Month: September 2013

 
The usual approach to writing about film culture in postwar Germany is to restrict the discussion to films made by Germans, in order, as Jennifer Fay puts it in the introduction to Theaters of Occupation, “to assess how they negotiate Germany’s complicated relationship to anti-Semitism and to the country’s National Socialist past” (xxvi).¹ Fay, however, is more interested in the postwar Germans’ sense of the present than in their relation to the past; and she’s less interested in postwar German films per se than in the ways those films functioned, along with the American movies screened as part of the Allies’ efforts at reeducating the German public, in the staging of the encounter between a shattered Germany and a politically and culturally ascendant United States.² Indeed, although much of the book’s time and space are devoted to the examination of individual films and their reception, with all but one of the chapters turning around the consideration of what Fay calls a “nodal film” (144), Theaters of Occupation is less concerned with film than with ideology, cultural politics, policy, and political theory.³ Fay’s main aims are to lay out a critique of American ideological commitments—especially, but not exclusively, those informing U.S. policy during the occupation; and to argue, in the course of laying out that critique,⁴ first, that the U.S. effort to reeducate the Germans, at least insofar as Hollywood fiction films and American-made documentaries figured in that effort, failed to produce the desired effects; and, second, that the German experience of America’s reeducation campaign nonetheless promoted—inadvertently and in quite ironic ways—the development within Germany of a more genuinely democratic sensibility than the one the Americans were self-consciously aiming at.
 
This redefining of the discursive terrain is on the whole very productive. As Fay’s analysis consistently demonstrates, a consideration of U.S. occupation policy regarding the reeducation of the postwar German population brings American ideologies into stark relief—mainly because the process of promoting American cultural identity more or less forced the Americans into wearing their ideological positions, as it were, on their sleeve. Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of Fay’s work—which masterfully weaves together elements from an array of disparate fields—produces treatments of individual films that are at once novel, compelling, and persuasive. Helmut Käutner’s Der apfel ist ab (The Apple Fell, 1948), for example, has previously been thought to be of interest mainly because of the objections it raised among the clergy both before and during its release. Fay mostly sidesteps discussion of both the blurred religious allegory the film suggests and the cultural controversy that that allegory engendered. Instead, she presents Der apfel ist ab as a parody of democratic origins and as a political allegory satirizing the paucity of choices being made available to Germans as tensions between East and West began to rise. Her reading of this film is set in the context of a broader discussion of American cold-war propaganda as represented by Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), which the Americans put into heavy rotation in Germany in 1948, the same year Der apfel ist ab premiered, and by the Welt im Film (World in Film) newsreels that were a principal tool in the reeducation effort (and whose screening was, as Fay notes, “compulsory for all exhibitors in the U.S. and British zones until January 1950” [46]). As Europe generally and Germany particularly became staging grounds for the conflicts between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both Lubitsch’s film and the newsreels, Fay argues, presented reductive images of the competing political systems and of the distinctions between them—and by so doing worked to make the political choices before the Germans seem clear and straightforward. In Ninotchka, the choice between capitalism and communism is simplified to “one between embodied enjoyment and the suppression of desire, affect, and appetite” (90-91); the newsreels, simplifying further, offer a decision “between pleasure and unpleasure, survival and starvation, freedom and unfreedom” (112). Der apfel ist ab highlights the absurdity of these sorts of impossible choices where there is really no choice to make. And in its depiction of a protagonist unable to choose between a pair of polar opposites, figured as potential mates, the film raises questions about the very possibilities of self-government. Theaters of Occupation‘s analysis of the films and their relations, and of the cultural situation in which their interplay occurred, is rich, informative, nuanced, and clever.
 
Cagier still is Fay’s work on, and with, George Cukor’s female gothic film Gaslight (1944), which surveys revealed to be highly popular among German audiences when it was released in Germany in 1948 (152). Fay doesn’t offer a reading of the film. Rather, by way of explaining its popularity, she teases out what she takes to be the various ways it resonates with occupation experience. She then uses it to build a portrait of “democratic subjectivity” (169). Citing studies by several scholars doing work on gothic literature, Fay argues that, historically, the gothic as literary genre is tied to concerns about “democracy … foreign invasion, loss of sovereignty, and violent regime change” (147). These ties make the genre amenable to analysis in the context of military occupation. Female gothic fictions and films, moreover, which center around images of disempowered women victimized by men who, shortly after the women marry them, turn out to be exploitative and murderous, would have appealed, Fay suggests, to an audience that was comprised largely of women; that as a whole, including both men and women, had been feminized—and made critical of masculine authority—by the experiences of war and occupation; and that felt betrayed—regardless of whatever commitments to National Socialism there might have been before the war—by Hitler and the Nazis. As for Gaslight: on Fay’s account, it can be, and might well have been, seen as having an almost allegorical relation to occupation history: there’s the paranoia inducing experience of the main character Paula’s relation to her “mystifying East European husband” (161), onto whom “we could variously map the Hitlers and Stalins of Europe” (162); there’s the “demystifying American rescuer” (161-62); there’s the threat of loss of identity, with Paula’s psychic disintegration paralleling German cultural disintegration; there’s the general sense of anxiety generated by the possibility that the present will collapse into a repetition of the past (“that Paula is fated to end as her mother did: alone in an asylum” [163]; that “the injunction that Germans imitate Americans and reproduce their popular culture,” given the “racism, xenophobia, militarism, and anticommunism” encoded in that popular culture, “could be interpreted as a terrifying call to reenact the very kinds of violence that prompted the occupation in the first place” [142]). “We could say,” Fay notes, “that Gaslight offers its German spectators a national script of female victimization, authoritarian manipulation, and perhaps also liberation that could find wide historical application” (163).
 
In addition to capturing postwar German concerns and resonating with occupation experience, Gaslight also serves, according to Fay, an educational function—mainly by endorsing Paula’s mistrust of the male authority figures in her life. In female gothic plots, that is, the sanity of the protagonist is typically put into question: shortly after marrying a mysterious and charismatic man she doesn’t know well enough, the heroine comes to believe that the man is trying to kill her; but circumstances are usually such that the legitimacy of the heroine’s suspicions remains in doubt. There is a history of insanity she may be repeating. She may simply be paranoid, her sense of victimization a delusion. And in some female gothic films—Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), for example—the heroine’s concerns do turn out to be a fantasy. Not so in the case of Gaslight: Paula is right to be suspicious of her husband; he is, in fact, trying to drive her mad and destroy her. Moreover, Paula’s mistrust—a “gothic skepticism” (172)—carries over into her relation to the man who helps save her—from whom she accepts, not a proposal of marriage, but of friendship. “Paula learns the folly of falling too quickly and too completely for the man who would rescue her from her dark past, and she learns that the only way to avoid history’s return is by knowing that history to the best of her ability” (171). The implications, in terms of political allegory, are clear: “where Ninotchka allows herself to be seduced by capitalism, the gothic heroine would be suspicious of the regime that lures her. She would be wary that this new government may harbor a violent history and may be just as untrustworthy as the regime it replaces” (171). The suffering the Germans endured as a consequence of their allegiances to Hitler and National Socialism has, in other words, predisposed the population toward a healthy skepticism concerning authority and an acute awareness of the violence necessarily associated with the institution of law. The American effort at reeducating the Germans—at least where the use of films is concerned—only served to reinforce the Germans’ wariness: the Welt im Film newsreels recalled Nazi propaganda; Hollywood movies, made ambiguous by their efforts to abide by censorship codes, often contained material that could be seen as signaling similarities between American history and the history of Nazi Germany (both of which are marked by genocidal violence) and between Nazi Germany’s and America’s ideological commitments (a shared faith in capitalism and fear of communism, shared anxieties about race that translate into the production and promotion of a white national identity, a shared veneration of military valor and the glories of war). “Rather than feeling propelled forward into a new political reality,” Fay writes, “there is a sense that Germans may have experienced the occupation as history’s uncanny return, or perhaps the return of uncanny history” (142)—a circumstance that produced in Germany, however, a productive paranoia, a suspiciousness about power and those who seek and wield it. Gaslight thus reflects German postwar dispositions and predispositions, but it can also be said to “foster,” Fay argues, “a democratic subjectivity” (169).
 
What’s most striking about Fay’s analysis is the facility with which she organizes insights drawn from a diverse array of disciplines—literary criticism, literary theory, film studies, political theory and history—into a coherent whole. It’s a very rich tapestry that she weaves. But as smart as the analysis surely is, it does raise, for me a least, a few questions. The first has to do with the methodology Fay uses, not just here—in the chapter on the political implications for Germany of the reception of the female gothic film—but throughout the book.
 
Much of Theaters of Occupation—most of the discussion of Hollywood films, parts of the chapters dealing mainly with films made in Germany—presents itself as a contribution to film reception history. That is, one of Fay’s chief concerns is to identify the ways Germans living under the American occupation were responding to particular films and to particular types of films. The persuasiveness of her claims on that score is an issue in its own right. But the force of what she has to say about U.S. foreign policy—that the reeducation effort failed to deliver the results the Americans desired but did produce a sort of inadvertent success when looked at from the standpoint of the Germans—depends at least in part on how convincing she is on the issue of reception: if the Germans aren’t seeing echoes of their disastrous National Socialist past in the American films they are watching, then they don’t acquire the “gothic skepticism” that is, for Fay, a key to the evolution of democracy in Germany after the war. And if the specifics involved in Fay’s account of Germany’s transformation into a democracy don’t hold up, either we’re left with a historical conundrum or we’re forced to return to a more conventional assessment of the historical situation (that, however flawed in details, U.S. occupation policies succeeded in laying the groundwork for the development of a democratic Germany).⁵
 
The problem, of course, is that, in the absence of some sort of hard evidence—detailed surveys of audience reactions, collections of response cards filled out at the time of the viewing, broad cultural discussion (in the form, say, of editorials or letters to editors), or extensive review—it is difficult to make fully convincing claims about the ways actual viewers respond, or have responded, to films. In the case of films shown to German audiences during the occupation, as Fay herself admits, there is little hard evidence concerning audience attitudes to work with.⁶ Her chapter on Gaslight cites surveys and some contemporary reviews (both of Gaslight and of a few other films whose reception, according to Fay, bears on our understanding of the reception of Cukor’s film). While the survey results do tell us that Gaslight was the most popular film shown in Germany in 1948, they have nothing to say (going by Fay’s presentation of the material) about the reasons for its popularity. And the reviews Fay quotes don’t really speak to the issues at the core of her analysis. They do, in a sort of loose way, support her claim that “film reviewers in occupied Germany conspicuously engaged films … as ideological and even ethnographic texts that were meaningful within the wider discursive environment of occupation” (155), but the ideological and ethnographic concerns most on display in the passages she quotes have to do, not with worries about the possible reestablishment of a totalitarian regime in Germany (a gothic suspicion that history is repeating itself), but with German anxieties about the vulgarity or banality of an encroaching American culture.
 
Given the lack of hard evidence and the vagueness of the evidence that does exist, Fay’s representation of postwar German responses to the films in circulation has to remain highly conjectural—a problem made more acute by the sometimes circular reasoning involved in Fay’s efforts at reconstructing the probable interplay between viewers and films. To return to the discussion of Gaslight and the female gothic: Fay asserts that for the Germans living under the occupation, the fear arose “that your Allied protector—this emissary of democracy—[was] in fact out to harm you, steal your property, commandeer (literally occupy) your body and house, and drive you mad” (150). She offers little in the way of support for the assertion.⁷ Rather, it’s the popularity of Cukor’s film that serves to justify the positing of this gothic occupation subjectivity. But then the existence of that subjectivity in turn serves to explain the popularity of the film. Given the number and the heterogeneity of the Hollywood films shown in Germany during the occupation, and given the almost willful indeterminacy of those films, one could probably use such a process of reasoning to justify just about any statements one might be inclined to make about the postwar German world. And there are aspects of Fay’s own analysis that raise questions about the conclusions she draws. Assuming that Fay is right that the Germans’ experience of occupation resonated with the experience of the heroines of female gothic films, and assuming that such resonance explains the popularity of Gaslight, it seems to stand to reason that gothic films generally would have enjoyed a marked popularity. Fay notes that several such films were shown in occupied Germany. But of the three she mentions by name (aside from Gaslight), only one—Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941)—was well received. German critics, according to Fay, lambasted The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945) and found Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1944) to be laughable. Thus in the context of an argument for the centrality of the female gothic film to postwar German experience, the author’s own research forces the reader to wrangle with the troubling fact that the Germans apparently liked only half of the female gothic movies the author discusses.
 
This sort of tenuousness marks other moments of the analysis as well. I’ll mention just one. Fay contends, plausibly enough, that given their awareness of the aims of the Allied reeducation campaign, German audiences during the occupation would have been inclined to read the Hollywood films for their encoded political messages. She also contends, with equal plausibility, that Hollywood films, which, because of the pressures of the censorship codes, were forced to be highly ambiguous, encoded political messages quite at odds with the aims of reeducation. American films, Fay writes, produced an “unruly image world of America’s democratic unconscious” that “revealed in its fissures, obscurities, and curious asides a darker side of American politics to those audiences open to alternative readings, as indeed Germans were” (58). Fay unveils this “darker side of American politics” in the course of a series of brief readings of particular films, all of the readings focusing on some aspect of American racial politics or America’s racist past: the Sonja Henie star vehicle Sun Valley Serenade (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) exposes the exclusionary aspects of America’s assimilationist mythologies; John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Across the Pacific (1942) “are shot through with national and racial substitutions that were animated by America’s pernicious orientalism” (64); John Ford’s Drum’s along the Mohawk (1939) and Fritz Lang’s Western Union (1941) reveal (by seeking “to authorize”) “the genocide that made possible America’s democratic founding” and “implicitly question the costs of cultural conformity by working through the outsider’s relationship to America’s civilizing mission” (75). These readings are, while not especially original, surely tenable. They would have been available, that is, to German viewers. But, again, Fay has no real evidence to suggest that the Germans did in fact read these films as she reads them. Maybe they did. But, then again, maybe not.
 
My second concern about Theaters of Occupation has to do with some of the juxtapositions in play throughout the work. Inasmuch as Fay’s thesis is that the Germans living under occupation came to experience American efforts at reeducation as an eerie re-imposition of their fascist past, the whole of the work serves as something of an extended meditation on the analogy to be drawn between the U.S. and Nazi Germany. A host of specific comparisons punctuate the text. In the first chapter, for example, in the course of a discussion of an American movie, Tomorrow—the World! (Leslie Fenton, 1944), that was released shortly before the end of the war and that was designed to show how the soon-to-be conquered German people could be rehabilitated, Fay remarks on the similarity of Fenton’s film to a Nazi-era propaganda piece entitled Hitlerjunge Quex (Hans Steinhoff, 1933), which concerns the political conversion of a young German boy to Nazism and his eventual murder by communists. Referring to the latter as “[a]lmost a prequel to” (27) the former, Fay notes: “the similarities between Hitlerjunge Quex and Tomorrow—the World! leave little doubt that American cinema is not Weimar or even Nazi cinema’s opposite but its shadow” (32). In the following chapter, Fay offers a comparable correlation between Across the Pacific and another Nazi propaganda film. “What is interesting about [Across the Pacific] in the German context is that its representation of Japanese otherness bears comparison to the stereotypes of Jewish culture in Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (Jew Süss, 1940), a Nazi-era film that likewise dramatizes the danger of assimilating the ethnic minority” (74). Fay goes on to note that just as Jud Süß “enables a ‘consent to genocide’” (Fay is citing Katrin Sieg here [Sieg 85]), Across the Pacific “foments a consent to internment” (74). In the concluding paragraph of this same chapter, Fay states that the film program that was put together by the American Military Government (and that Fay has, in some sense, briefly reviewed) “suggests that even the American occupiers sensed a disturbing similarity between themselves and their Nazi-era German wards” (82). The end of Chapter 3 sounds the same refrain. After examining the propaganda purposes to which Ninotchka was put by the Americans as the cold war began, Fay writes: “[t]hat Goebbels also celebrated Ninotchka … raises the possibility that in choosing as Ninotchka does, Germans may in fact restore themselves to ideals of Nazi citizenship” (113). As I noted earlier, these sorts of comparisons are common in Theaters of Occupation; and many more examples could be adduced. My aim in drawing attention to them is not to question the legitimacy of any of the particulars but to suggest that in their totality—in their number and in their insistency—they work over the course of the book to insinuate that there isn’t finally much to distinguish the United States from Nazi Germany. Such a flattening of meaningful distinctions is a problem in its own right. But the distraction it produces also makes it difficult to attend fully to the moments in Fay’s book of more trenchant analysis.
 
I want briefly to discuss one of those moments. In the introduction and first chapter of Theaters of Occupation, Fay lays out the logic of the American reeducation campaign in Germany. U.S. policy, Fay argues, was grounded in the ideas—promulgated by a number of academics working in the emergent field of psychoculturalism—that each country possesses “a unified ‘national character structure’” and that this structure is mutable (3): “[a] product of traditions passed on from one generation to the next, character structure was an evolving cultural construct that, while manifested and reinforced in all aspects of a national, social, and psychic life, could nonetheless be changed” (3). Germany’s national character, according to the psychoculturalists, was diseased, paranoid, primitive. America’s national character is democratic. Since, for the Americans, democracy was less a matter of institutions and political practices than “a type of behavior, a public attitude, and an affective relationship to the state” (xiv), reeducating the Germans would involve getting them to learn, by miming, these behaviors and attitudes. The “master trope” for the process of reeducation (58), Fay maintains, was immigrant assimilation. Germans living under the occupation could learn, just as Germans who immigrate to the States learn, to be good democratic citizens. In order to accomplish this transformation, the Germans in the old country, like those in the new, would be required to give up their ethnic and cultural distinctiveness. In effect, they would have to become Americans. “The logic of reeducation,” Fay writes, “is that ‘democracy’ depends on a mimesis that erases difference” (xvi): as the Americans conceive it, that is, “democracy is not an enlightened pluralistic philosophy so much as a homogenizing force” (xvi).
 
