimism 122)

When later in the essay Berlant offers an account of how it is that another person can effectuate such impactful transformation, the concept of “emancipatory form” is introduced to suggest that, “in its spectacularly alien capacity to absorb a person, to take her out of her old way of being whether or not she finds a place elsewhere,” the “emancipatory form does not require a particular content but instead the capacity to be both surprised and confirmed by an attachment of which one knows little” (140). Non-specificity is an essential feature of the “emancipatory form,” since what the subject experiences as transformative isn’t anything “particular” about the object per se, but is “in the spectacularly alien capacity to absorb a person, to take her out of her old way of being.” Transformation is a version of absorption, and given the immense burden of Dorothy’s traumatic past, it is no wonder that, according to Berlant, “the most thematic but not least dramatic instance of this double movement is in Dorothy’s encounter with Granite” (“Two Girls” 140).

Privileging the formalism of a transformative event is crucial to understanding what people do to have and hold onto their optimism, but in the commitment to “deshame fantasmatic attachments” (“Two Girls” 122) there is a wholesale flattening of relational forms into things that have value despite their “particular content.” Working against the critical tendency to devalue and dismiss the subject’s strategies for “staying afloat,” Berlant’s essay seeks to redeem the silly or sentimental cathexis by demonstrating that fantasy-based attachment is on a spectrum of projective need, not a symptom of errancy. The twofold implication here is that fantasy is the universal mechanism of everyone’s object relations (everyone does it) and that it is the common ground for all different kinds of object relations (every relationship is equally fantasmatic). An interpretive model that takes the subject’s self-alienation as presumptive opens up innumerable possibilities for being curious and compassionate about all that compels us toward/away from each other and ourselves. But then what is the specificity of being transformed as a process of becoming-different? Here I think we can begin to perceive a non-difference, in Berlant’s account, between “absorption” as a technique for managing anxiety and pain versus “relating” as the connection to an object that enables psychic change. In fact, extrapolating from this conflation of absorption with relating, it is as though all attachment becomes functionally identical to any other compulsion for managing distress. Can individuals use objects outside overdetermined circuits of meaning? This seems indisputable to me. And where in doubt, Berlant’s oeuvre resolutely shows that pleasure and relief are not derived from necessarily “coherent” or “appropriate” activities. But how can we make the leap from this observation to the notion that there is no difference between being absorbed and being transformed because an identical mechanism underlies both – a need getting met – unless we consider transformation as somehow dissociable from psychic relating?

Indeed, Berlant insists on severing the association between “particular content” and “emancipatory form” even as the novel and essay proliferate evocative glimpses of barely symbolized, non-conscious, non-representational “communication” between each set of girls. Dorothy describes the power of Granite as “the first writer, ever” who “showed me that human beings can live in strength and honor, not oppositional to it” (Two Girls 27). Berlant replicates the rhythm of this scene when she says of Sedgwick’s work, “to admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long (life) sentence, is sentience – that’s what I’ve learned” (Cruel Optimism 122–3). Here and elsewhere, scenes of learning refer to something specific about the object-as-teacher that makes a given interchange transformative. And yet, when Berlant conflates “absorption” and “relating,” it is because “a poetics of misrecognition” (122) redescribes all attachment as motivated by the projection upon the object of a fantasmatic need. In his theory of the “mirror stage,” Lacan uses the child’s experience of registering the disjunction between his “unorganized jumble of sensations and impulses” and the reflection of a “unified surface appearance similar to that of the child’s far more capable, coordinated, and powerful parents” (Écrits 13) to demonstrate the subject’s foundational self-estrangement, the impossibility of aspiring to a true self, and the comedy of encountering, in every other, a self that is always already mediated by fantasy. Using Lacan’s formulation, Berlant writes that

misrecognition (méconnaissance) describes the psychic process by which fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that we can imagine that something or someone can fulfill our desire: its operation is central to the state of cruel optimism. To misrecognize is not to err, but to project qualities onto something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having those qualities – which it might or might not have. (Cruel Optimism 122)

The subject of this scenario attempts to get what it needs, and what it needs is, ultimately, to manage confusion and get some relief. There can be a diversity of objects who provide this and a multiplicity of means, but the need to “imagine that something or someone can fulfill our desire” is the subject’s most elementary wish.

Berlant treats the “poetics of misrecognition” as an analytic formulation that, despite their slightly different critical investments, she and Sedgwick share. According to Berlant,

Sedgwick seeks to read every word the subject writes (she believes in the author) to establish the avowed and disavowed patterns of his or her desire, and then understands those repetitions in terms of a story about sexuality that does not exist yet as a convention or an identity. … The queer tendency of this method is to put one’s attachments back into play and into pleasure, into knowledge, into worlds. It is to admit that they matter. (Cruel Optimism 123)

But “my world,” Berlant writes a few paragraphs later, “operates according to a proximate, but different, fantasy of disappointment, optimism, aversion, and attachment than the one I attribute to Eve” (126). Berlant avers that “this distinction is not an opposition” (125) since,

like Eve, I desire to angle knowledge toward and from the places where it is (and we are) impossible. But individuality – that monument of liberal fantasy, that site of commodity fetishism, that project of certain psychoanalytic desires, that sign of cultural and national modernity – is to me a contrary form … . There is an orientation toward interiority in much queer theory that brings me up short and makes me wonder: must the project of queerness start “inside” of the subject and spread out from there? (124–5)

To illustrate this point biographically, even though “in writing this way I am working against my own inclination,” Berlant writes:

My story, if I wrote it, would locate its optimism in a crowded scene too, but mine was dominated by a general environment not of thriving but of disappointment, contempt, and threat. I salvaged my capacity to attach to persons by reconceiving of both their violence and their love as impersonal. This isn’t about me. This has had some unpleasant effects, as you might imagine. But it was also a way to protect my optimism. Selves seemed like ruthless personalizers. In contrast, to think of the world as organized around the impersonality of the structures and practices that conventionalize desire, intimacy, and even one’s own personhood was to realize how uninevitable the experience of being personal, of having personality, is. (125)

In what might otherwise be a heartbreaking glimpse of a terrifying childhood, Berlant insists instead that the subject’s capacity to survive and the quality of her object-relating are not, necessarily, linked. This breach between attachment and personhood anticipates the disconnection between particular objects and impacted subjectivity that Berlant asserts is fundamental to every transformative relation. Moreover, by applying “this isn’t about me” to object-relating tout court, and to transformative encounters especially, Berlant uses her interpretation of what transpires between two sets of fat and thin girls to prove that transformation is not about getting “personal” (since look at all the ways these women do not know or even care about each other), and subjectivity is not about being transformed (since motivation and the interiority it fabricates is a psychological and hermeneutic luxury for those who aren’t simply desperately trying to “stay afloat”).