This homogenizing aspect of American culture and of the reeducation policy the U.S. pursued, this intolerance of difference, is one of the central failings, according to Fay, of both the country’s political culture and of its policy in postwar Germany. It’s a chief preoccupation of Fay’s work. To be sure, the idea that American democracy—which, as Fay suggests, is majoritarian in principle and tends to reduce the idea of freedom to market choice—functions as a sort of machine for producing sameness is not original to Fay’s book. But the particular focus of her study, as I’ve said, brings the country’s ideological operations into the open. Fay’s concern with culture loss and with the elimination of difference, moreover, acquires considerable weight as a consequence of more recent historical developments. As Fay points out, the administration of George W. Bush presented America’s occupation of Germany as a context for its invasion and occupation of Iraq.
 
The universalizing impulses that motivated the reeducation campaign in Germany, and the assumption of a universality of human being that made sense of the effort, were in play as well in the case of Iraq. Given the ways they worked and were worked to make possible that still ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East, these impulses and assumptions are not just troubling but dangerous. Theaters of Occupations provides a valuable service in drawing attention to them.
 
The question of how—and to what extent—to accommodate difference is, however, vexed and vexing. And Theaters of Occupation doesn’t really acknowledge the problems the issue presents. There’s a point, for example, near the end of the book, where Fay, summarizing a critique of American liberalism presented by Eric Erikson in 1950, notes that American “majoritarianism” is not really interested in “universal justice or pluralism” (181).⁸ This easy yoking of those two terms suggests there is no tension between them. They aren’t, I think (and hope), antithetical, but the ideas (that we ought to aim at producing “universal justice”; that we need to value “pluralism”) don’t reconcile easily. If, in the face of the homogenizing force of a metastasizing American market empire, our central commitment needs to be, as Fay suggests, to foster different cultural modes of being, we will be hard pressed to promote universal justice. Local cultures generate local forms of justice—which are not infrequently at odds with one another. In certain cases, in relation to certain sets of issues, celebrating the local becomes problematic. The limit case, of course, is genocide. One of the features of the local culture Hitler governed was the belief that dispossessing and murdering Jews constituted a form of justice. And while it is true that preventing this distinctive cultural practice was not the reason the U.S. (or any other country) went to war with Germany, one of the lessons the world seemed to think it learned from its encounter with the camps (as measured most clearly by the United Nation’s adoption in 1948 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) was that interfering with the expression of cultural difference is, in this instance at any rate, a moral imperative.
 
Arguments can be, indeed have been, made for seeing one culture’s interfering with another culture as always illegitimate, even in the case of genocide. Perhaps a really thoroughgoing commitment to the value of difference is our primary ethical obligation.⁹ But the counter-arguments (those critical of the notion of sovereignty, for example, or those in favor of the enforcement of international law) are also compelling—especially at a time when it is possible to imagine Bush administration officials being indicted for crimes against humanity. We are—at this moment when the forces of an inevitable globalization produce increasing cultural conflict—just at the beginning, I believe, of what will be a protracted international, multicultural, and multidimensional negotiation of just these tensions: between sameness and difference, between the belief, on the one hand in the principle of universal justice, and the desire, on the other, to embrace diversity. Although Theaters of Occupation doesn’t fully register the difficulties involved in that negotiation, it is a rich and engaging contribution to the discussion.
 

 
Basing itself largely on an emergent body of ethnography concerning the contemporary traffic in human organs, and especially on the buying and selling of human kidneys in South Asia, Kalindi Vora’s “Others’ Organs: South Asian Domestic Labor and the Kidney Trade” can certainly lay claim to a considerable degree of ethical and political urgency. It quite rightly insists as well on the need to view this horrific new form of globalized commerce as inseparable, from the standpoint of the logic of capital, from the no less desperate circumstances leading to the export of “whole” South Asian laboring bodies themselves, here the Sri Lankan women who make up a large proportion of the domestic “care” workers in wealthy enclaves such as the Gulf State of Dubai. To the extent that it draws the attention of its readers to this real and sinister index of the South Asian economic “miracle” even now still being touted in the pages of mainstream media and among the diehard apologists for neoliberal economics and development policies, its appearance in the pages of Postmodern Culture is a welcome occurrence.
 
Less fortunately, however, “Others’ Organs” regards these “vital commodities” insofar as they are products of what Vora also terms “affective and biological labor from the Global South” as, when viewed from a “cultural studies framework and building upon feminist and postcolonialist theories of value and production,” arguments for “the need to rethink the terms of Marx’s labor theory of value” (par. 3). The bulk of the essay attempts to make good on this theoretical claim. The results are disappointing, and purport to engage in a debate with or somehow emend the theoretical axioms laid out in the first chapter of volume I of Capital in which the latter, for this reader at any rate, have become virtually unrecognizable. At one point Vora does offer the following reasonably approximate gloss on what she refers to only as the “labor theory of value”:
 

 

For Marx, value in its multiple forms can be quantified through labor time, or time spent expending the energy of the body and mind in producing an object, which under capitalist production becomes a commodity. He argues that at the level of the commodity, value can exist as both exchange value and use-value, but these are ultimately different moments in the life of value produced by labor.
 

(par. 6)

 

One wonders what “multiple” can be referring to here, but otherwise fair enough. Yet with what is virtually this one exception, the word “value” itself undergoes a bizarre and, it would seem, symptomatic process of continuous ambiguation or conceptual slippage throughout the pages of “Others’ Organs.” So, for example, Vora’s opening anecdote concerning the tragic death of the Pakistanti/Afghani airborne stowaway Mohammed Ayaz, fallen from the undercarriage of a plane at Heathrow airport in 2001, becomes a “story [that] also forces us to think that … lives [such as Ayaz’s], their labor, and their value may circulate outside the logic of capital” (par.3; my emphasis). “Outside”? For anyone the least bit attuned to the argument of Capital I, this is a sheer oxymoron: value, or valorization, is the logic of capital: “buying in order to sell,” or, in Marx’s celebrated formula, M-C-M’, the conversion of money, or a quantum of value, via its conversion into its commodity form and sale, into more money (Marx 247-257). To be “outside” value in this sense—and Vora never specifies any other that connects in any way to the terms of Marx’s theory of value—surely, is eo ipso to be outside the other, capital. “Value” that circulated outside the logic of M-C-M’ would not be value any longer.

 
But “Others’ Organs” proceeds as though some other, intermediate sort of “value,” neither the socially necessary abstract labor that, per Marx, constitutes the “substance” of value and whose duration constitutes the latter’s “magnitude” (Marx 125-130) nor the common sense cultural or ethical sense of the lexeme as, say, “norm” or subjectively-held judgment or belief were discoverable in the organ-trafficking and the “affective” labor of South Asian care workers. “I recognize,” writes Vora,
 

the labor theory of value advanced in Marx’s Capital as the dominant logic of the way new forms of commodities and commodified labor forms behave under capital, but at the same time, as subaltern historiographies and feminist materialist scholarship have established, I suggest that other economies are made illegible within the dominant logic. These other articulations of value establish multiple meanings of commodities and labor, and therefore the lives and bodies entangled in systems of value.
 

(par. 8)

 

But to insist however stubbornly on the point in question here: if the “meanings” of these “other” economies are in fact articulable (and therefore, in the end, surely “legible”) within the dominant and contradictory logic of value (of capital)—and surely, on this precise point, Vora is right: other, non-capitalist relations of production may still persist in a subordinate position within the capitalist mode of production as a whole—then what sense does it make to refer to them as articulations of “value” at all? It is not that value has no other. It is that the other of value is something other than value. Value, like the Hebrew deity of the book of Exodus, “shall have no other gods before” it. That, as the great, systematic and unequalled concretion of Marx’s thought throughout his mature work makes clear over and over again, is precisely the historical specificity of “self-valorizing value,” i.e., of capital. By settling for what soon enough becomes the transparent and facile rhetorical sleight in which one speaks of “value” as at one and the same time the “dominant”—and consummately objective—”logic of capital” and as nevertheless a function of how people are represented (“valuable” or not?), of “value” as something “assigned to people as labor-commodities” (Vora par. 19) may alleviate some immediate multiculturalist anxiety lest one be suspected of failure to respect difference. But it does so at the cost of effacing what is precisely the historical difference of value, i.e., of the commodity-form, as, to use Moishe Postone’s invaluable phrase, a “form of social mediation.”

 
The word matters here, because the concept, and the theory, and the critique towards which it beckons and refers, matter, and this not only for purposes of mere intellectual rigor but ultimately for the lives of the South Asian—as of all—victims of capital over whose plight Vora evinces her unquestionably sincere and deeply felt agony in this essay. In this sense it is worth considering (as Vora appears to do at one point; see par. 24)¹ whether in fact the terrible, barbaric necessity that forces South Asian villagers to sell their kidneys in the vain attempt to escape from debt-peonage no longer obeys the logic of the labor theory of value at all but that of its historical crisis and breakdown—the fact that the de-valorized, in effect (to use Robert Kurz’s term) “unexploitable” labor-power of the vendor—and of an immense proportion of the globe’s pool of potential wage-laborers—makes of her organ (in Scheper-Hughes’s term, as cited by Vora) the “last commodity” precisely because the labor-power of its “owner” is itself no longer saleable as a commodity. Here the theoretical terms of Capital allow us to be quite precise:² the kidney, we might reason, is sold not for its value—it has none in this case—but for its price. It takes the form of a commodity, but is not itself a commodity—here because it is literally all that remains to the seller when what is truly the “last commodity,” labor-power, now no longer commands any market whatsoever. Contra “Others’ Organs,” there can, in fact, be no “supplement” (par. 34) to the labor theory of value—no more than there can be a “supplement” to the history that produced it and that now seems well on its way to driving it, with what for now at least appear to be the immediate prospect of even more catastrophic social consequences, to its own self-abolition.
 

Ideally perhaps one should, like the novelist, have one’s subject under control, never losing it from sight and constantly aware of its overpowering presence. Fortunately or unfortunately, the historian has not the novelist’s freedom.
 

–Braudel, The Mediterranean

 

I.

 
The computer is one of those swerves in the history of built things that bring whole ways of life to an end–and seldom with the drama with which the first to sense a change often pronounce it. Real change is painfully slow, building to crisis well off the range of dailiness-numbed sense: a pattern of sun and shadow filtering into a room, here illuminating a particular object for no particular reason, there, with precisely the same absence of portent, shrouding another. There are regressions, and some habits and routines left precisely as they were or are, while others vanish or metastasize. Newness covers the old with a creeping patina, in which what will be and what no longer is exchange places and seem to intermingle, at the same time.
 
New media studies, we might say, has discovered temporality. After fifteen years in which its cultural dominant was presentist prognostication, even–often enough–a kind of bullying, the field has folded on itself with such new guiding concepts as the “residuality,” the “deep time” or “prehistory,” and the “forensic imagination” of a new media now understood as after all always already new.¹ This is a more absorbent fold, perhaps, than that embedded in one of the field’s originary figures, “remediation”–a determinedly modern progressive figure, though one whose conceptual plasticity always suggested the possibility, beyond linear reframings, of non-modern medial cycles or folds (see Bolter and Grusin). Without a doubt, it is that depth that sends us searching, now, for a reading of the temporal turn that seems all at once to discard and even undermine the prime rhetoric of a field of study settled in self-establishment. Read symptomatically, there is perhaps more to all of this than the usual need for professional distinction in the field itself, which like any mode of absorption of surplus, needs a manufactured boom and bust, on a regular cycle. To the shaming of the slow, the skeptical, and the selfrespecting who refuse the unfunded mandates of technocratic reactivity, in the New Economic home-classroom-office pod of unrelievedly public life online, new media studies now adds to its figural repertoire a synchronic complement, in the reflection of what the Jameson of the 1970s, writing Marxism and Form, calls the “commodity structure of academic intellectual life” (393).
 
Were it not for the institutional dynamic of critical desire through which one is forced to embrace what one declines, in order to scale the heights from which to renounce it again, one might have begun there. But what is done is done. With the swap-file virtualities of an endless present suffering stain, again, we might suspect this anachronic return to time, in a new media studies that seems never to have known it at all, of being sensitive, registrative, or even merely, vulgarly reflective of the sociotemporal order-as-disorder of U.S. imperial and global capitalist crisis, as an apparent crisis of progress. To materialist critiques of the disembodiment of information, which corrected the intellective disposition of an early euphoria without doing much to blunt its complacent productivity, one can certainly imagine being attached, now, a materialist critique of the conditions of the critique of disembodiment, itself, in a resource-intensive field of inquiry into disproportionately resource-intensive social behaviors whose future is inseparable from the future of U.S. consumerism–above all, the consumption of energy. Our appetite for the materiality, as much as for the virtuality of new media, is also a form of systems maintenance. One might say that the specter haunting new media studies today is the late imperial “peak energy” spectacle of middle-class U.S. Americans in sweaters, riding their bicycles to work.²
 
This is no merely elected sentiment. Rather, it marks a disposition that is hidden in plain sight, today, in so far as its material conditions of recognition burden it also with gratuitous blindness. To come to accept the long duration of intellectual history, without which episodic conurbations of research cannot thrive, is to accept the destiny of decline, compressed in Braudel’s formula “All conquests lead to exhaustion” (166). Necessarily, it is to come to permit the presentation of unavoidable, and unavoidably disturbing, questions.³ Let me air only one that comes to my own mind, without suggesting that I imagine my own way of life and work, in the field of new media studies, as in any way immune from its most damaging imputations. That question is this: is it possible that we may have lost literacy, all at once and already, without yet, or without ever, gaining “electracy”?–and that in some unimaginable future, we might be charged with simply getting it back–of retrieving literacy for sheer survival?
 
I think we can say that we are, at last, officially of two minds on this issue–which is what one of our first leaders, and first seceders, insisted we be. I speak, of course, of hyperfiction pioneer and demiurge Michael Joyce, about whose legacy I will, in what follows, have something I believe is unprecedented to say. But first, we need to ask a second set of questions, comprising the frame for the first, in an inversion that carries with it all the abject cruelty of admission, at last, to the club that one would never want to belong to if it had one for a member, just as it is about to close. That in some ways, literary studies now appears prepared to absorb new media studies, as once upon a time it absorbed (and then purged itself of) cinema and cultural studies, certainly prompts some reflection.⁴ What can explain our radically untimely embrace, in English studies, of gaming, Second Life, and (naturally) “netlish,”⁵ along with (at last) the old hyperfiction and ergodic literature, just as global food, energy, and political and environmental security re-enter the second of two major postwar systemic cycles of scarcity–now canonically bound, in the immensely influential world-system historiography of Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and others, to the historically decisive routine decline of empire?⁶
 
In comparative literary studies, meanwhile, where something more than cinema is now definitively on the extraliterary agenda (see Andrew and Poster), one wonders why the comparative project, in its essayistic substitution of transitive (and translative) articulation for critical substantiation, should be so eager to seize what it already predicts must elude its (as any) grasp. Hasn’t comparative literature “won its battles,” in dissemination to fields once supremely confident of their objects (Saussy 3)? Isn’t it the unacknowledged legislator of our humanities disciplines today? Why would it go prospecting now, when anticolonial comparative methods and models are firmly entrenched even in departments of English, in the study of peoples without a phone? Hasn’t comparative literature always embraced its own amateurism, anyway, even at its philologically rigorous origin? (Picture once more Erich Auerbach, famously marooned, without a working library, in wartime Istanbul.) At their very best, we might say, all the innovative formations of the last thirty years of literary studies have demanded respect for the indiscipline with which they resisted and lamented the objects of their own disciplinarity: on their radical work of the imagination, finally closer to the mode of production of the literary object, itself, than anyone dared to dream.
 
In response to the unanswerable question implicit in my opening gambit, here–that of how, and why, new media studies might all at once have “arrived,” and how its arrival takes the form of a temporal loop, cycle, or fold–let me, before proceeding any further, offer something of a frame for the frame. Always, in attempting to look through the reified critical object of a disciplinary research field, we are necessarily attempting to look at the technocratic procedures producing that object. Inasmuch as it can be said to have emerged as such, new media studies, as a disturbance in both the practices and production regimes of humanistic discipline, is and always has been best thought less as an emergent field than as a site of such double vision.⁷ For this question to be of any use to us, we must frame it critically, in the sense that that term has always carried in the history of Euro-Atlantic philosophical modernity, where it denotes the impossible secular task of structural self-understanding. To confront the question of how something eventally new, for going on at least a decade and a half, can only now have emerged, let us do what comparative criticism is supposed to do, and compare. Let us look, in this case, for new media critical homologies embedding new media literary-critical formations, in a non-selfevident temporal relation, in their historical antecedents. To honor the convention of providing an example, I suggest one such homology in a moment.
 

II.