What “staying afloat” shares with the “poetics of misrecognition” is a conceptualization of what constitutes the subject’s basic needs. But this idea of the subject who relates by fantasmatically conforming the outside object to his internal needs depends upon the assertion that biological self-preservation and psychological growth are structurally and economically identical and, moreover, that psychic development works the way eating does. Laplanche vigorously warns: “we must refuse to believe in the illusion that Freud proposes. From the hat of hunger, from a self-preservative instinct, Freud the illusionist claims to produce the rabbit of sexuality, as if by magic. This is only possible if sexuality has been hidden somewhere from the start” (Freud and the Sexual 69). While the experience of being fed and the mirror stage are different developmental moments, Laplanche identifies the way that both fables share the modeling of all psychic need on the mechanism of alimentary satisfaction. Since for Laplanche, the satisfaction of needs (milk) is always part of someone else’s sexuality (breast), the notion that adult desire is autocentric, conscious, or necessarily even aligned with self-preservation belies the fact that there never was an object who was only or simply the provider of alimentary needs. Even the “provider” had a psychology that, while dispensing food, was also “enigmatic” and whose enigmas demanded the subject’s “translation” and response. Therefore, whereas “self-preservation” (eating) works according to a principle of pleasure (satiety and the reduction of tension), the “drive” denotes a force that is “not goal-directed,” “variable from one individual to the next,” “determined by the individual’s history,” and that works according to a principle of excitation (increase in tension) (Laplanche, Temptation 121). Since the drive “is bound to fantasy, which for its part is strictly personal,” Berlant’s insistence that desiring transformation is governed by the principle of “self-preservation” (survival) is incoherent to the extent that transformation is a product of the subject’s fantasmatic life as constituted by relating to others. Transformation is not a basic need that can be efficiently met, but a function of an idiosyncratic psyche pursuing becoming. Asking why an individual would attach to things that militate against flourishing presumes that somehow flourishing is dissociable from attachment. But while this construct makes sense within a Marxist frame, in a psychological one there is no way to separate what’s in a subject’s “interests” from the objects of attachment; the “interest” of the subject is survival and attachment is the means. “Cruel optimism” risks tautology by using psychological principles to redescribe a problematic those same principles presume.

Fat Vs. Thin, Personal/Impersonal

Gaitskill uses the “fat/thin” distinction to denote the different psychic and environmental textures of each girl’s experiential world, and in her essay, Berlant elaborates this imagined juxtaposition by grafting onto “fat” and “thin” literal distinctions between Sedgwick and herself (Sedgwick writes about being fat, Berlant talks about her asceticism) as well as conceptual distinctions between personal and impersonal, biography and anti-biography, attachment and detachment. This overarching categorization meditates on fat/thin as a difference of relational intensity that is concretely expressed in each girl’s relationship to the pedagogic object at the novel’s center: Dorothy is over-identified with Granite, imitative, infatuated, evangelical, while Justine is skeptical of Granite, journalistic, curious, interested in writing about her but not in becoming an actual acolyte. And so, although both “fat” and “thin” represent modes of impersonality, they each also figure for notably different relational tendencies, such as: Dorothy/Sedgwick/Fat = voracious, entitled, outstretched, versus Justine/Berlant/Thin = aloof, apart, contained. (Since I’m insisting on relating and what my relating might mean, I think, though I’m skinny, we know whose company I’m in.) What is suggestive about Berlant’s metaphoric framing of relational styles in metabolic terms is that it consigns relationality to a spectrum of “greater” or “lesser” degrees of aggression (grandiosity) and demand (projection), the result of which is that Justine behaves fantasmatically and Dorothy tends to make-believe. However, the novel and essay contradict the classification Berlant constructs: not only are both girls compelled by Granite, even if Justine seems impassive and Dorothy feels cosmically ordained, but both the novel and the essay depend for their existence on thin girls trying to be intimate with what fat girls say they love.

The implications of this fat/thin distinction are not limited to analyses of each girl’s fantasmatic range, but serve, in Berlant’s essay, to characterize the different appetitive profiles of critical interpretation. Although the essay begins by sketching her and Sedgwick’s “different, but proximate” fantasies of personhood, and Berlant assures us that this “distinction is not an opposition,” the essay progresses by systematically collocating possible avenues to psychological meaning, then dispersing them onto an all-exterior landscape of un-interpretable sensation and non-comprehensible events. If the subject is only ever fumbling and stumbling and trying to survive with a bare minimum of optimism intact, then attributing behavior to interiority and interpreting what motivates sexual or “textual” desire already aspires to explain overmeaningfully—as if trying to understand the subject in psychological terms becomes itself a sign of critical greed. Or critics more wounded and austere would never even be that hungry.

Berlant’s suggestion to be less hungry critics, or at least to train ourselves to evacuate whatever “meaning” we ingest, complemented the discourse’s interpretive focus on adumbrating the “thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs” (Gregg and Seigworth 4) and on rejecting the big “compartmentalisms” of subject/object, representation, memory, time/space, etc. But it also enabled psychoanalysis to retain its status as the absolute explanatory paradigm of human behavior by ratifying “transference” as the preeminent mechanism of object-relating. If, beyond insinuating that opposite body types attract because they are symbolically complimentary, Berlant’s essay cannot account for what brings these girls together, it is because when everyone is a “ruthless personalizer,” what motivates contact is not much deeper than how well (or badly) the other serves one’s own projective longings. This uncritical reduction of all relating to “transference” and projection preserves the psychoanalytic ideology of the autocentric subject, and in doing so, simplifies intimacy and transformation precisely where queer theory seemed uniquely poised to complicate it.

Since the concept’s debut in Freud’s early writings to the contemporary proliferation of diverse typologies, “transference” has become the ur-mechanism for understanding how subjects experience each other as familiar objects. Initially Freud defined “transference” as “new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and fantasies that are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity … that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician” (116). No matter what brand of transference it is (sexual, negative, oedipal, narcissistic, etc.), certain key features are consistent: temporality moves forward and/or backward, shuffling between present, past, and future tenses; the directionality of affect flows only from inside and toward outside, in varying permutations of projection and identification; fantasy and need are the main impulses for transporting affect between objects, even if other mechanisms like the body or landscape function interactively as well.

As we will see, it is impossible for transference to be used without invoking its ideology of affect. The word transference itself, with the root verb “transfer” describing the movement of something in someone to someone/thing somewhere else, bears the trace of the concept’s particular genealogy in classical Freudian psychoanalysis, where transference represented the patient’s affective “resistance” to the “talking cure.” Although the term’s antagonistic dynamics have been notably softened by the development of a “two-person” framework, I argue that no matter how brazenly contemporary clinicians insist on increasing the ratio between neutrality and the reality of an interpersonal context, the philosophical foundations of transference retain the infrastructure of a psychic subject whose experience originates in a monolithic historical past that gets reimposed on an otherwise innocent relational present. Sedgwick’s mobilization of Tomkins’s affect theory is directed at dethroning Freudian/Lacanian metapsychology at exactly the point where psychoanalytic formulations reduce subjectivity to a crude relational determinism and psychobiology; by showing that affects (and not just alimentary “drives”) motivate, new possibilities emerge for interpreting the subject’s experience. How, then, can we understand the totalizing reductiveness by which what happens between “two girls” becomes no more than a transferential event, the formal effect of the general wish each girl projects “for something transformative” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 127)?

As a critique of individuality – “that monument of liberal fantasy, that site of commodity fetishism, that project of certain psychoanalytic desires, that sign of cultural and national modernity” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 124) – Berlant’s impersonality would seem, nearly automatically, to demand the dissolution of the autocentric subject. However, by conflating psychology with (available/interior) consciousness, and flattening relating into need-based projection, Berlant corroborates transference and its enforcement of the most persistent and totalizing myth of psychoanalysis: that transformative relating is exogenous to the constitution of subjectivity. As an argument, Berlant’s use of her relationship to Sedgwick, and Dorothy’s relationship to Justine, to prove that relating does not need to be personal to be transformative, depends for its cogency on conflating biography with psychology, but they are not, after all, the same thing. In fact, it is precisely the tension between them that animates and challenges the critic’s interpretive task. As such, while defending the subject’s rights to incoherence is a vital hermeneutic precept, limiting the subject’s psychological processes to originating “basic” needs and meeting them consolidates the subject’s absolute, autarkic role. What about becoming-different as a form of relating that is irreducible to “getting by” or ontogenesis? After all, a girl whose compulsions we can’t read is different from one whose compulsions have no meaning. Ruth Leys echoes this observation in her seminal critique of affect theory’s anti-intentionalism⁹ when she writes, “a materialist theory that suspends considerations of meaning or intentionality in order to produce an account of the affects as inherently organic (indeed inherently mechanical) in nature” is necessarily committed to an idea of emotions as “inherently objectless” so that, even though “I laugh when I am tickled,” “I am not laughing at you” (463). Laughing, but “not at you” helpfully demonstrates the way that affect theory’s “anti-intentionalism” is practically contingent upon, and responsible for, a non-relational metapsychological framework. To extrapolate even further from these observations, I would suggest that the compatibility of Lacanian metapsychology with a Deleuzian ontology of immanence and non-representational theory occludes affect theory’s depsychologization of relationality because linguistic structuralism effectively materializes psychic action into generalized “forms” that are beyond personal, relational, or concrete “content.” I think it is a specific kind of formalism that is organized against the content of anything “personal” about the object or relation that enables Berlant to claim that what is transformative is the self’s “impersonal,” non-psychological attachment to the object, not something – however imperceptible or non-representational – that happens between them.