 
During the New Economic 1990s, as new media invaded literary-critical workspace through the portals of the Web, the discrete and combined hazards of deconstruction and cultural studies for autonomous art as manipulable object reawakened in anxieties focused on the ephemerality of critical writing and publishing “on line,” in time and in motion. Such fear of the virtualization of the literary-critical took many forms, of course, from Gutenberg elegies, to new formalisms, to the ballyhooed returns of sincerity, nature, personal voice, affect, pleasure, and any number of other monads said to have been squashed by demoniac posthumanist theory. If the lessons of modernity and postmodernity had already been learned, that only means, perhaps, that routine vulgar dialectics provided the means to affirm what one salvaged, in such operations, without its preening innocence. And yet latent in this double reading of the standing present, we might say, was an entirely accurate sense that matters had already grown very complicated, indeed, in the interanimation of cultural time and critical history–and that it was that complication itself, if anything, that was going to have to be what post-modernization would come to mean. Already, then, what Benjamin, then read to excess, pictured as “an orchid in the land of technology” (“Work” 233)–an impossible palpability, within the impassable virtuality of the film set–at once described and militated against the quest for pre-virtual critical authenticity, not because such quests were hopelessly doomed, but because as the Jameson of the 1990s put it, they offered “the expressive raw material of a deeper comparison” (Postmodernism 301) that needed to be made.
 
Many of us, in those days, conceived things straightforwardly. We proposed to consider the impact of electronic media–specifically, the document formats or “sites” of the so-called World Wide Web–on United States literature, just for example, at the turn of the twenty-first century: an inquest that took as its narrative flashpoints 1991, the year Jameson completed a provocative U.S.-centrist statement of ephemeralist postmodernism, and 1993, when the appearance of the Mosaic browser began to renegotiate some of the ground terms of publication in the literary arts.⁸ To the extent that such impact was presupposed and determined, by the question itself, to construct an object-pattern or trace of itself as legible, we might say that it hardly occurred to many involved in this enterprise that it might take the form of erasure before the archival fact. That the secession, not so many epochal years later, of Michael Joyce from the field he was now to set on its feet might in fact proceed from the very logic of that pursuit of the new, rather than obstructing or contravening it.
 
The proximity of artifactual life to death, in this new field of critical awareness, was underscored by the panic over object stability that followed discovery forthwith, in a radical compression of the purview of antiquarian desire. Such efforts as the Electronic Literature Organization’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project, which registered widespread alarm at the developmental precocity, velocity, and caprice of the new literary artists, were no better prepared to question the mandate for conservancy itself than to uphold it, on a U.S. scene yoked to the startup venture-capitalization of proprietary data file formats and dominated by freelance coders making Web art in their Gleitzeit. The running battle between an art culture producing faster and faster–indeed, living art online (see Breeze)–and a curator culture determined to find careers in it, nevertheless, offered a dramatic update of the antitheses on the avant-garde formulated by Paul Mann around (snail) mail art, earlier in the decade.⁹
 
It is clear, in any case, that Jameson’s postmodernism was a vital branch of the storyspace charting the complex relation of the literary art practice of the time to its academic theory, and that it had specifically recursive effects on the relation of art practice to theory and criticism, in its wake. As a publishing medium, the WWW invited U.S. literature to a set of changes that would recursively alter the Web-as-medium without collapsing into it, or expiring within its limits. By 2001, for example, one could speak of an overlap zone populated on the one hand by print poetries radically animated by cybernetics, and on the other by “code poetries” importing and renovating the interpreted conservatism of a lyric tradition.¹⁰ Within such a new order of things, Monique Roelofs’s “Zwischenology” was a handy figure for the study of such paradox, overlap, or betweenness, which resisted the easier postures of apocalyptic and utopist futurism. And yet print literature was already being used to augur the ruin of post-print irreality. In the commentary on Bob Perelman’s poem “China” that formed such a controversial sideshow within Postmodernism, for Jameson’s readers working in literary studies, the figure of the poem’s absented referents or unities is used to illuminate what the Jameson of the 1990s calls “the crisis in historicity,” a temporal limit in, of, and to contemporary cultural criticism become a limit-site of postmodernist euphoria in dissolution.¹¹ While for Jameson, the danger lies in the seductions of irreconcilability in situ, his dialectical critic’s characteristic ambivalence pursues a discussion of Perelman’s poem to its peremptory conclusion (or break), which finds Jameson now famously pitting the ephemeral video art of Nam June Paik against the nihilism of a “traditional” poetic poststructuralism enjoined to no longer dare utter its name.
 
And yet all this is better re-read, in 2009, as a problem of research and temporality, posed by the critical life-span of a “reading” itself, than as a debate over the form (or content) of the curator’s object, now or then. Not least of the durable provocations of Jameson’s project, in Postmodernism as everywhere else, is the tropism of his dialectical prose, which has always invited, and received, many comically speculative and many more ploddingly positivist thetic refutations. Among the alignments in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a contemporaneous and complementary stylization, terms “the battle between marxism and deconstruction” (314), the Jameson of Postmodernism is illuminated, on one side, by the novel and generous use he found for the Baudrillardian chiasmus of the simulacrum, and on the other by his doggedly restricted Lukácsian insistence on cognitive mapping. It is from this conjuncture that the new media literalists of the 1990s, stalking auguries of the brave new office, drew their sanctions for reading Jameson, poorly, through a McLuhan read even more poorly, in a mode of reception remarkably alienated from the long intellectual history of a philosophical concept of mediation–and so unable to imagine “virtual reality” as a descriptor of unavoidably abstract critical thought itself. Looking back in counterpoint, it seems that Perelman’s poem suffers, in Jameson’s never less than withering estimation, not only as an artifact of print culture, but in its typicality as a vanguard expression of the avant-garde type, itself; in the Jamesonist typology, the materially practicing poet was the ephemeralist, fixing “joyous intensities” in the self-celebrating play of shallow disjunction (Postmodernism 29), while the video-tracer recovered a “positive concept of relationship” (31) in transient screen flicker.
 
All along, it was a matter of the relationship between the time of the work and the temporality of criticism itself, in their mutual imbrication, from which no historical materialist can or must dare to retreat. Video, the Jameson of Postmodernism tells us, disembedded us from the fictive phenomenological-subjective time of film and television representation as always already destined for entertainment, re-embedding someone–or something–as dematerialized subject-in-relay with dematerialized object, in the flow of radically neutral (and deadly boring) social-machine time (Postmodernism 76). In the process, it bypassed altogether the blank parody of schizomorphic postmodernism, as a “virtual grab bag” of creatively pure and ahistoric selfpresence, and as a breakdown of temporality itself, in the infinite jest Jameson thinks he discerns, correctly or incorrectly, in Perelman’s “China.” But where that chaff promises enduring diversion, we must, Jameson suggests clearly, rather be prepared to be bored, in order to be critically stimulated at all. If to identify video as the most important and distinctive new artmedium of late capitalism was, then, to arrive on the scene an epoch too late, from the point of view of those needing to promote something new (the World Wide Web as re-remediation), Jameson’s demand for lassitude, in its all the hazard it poses to research productivity at an urgent moment of innovation (none of which, of course, blunted Jameson’s own prodigious output one whit), refused to apologize for that.
 
From the beginning, Jameson had linked the resistance of Adornian prose style to the simple difficulty of temporality, in his exegesis of negative dialectics as the rescue of philosophy, as of all the object pursuits descended from it, from “a fetishization in time, from the optical illusion of stasis and permanency” (Marxism 58). Such “falling into time” (to reproduce a tropism Jameson extracts, for his purposes, from Barthes writing on Proust) mandates the production of dialectically comparative sentences, whose strength grows “proportionately as the realities linked are distant and distinct from each other” (54)–producing just that “massive failure” affirmed, in Adorno’s project, as a kind of success.
 
It is here, perhaps, that we can mark a form of reserve in Jameson’s work, through which the more or less gentle criticism Adorno receives, at his hands, rebounds. “No doubt the emphasis on method and on the theory rather than the practice of negative dialectics,” Jameson observes, “risks giving an exaggerated and distorted importance to the moment of failure which is present in all modern thinking: and it is this overemphasis, more than anything else, which seems to me to account for that lack of political commitment with which radical students reproached Adorno at the end of his life” (59). The history of Marxist literary criticism is the history of an advocated interpenetration of (literary?) theory and (literary?) practice, which in Lukács and Jameson, no less than in Adorno, produced nothing more or less than another magisterial scholar-critic, who abandons the primary production of works of literature to that division of labor affirmed as the very price of Marxist modernity–though never without secretly protesting it, again. In an earlier critical review of Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Perelman himself toes this austere, if never ascetic line, observing that “in the arena Jameson is working in, ‘theory writing,’ writers, the producers of the raw material, are a bit dispensable” (175). And who can forget the outburst of Mike Featherstone, protesting in his contribution to the 1989 volume Postmodernism/ Jameson/ Critique that Jameson was “unwilling to become an advocate of the new methods and practice postmodernism in his writings” (129)? For every one of the terrifically prolific critics in Lukács’s direct or indirect line of descent, it is precisely that nonproductive boredom Jameson theorizes that, in so many ways, is really a nonstarter.
 
Thus it is that Jameson throws into relief, in the nascent new media studies of the epoch of the postmodernism debates, the substantive reifications of the “commodity structure of academic intellectual life” (Marxism 393)–while not escaping from them himself, any more than Adorno might or could have. We might say it is this unbearable distance of cultural criticism from cultural practice that drives the trope of comparison, in Jameson’s work, as the maximal flex of critical discourse to–but never over–the brink of critical silence. To speak, again, of the impact of new media on literature, it might be imagined that cultural opacity or noise, in any such composition of influence, would necessarily grow alongside complex critical transparency or “silence”: indeed, a Jamesonist mind must posit “homologies” between them, structured affinities whose very dynamic consumes something of the tissue of resemblance itself. Here is this thought, as expressed late in Jameson’s “Conclusion: Secondary Elaborations”:
 

There may also be structural parallels to be established between these new “informational” machineries that are neither basely physical nor “spiritual” in any nineteenth-century sense, and language itself, whose model has become predominant in the postmodern period. On this view it would not be the informationality of the new technology that inspires a meditation on language and spurs people on to the construction of new ideologies centered on it, but rather the structural parallels themselves between two equally material phenomena which equally elude physical representation of the older type.
 

(Postmodernism 386)

 

Is it through just such a negative dialectical construction that the disciplinary object of new media studies has to have come at once, now, to embrace disciplinary “information” and noise? For the transpositions, paradoxes and regressions of media to “replace” their remediative linear displacement and (and or) succession, in a kind of noctilucent disturbance that might be understood, now, always to have been underway, if only, suddenly, self-evident? If in 2009 scholarship in literary studies yet evinces precious little of the real possible impact, as one must think it, of new networked and programmable media, is it possible that that is because the structural-historical configurations of print culture and electronic publishing have been mingled–sometimes deliberately, often by chance, in a Babel of avant-garde, epochally middling, and “dead,” dying and spectral media, in a process that no one may regulate, and to which all are accountable?

 
But one of the consequences of that might be that we would have to learn to learn in two drifts, moving contiguously both forward and backward in time, in that flexion the desire for objects impedes. Indeed, to do that, we will have to accept the unacceptable fortuity that tells us that new media studies might, for those of us most invested in it, always already have come to an end. To get back to where we went back to, then, we must skip forward to the near past.
 

III.

 
Last modified on March 3, 2004, the Vassar College faculty Web page of Michael Joyce offers little more than a telegraphic summary of Joyce’s work and teaching, prefaced by a small photograph image of a rock cairn and the statement: “Michael Joyce is no longer maintaining a public web presence.”¹² One cannot exactly say that this end of events, and the order of things marked by it, is much of a secret, as by any measure Joyce has, in the years since he thus returned to writing books in print, made his absence as pivotal to new media studies as his presence had been. We might say that the power of such end-punctuation has always rested in its injunction not to exercise one’s hermeneutical training on it–to honor its apparent nihilism as both something more and something less than a simple, baffling “no.” And yet, that the undisputed leader of an emerging field might so decisively step back, on what might have been considered the verge of something like victory, is apparently something of a scandal for new media studies. The wrench that Joyce thus threw into the perpetual motion machine of bureaucratic culture–his implicit demand that we simply stop for a while–is not discussed at any length or in any depth in any peer-reviewed published scholarship on Joyce’s work currently on record.¹³ That is understandable, of course, given that when I say Joyce implicitly demanded we “stop,” I mean, of course, that he demanded we stop speaking (and writing) with such consensually unadulterable zeal on our topic of choice: an endeavor which, as most every reader of this essay will know–for reasons I will therefore not bother to detail–is structurally impossible.¹⁴
 
All supervisory protestation aside, we scholars, who have been gifted with speech, know that we will always be haunted by those who cannot speak, whether or not we choose to regift or to yield them speech, and even if we do finally just choose to be quiet. The sources of Joyce’s enormously influential work lay in the sociality of a twenty-year career as a writing educator at Jackson Community College in Jackson, Michigan, on the one hand, and in the textuality of the essayist counter-tradition of poststructuralist French feminism, on the other. Joyce went out of his way, in his critical and personal essays, to advance these elective affinities, which describe two of the territories most evenly at odds with the bureaucratic research-intensive regime of the new object for whose sake new media studies, in its self-constitution through Joyce’s work, was embraced. For literary scholars eager at once to seize the object “hyperfiction” and to both subordinate and elevate themselves, in traditional fashion, in the critic’s relation to the writer, the institutionalized activism of writing pedagogy, at the intake valve of the educational system, represented an anonymous form of professional labor conveniently discarded with Joyce’s transition to the more rarefied environ of Vassar. And if a determinedly continental écriture féminine was never wholly marginal to the first-wave U.S. hypertext theory that hitched its critical wagon to Joyce’s writerly star, it was certainly never central, either, at least to the extent that the usual alchemies of Anglo-American import substitution, administered by both masculinist and feminist notaries, transformed its practices and procedures into works and theories. The red thread of Joyce’s life-work might thus be said to traverse a blind spot in the voluminous body of scholarship chronicling it, to the extent that the lesson it leaves for the curator’s habitus has always already, in a way, been unlearned.¹⁵ That lesson lies in the capacity of the literary artifact to make counter-claims on the method and form of the criticism literally regarding it: and not because what we call social and historical “context”–a wealth of found or imagined realia–impresses the work, in an emplacement the critic can demand from the research object while tactically bracketing it in her own effort. Rather, in the unavoidably sublimated and so inadmissible homology, or structural affinity, of critical with literary writing itself (which finds departments of English studies, for example, serving today as common homes for dedicated “creative writers,” who create literary objects, dedicated literary scholars, who analyze their creative colleagues’ published products, and dedicated rhetoric and composition scholars, to whom the theory-praxis of writing about writing itself now falls and belongs). To begin to discern the outline of the new media critical homology I am proposing, one would have to look to the theory of the essay as it lives, today, in U.S.-based rhetoric and composition studies, in its constructive intimacy with democratic statism. Simultaneously, and with tolerance for their conflict, one would have to look to its legacy in what Todd May has called “poststructuralist anarchism”–and its afterlife in the early hypertext theory of Joyce’s moment.
 
To “see” both at once, one would need something like what the compositionist Douglas Hesse, combining concepts from Ricoeur and Heinrich Schenker, calls the Auskomponierung or “composing out” of the essay, as the diachronic prolongation, in sophistic narrative, of the synchronic chord of the scholastic proposition (“Essay Form and Auskomponierung” 292ff). Already, in the very first of the “theoretical narratives” of his book of densely tropological essays, Of Two Minds, Joyce writes in the collective first person of being “too late at the end of something and unable to speak” (1). To write, as Joyce writes, that the book’s “interstitial” documents were not composed from nomadic and iterative detachments, but rather were composed as such Bruchstücke,¹⁶ in a form that places them radically at odds with the generic professional self-reproduction constructing a field, is after all only to remind ourselves that fourteen years after the University of Michigan Press published Joyce’s radically essayist multigraph, traditionally peer-reviewed scholarship emerging from literary studies itself into the research field of new media studies, as such, remains scarce.¹⁷ That Of Two Minds is a book of critical fragments introduced by a parable reproduced from the author’s unpublished “twenty-some-year old” novel (1) invokes a homology on which I have elaborated elsewhere,¹⁸ between the productive activity contained and managed by the term “creative writing” and the act of invention, rather than discovery, constituting a new field of inquiry. That a few pages later Joyce goes on to invoke a “tradition of hypermedia studies” is in turn arguably something of a feint, in so far as the division of labor solicited here is metastasized to the point of failure as division:
 

We had generally completed the underlying functionality of the [Storyspace] program before we heard the term hypertext or read Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines (1990). Yet from the earliest point in our collaboration we progressively found ourselves in contact with the tradition of hypermedia studies, beginning with Bush and Engelbart and continuing to Nelson. That tradition of scholarship and active collaboration existed as something of an iceberg–or, more aptly, like some huge octopus with only its eye above water but with submerged tentacles reaching almost everywhere around us, including pedagogy, linguistics, cognitive science, literature, physics, database theory, classics, media studies, medicine, and so on. Because it was a tradition concerned with links and interrelationships, it observed no intellectual boundaries.
 

(32)

 
A credulous reading of the first two sentences, here, will overlook their excavation by what follows them, the concealed inertia of the iceberg yielding to the life of the disciplinary octopus, itself exceeded and erased in its substantiality by an abstract conceptual image–of the genrecidal impossible possibility, as it were, of a tradition recognizing no bounded corpus or archive or division of labor. Here is the double writing of much of Joyce’s body of work, in its both critical and creative forms, which finds its reception, for the most part, in uncompounded readings: that of the eager scholar-entrepreneur who seizes on the historical trope of discrete continuity (a “tradition”) essential to the institution-building project of discipline, and that of his counterpart for whom that discretion itself, more (or less) than a pragmatically ineluctable, bureaucratic fiction, is the very trace of that disavowal without which such fictions may never come to be.
 
It was the extrusion of the computer itself, Joyce explains, as a mediator of scholarship that epistemically reframed our “work” on, in, and of knowledge: an event whose meaning lay in the negative critical disturbance of discipline, rather than in the positivized fulfillment of “interdisciplinarity” that it certainly always suggested:
 

As we appropriated computers to our uses and modeled complex understandings upon a foundation of low-level concerns, we found ourselves in dialogue with others who, though they proceeded from much different disciplines, shared a common process of tool building and intellection with us.
 