“Resonance” and Relationality

Perhaps the extent to which affect theory moves us toward a new vocabulary for describing relational experience while simultaneously circumscribing the theoretical range of what it will capably radicalize is evident in the different ways “resonance” can be understood. Berlant uses “resonance” to characterize the sensation Dorothy and Justine experience when they first meet:

At the time of their meeting, neither Justine nor Dorothy has had a good conversation with anyone in many years. … Yet from the moment of their initial phone call they resonate with each other, a resonance that they take personally but that has, in a sense, nothing to do with anything substantive about each other. (Cruel Optimism 127)

“Resonance” recurs often in affect theory and the phenomenological thought influenced by Merleau-Ponty, offering, as it does, a term for signaling a “felt” occurrence that is not necessarily assimilable into linguistic representation or more concrete signification.

I want to suggest that in order for each girl to function “formally” rather than “substantive[ly]” for each other, for “formalism” to be juxtaposed to “content” in this way, we also have to imagine that the “resonance that they take personally” can be physiological without being psychological, or, put another way, that in order to be perceptual, meaning has to be perceptible too. But Merleau-Ponty uses “perceptual meaning” in a functionally similar way to Laplanche’s “psychic reality,” namely, to denote an alternative logic of development that is simultaneously constitutive of subjectivity and relationality, irreducible to biological or linguistic reductionism, singular and not-me, singular because I am where I respond to the other. If it is through the self’s movement in relation to others that a self develops, then “resonance” is an exemplary encounter with movement as being-moved that is not necessarily accessible to signification.

Therefore, whereas “resonance” within an applied Lacanian model merely compliments the affective topography of an ultimately transferential event, in a Laplanchian-inflected formulation of relational encountering, “resonance” is the way the impact of a transformative “textual” engagement becomes registered, non-meaningfully. This means that we can “resonate” with an other even though we cannot know what or why or even how – only that we are resonant and, since our knowledge is embodied, since “textuality” lives in our gestures and glances, our resonance means even if we will never know what it means. This “resonance” that happens between subjectivities is not, then, a narrative moment where form exceeds or supersedes content, but a psycho-physiological instant that attunes me to my “textual” self, and to myself as “textual.”

I have used “textuality” to refer to the questions (Laplanchian “messages”) that propel transformative “relating” and “textual desire” to the need/wish to experience these questions as questions. What I want now to add to this formulation is the mechanism that links these two concepts, something Laplanche calls “reactivation”:

The translation of the enigmatic adult message doesn’t happen all at once but in two moments … . In the first moment, the message is simply inscribed or implanted, without being understood. It is as if maintained or held in position under a thin layer of consciousness, or under the skin. In a second moment the message is reactivated from within. It acts like an internal foreign body that must at all costs be mastered and integrated. (Freud 208)