I knew of, and for years had given lip service to, the interdisciplinary nature of my professional life. I had done my work at the Iowa Writers Workshop and so was in touch with a widespread and active artistic and learning community as well the scholarly and critical community that Sherman Paul had introduced me to. I had trained myself as a composition theorist in the line of fire, as chair of a community college English department, and knew that field through research, practice, conferences, and anxiety attacks. Not only did each of these domains interact with one another; they also actively espoused essentially interdisciplinary stances.
 
Despite all this, the problem was that, if we talked at all, my colleagues and I more often than not spent more time talking among ourselves about interdisciplinary learning than we did putting it into practice.
 

(32-33)

 

Read attentively, in 2009, such meditation perhaps displays some of that patina of enigmatically recent age, so disturbing to the temporization of research, to which Nietzsche, writing of the utility and disadvantage of scholarly historiography for life, gave the not entirely translatable term unzeitgemäß. If the narrative through which Joyce appears to construct the fulfillment of interdisciplinary desire in computerization thus seems, in its presentist or futurist naïveté, like something from what Glenn Willmott calls the “junk pile of critical history” (207), that is because, ever the rhetorician, Joyce knows how to declare one thing while suggesting another or, what is another way to put it, how to use language to suggest the difference of language from code, without reducing that insight, itself, to transmission. It is in this respect that, then as now, many of Joyce’s more comfortably technocratic peers and promoters simply have not, and do not, read him.

 
Through all the periods of the periodizations that followed, from a first generation of link-focused “verbal” hyperfictions received with inflated deconstructive claims, to the structural-functionalist restoration of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), to a third wave as yet exposed to reification,¹⁹ Joyce’s legacy has perhaps too often turned on readings of his hyperfictions–above all, the inaugural Afternoon, a story–which reconstruct the work implicitly or explicitly as the work of a working artist or writer, demandedly distinct from that of the thinker, critic, theorist, or essayist Joyce always already also was (and is).²⁰ To be sure, such readings have often made good use (if often in precritical fashion) of Joyce’s various declarations of authorial and other forms of procedural intention, as a mode of indulgence of such hyperprofessionalized ethnographic consultation. It is less often that the critic of Afternoon is committed to reading the thinker’s essays in Of Two Minds (just to start with) in determined counterpoint with the writer’s artifact. And never, as far as I can tell, has anyone pondered the modification of that counterpoint, itself, by the self-consciously Bartlebyesque resignation of the intention declared on that very strictly access-controlled and verified means of publication, Joyce’s personal “not at home” page.²¹ Let me suggest, by way of a kind of testimony, if not an accomplishment of compensation, that if we still want to consider Joyce’s work a founding moment in new media literary studies, in the United States, we have to recognize the radical untimeliness of, and at, that foundation. I mean the extent to which the negativity of Joyce’s secession from this emergent field must be understood not as the end of his influence in it, but in antinomian fashion, as its beginning again.
 
For the reduction of Joyce to hyperfiction author, in the new media studies scholarship that more or less brackets Joyce’s critical project, is in fact nothing new as a disciplinary gesture; rather, it is a repetition of the founding ruse of literary-critical modernity, in what Clifford Siskin has called “novelism”: the generation, from a heterogenous and yet unified (or combined and uneven) field of writing, of the separate positions of the self-identified critic and her critical object, produced by the writer. In the subordination of writing, a discourse and an institution, to the (fabricated) research object “the novel,” modern disciplinarity in the literary sphere naturalizes writing as mimesis–that is, gives it a job to do, in determined opposition to the radical self-reflexivity of writing as mass professionalization itself, in its capacity simultaneously to expand and to contract the division of intellectual labor. Over and against this “novelism” of U.S. new media literary studies, I am suggesting, Joyce’s work must be read–must be reread–in context of the German and French counterconcretions of what R. Lane Kauffmann and Claire de Obaldia call “Continental essayism,” and which has to be seen as a legacy of the moment of “high theory” and its import substitution in the U.S academy. As a problem of form and of style in the temporizing of the knowledge-object, that legacy, as Jameson observes apropos of Adorno, is nothing if not the incitement to rereading, itself, as juxtapositional comparison, the generation of critical homology:
 

Such essays are thus the fragments of or footnotes to a totality which never comes into being; and what unites them, I am tempted to say, is less their thematic content than it is on the one hand their style, as a perpetual present in time of the process of dialectical thinking itself, and on the other their basic intellectual coordinates. For what as fragments they share in spite of the dispersal of their raw material is the common historical situation itself … which serves as the framework within which we understand them. To this concrete situation itself the language makes fateful and monitory allusion: the administered world, the institutionalized society, the culture industry, the damaged subject–an image of our historical present which is Adorno’s principal sociological contribution and which yet … is never expressed directly in the form of a thesis. Rather, it intervenes as a series of references to a state of things with which our familiarity is already presupposed …. The mode is that characteristic German sarcasm which may be said to have been Nietzsche’s contribution to the language and in which a constant play of cynical, colloquial expressions holds the disgraced real world at arm’s length, while abstractions and buried conceptual rhymes compare it with the impossible ideal.
 

(Marxism 52-53)

 

IV.

 
The capacious and considered retrospective treatment of Joyce’s Afternoon offered by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, an ambitious and successful recent attempt to bring U.S.-based new media studies to disciplinary self-consciousness, is a good place to start. Kirschenbaum’s reading, if he would want to call it that, begins with the dramatic historicizing, in a journalistic mode, of Joyce’s conversion from print novelist to hyperfiction writer, upon his seduction by the personal computer as writing tool:
 

Storyspace was a product of the early 1980s personal computer boom. At the time, Joyce, whose first novel The War Outside of Ireland (1982) had just won a regional literary prize, was interested in exploring what he termed “multiple fictions,” the concept that would eventually be made manifest as “a story that changed with every reading,” the mandate with which Joyce wrote Afternoon. He had become a home computer hobbyist, acquiring first an Apple II and later a Macintosh. Early in January of 1982 (the same year “the computer” would be dubbed Time Magazine‘s “Man of the Year”) Joyce wrote to Howard Becker, a sociologist at Northwestern who had read and admired his first novel and whom Joyce has since characterized as his earliest hypertext supporter. Becker was a self-professed Apple evangelist.
 

(168-69)

 

Kirschenbaum’s account ends, meanwhile, not with Joyce’s own authorial closing parenthesis of 2004, under that sepulchral rock cairn, but with an equally moving first-person narrative of Kirschenbaum’s own archival work with the Michael Joyce Papers now housed at the University of Texas. This was singularly temporizing work, involving the emulation of obsolete software environments and other forms of “hacking” at the intersection of what Kirschenbaum distinguishes, in a conceit fundamental to his argument, as “forensic” and “formal” concepts of medial materiality. Fittingly, perhaps, it is the one moment in this industrious and exacting work of structural retrospection when its author yields to the melancholy of the digital archive’s unavoidable juxtaposition of immaterially presentist facilitations with the future anterior dilations of software and bit rot:

 

The digital objects in the DSpace repository are what are known in the trade as BLOBs, Binary Large OBjects. DSpace knows how to manage both item-level metadata and access to these files, but it does not facilitate the use of them. To actually work with the Afternoons or with any other material it must first be downloaded to the desktop of the Ransom Center’s laptop, where I use what means and know-how I can to make cranky old binaries execute on the up-to-date operating system. Sometimes I am unsuccessful…. At the end of every work day I leave the Ransom Center and cross busy Guadalupe Street to a coffeehouse that offers public WiFi service. I log on and immediately copy and paste my notes into an e-mail message that I send to myself, the bits beamed into the late Austin afternoon to be sprayed across the surface of a hard disk spinning in the silo of a server farm I will never see.
 

(207-8)

 
Objects hidden in space and vanished in time are juxtaposed, here, in an analogy for the distinction between forensic and formal materiality (the bit as inscribed, yet only microscopically legible, vs. the bit as manipulable self-present symbol), itself designed to facilitate a procedural intervention in the wayward idealism of new media literary studies, without allowing it much of an answer. To the extent that that distinction informs Kirschenbaum’s approach to Afternoon as an archival object, it includes a pointed demonstration of critical distance from one of the fancies of so-called first-wave hypertext criticism, in a gambit that does more to emplace Kirschenbaum’s study in the dislocations of its own moment than anything else in the book. That fancy is the euphoric identification of electronic writing or textuality, in its play of absence and presence, with the theses of poststructuralist literary and cultural theory, as exemplified in George P. Landow’s landmark 1991 study Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.
 
Landow’s book, Kirschenbaum reminds us, was typical in placing Joyce’s Afternoon at its center, as a reunion of the mutually alienated cultures of the writer and critic, as well as a triumphally performative material enactment of antithetic poststructuralist “theories” whose thetically conceived credibility was under assault, then as now, from latter-day Johnsons willing to bruise their toes on the rock of positive common sense to score a point. This untimely “convergence,” which Landow more or less continues to defend in the updates producing Hypertext 2.0 (1997) and Hypertext 3.0 (2006), was right from the start, Kirschenbaum tells us, “oddly out of step with mainstream literary studies,” which had already sloughed off its poststructuralist torment for (a presumably less culpably faddish) cultural studies and the new historicisms (165). But it turns out that the impairment of Hypertext‘s critical modernity, as Kirschenbaum sees it, has another, deeper or wider source, in the “latent Romanticism” of literary studies of which poststructuralist criticism was merely a single convenient symptom, and which Kirschenbaum suggests infected “much of the writing about the experience of reading (or playing) Afternoon” (166).
 
Aware, for all that, that the period under discussion was not simply a moment of addled hallucination, but a meaningfully different critical-historical conjuncture, Kirschenbaum makes a somewhat cursory nod, in Mechanisms‘ coda, to the simultaneously ethnographic and philosophically critical concept of media appropriate to cultures that still, so to speak, believe in ghosts–or modernities in revolt:
 

The recovery of the past through objects in the present is our one recourse, besides spiritualism, to satisfying a desire to speak with the dead. Storage, which I have discussed throughout this book, is all about creating a systemized space in which this activity can unfold.
 

(251)

 

But Kirschenbaum does not seem all that interested in the negativity of the spectral that was integral to the French poststructuralist teratology of Nietzsche with Freud and Marx, through which we might say the subject of Euro-Atlantic techno-modernity, at a particular criticalhistorical conjuncture, pursued the ethical imagination of the unheard (or the violently silenced) speech in its “dead” peripheries. That, if anything, needs to be taken as the most charitable understanding of the impulse that drove what Kirschenbaum calls “high poststructuralism,” read not for its theses on the administered world of literary criticism, but for the indirection, both modal and stylistic, through which it operated as what the Jameson of the 1970s, himself barely tolerating its challenge to Lukácsian Marxism, calls a “problem of continuity” (Marxism 50).

 
To be sure, Landow’s exponence of hypertext was characterized by an eagerness to make connections that were always, in his own eyes (and his own words), slightly embarrassing.²² But that is perhaps merely a way of pointing to its roots in a tradition (Jameson’s word) other than, and other to, the Anglo-American tradition in which Kirschenbaum’s own determinedly empiricist work appears to move–and which carries what Jameson calls an “anti-speculative bias,” in the emphasis placed “on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relationship in which that item may be embedded.” The liberal positivism of that tradition, Jameson tells us, is characteristically resistant to the forging of fanciful links (Marxism x)–among such ostensibly irreconcilable categories, for example, as a software program and a theory of reading. To this observation, one would perhaps have to add Adorno’s trenchant readings of that chorismos or “block” in the Kantian modernity to which he saw Euro-Atlantic thought as having regressed today–yet which he characterizes, with something more (or less) than uncomplicated hostility, as “what a Romantic artist once named the innermost life of the world” (Kant’s Critique 178). It is no pointlessly arcane disclamation to observe that Jameson’s dialectical thought shares with poststructuralist theory (or whatever we want to call it) a stance inimical to that disavowal of reflexive critical attention that is in some ways implicit in thirdwave new media criticism’s disavowal of its first-wave pro-theoretical naïveté–as it is explicit, perhaps, in a now vast corpus of restorationist work on literary studies “after theory.” Implicit and explicit, we might say, in the disavowal of poststructuralism, is a disavowal above all of the need to read that massive corpus of cultural criticism, grounded in Continental European philosophy and social theory, that was generated in its name–and to read it, so to speak, closely: a term marking not claims for the ontological primacy or exclusivity of texts, but simply the practice of not taking things literally, of thinking twice, looking before one leaps, and so on. All the uncomfortable pauses in textual practice, that is to say, that in truth do interfere in the regimented progress of a properly professional body of work (Joyce’s own irregular and finally negative path to his professional profile today is ample evidence of that). Counterposed with such ritual circumscription, Landow’s inadroit claim for hypertext as the embodiment of literary theory (and later, as the disembodiment of postcoloniality)²³ might be described as sincerely enthusiastic.
 
But Landow’s pronouncements were perhaps never as unreflectively thetic, in the first place, as Kirschenbaum, with others before him, makes them out to be. In the tropisms of those “shocks of recognition,” of those concepts that “cry out for hypertextuality” (Hypertext 3.0 1, 53), one finds not, in fact, the advancement of theses, but rather imagined comparisons between factical and fictional worlds–offered not to falsifiability tests, but to what Elizabeth Bruss, writing in 1982, calls the criterial, rather than evidential ground of argument (44). Indeed, one might say this was the very premise of the now justly famous opening gambit of Hypertext:
 

When designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas or Of Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary Machines, they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson. These shocks of recognition can occur because over the past several decades literary theory and computer hypertext, apparently unconnected areas of inquiry, have increasingly converged…. A paradigm shift, I suggest, has begun to take place in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam. I expect that one name in each pair will be unknown to most of my readers.
 

(Hypertext 3.0 1)

 

To be sure, Kirschenbaum’s extended argument for the diachronic remanence of data in inscribed storage, over its static ephemerality in the endless present of screen memory, is a successful corrective of some bad habits in the reception of new media literary artifacts–including what he would call the “medial ideology” of self-evident representation, as marked by the volatile enthusiasm Landow imputes, in this more or less famous passage, to the “encounter” between theory and machine. Quite plausibly, those bad habits were themselves built on bad habits in the Anglo-American literary reception of the endgame of continental European philosophy, as an import substitution scheme and editorial racket the legacies of which have yet to be sorted out coherently even today. Speaking as a literary scholar, writer and humanist partisan who for five years has used a Concurrent Versioning System repository for all of my text production, itself taking the form of document-records simply numbered in time, I was delighted to find in Kirschenbaum’s book a substantive meditation on a problem I had so far been unable to frame for myself with any degree of critical adequacy whatsoever. While checking into my personal CVS repository successive drafts of the essay you are now reading, on this page or screen, I realized why, for reasons Kirschenbaum’s book has helped me think through, that practice of self-archiving has displaced my own previously vigorous interest in “screening” individual new media literary artworks, as a primary mode of “doing” new media studies, in the sense that one “does” one’s work in one’s field.²⁴ It is the cyclic or folded temporality and historicity in critical practice itself, we might say, that goes missing in the acquisitive pursuit of critical objects whose volatility our very profession forces us to undermeasure.

 
I must admit I am haunted, on the other hand, by the confidence implied by Kirschenbaum’s emphasis on the persistence of data, in the legacies of the inscribing technologies of nineteenth-century Euro-Atlantic imperial modernity–and in the confidence it implies in that modernity as a civilization.²⁵ Among other places, it was precisely in that firstwave hypertext theory, which Kirschenbaum (not without precedent) now proposes we discard, that what we might call poststructuralist essayism “survived,” in the sense of that term familiar to readers of Derrida’s readings of Benjamin’s altogether too famous essay on translation, where it marks the fragile founding twilight of “our” modernity as a guarantor of secular truth. Indeed, this emphasis on continuity seems to sit at some odds with the reaching for figures of cyclic or folded temporality, in some of the more imaginative new work emerging from the field into which the argument of Kirschenbaum’s book is crafted to intervene²⁶–work one can read as embracing a newly self-conscious and justly sensitive form of temporizing attention to its own imperial Euro-Atlantic First Worldism. To its own dependence, that is to say, on wealthdependent (and as such, highly leveraged) habits and levels of energy consumption. If, among its many valuably singular insights, Mechanisms contains one potentially fatal intellectual infelicity, it lies in this emphasis on the remanence of data, deployed against the virtualities of the poststructuralist imagination, at precisely that cultural moment when the permanence of the progressive civilizational legacies of Euro-Atlantic modernity is a question, rather than an answer, for more core subjects of the United States empire than at any time since the 1970s.
 