The psychic mechanism Laplanche outlines makes it possible to imagine relationality as an experience of one’s own “messages” being “reactivated” by the “messages” of an other. What distinguishes this model from what Laplanche often refers to as the “trans-individual structures” of Lacanian “language,” or the fantasmatic activity of Kleinian “projection,” is that only a specific, concrete other whose “messages” resonates with my own can provoke the “reactivation” of my “untranslated” questions. This is the reality of the “message,” i.e., of the signifier as it is addressed by someone to someone. According to Laplanche,

to project, to introject, to identify, to disavow, to foreclose, etc. – all the verbs used by analytic theory to describe psychical processes share the feature of having as subject the individual in question: I project, I disavow, I foreclose, etc. What has been scotomised … , quite simply, is the discovery that the process originally comes from the other. Processes in which the individual takes an active part are all secondary in relation to the originary moment, which is that of a passivity: that of seduction. (Essays 136)

It is no longer possible to think psychic life archeologically, since development is mediated by the concrete “other,” and what the child bears as “knowledge” is only ever already a product of the way that “enigmatic” content has been idiosyncratically “translated.” Laplanche offers a way out of the determinism of “transference,” since there is no unified or legible scene that could be wished-for or repeated; there are only implanted “messages” shot through with affect and signification that in their exigency compel us toward we know not what, or whom.

Two Girls, Relational and Queer

This essay suggests that Two Girls is an exemplary dramatization of how relationality unfolds in non-hermeneutic, non-teleological, indeterminate ways, for not only is Dorothy’s response to Justine’s “index”-card call for “followers of Anna Granite” literally an answer to Justine’s question about Granite, but Dorothy’s relationship to Granite is something that, for whatever reason, Justine wants an occasion to live with (and through) for a while. Why else would Justine want to write about it? And even then, why interview ex-acolytes? This is not an attempt to deduce unconscious motivations but instead to insist we take seriously the conditions that bind any of the “two girls” writing or being written about. This means that we cannot treat as narrative coincidence that these two girls are brought together on either side of Granite (a teacher) and Definitism (a movement compelled by the search for Truth), even if it looks as though the intimacy between someone detachedly curious and someone who cathects heroically is reducible, merely, to the structural drama of a thin girl experiencing proximity to a fat one. Because even when the manifold effects of this comic méconnaissance seem weird and queer and enigmatic, sadly, the motivational mechanisms that underlie it never are. For although putting each girl’s desperate, justifiable need for a transformative object at the center of whatever transpires between them purports that phenomenological rawness proves attachment has been stripped unsentimentally down to the bone, it only, really, strips attachment of the complexity that renders it any kind of relationship whatsoever.

While the biographical data we’re given is at once too limited and conventional to explain their respective attraction to Definitism or to each other, the novel seems decidedly more provocative as an exercise in rendering, as links, the possible knots of psychic entanglement that it could sketch but barely, if ever, begin to untangle. Therefore, insofar as “resonance” aims to describe the powerful, mostly nonlinguistic and non-representational relational current connecting psychic subjectivities to each other, I want to read the ending as the beginning the novel has been working its way to elaborating. The ending is therefore not only “not nothing,” (“Two Girls” 152) but is also radical because it isn’t any kind of ending at all but rather a singular moment of elaboration, where the “sonorous” sense of “resonance” can only emerge little by little, halting and halted in a holding embrace, where the force undergirding their “resonance” emerges and can glimpse something of what “resonance” would look like if it never had to assume a relational form. Whereas for Berlant, this ending resists categorization by being ambiguous, I want to read the ending as the concrete expression of a “resonance” these girls have experienced in relationship to each other from the beginning.

In her essay’s countermanding conversion of all meaningfulness into abstraction, Berlant valorizes their inscrutable “falling asleep” by ignoring that Dorothy interrupts Justine during an S/M scene, which, in a novel this bracingly deliberate, we have to consider as being about more than just salvation from violence (they’ve each had so much of that already), and more about the ways their complimentary or enigmatic “questions” dramatically intersect. For Justine, this final S/M scene marks an escalation of the danger/pleasure ratio she has been testing throughout the novel. While Dorothy spends the novel attempting to regulate her desire by idealizing then denigrating her objects, Justine tries outsmarting her detachment by finding a viable spot between terror and indifference. Although each girl is preoccupied privately and outside any dialogue they’re explicitly having, the novel’s trajectory plots them on parallel paths that converge when they experience their struggles in relation to each other. Of course, to every thin girl, sureness looks big, and to every fat girl, deprivation needs saving. But calling this a relational dynamic is not to imply a conventional love plot. We need terms for distinguishing relationality from structures of compulsory kinship – otherwise all attachment is effectively heterosexual and all relationality automatically non-queer.