In postwar U.S. literary studies at its boldest, anyway, “literarity” has always been understood to include the undisciplined Nietzschean temporality of the event, as well as its Weberian secular avocation. Kirschenbaum glances in this direction, I think, when he concedes that “software is also ineluctably part of a proleptic now” (203), empirically affirming Joyce’s own assertion, in the lines echoing Marx and Engels that Kirschenbaum quotes from Of Two Minds, that “Electronic text appears as dissipate mist” (233). But that assertion, like others in Joyce’s essay into which it is woven, is rhetorical–by which I mean simply that we are forced to find in it the possibility, the certainty, even, that Joyce was and is saying something other than, or in addition to, what he actually wrote. What we call poststructuralist theory, which we would do better to call poststructuralist writing, was not a body of falsifiable propositions, least of all about the positive qualitative ephemerality of anything, including the object “writing.” What we call poststructuralist theory, in its particulate presence in U.S. literary culture, was an intensity of writing practice through which the works of Derrida, Deleuze, and all the other usual suspects served temporarily to reverse the programmatic suppression of rhetoricity in bureaucratic academic modernism. As a committedly literary user of the Concurrent Versioning System whose arborescent constraint Kirschenbaum delicately counterposes with the rhizomorphist euphoria of literary theory,²⁷ let me insist that, all revisionist hopes and dreams notwithstanding, the disciplinary question of what we call “theory” is still very much unsettled. Because as an essayist I set out (with no illusions of freedom) to write rhetorical essays, rather than deliberatively structured text, the hierarchical tree that I cannot escape is something for which I nevertheless have no substantive use. And to speak of archiving, rather than writing, I find little need, in preserving my own work, for the disciplined programmer’s branch invoked by Kirschenbaum against early hypertext theory’s imagined comparisons, which he permits to be marked, in his text, as another form of humanist naïveté. That he claims, on one page of Mechanisms, that the appeal of poststructuralism for new media studies has been “abandoned, or at least … diluted” (43), and on the next that the “medial ideology” it promoted remains entirely intact (45), speaks to the weight that the CVS tree is being made to bear, in the strife of faculties marking Kirschenbaum’s clearing of space for himself in critical history:
 

From this perspective the poststructuralism that has held sway over discussions of electronic writing since the late 1980s is a demonstrable medial artifact, one that had more to do with its moment (and marketing) than with the fundamental nature of electronic textuality. By contrast, an industrial-strength CVS environment is perhaps the ultimate realization of the kind of document science that has been practiced since the first stemma were printed in 1827 to display the relationships amongst a group of Swedish legal manuscripts.
 

(201)

 
To demand, as Kirschenbaum demands, that those who study books also study software, is to make claims on the modernity of literary studies itself, asserting priority for the mechanism and its technical administration (and administrators) at a level that exceeds the modesty, and indeed the genuine appeal, of Kirschenbaum’s proposals for those of his readers already with him in the letter, if in agreement or disagreement in spirit–and rather than not yet there. New media studies has always generated forward momentum through grandiose claims for renovation and threatened consequences for those left (or staying) behind, and while it seems only fair to grant Kirschenbaum’s own theses their own aspect of indirection, it needs to be said that since no “poststructuralist theorist” has ever asserted thetically the ideal rhizomorphism of anything, be that anything textual or nontextual, first-wave hypertext theory cannot credibly be accused of doing that, either, no matter how crudely and schematically some of its individual exponents may have (and have been) read. The critical clout of Kirschenbaum’s intervention pales where its foils are literally spectral, in this sense–a kind of ghost data, or intrasystemic ideal–and where “poststructuralist theory,” the thing he pursues to debunk, eludes him only because it was never there.
 
Joyce’s sentence “Electronic text appears as dissipate mist” was written in the language of manifesto–which as Janet Lyon observes in her study of the form, “marks the point of impact where the idea of radical egalitarianism runs up against the entrenchment of an ancien régime” (1) and is difficult to read, in so far as “its apparent rhetorical straightforwardness obscures the degree to which the form is embedded in the contradictions of political representation” (2). In its “literally, inexorably, and grindingly absolute” linearity, the genetic CVS architecture that Kirschenbaum mobilizes against the misguidedly rhizomorphist theses of poststructuralist theory (and its hypertext-theoretic avatars) seems in some ways to serve to reproach Landow not only for his bureaucratic First-Worldist left anarchism, but for the still more irredeemable excess of a vision of hypertext as decolonization, as well.²⁸ But it was Edward Said himself who, in the essay that places the anti-systemic form of the essay at the heart of what Said calls “secular criticism,” describes Euro-Atlantic imperial modernity as a product of the inexorably democratic displacement of the natal and vertical filiations of family and culture, by institutions such as the university, whose social character was best figured as agenealogically horizontal (17). To the extent that such “affiliation,” whether conservative (in, e.g., Eliot) or progressive (in Lukács), tends to recreate a “systematic totalizing world-view”–that is, to reinstate, in new form, the authority previously evacuated from genealogical filiation–Said argues that affiliative orders become cultural systems through which university-based intellectuals, for example, lose touch, in time, with “the resistance and the heterogeneity of civil society” (26). Despite the abdication of the genuinely insurrectionary literary theory of the 1960s (Said is no more sympathetic to “poststructuralism” than Jameson), this compensatory cultural system, Said suggests in 1983, is now feeling decisive pressure for the first time, as the dynamic legacy of decolonization replants the world-system’s peripheral regions squarely in front of (and even within) the campus gate. That one looks in vain, in the pages of Mechanisms, for any sense of that pressure, leaves one wondering what has replaced it–and what form its own criticism must take.
 
An antipositivist might take a page, so to speak, from the double negation of a romantically ironic book on note-taking entitled “How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think.” That “book” is a freely available PDF document authored by software programmer Lion Kimbro, who advocates the deliberate creation, in note-taking practice, of what, with doomed aspiration to polysyntactic perversity, he calls “imaginary false links.”²⁹ Here is a useful point of convergence–or opposition–between comparative literary-critical practice and new media studies. In the now strategically anachronistic first-wave ephemeralist concept of the differential hyperlink, a liminal interval traversing and demarcating at the same time, one might determine a homology with what Adorno (writing in 1958) calls the essay as form, in which our non-elective capitulation to modernity is balanced by a non-frivolous dream of freedom (“Der Essay”). Is it really too much to say, lending the word all the weight it deserves, that this matters?
 

Before the End of the World

 
American artist-architects Diller & Scofidio and Team Extasia presented their Blur Building as a media pavilion for the World Fair or Expo in 2002, on Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Its participation in this kind of event situates the Blur Building in the modern world, as belonging to the modern epoch. But after three and a half years of extensive preparations, constructions, and tests, this project managed to interrogate any environment–built, controlled, artifactual–including the climate, as well as the predominantly visual, cognitively mapped, and perceptually oriented culture that surrounds us today. The Blur Building produces different spacing and temporality from those of the modern world, hovering uncertainly at the limit or at the end of the world (as we know it). Doubtlessly, this renewed questioning of the limits of our world and time is intimately related to the fact that Diller & Scofidio were quick, among architects, to embrace the potential for alternative productions of presence found in 21^st century information technology and new forms of electronic mediation. Notably, in opening a blurred, mixed world in the era of globalization, Diller & Scofidio both affirm and develop Fredric Jameson’s earlier diagnosis of postmodernism as predominantly synchronic and spatial. It is perhaps in the realm of architecture qua living space that modifications of cultural and aesthetic production make themselves felt most dramatically–not least by problematizing modernist distinctions between high and low culture, as well as by a more populist shaping and sharing of the multiplicitous surfaces of our milieu or world (Jameson 189, 200). As an open-ended becoming of mixed reality, the Blur Building takes on “the new machine” of a hyperspatial postmodernism of surfaces, along with the imperative from new architecture “to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” (Jameson 219).
 
However, the Blur Building also leaps forward to overtake more recent developments in architecture, as well as in IT and new media, including those pertaining to the thoroughly distributed, networked, and embedded multitudes of computational entities in ubiquitous computing. In this way, the installation project approaches a ubiquity of what I am calling mixed presencing (new modes of technological and mediatory production of our life form) as an informative principle of work that leads to a certain displacement and deferral of the existing demarcations of our world. The Blur Building embraces a virtual and computational architecture for ubiquity and seeks its actualization in various combinations or mixes, so that architecture, along with life itself, mediates and negotiates habitable spaces, each unfolding as very provisional “solutions” to the problem of how to inhabit space bodily with others. Diller & Scofidio’s architecture attempts to further negotiate the problem of spatialization that life poses to bodies, a negotiation that opens itself to “the movements of time and becoming” (see Grosz 148). The Blur Building thus places itself experimentally and virtuactually among current research and artistic productions involving IT and new media. If the Blur Building moves towards “the end of the world,” this is because it follows the strong interest in virtuality in the 1990s and the exploration of more radically actual modes of tele-presence beginning in the mid-90s. Diller & Scofidio’s project bespeaks a slow reontologizing of these fields today, which one might call an immanentizing physical turn or a movement towards the encounter of bits and atoms, as Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer would have it.¹ This project might well be described as a turn towards mixed worlding, understood as a dynamic ecotechnics liable to sense. Alternately, one might call it a turn towards technologized worlding qua a virtualization of the physical, but this would emphatically concern those whose actualization of technics facilitates embodied relations and interactions of the end of the world.
 

 

1. Of the End of the World I – Mixed Reality and the Embeddedness of Ubiquitous Computing

 

… we are not intending to make a volume of space covered with fog. We intend to make a building of fog with integrated media. –Diller and Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing 39.

 
Diller & Scofidio and their team oversaw years of projective planning and invention while working on the Blur Building, which had a nebulous impact on its visitor-inhabitants, – not least because of the complexity and dynamics of its vast, artifactual mist-cloud.² Only after the initial design period were the architects confronted with the many obstacles involved in the actual construction and installation of this contribution to the Swiss Expo. In between inventive projection and actualization, several creative initiatives were abandoned. Unfortunately, then, the final building included neither an LED text forest of vertical panels with scrolling text (from Internet feeds or from artist Jenny Holzer), nor a Hole in the Water restaurant made of submerged twin glass cylinders with an aquarium layer in between, in which diners would sit at eye level with the lake and eat sushi. Nor did we get an open air Angel Bar on top of the building’s mist cloud (to be served: a great variety of water beverages, from glacial tappings to municipal waters from around the world) (Diller and Scofidio, Blur 100-111, 146-155, 163, 324). Nevertheless, the opening of the Blur Building in 2002 was provocative and transformative enough to present us with the end of the world, to put it pointedly. But why should one approach the Blur Building as a question of the end of the world?³
 

 
Blur is of the end of the world because, as an exemplary artistic-architectural project, it involves new media and information technology in ways various and extensive enough so as to begin to problematize any strict distinction between a given sense of the world and what one might call contemporary ecotechnics. Ecotechnics here designates the almost sovereign capacity of current information technology to perform calculative operations by the quantifiable means that pervade globalized culture, cosmopolitan democratic values, a sociocultural sense of community, and embodied attempts to delineate the world as an already meaningful environment.⁴ For any one visitor-inhabitant of the Blur Building, then, the body as the spacing or sharing out of sense emerges as the place of that originary relation of technicity, at work both in the presencing of bodies and in the way we disclose a world. The relation of bodily sense to the ecotechnical apparatus informs the way the world of Blur may come to seem meaningful to us. It is pervasive and originary technicity, the manner in which you are connected, which delineates your mode of existence and your experience or constitution of world-hood. If Blur affirms this originary technicity at stake in the world-hood of the world, it is without positing technology as a substantial fixed origin or a projected finality. Rather, it is a matter of worlding in radical finitude, that is, the event of the emergence of the world in the absence of a solid ground or a determinable end.⁵ As Jean-Luc Nancy formulates it, “[e]cotechnics … substitutes projections of linear history and of final goals with local differences and multiple bifurcations. Ecotechnics deconstructs the system of ends, it renders them nonsystematizable and nonorganic” (Corpus 78; my translation). To experience Blur as an event of worlding, we depend upon that sharing out of embodied sense that takes place as a technical-mechanical relation between material bodies, partes extra partes, or as a delineation of material bodies in a contact-separation, a touching-letting go, of sense and matter. When inhabiting Blur one would have to concede, with Nancy, that our world is of the ecotechnical that marks out our bodies, lets them proliferate, and plugs us in a multitude of directions:
 

Our world is the world of “technical,” the world whose cosmos, nature, gods, whose system, complete in its intimate jointure, are exposed as “technical”: the world of an ecotechnics. Ecotechnics functions with technical apparatus, with which it connects us in all directions. But what it makes is our bodies, which it puts into the world and connects to its system, our bodies, which in this way it creates as more visible, more proliferating, more polymorphous, more pressed together, more in “masses” and “zones” than they have ever been.
 

(Corpus 77-78; my translation)

 
Diller & Scofidio’s building project, its pursuit of ecotechnics, and its polymorphous zoning of bodies participate in a time when the third main wave of computing is emerging, a movement which both partly sidesteps and goes beyond the earlier developments of mainframes, desktops, laptops, and their stable networked infrastructure. Their work does not so much reflect what is currently happening on the large infrastructural scale (where the speed and data-capacity of grid computing promises to enhance and gradually replace the Internet),⁶ nor the scale of supercomputing (where quantum computing is still under development),⁷ nor the microscale of biomedia and nanotechnology.⁸ Rather, the Blur Building inserts itself in the middle, into a context marked by research in and the actual installation of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. This kind of computing–marked by the deployment of multitudes of relatively inexpensive, mobile, wireless, and relatively intelligent machines–is flexible, complex, and massive enough to warrant speaking of a technicity whose sensors and actants not only pervade the human life world, but become almost indistinguishable from the environment or the world as such (Umwelt).⁹ Whether in terms of spacing or of temporal unfolding, Diller & Scofidio’s project presents a mutual overlaying of the world and technics that arise from a transductive relation, that is, when both the world and technics appear in their co-implication on the basis of their more primary individuating relation.¹⁰
 
Consequently, the Blur Building is of the end of the world to the extent that here “the world” does not have or display a pregiven sense. Rather, a sense of the world emerges as it undergoes a vague transformation via the movement of this project, whose overlaying and combination of ubiquitous computing and existential worlding paves the way for a mixed reality.¹¹ For Diller & Scofidio, an augmented and mixed reality emerges as our problematic of temporalization and spacing in the first decade of a young millennium. Here ubiquitous computing poses as the concrete technical way to approach a decidedly mixed reality where virtuality and actuality are combined to such a degree that one is not readily separable or distinguishable from the other. It should be pointed out, then, that upon encountering the Blur Building we sense a complex set of relations between a real physical world and the potential generated via virtualizations, something that compels us to wonder whether their mutual overlays and interlacing interfaces constitute and transform our experiential reality. The world of the Blur Building does not display a given sense precisely because it comes into presence as a mixed worlding where actuality and virtuality (of phusis and techné both) are superimposed upon and mixed with each other. In Blur the physical and the virtual cannot immediately be distinguished or even made into objects of awareness. Thus we must consider the question of an invisible, vague, unnoticeable, and typically pre-conscious combinatoire of interminglings in real time and in a three-dimensional world space.
 
This mixing of world and ubiquitous computing, actuality and virtuality, constitutes the enigma of Diller & Scofidio’s project insofar as virtuality is largely embedded before awareness and to the point of invisibility. A chief characteristic of ubiquitous computing is its efforts to proceed towards pure immanence or strict embeddedness in the world. Approached from that angle, one might say that the vagueness, apparent invisibility, enigma, or secrecy of Blur as mixed worlding increases alongside the inhabitants’ inability to become aware of these characteristics, to the degree that it pursues the ideal goal of embeddedness that Mark Weiser and others at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) set up for “calm computing”:
 

We wanted to put computing back in its place, to reposition it into the environmental background, to concentrate on human-to-human interfaces and less on human-to-computer ones …. In the end, ubi-comp created a new field of computer science, one that speculated on a physical world richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives and connected through a continuous network …. [We] have begun to speak of calm computing as the goal, describing the desired state of mind of the user, as opposed to the hardware configuration of the computer. Just as a good, well-balanced hammer “disappears” in the hands of a carpenter and allows him or her to concentrate on the big picture, we hope that computers can participate in a similar magic disappearing act.
 

(Weiser, Gold, and Brown)

 
The Blur Building, as a mix of the world involving calm, ubiquitous computing, performs a series of more or less complete disappearing acts, a whole flock of moves towards a more or less pure immanence which our modes of embodiment and sense encounter as so many variants of a vagueness that comes to seem irreducible.¹²
 

2. Of the End of the World II – Blurring the Given Worldview

 

The complete critique is perhaps not one that aims at totality (as does le regard surplombant) nor that which aims at intimacy (as does identifying intuition); it is the look that knows how to demand, in their turn, distance and intimacy, knowing in advance that the truth lies not in one or the other attempt, but in the movement that passes indefatigably from one to the other. One must desire that double excess where the look is always near to losing all its powers. –Starobinski 52 (my translation)
 
… Diller & Scofidio have concentrated on the undefined. It is almost as if they are reacting against their own desire to control and produce recognizable images, places, and objects by creating works in which one is never quite certain what one is seeing. –Betsky, “Display Engineers” 35.

 
Of the several immanentizing moves at stake in the mixed worlding of the Blur Building, perhaps the most noticeable one is the disturbance, blurring, or bringing down of world-vision. The mist-cloud, the biogenetic pumping system at the Expo site lakeshore, and the smart weather system embedded in the building are the most obvious generators of a new immanentism because they disrupt the obvious: they impinge on and disturb our cultural and bodily habits of privileging the obvious, most notably our continuous foregrounding of vision and its alleged clarity of sense. Extremely aware that their project found itself inserted in the context of a World Fair, information technology, and cosmopolitanism, Diller & Scofidio intended for their building to become a counter-strategy to the predominant access to the world via visual appropriation and an assured world-view.
 

 
One might say that in its immanentizing problematization of an assured, meaningful Weltbild, the Blur Building engages in a wider exploration of the phenomenology of the senses, an exploration that circumvents what Hans Jonas has calls “the nobility of sight.” Therefore what is at stake here is not so much another hailing of vision as the most excellent sense, nor the pursuit of theoria as the noblest activity of the mind, which is also traditionally described primarily in visual metaphors. Rather, the building involves a certain experimentation with the supports or supplements of vision, i.e., with the other senses, sensation in general, as well as “the more vulgar modes of commerce with the importunity of things” (Jonas 136). To that extent, mixed worlding cannot but blur the three main characteristics of the image-performance unique to sight. The Blur Building resists having its presentation of a sensate manifold yield to simultaneity; the causality of sense-affection insists on its non-neutrality; and it will remain difficult, if not impossible, to achieve a proper, objectifying distance in the spatial and cognitive mental senses. In other words, Diller & Scofidio’s counter-strategy very much brings a different sort of attention to vision, while in the process making felt the otherwise forgotten or suppressed, but all the more originary, need for complementation from the other senses and from the motility of our bodies (Jonas 152). Thus, blurring here implies a movement towards an embodiment of the forces at play within differentiated and distributed sensation.¹³
 

 
More specifically, the Blur Building is of the end of the world on any general, grand scale of viewing, because of its trans-immanent resistance to becoming part of a tourism dominated by spectacular sights and attractions, an official set of scenic views, image expectations as “good” photo opportunities, and a certain scopic control granted to the “sightseer” (Diller and Scofidio, “SuitCase Studies” 42-44). This artifactual architectural installation refuses to be primarily a visual cultural object for consumption in the experience-economy of today, just as it problematizes in quite ironic ways any God’s- or eagle-eye view of the world from above. As the architects themselves state in an interview:
 

We knew right away that we wanted to use the touristic setting as a foil. We realized we could use the lake water to problematize vision, to get in the way of the lake view. We also wanted to produce an anti-heroic architecture in the form of a special effect, an atmosphere. It was a reaction to the new orthodoxy of high-definition and simulation technologies. We wanted to create a low-definition space, a blur.
 

(Anderson 147)

 

If there is any view of the world involved in this lo-fi world-spacing, or that participates in a clear vision of the sense of the world, this view is minimized place-wise and remains a delayed and deferred epiphenomenon, such as the one that takes place on the Angel Deck, which hovers uncertainly above the more primary, extensive, and chaotically dynamic mistclouds down here, and which all inhabitants of this fuzzy mixed world must traverse first and last. Diller & Scofidio’s alternative engagement with the commodification of vision by globalized tourism might well lead one to suspect that the Blur Building concretizes a version of that “profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era” which Martin Jay traces, with a certain disapproval, in recent French thought, only to counter such antiocularcentrism with an unrepentant enlightened clarity.¹⁴ From this perspective, the Blur Building would be of the end of the world to the extent that it simply and strictly refuses any certain, stable, and visual domestication of world space as both inherently meaningful and as clarifiable to the point of having light or enlightenment eradicate all remnants of its obscure metaphorical texture. However, identifying in this project only a pure “suspicion of vision” remains too reductive, as does an inverse movement towards an altogether live metaphor of the sun, i.e., what Jacques Derrida retraces as the circle of the heliotrope whose pervasive, dazzling light (whether ideal or a question of lumen naturale) allegedly illuminates everything (“White Mythology” 266-267). Here the blurring of Weltbild and vision is a matter of neither a fall into strict blindness, nor an unwarranted celebration of an accidental obscurity that will be removed by the return of or to radiant enlightenment. Rather, Diller & Scofidio’s project pursues what moves differently within vision and its illuminating image-performance–what makes presencing disappear in its own radiance, or the indefinite selferasure of light that permits it to come as light. Blur is after another self-erasure or withdrawal of the visible, one whose different and deferred textures of light touch its worldinhabitants in practice.¹⁵ Perhaps in this way it approximates an archi-texture within an architectural project, drawing on supplementary haptic practices so as to transform a visible building into an unfolding of the inhabitants’ critical debate of and interactive engagement with vision. Diller & Scofidio’s Blur Building is thus a gentle and affirmative critique of tourism from within.¹⁶ It makes itself felt as an ongoing questioning of the very fabrication of the aura and authenticity of tourist sites, the gaze, and the meaningful imaging of memorial or memorable places in the world of today (Zavatta 12-14).

 

3. Before an Announced or Desired World-Construction: Practicing Haptic World-Vision

 

The media event is integrated with the enveloping fog. Our objective is to weave together architecture and electronic technologies, yet exchange the properties of each for the other. Thus, architecture would dematerialize and electronic media, normally ephemeral, would become palpable in space. Both would require sophisticated technologies that would be entirely invisible, leaving only their effects. –Diller and Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing 44.

 
The Blur Building questions built, controlled, and artifactual environments, including climate, alongside the hegemony of visual culture in the western tradition. By leaping through more recent developments in architecture as well as in IT and new media, it approaches an open-ended becoming of mixed reality. As such, this large-scale installation project takes up mixed presencing qua new modes of technological and mediatory production of our life form so as to displace at least two architectural trends. First, it displaces the more traditional view of digital technology and electronic mediation as inherently foreign to any architecture of durability, utility, and beauty. Second, it counters the tendency over the last 10 years for a contemporary generation of architects who do embrace virtual architecture to remain stuck with fascinatingly innovative, but very abstract computer models that seldom become actual buildings.¹⁷ The blobs of Greg Lynn and others, Marcos Novak’s liquid architectures, the work of NOX and Lars Spuybroek, Neil Leach’s swarm tectonics, Asymptote’s NYSE trading floor, and Peter Eisenman’s rethinking of his notion of the interiority of architecture via the diagram would perhaps serve as a first set of indices tracing the development of virtual hypersurface architecture.¹⁸ Although Diller & Scofidio make a different move towards actualization, there is no small echo here–in their obsession with the fluid flock, the cloud, and the movement in time of water–of the virtual architects’ efforts to embrace the computer as an instrument for viewing form as generated in time in order to stop modeling from the outside and to undertake a shift, as Lars Spuybroek writes, “from Euclidian geometry to topology, from tectonics to textile, from object to process, from crystalline space to the undulating field or medium” (20).
 
The Blur Building thus embraces a virtual architecture for ubiquity and goes on seeking its actualizations so that architecture, and life itself, develop in a mediatory negotiation of habitable spaces, each unfolding as very provisional “solutions” to the problem of how to inhabit space bodily with others and the other. Diller & Scofidio’s architecture negotiates certain experiments with spatialization as a question life poses to bodies, opening them to what Elizabeth Grosz calls “the movements of time and becoming” (148). In this way, the Blur Building presents itself as a matter of a slow re-ontologizing of mediatory architectures and life forms. It involves virtuality, tele-presence, and the mixed realities of ubiquitous computing. Its immanentizing, physical turn moves towards a mixed worlding, understood as a dynamic ecotechnics liable to sense, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it.
 

 
As part of such a turn, the Blur Building relinquishes the earlier emphasis on first generation virtual reality, head-mounted displays, immersion in perfect simulations of 3-D scenery, and a long line of formal, abstract, or metaphysical idealizations, perhaps best recognized in William Gibson’s literary evocation of cyberspace and the engagement with virtuality in the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix movies. Accordingly, the Blur Building turns physical in order to newly emphasize corporeality and actualization of the virtual. This turn situates its architecture in a context of developments that we also see in today’s art world. Broadly speaking, the current coupling of artistic cultural production, IT, and new media leads to the emergence of a multiplicity of large, complex, intermedial, and interactive installations, sometimes spanning the planet network-wise. This context has made the installation something like a paradigmatic art form–momentarily parenthesizing traditional mass-media frames for visual information-culture (images, advertising, mainstream movies, TV). Blur relates to the world of installation art found in museums and art institutions, but also to the installation art found in all the public spaces of globalized culture. Via networks, computers, cell phones, and a host of new types of interfaces, actants, and sensors, these installations find their way across traditional distinctions between bodily intimacy and distance, the private and the public, interiority and exteriority, making them extraordinarily porous. In “The Poetics of Augmented Space,” Lev Manovich historicizes this physical turn and concisely articulates its media-specific and technological tendencies:
 

The 1990s were about the virtual. We were fascinated by new virtual spaces made possible by computer technologies. The images of an escape into a virtual space that leaves the physical space useless and of cyberspace–a virtual world that exists in parallel to our world–dominated the decade. It started with the media obsession with Virtual Reality (VR) …. At the beginning of the 21^st century, the research agendas, media attention, and practical applications have come to focus on a new agenda–the physical–that is, physical space filled with electronic and visual information …. While the technologies imagined by [current] research paradigms accomplish this in a number of different ways, the end result is the same: overlaying layers of data over the physical space.
 

(220-223)

 
The Blur Building is a singular fragment of the installed world that does not have a pre-existing sense. It takes place as an intersection of contemporary architecture, art, and cybernetics. It installs mixed worlding to the extent that it opens not only an augmented space, with physical and information dimensions overlaid, but also an augmented temporality insofar as the temporal object is layered with digital eventualization of experience. This project towards mixed worlding may not have a sense. However, the ingenuity and the innovations involved on artistic, architectural, and cybernetic planes may well lead one to claim that the Blur Building is all about an already announced or desired construction or creation of the sense of the mixed world, relying on what goes on in practice or in performance. Such a claim would then be in alignment with a number of efforts in more or less radical versions of socio-cultural constructivism and with certain implications of ideas of unfolding parallel worlds (possible and/or actual).¹⁹ On this score, Diller & Scofidio’s work and our involvement with this work supposedly demonstrate that contemporary worldmaking makes sense of the mixed world through cultural and technological inventions that mix virtuality and actuality functionally, given various contextual constraints for us and the architects. The Blur Building would thus be of interest because it makes a double enactive and constructive effort: not only towards virtualizing an otherwise stable architecture to the point of “losing the building” in any traditional (visual) sense (see Wolfe), but also an effort towards actualizing an otherwise transcendentally inclined technology so as to affect embodiment and the inhabitants’ relation to sense and to the sensible. This double effort will lead away from a transcendent worldview and an image of Blur as having a pregiven sense to be revealed or disclosed. It will likewise dispel notions of an external, pre-existing, independent world, and attendant ideas of resemblance and representation. It should lead one past thinking that this project is meaningful by way of an adequate resemblance to the world that we as visitor-inhabitants may uncover. Rather, as a mixed world it becomes meaningful through a more difficult or complex practice of worldmaking that occurs through the architects’ ingenious creation and construction, as well as through our experiences in Blur that surely construct the sense of this world in many ways. It engages in an adaptive, functional symbolism of the world that we might come to share, through a long, perhaps infinite pragmatic conversation concerned with a worlding blurred in various ways.²⁰
 
Certainly, constructive worldmaking accounts for much of what is at stake in Blur as inventive mixing. The relevance of this approach makes critics consider the possibility of characterizing Diller & Scofidio as “engineers of experience,”²¹ and it seemingly allows a treatment of their work as part and parcel of constructing a “technological sublime” for a mixed world–one that makes landscape, climate, and technology intersect with its inhabitants.²² From this perspective, Blur is essentially a manufactured cloud with an embedded viewing deck, the Angel Deck, hovering over Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. Significantly, the exterior “skin” of the building is based on reactualizing the tensegrity concept developed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s. The entire building (100 meters wide, 65 meters deep, and 25 meters in height), including all the decks, can thus be seen as a structure that is, in principle, omnidirectional, non-linear, and yet able to distribute all the local loads because the combinations of tension and integrity allow for coupling a number of continuous cables (in tension) and discontinuous members (in compression) so as to enclose a volume (Schafer 93). Access to the building is secured by tunnels and bridges across the water, along with walkways and stairs that start and end at the surface of the lake, so as to allow passages through the Blur Building as a made environment.
 
A constructivist approach also informs us that the artifactual mist-cloud is generated from the lake through a hidden, complex system that pumps and filters the water. Visitorinhabitants meet this system primarily at the end-interface, in the form of more than 31,000 small, high-pressure fog nozzles passing through the building, a design invented by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya for the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka.
 

 

The pumps are operated via a computerized climate control. This smart weather system reads temperature, humidity, as well as the speed and direction of the wind in order to regulate water pressure and continuously adjust to changing climate conditions. This weather system keeps the spread of the mist-cloud largely within range (a 300 meter radius from the lakeshore entry) and also controls the intensity of the fog, while limiting the amount of chlorine, bacteria, and toxins in the water and fog, in accordance with the values decreed by the Swiss authorities (Diller and Scofidio, Blur 362-363). One might observe that this weather system is the aspect of the Blur Building that goes furthest in stressing the porosity of the distinction between architecture and the environment, and in commenting, somewhat silently, on the remarkable development of environmentally sustainable architecture.²³

 
However, although both the mist-cloud itself and the smart weather system controlling it can be said to make good constructive sense of this world, they are also hinges around which turn all practically constructive strategies for redeeming a clear vision of and insight into this world. For they simultaneously introduce a perpetual blurring of any horizon and imprint registers of sensation other than those open to the clear and appropriative sense of sight. In fact, the delimiting exploration in the Blur Building of visual modalities of sense and sensation might well lead one to rather strong statements regarding epistemological and ontological aspects of the mixed world in play. To be sure, in this project there is very little world in the visual sense of an exterior, transcendent mundus, that is, the cosmos as a well composed, complete order in which one might find a place, a dwelling, and identifiable elements of orientation. Thus, this is not of a world down here that one could pass through to a télos outside this world, just as there is no longer any spirit of the world, nor a History before whose tribunal one could stand. The blur as “the vague open” of the building, as the fuzzy sense of a mixed world, suggests that there is no longer any assignable signification of “world.” Alternatively, that the “world” is withdrawing, bit by bit, from the entire order of clear signification available to us as its living, traversing, desiring inhabitants. Except, perhaps, the non-assured cosmic signification of world as universe–announced or called up as an infinite, misty expansion. A mixed world, the Blur Building is not a matter of meaning that is either revealed or disclosed, announced or desired.
 

Consideration of the Blur Building as mixed world has led Mark B. Hansen to claim, rather pointedly, that Diller & Scofidio’s project is a consequence of today’s “historically unprecedented interpenetration of body and media,” following up on the necessity to develop “a post-visual, affective phenomenology”: “what is at stake in the Blur Building is not simply a ‘seeing that can no longer interpret,’ but a wholesale short-circuiting of the role of vision, such that the affective body is literally compelled to ‘space the void’” (“Wearable Space” 369-370). The strongest confirmation of such a claim for the Blur Building qua “a wholesale short-circuiting of the role of vision,” whose literal forces operate before or beyond insight, is perhaps found rather deeply embedded within the constructions mentioned above: the system of wearable computing as yet another cluster of computers and an extensive wireless network with tracking capacity, distributed across the building. Visitor-inhabitants meet this system at the lakeshore in a two-fold manner. First, there is a personal preferences questionnaire that is filled out at the log-in station. This is scanned and sent to a (hidden) central computer that interprets the information supplied and creates a social profile. These profiles are then downloaded into wireless devices in waterproof “braincoats,” wearable computing raincoats that are handed out to all visitors-inhabitants and that constitute the second component of the wireless system. Once inside the wet mist-cloud of the Blur Building, the wireless network functions as an embedded surveillance system which is, both as a back-end system and as a front-end multitude of micro-scale device-components, largely on the order of the invisible as far as visitor-inhabitants or wearers of its mixed spacing are concerned.

 
Nevertheless, one would want to move at a slower pace here and relinquish, at least for a moment, the emphasis on the historically unprecedented, the strictly post-visual, as well as the literally compelling, non-hermeneutic, and extra-significatory force of the Blur Building qua mixed worlding. To begin, the dematerialization of architecture takes place alongside and inside a revitalization of existing, concrete architectural traditions (e.g., Buckminster Fuller). There is, moreover, no shortage of visual presencing when approaching the Blur Building from a distance, just as a certain modicum of visibility is retained when one can see from the more or less foggy decks, when the numerous LED posts and their colored displays installed as part of the system of wearables send off their blinking signals, and when the braincoats operate their visual interface in red and green colors. Finally, the experiential passage through linguistic or discursive signification towards the literal force of mixing with alterity seems continually complex, to the point of being infinitely extendable. Generally speaking, then, the “post-visuality” at stake, if there is any, seems to solicit a different internal working-through of image-performance and the visible by way of the various immanent modes of blurring vision encountered in this project. Moving carefully along this path, one could begin to approach blurring both by means of the visible and of the auditory spheres of haptics so as to trace how the Blur Building is perhaps not immediately of a literal force beyond sense, but rather remains liable to sense. It touches us both via haptic vision and via an auditory ambience or atmosphere (Stimmung) before or beyond a worldview qua definite cognitive map (Leitbild).
 
Insofar as it touches us from the outside inside global visual culture and its image-world, the Blur Building is not forcing us outside sense without further ado but remains liable to sense as it exposes us to worlding as (our) infinite finitude, letting us ex-ist on the contours, at the sensate limit of the world of sense. It keeps leading us to this limit. By integrating a set of originally or surprisingly inventive cultural-technological experiments in interactive practice, it attracts us towards that which draws the contours of the world as sense. These experiments undertake an immanent transformation of visuality, displacing clarity of sight and sense–here towards a haptic vision in the first place. The LED displays in the mist-cloud and the vaguely graded spectrum of red and green emissions from the braincoats worn in Blur give rise to a kind of new Egypt in Diller & Scofidio’s project: haptic spaces composed in unique ways, of color and by color, juxtapose so many pure tones on flat surfaces (see Deleuze, Francis Bacon 107-113). These haptic spaces solicit a properly haptic functioning of the eye capable of dealing with the “sense” of colors, not primarily in the representational manner related to depth, contour, or relief in an ideal tactile-optical space, nor in a purely manual space where touch is strictly superordinate to the eye. Rather, the sense of the Blur Building qua haptic space implies an in-between seeing, a non-optical close-up rhythm of viewing whose sense of sight behaves just like the sense of touch and generates an inventive experience where figure and ground are perceived to be on the same plane.
 