What Do Teachers Have to Do with “Two Girls”?

It is, after all, the pedagogic context that first brings all these unlikely pairs of girls into each other’s orbit. Of course Dorothy and Justine both perform rituals of projective appetitiveness that can make their cathexis to Anna Granite seem like the desperate attachment of students onto the teacher-hero as empty form. But as we observe the way they circle and evade each other, the force that compels them to keep sharing something simultaneously becomes concrete and more vague. This isn’t what happens to two girls in spite of their history, but what happens between them because of it.

Alas, not only is Gaitskill’s novel a story of “two girls” who meet through a teacher, and not only is Berlant’s essay an account of what she learned and “Professor Sedgwick” taught, but Berlant’s essay itself begins, and ends, with the sentence – “history hurts” – a reference to an idea from her own teacher’s text (“Two Girls” 121). Although Fredric Jameson is nowhere situated as her teacherly interlocutor, Berlant implicitly avows the essay’s pedagogic context when, in addition to her opening riff “history hurts, but not only” (Cruel Optimism 121), she later adds: “Here is a stupidity of mine: ‘History is what hurts,’ that motto of The Political Unconscious, is a phrase that I love. It resonates as truth; it performs a truth-effect in me. But because it is in the genre of the maxim, I have never tried to understand it. That is one project of this essay” (126). Again there is “resonance” – this time between Berlant and something her teacher said that she loves. And what is that “phrase I love” without ever “try[ing] to understand it,” but her own teacher’s idea of history’s relation to subjectivity, genre, and trauma, a theory of transformation and impact that she distills her own meditation on traumatized subjectivity in relation to?

For that matter, what is that sentence from Jameson she calls “a stupidity of mine” but precisely a knowledge that she just does not yet “understand” because before she has a chance to intervene, it “performs a truth-effect in me?” Berlant blames the sentence’s formalism for obstructing her access to critical self-reflection: “because it is in the genre of the maxim,” she says, “I have never tried to understand it.” But isn’t it actually the “genre” of pedagogy that makes this motto feel so unavailable to critique? For if teacher-student relationality has no phenomenological integrity that can’t eventually be reduced to the hysterical relay of impersonal projections, then endeavoring to elaborate one’s own textual objects has no recourse to engage a material, specifiable other. Indeed, her account of “a phrase that I love” is surrounded at every turn by references to its mystical genealogy, as if attachment can be either sensible or magical, legible or stupid, desperate or depressive. But if pedagogy is the condition of Berlant’s attempt to push against what she calls her “stupidity” while writing about someone else from whom she’s learned, and if pedagogy is the context of Dorothy’s initial struggle to become a girl whose not her father’s daughter, a project she begins with Granite and resumes in relation to another girl’s learning, it may be because resonating with the question an other asks is the only way to reactivate the knowledge I did not know could ever be a question.