Thus, Diller & Scofidio’s experiments link cultural conventions and contemporary technics so as to facilitate and even necessitate a haptic exploration of ways to transform the sense of the world. This exploration involves haptic vision but also comprises, sometimes alongside and at other times internal to, several more planes and events in what one would call the multisensory dimension and process of the Blur Building. To the extent that even haptic vision blurs, converting the haptic in the direction of manual space, the sense of this mixed world draws increasingly on other modes of sensation, notably the hearing involved in delineating minimal rhythms and refrains, not only within the large scale ambience of the environment as such, but also, and perhaps especially, within the more intimate data space laid out via the auditory sonar pulsing interface integrated into the braincoats (Diller and Scofidio, Blur 209-223). This pulse undergoes continuous variation, but never ceases to indicate whether other visitor-inhabitants are far away (a decelerated or steady sonar pinging pulse) or close by (an accelerated sonar pinging pulse) and so touches one aurally, providing pressures that are vaguely dispersed but retain a certain regularity that makes possible an outline of semi-distinct dot-lines or sensible navigational horizons in the auditory atmosphere, in the soundscape that forms a rather indeterminate ambient socio-cultural environment.²⁴
 

4. Blurred to Blindness: From Haptic World-Spacing to Originary Tactility

 

… salut, obscurity! Salut to this erasure of figures and schemas! And salut to the blind whom we become … salut to the vision that did not cling to forms and ideas but that let itself be touched by forces. –Nancy, “Salut” 313.

 
Constructivist paths, even ones of haptic vision and hearing, provide us with a sensible image of the Blur Building as a world that mixes virtuality and actuality, just as they facilitate an interpretation of the building as a functionalist symbol of the world at large. Such approaches may vary considerably, may be open to dispute, meet constraints, and go on to reconstruct themselves in the face of a complex environment like this one. Nonetheless, precisely by being too sensible, by making too much sense constructively, and by providing too much of a world-image, be it only one of lo-fi ambient tones, they may be missing the point. They do not address what remains the most difficult question: how is it that Diller & Scofidio’s mixed worlding never ceases to elude the desire for clear sight and its productive, efficient, making and announcement of sense? We cannot answer this question if we presumes that we operate primarily, or even just largely, as demiurges, semi-transcendent creators of the sense of the world.²⁵ We can hardly consider mixed worlding as what touches us, in a blur radical enough to blind, if we hold to the notion that we, or Diller & Scofidio, are the creative enactors at the genesis of the sense of the world, if not of the world as such. Rather, this project shows that the architect is not a traditional manager, bringing order to social space by designing and fashioning the world. Perhaps this argument parenthesizes form, style, and signature in favor of the processual opening of a situation, relinquishes control in favor of a lived experience of indefiniteness and chance, and downplays order and the permanence of inclusion in favor of a more flexible, plastic, and fragmentary potential for transductive individuation. Along these lines, the Blur Building is less a demiurgic, semisublime construction of a meaningful world than an opening formation felt through the ongoing arrangements and modular elements that it proposes in reciprocal cooperation with its visitor-inhabitants. It moves as a uniquely mediating ecotechnical assemblage (of landscape, air, water, steel, and a host of actual architectural vectors alongside networks, computers, databases, sensors and actants, and software code) that proposes to reweave a strong affective bond with and between people, liable in its mixes to unfold towards yet another territory without being constructed as one.²⁶ The charge that a kind of collaborative appropriation of the situation is at stake here should perhaps be tempered by an awareness of the degree to which the Blur Building remains variable, presents possibilities for meaning that cannot be foreseen, and offers an architectural spacing of the moment that involves timeeffects and installs a movement rather like a developing organism.²⁷
 
The Blur Building is, as Hansen has observed, an installation involving wearable space, understood as our experience of phenomenalizing embodiment (our mediatory relation to a now highly technologized life world).²⁸ However, it is perhaps not primarily as an experience of wearable space that it touches us. The Blur Building is also, as Cary Wolfe has argued, an artful system of social communication that uses a perceptual blur to perturb the normativity of mass-mediated global communication. Diller & Scofidio’s project is clearly both, and Hansen and Wolfe respond to important traits: embodiment, wearable computing, and media intimacy in Hansen’s case; perception, communication, and artistic perturbation of massmedia constructions of reality in Wolfe’s. Nevertheless, they are also too eager to enact semantic sense, via strict foci on embodied experience (although this is open to affective sensation) and on social communication (although this is undergoing perturbations of perception). They tend to marginalize or leave out the fact that the Blur Building is not just of a world on meaningful display: it is a problematization of making clear, visual, imaged, productive, consumptive sense of the world.
 
As the subtitle of the artist-architects’ book indicates, the Blur Building attests to a certain care for “the making of nothing.” They, along with the Blur Building, can problematize making sense because the remnants of transcendence in an announced or desired sense, inherent in constructivist making, have already been abandoned in favor of affirming haptic world–spacing as the transimmanence of the world.²⁹ In favor of a practico-tactile sense as existence and techné (Nancy, Sense 45). The world is not the sense we make of it, but rather what we transform transimmanently during our approach to it as a presencing liable to sense. The Blur Building comes into presence not only as a dynamic set of informational affordances liable to sense, but also, and earlier on, as flows of matter and energy affecting us, letting us feel anew that architectural mediation qua territorial spacing was always already intimately connected with providing a protected set of food sources, and that it is the flow of energy that creates stabilizations of worlding in the first place.³⁰ Using this approach, we would be towards the Blur Building when we touch it; touching it is an eventual process of mixed worlding that comes before and surprises current versions of experiencing the life world. It is, then, of an a-visual architexture, a matter of tactile relations opening onto a different existential contact and reaching out energetically at the blurred limit of sight and hearing.³¹ As Diller & Scofidio have it, Blur is “decidedly low definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself” (Blur 162). Blurring world-vision and imaging, beyond, or rather inside-below, haptic vision and Stimmung, to the point of contacting what affects and animates us, is structurally earlier than or ahead of any commonsensical hermeneutic horizon of meaning, as Husserl’s thought of the life world would have it. When the tactile interface of your braincoat, located at the lower and rather intimate bodily region, is activated during the encounter with another world-inhabitant whose scanned profile matches yours with 100% affinity, its tactile vibrancy is hardly a matter of sensible interpretation of an experience.³² Rather, this coming to presence of the touch of the other’s life form, and of other forces and energeia, takes you to the limit of Erlebnis qua a sensation of originary tactility. The ongoing specific differentiation of the Blur Building offers up to us a mixed medium, that is, a dynamic environment for a life in transduction between technology and live culture or, in other words, a mixed medium qua an epiphylogenetic processing of culture, biology, and technics that also lets us live on through means other than life.³³
 

5. At Our Discretion: Among the Almost Immanent … and Untouchable Embeddedness

 

… the there is nothing other than the Wittgensteinian “That” of the world, while at the same time being the world’s original “how”…. It is not a place of places, or a sensorium Dei, or an a priori form. More likely, it would be a priori matter–but here the a priori, in its act of birth, would be the sensible entelechy itself: the unity, opened within itself, of the touched/touching … the worldliness of the world, qua absolute existential condition, exhausts its finite sense–exhausts it, that is, opens it infinitely. Mundus patet. –Nancy, The Sense of the World 159-160.

 

 
As mixed worlding, the Blur Building directly engages the way in which information and communication technologies today move towards becoming indiscernible from any ontological exterior inside (nature, the environment, the milieu, embodiment, organs, bodies, the body). Participating in the emergent movement of pervasive computing, Diller & Scofidio’s project pursues both the disappearance of the computer and the pervasive embedding of computing, and so places us among the invisibly integrated world-spacings of ubicomp, as described by the Intel Corporation around 2001:
 

Computing, not computers will characterize the next era of the computer age. The critical focus in the very near future will be on ubiquitous access to pervasive and largely invisible computing resources. A continuum of information processing devices ranging from microscopic embedded devices to giant server farms will be woven together with a communication fabric that integrates all of today’s networks with networks of the future. Adaptive software will be self-organizing, self-configuring, robust, and renewable. At every level and in every conceivable environment, computing will be fully integrated with our daily lives. (qtd. in McCullough 7)³⁴

 

Here and now, the Blur world and its events are not that of which we make sense. Rather, blurred worlding invisibly overlaid with the pervasively embedded and calm computing of mixed reality (in the widest “sense”) is ecotechnics as how we exist. The world is not what we make or manipulate, but how we exist with a cultural and technological sentiment or affect.³⁵ The sensible entelechy of the Blur Building, its originary opening of the touching/touched in uniquely vague artifactual dynamics and movements, calls for and allows transformation of the sense of our existence in an interactive and performative practice at the edge of the world. It attracts and leads us most when and where it approaches an infinitely finite world delimiting sense, sentiments, and affect. An impersonal, inoperative, disorganized, scattered, and discrete world of tactility prior to rhythmic pulse, image, and clear vision. Structurally earlier than or evading haptic vision, hearing, and manual spacing. Withdrawing even from the distinction between self- and other-reference, which it allows. A world of relational existential tangens which remains fuzzily vague, because liable to sense, whether originally or as a world to come. One whose traits are perhaps not just being-in-theworld or being-towards, but just as much being-with, being-between, being-among … other existents and things. An irreducibly vague world of ecotechnics, because discretely different. One whose touches are delightful or terrifying, beautiful or technologically sublime, depending on the character of the exposition to becoming other elsewhere, in singularly plural contact-among. Perhaps the tangens of this mixed worlding in a place and an era of ubiquitous computing is at its most difficult when its demand is exorbitant, when the embeddedness of the pervasive altogether smoothes space and time and thus demands an impossible tact. At this level of tactful giving/withdrawal, the mixing of the world, which may be all, cannot be struck, grasped, stroked, caressed, kissed, licked, or tasted on any one plane. Of necessity, it can only be mourned, with a certain respect for what exceeds the smallest fragment of erotic light or Eros qua texture, at the limit where touch cannot remain within the confines of the tactile but learns and is learning anew what it feels like to touch without touching. Blur with its blurring goes and comes as it invents the world as an affinity of disjunction and conjunction (do not touch, but touch). As an inventive building of the world, it brings into contiguity, partes extra partes, contact and non-contact where all it touches is the other.³⁶

 

 

 

Real reading goes forward unknowing, it always opens a book like an unjustifiable cut in the supposed continuum of meaning. It must go astray at this break.
 

–Jean-Luc Nancy, “Exscription”

 
In confronting the visual representation of pain and suffering as its object of study and the role that the medium of photography plays in this global enterprise, Susan Sontag’s final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) has served as a touchstone for post-9/11 political and ethical debates, especially in connection with the amorphous “war on terror” that has been waged during the Bush administration, when the state of emergency became standard in American foreign policy.¹ The book took on an even greater resonance in the spring of 2004 with the release of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs in Iraq and against the backdrop of revelations of the harsh treatment of prisoners (or so-called “enemy combatants”) in Guantanamo Bay.²Regarding the Pain of Others contains Sontag’s conscientious reflections and objections to the images of death and destruction that constitute the genres of war and torture photography (see cover art). Her account traces the venerable history of war photography from Roger Fenton’s propagandistic images in the Crimean War that served the nationalist agenda of the British sovereign in 1855 through the Golden Age of photojournalism featuring the auteurship of such celebrated figures as Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith in the Spanish Civil War and World War II to more recent examples of the horrors and disasters of war in places like Rwanda, Somalia, and Sarajevo. Completely lacking in photographic illustrations, Sontag’s survey carefully avoids visual spectacle. Instead, the book features an onslaught of horrific photographs that flash up and pass away in the minds’ eyes of her readers. Eduardo Cadava theorizes the reading and regarding of photographic images as a way we learn about death—as a way of “learning to die.”³ As Cadava and others argue, this lesson relies in large part on the relationship of the photographic image to time—as it exposes finitude and mortality as markers of our being-in-common.⁴ While one is tempted to generalize this as the property of every photograph, it is the unfortunate characteristic of war photography that it puts the corpse (of the dead soldier or civilian) and the ruin (of the destroyed building) at the center of its action. As Sontag writes quite early in her book and in a manner that articulates her view that the photograph is an indexical trace of the referent and therefore cannot but tell the truth: “Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins” (Regarding 8). Sontag’s description of what war photography does foregrounds a litany of destruction–of violent actions that rip open and break apart the body politic and the soldiers who serve its commands (tearing, rending, dismembering, ruining, etc.). But rather than envisioning these images as indexical traces to be comprehended in terms of a transparent logic of appearance (“this is what it’s like”), it would be more to the point in the face of the destruction and the havoc wreaked by and in these images to view these photographs as deadly exposures that occur at the limits of meaning and understanding. Here I am recalling the etymological root of exposure as “being posed in exteriority.”⁵ Such deadly exposures and scorched illuminations put both photography and the reading of photographs on a perpetual war footing.
 
It is interesting to note that the violent imagery that is conjured here—of tearing and rending, of ripping open and eviscerating—returns later in the book with Sontag’s close reading of a photograph that depicts the infamous Chinese torture of a hundred cuts (lingchi). This leads Sontag to the ideas and desires of Georges Bataille and to a group of lingchi photographs derived from the beginning of the twentieth century, from before this practice was outlawed in China in 1905. The images were taken by French troops stationed in cities like Beijing and Tianjin and were first published by Louis Carpeaux just a few years later in France. These photographs were to become a crucial site for philosophical reflection (as well as Buddhist meditation) throughout Bataille’s life, especially after he was given one of these images as a present by his psychoanalyst, Dr. Adrien Borel, in 1925. While Sontag seeks to enlist Bataille’s support for her own arguments, the question remains whether this post-Nietzschean philosopher of laughter and unknowing can be made to serve the somber rhetoric of Sontag’s Regarding. For when Bataille introduces us to something like absolute dismemberment or rending in one of his subversive readings of Hegel and the master/slave dialectic, it is framed in terms of the complicated (or even tortuous) concept of anguished gaiety. In contrast to Sontag, Bataille writes in “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice” with the blackest of humors: “On the contrary, gaiety, connected with the work of death, causes me anguish, is accentuated by anguish, and in return exacerbates that anguish: ultimately, gay anguish, anguished gaiety cause me, in a feverish chill, ‘absolute dismemberment,’ where it is my joy that finally tears me apart, but where dejection would follow joy were I not torn all the way to the end, immeasurably” (25). What happens to the anguished gaiety of Bataille’s gaze upon the work of death and dismemberment and/as the (immeasurable) loss of meaning, which he associates with a practice of sovereignty, that could only take place at the limits or the interruption of discourse—what happens to that gaiety when it becomes appropriated by Sontag’s Regarding, enmeshed as it is in a discourse that seeks to give a sense and a meaning to the pain of others and that thereby practices a form of Hegelian mastery that would claim to avoid the loss of meaning? In this regard, Sontag’s confident and transparent assertions about the photography of war and its horrors (with statements like “this is what it’s like”) mirror Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and a practice of lordship and mastery (Herrschaft) wherein, as Bataille states, “[d]ismemberment is, on the contrary, full of meaning” (27).⁶
 
It is important to stress that Sontag’s discussion of the lingchi photographs never invokes Bataille’s practice of sovereignty and its impossible (or even laughable) relationship with death. According to Arkady Plotnitsky, the sovereign operation marks for Bataille the “irreducible loss of meaning which is also always excessive, in particular with respect to any possibility of containing it by presence, consciousness, or meaning.”⁷ The sovereign operation would disenable Sontag from making sense of the pain of others through the medium of photography and to enlist these images as a type of moral knowledge that is therefore full of meaning. In addition to ignoring the sovereign operation, Sontag overlooks Bataille’s engagement with general economy as the science or the theory of such sovereign practice that manifests at the level of political economy. Finally, rather than acknowledging Bataille’s (non)concept of nonknowledge (nonsavoir) in relationship to the lingchi photograph, Sontag insists that the contemplation of this image offers “a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge” (Regarding 98). In these ways, Sontag’s writing on Bataille remains embroiled in a practice of mastery and in a restricted economy that excludes the practice of sovereignty. However, this is not to overlook that Bataille’s sovereign operation also involves mastery within certain reconfigured limits.⁸ This recalls one of the crucial points that Jacques Derrida makes in his groundbreaking essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve.” Derrida insists that the sovereign operation reconfigures meaning by marking its limits within an excessive field of chance, nonsense, play, and non-knowledge. This is exactly how Bataille practices a “Hegelianism without reserve” and why Derrida writes that unreserved play or chance includes the work of meaning not in terms of any regime of knowledge but in terms of the force of inscription. In the sovereign operation, meaning becomes a function of play and non-knowledge through a process of reinscription or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “exscription.” Derrida’s review of Hegel’s blindspots would also apply to Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others in terms of its “conscientious suspension of play” in the face of the disasters of war. Derrida writes that
 

Hegel has bet against play, against chance. He has blinded himself to the possibility of his own bet, to the fact that the conscientious suspension of play (for example, the passage through the certitude of oneself and through lordship as the independence of self-consciousness) was itself a phase of play; and to the fact that play includes the work of meaning or the meaning of work, and includes them not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of inscription: meaning is a function of play, is inscribed in a certain place in the configuration of a meaningless play.
 