What I think this means is that teachers are not those whom we learn from by “overthrowing” – besides, rage against temporal difference seems far more like the aging father’s problem than the younger son’s. Rather, we learn from those who help us survive our questions by inviting us into their own. Since resonances are partial and non-meaningfully known, difference is constitutive of attachment, not its retributive form. As such, if the pedagogic relation is so essential to every iteration of “two girls,” it is because pedagogy cannot be reduced to merely another non-specific psychic mechanism of survival-by-any-projective-means necessary. Relationality is not only what happens in the suspension and disorganization of genre – a formulation that ultimately reifies social categorization by locating potentiality in materiality’s elusive “elsewhere.” Relationality is the way that “textuality” becomes transmissible and transformed. While contemporary critical and literary theory proliferates generative and rich possibilities for the ways that subjectivity can be non-symptomalogically experienced and expressed, it maintains a distinctly more limited imagination about what happens between subjects who are not only structural placeholders for abstract psychic functions but also concrete others carrying “enigmatic messages” that “resonate” and compel. Insofar as relationality requires a methodology that foregrounds between-ness epistemologically, we need a metapsychology that can wonder about how strangers reach and turn away from each other, how Two Girls is about what happens between two girls, and how it is what’s elaborated between girls that is potentially transformative for each girl. To the extent that “history” is not only what “hurts,” it is also in no small part a result of whom we meet and what, because of who they are, we find transformable, and transformed, about ourselves.

Footnotes

1. The essay was originally written for Barber and Clark’s Festschrift honoring Sedgwick and later reprinted in Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.

2. Berlant’s formulation relies upon Leo Bersani’s radical transformation of sexuality from a mechanism of self-knowledge into a site of ego-“shattering” (Bersani and Phillips 57) that he later calls “impersonal narcissism” (85). Bersani writes, “might there be forms of self-divestiture not grounded in a teleology (or a theology) of the suppression of the ego and, ultimately, the sacrifice of the self?” (57). Adam Phillips elaborates the transformative power of “impersonal narcissism,” when he explains that “the psychoanalyst becomes intimate with someone by not taking what they say personally” (Bersani and Phillips 92).

3. See also Clough and Halley’s introduction to The Affective Turn.

4. The development of affect theory belongs to a broader moment in philosophy that, often exuberantly, avows its disinterest in representation’s familiar limits and instead calls for stretching perception beyond the linguistic/symbolic frame. As Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman write in “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,”

Even while disdaining the traditional idealist position that all that exists is some variation of mind or spirit, continental philosophy has fallen into an equally anti-realist stance in the form of what Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’ – the ‘idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.’ This position tacitly holds that we can aim our thoughts at being, exist as beings-in-the-world, or have phenomenal experiences of the world, yet we can never consistently speak about a realm independent of thought or language. (3–4)

Variously called Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented-Ontology, New Materialism, Transcendental Materialism, and Non-Philosophy, these related developments share the wish to distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm.

5. As my use of Laplanche and “textuality” shows, affect does not invalidate the grip of language on the formation of subjectivity and sociality, but instead alerts us to the need to put what we know about signification in relation to other things we know about affective transmission, nonhuman lifeworlds, brain synapses, etc.

6. I use “speculative” in Tom Sparrow’s sense, which builds upon work in Speculative Realism and related philosophy. Sparrow writes:

the proliferation of speculative philosophy in recent years may be unnerving to some. Is this the return of dogmatic, ungrounded, free-floating knowledge claims? Has the Kantian lesson withered away, leaving us just where we were before the 1780s? . . . In a less alarmist tone, the speculative turn is not a rejection of the critical philosophy, but “a recognition of [its] inherent limitations. Speculation in this sense aims ‘beyond’ the critical and linguistic turns. As such, it recuperates the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of critique” [Brassier]. (19)

7. Shaun Gallagher, p81. I am thinking of Paul Ricoeur’s The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays on Hermeneutics, where the focus on a “hermeneutics of selfhood” outlines the way the subject emerges through interpretation; we could think of Roland Barthes’s S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text as expanding our ideas of what a text can refer to and the varieties of ways we can engage a text.

8. Laplanche further delineates a difference between “sexual instinct” and “sexual drive” in order to show that instinctive sexuality is not identical with drive sexuality. See Freud and the Sexual (2011).

9. Cf. the work by Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Michel de Certeau, Brian Massumi, and Nigel Thrift that studies performativity and bodily practices in the everyday rather than focusing on representation and meaning. In his seminal Non-Representational Theory, Thrift writes, “non-representational theory is resolutely anti-biographical and pre-individual. It trades in modes of perception which are not subject-based” (7).

Works Cited

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