(260)

 
We also need to ask what happens to Sontag’s Regarding and the insistence that “the moral capacity of the photograph is repeatedly defined by its relative ability to confer knowledge and understanding on the viewer” (Beckman 119) if and when one applies Bataille’s radical and unconditional unknowing to it. What is to be done in the face of Bataille’s sovereign insistence upon the “exscription” of meaning? How does one regard that which seeks to expose what Jean-Luc Nancy has called the “infinite discharge of meaning” or that which “withdraws from all signification” (“Exscription” 64)?⁹ This essay addresses such questions by comparing the ways Sontag and Bataille analyze and interpret—as well as fail to analyze and interpret—these infamous and painful lingchi photographs poised at the limits of the sayable and the knowable. In contrast to Sontag’s mastery, Bataille’s (non)concepts (e.g., sovereignty, unknowledge) and the specialized ways in which he deploys them seek to make meaning slide—or even to go beyond meaning—as they laugh in the face of death and the impossible. Following Nancy, the goal of unknowing Sontag’s regarding would be “to read in every line the work or the play of writing against meaning” (62). For a long time, scholars believed that the images that were in Bataille’s possession illustrated the torture of the political prisoner Fu-Zhu-Li, who had been found guilty of the murder of Prince Ao-Han-Oun and who was executed by lingchi on April 10, 1905. However, recent research by Jérôme Bourgon at the East Asian Institute at the University of Lyon has clarified that the victim in Bataille’s photographs was not actually Fu-Zhu-Li but another, unknown criminal from the same period.¹⁰ There are eight extant images from this execution, and four of them were published by Bataille in the final section of The Tears of Eros, his magisterial survey that examines the history of art at the intersection of eroticism and death.¹¹ The confusion stems from the addition of a caption in the book that accompanies one of the photographs and that recites Carpeaux’s summary of the execution of Fu-Zhu-Li. Offering readers a date for one of these images that turns out to be five years later than the abolition of lingchi in the Chinese penal code, Sontag introduces the image in the following way:
 

One of the great theorists of the erotic, Georges Bataille, kept a photograph taken in China in 1910 of a prisoner undergoing ‘the death of a hundred cuts’ on his desk, where he could look at it every day. (Since become legendary, it is reproduced in the last of Bataille’s books published during his lifetime, in 1961, The Tears of Eros.) ‘This photograph,’ Bataille wrote, ‘had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.’”
 

(Regarding 98)

 

Before delving further into this passage, one notes that an extra cut has taken place in Sontag’s transcription of the citation from The Tears of Eros. While the original quotation has a question mark after the word “ecstatic”—”ecstatic(?)”—this has been cut out of Sontag’s version, making for a world of difference. While Sontag calls Bataille the philosopher of Eros, she does not mention here that he is the philosopher for whom Eros is always bound to Thanatos, the promiscuous coupling of sexuality and death that is not that far from Bataille’s Surrealist nemesis Andre Breton’s concept of “convulsive beauty” to which Sontag also refers elsewhere in the book (Regarding 23). This contrasts with an earlier essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in which Sontag writes that what “Bataille exposes in extreme erotic experience is its subterranean connection with death” (61). In this context, one also recalls the title of one of Bataille’s books that binds Eros and Thanatos via the violent acts of the sensual body—Erotism: Death and Sensuality. In the “Introduction,” Bataille states the following formula: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death” (11). The paradoxical formula structures erotism as an exuberance of life that strives for death as its limit experience. Bataille sees death as the continuity of being that discontinuous beings strive for in the passionate embrace of erotic activity. In light of Bataille’s formulation, it is not surprising that the orgasmic climax of sexual release is called the petit mort. The domain of eroticism is marked by violation and the transgression of discontinuous bodies. Bataille writes about this in a way that again invokes the limit. “What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?—a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?” (17). While ignoring the consequences of nonknowledge, this background about erotic violation unto death helps to flesh out and elucidate Sontag’s assertion in Regarding the Pain of Others that the contemplation of this harrowing and tortuous image and its violent depiction of death involves the “liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge” (Regarding 98).

 

 

For Sontag, Bataille clearly had an obsessive and intimate relationship with these photographs, and his regard for them (and upon them) took on the aspect of a daily ritual. In turning and returning to these images, from which others would want to turn away, it seems clear that Bataille wanted to remind himself of something. Sontag comes up with three reasons Bataille would have wanted to gaze upon these gruesome images. These involve taking courage, numbing down, and attesting to injustices. She writes, “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible” (Regarding 98). But Sontag does not consider another reason why images of the atrocious can become objects of contemplation, one that was very close to Bataille’s heart: to laugh in the face of death and the impossible. Steeped in solemnity, Sontag’s Regarding does not tap into the resources of the Nietzschean gay science (fröhliche Wissenschaft) that were pivotal to Bataille’s thinking and his laughter.¹² Time and again in his writings, Bataille turns to “Nietzsche’s Laughter.” He quotes the following as a laudable model: “To see tragic characters founder and to be able to laugh, despite the profound understanding, emotion and sympathy that we feel: this is divine” (The Unfinished System 22). Bataille’s compulsive return to these images stages an encounter with the impossible that goes far beyond an acknowledgment of the existence of the incorrigible and that remains open to the effects of nonknowledge. But this divine laughter derived from excess and full of anguish cannot be read simply as sadistic pleasure or mere maliciousness, for it acknowledges its own foundering and ruin in the same mortal breath. In meditating on his fascination with this Chinese torture victim in The Inner Experience, Bataille considers laughter in the face of ruin without any hope of salvation: “The young and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to the work of the executioner—I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin” (120). This inclusive view of the photographic exposure of suffering as both shared communication and as anguished gaiety is very different from Sontag’s perspective in an earlier essay, “The Image World” in On Photography, which argues that the “feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt” (168). Sontag’s disregard for this vital strand of anguished gaiety that marks the Bataillian corpus seems peculiar because she began her intellectual career in close connection with the renegades of French Surrealism and their transgressions. First of all, one thinks of her edition of Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (1976), which includes a considered and affirmative introduction to his work. Even more relevant to this discussion, one recalls her rigorous analysis of the transgressive eroticism of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye in “The Pornographic Imagination,” published in Styles of Radical Will (1969). Sontag pinpoints here the interlocking of death and eroticism that makes Bataille’s work so distinctive. “One reason that Histoire de l’Oeil and Madame Edwarda make such a strong and upsetting impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death” (60). However, Sontag does not explore either here or in her last book the comic aspects that arise from Bataille’s investigations of death and the laughable attempt to simulate “absolute risk” in view of the fact that death always remains at the limit of the possible and the knowable.¹³ Refusing to let go of the gravity of the situation, “The Pornographic Imagination” avoids an encounter with Bataille’s profound levity and the divinity of laughter. Reviewing the philosopher as pornographer, Sontag insists that Bataille’s “more effective method is to invest each action with a weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically ‘mortal’” (61). While there is no argument regarding the importance of mortality as a critical concern in all of Bataille’s thought, the emphasis on its gravity alone is quite disturbing. The rhetoric of authenticity weighs heavily around the laughing philosopher’s neck in this formulation of being as “being-toward-death.” Indeed, Sontag’s analysis has a much too stuffy existentialist air about it that thoroughly represses what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has termed the “laughter of being” in a brilliant essay of the same name. For Borch-Jakobsen, Bataille’s engagement with mortality means to “die[] of laughter and laugh[] at dying, bent convulsively over the impossible abyss of his own finitude” (752).

 
One of the limits of Sontag’s interpretation involves her reading of Bataille’s “high regard” for lingchi in terms of the rhetoric of transfiguration. Sontag’s move aligns Bataille’s obsession with this image with “religious thinking” in general and with the Christian transmutation of suffering into sacrifice in particular. “Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation” (Regarding 98-99). This is an odd conclusion for a self-professed atheological and iconoclastic thinker like Bataille who rebels against the pieties and sanctities of Christianity, who refuses the mystification of the afterlife, and who resists sublimation, sublation (Aufhebung), and transfiguration in all forms whether in its Hegelian or in its Christian martyr varieties. Indeed, Bataille follows Nietzsche in understanding salvation as a Christian mode of escape, as “the most odious of evasions” (The Inner Experience 12). This lapsed Catholic refuses to transfigure pain and suffering into a passion of the Christ. Instead, his project is to contaminate binary oppositions like divine ecstasy and extreme horror. Rather than using the Christian figure of “transfiguration” and its transcendental overtones, it would be more to the atheological point to speak of a radical reversal when referring, as here, to the site of excess and surplus where extreme suffering and joy meet and exchange places. In this way, the “something more” that Sontag invokes would remain on the side of the remainder (restance). After all, Bataille speaks in The Tears of Eros of the “infinite capacity for reversal” (renversement¹⁴) and not in terms of transfiguration. Similarly, the figure and the strategy of glissement (what makes meaning slide) is more akin to Bataille’s atheological practice than is the glorification (and the raising on high) of a Christian concept like transfiguration. In staking out an atheological resistance to transfiguration, it is important to mobilize the counterthrust of transgression as that which is vital to Bataille’s pornographic sensibility. Early on Sontag senses this in “The Pornographic Imagination” when she expresses great admiration for Bataille and his “profound sense of transgression” (60) and when she even intimates that Bataille outstrips Marquis de Sade in this respect. In her transformation of transgression into transfiguration, one is left wondering whether the late Sontag did not experience a kind of religious conversion experience herself.
 
However, it is by no means correct to say that Bataille necessarily makes a connection between sacrifice and a state of exaltation. This glosses over the important distinction that must be made between sovereignty and lordship or mastery (Herrschaft), which offer different approaches to sacrifice and its “meaning.” Sontag’s inattention to this nuance returns us to Bataille’s confrontation with Hegel in the essay “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” In Bataille’s reading, Hegel sees the institution of sacrifice as a profoundly human activity that exposes one to death and that allows one to contemplate the work of the negative face to face so that the individual “dwells with it” (18). But Bataille also insists that the Hegelian model of sacrifice is built on a ruse and a subterfuge because the one who sacrifices and who tarries with the negative in this way must stay alive in order to attain mastery. This leads to the following comedic paradox as outlined by Derrida: “To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life, to work, to defer pleasure, to limit the stakes, to have respect for death at the very moment when one looks directly at it—such is the servile condition of mastery and of the entire history it makes possible” (255). Hegel’s conception of sacrifice and of “the servile condition of mastery” therefore always holds something back, in contrast to Bataille’s insistence that “sovereignty is NOTHING” (The Accursed Share Vol. 3 430).¹⁵ Bataille exposes the comedy at the heart of Hegel’s theory of sacrifice and the mastery or lordship that it pretends to maintain as sovereignty laughs at the recognition that it needs to stay alive.¹⁶ “In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead …. But it is a comedy!” (“Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” 19). Bataille concludes the essay by suggesting that sacrifice remains servile when it is tied to the production of meaning and that it can only become sovereign and approach the state of exaltation when it sacrifices or lets go of meaning and the desire to make a meaning out of death. This is when it becomes, in Derrida’s words, the “heedless sacrifice of presence and meaning” (257). Bataille concludes: “Sacrifice, consequently, is a sovereign, autonomous manner of being only to the extent that it is uninformed by meaningful discourse. To the extent that discourse informs it, what is sovereign is given in terms of servitude. Indeed by definition what is sovereign does not serve” (25-26). Returning to Sontag, this close reading helps to qualify her statement that the state of exaltation necessarily follows from sacrifice while foregrounding that her own relationship to (the representation of) pain and sacrifice remains servile because she earnestly wants to figure out “What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering” (99) rather than opening up to the burst of sovereign laughter that arises out of these photographic exposures of and to nonknowledge. In this context, it is well to recall a pithy statement from Bataille in the lecture “Nonknowledge, Laughter and Tears,” where he underscores that “the unknown makes us laugh” (The Unfinished System 135).
 
One can also take issue with Sontag’s assurance that “Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation” (98-99). Sontag is careful here not to make Bataille into a sexual pervert or sadist who would derive pleasure from the witnessing of violent torture. Nevertheless, the attempt to shield Bataille completely from the pleasure principle and from any enjoyment of this image can only be done at the expense of overlooking those transgressive aspects of his work. In “The Tears of Photography,” Herta Wolf accurately pinpoints such ambivalent combinations as “agony and laughter” (74) and “laughter and mourning” (77) that are crucial to The Tears of Eros as a whole and that Sontag does not articulate in her analysis of Bataille. Given Bataille’s complex ideas about laughter and tears, pleasure and pain are intertwined in an impossible knot that cannot be so easily disentangled when it comes to his experience of the lingchi photographs. Derrida is also fascinated by the anguished burst of Bataillian laughter that breaks out when confronted with the comedy of Hegelian philosophy, with its notion of sublation (Aufhebung) that works to preserve meaning, and with the idealist conceit that “nothing must be definitely lost in death” (256-257). Derrida continues, “Absolute comicalness is the anguish experienced when confronted by expenditure on lost funds, by the absolute sacrifice of meaning: a sacrifice without return and without reserves” (257). It is this unsavory mixture of anguish spiked with laughter that Bataille experiences when casting his eyes upon the excruciating losses suffered by the lingchi victims, by these sacrifices without return and without reserves. Indeed, Bataille’s horrifying laughter affirms the absolute rending that cannot be contained by the Hegelian (or Sontagian) work of the negative. One encounters the same type of laughter in Bataille’s erotic classic The Story of the Eye, but here the tone becomes more mocking, shocking, and scandalous. It should be recalled that the pseudonymous and excremental author of this book is Lord Auch, a shortened form of aux chiottes (to the shithouse). In light of this discussion, Lord Auch should be viewed in the context of the passage from lordship to sovereignty. Bataille’s biographer Michael Surya believes that “[o]f all the books he wrote it is certainly the one in which laughter is the most perceptible” and that it marks the “obscene laugh of an apostate” (102). The sexual and criminal adventures of the narrator, Simone, and of Sir Edmond as they carouse their way through Spain and that climax in their murder and rape of a Catholic priest laughs in the face of Christian pieties and organized religious institutions and elucidates another facet of Bataille’s atheological deployment of a derisive and obscene laughter that functions as a mode of transgression.
 
Returning to Sontag’s review of the Chinese torture victim, one notices that she conflates him with the Christian martyr by bridging the religious symbolism of Eastern and Western visual cultures. While Bataille’s original publication contains an illustration of Aztec human sacrifice (ca. 1500) to serve as a visual comparison with the Chinese torture victim, Sontag fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian. Rather than attributing the comfortably numbed expression on the victim’s face to the administration of a dose of opium (which both Bataille and his biographer Michael Surya mention¹⁷), Sontag refers to “a look on his upturned face as ecstatic as that of any Italian Renaissance Saint Sebastian” (Regarding 98). Sontag invokes a comparison with this Christian saint and martyr whom the Roman emperor Diocletian in the third century A.D. had tied to a post and shot through with arrows. Saint Sebastian would become a favorite subject of many paintings of the Renaissance such as those by the Paduan artist Andrea Mantegna in the late 1400s. The ecstatic again becomes an unmarked term for Sontag as it is placed in the redemptive light of both Christian salvation and Renaissance art. However, it is important to reiterate that Bataille introduces the term “ecstatic” at the beginning of the section “Chinese Torture” in The Tears of Eros with a question mark.¹⁸ There is a mark of uncertainty as to whether Bataille feels comfortable in invoking this term in reference to the Chinese torture victim. Even when Bataille refers to ecstasy without question or mark further on in this same text, it is not to be taken uncategorically as something that is revelatory or that offers salvation. The ambivalence and the capacity for radical reversal continue here as “religious ecstasy” is coupled with that perverse mode of eroticism known as “sadism” (206), and is then followed by the unnatural pairing of “divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror” (207). In these ways, the ecstatic in The Tears of Eros inscribes a contaminating movement of transgression rather than a state of redemptive transfiguration. It also should be recalled that the ecstatic is inextricably linked for Bataille to the pursuit of sovereignty. Bataille’s atheological pursuit of ecstasy at the limits of knowledge leaves one with that same empty-headed feeling from which laughter bursts–anguished gaiety. As he says, “I would gladly define ecstasy: feeling gay but anguished—from my immeasurable stupidity.”¹⁹ In contrast to any knowledge of the ecstatic that could be derived from Sontag’s comparative investigations of art historical discourse along with its gallery of tortured figures of Christian piety, Bataille’s transgressive unknowing empties out onto a logical abyss in an aporetic structure that confronts the “identity of these perfect contraries” (Tears of Eros 207).
 
In resisting Sontag’s theological recuperation of the lingchi photographs, it is also important to remember that according to Bataille’s atheological investigations of the religious life and the spiritual domain, “God is an effect of nonknowledge” (The Unfinished System 146). Atheology—as the study of the effects of nonknowledge—can take many forms, but for Bataille it always places us in relation to something impossible. As Bataille writes in (and with) “Nietzsche’s Laughter,” “Fundamentally, the spiritual domain is that of the impossible. I will say that ecstasy, sacrifice, tragedy, poetry, laughter are forms whereby life situates itself in proportion to the impossible” (The Unfinished System 21). The impossible—where knowledge ends and where sovereign laughter breaks out—must have its place when Regarding the Pain of Others, when reading these war photographic exposures of pain, suffering, and death. However, such sovereign laughter has been repressed in Sontag’s account of the pain of others, where for her, the only morally sanctioned sentiments appear to be mourning and memorializing and where any other response is viewed as disrespectful or morally suspect. Faced with such images, Sontag writes: “No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia. There now exists a vast repository of images that make it harder to maintain this kind of moral defectiveness” (Regarding 114-115). But from Bataille’s perspective, an account that takes these images as deadly serious and that seeks to learn from them leads only to mental servitude. One sees again how Sontag’s Regarding cannot extricate herself from Hegelian dialectics as she disregards Bataille’s sovereign insistence that “[t]aking death seriously tends one toward servitude” (The Unfinished System 254).
 
In contrast, Bataille reinscribes the concept of ignorance in terms of the (non)concept of nonknowledge. Bataille addresses this point at the conclusion of “Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears” in his discussion of Ernest Hemingway’s writings. “In any case, it seems to me that if what is seductive about Hemingway, which is connected to ignorance, might be attained by us, it can only be attained on one condition, that of having first been to the end of the possibilities of knowing. It is only beyond knowledge, perhaps in the nonknowledge that I have presented, that we could conquer the right to ignorance” (The Unfinished System 150). While Sontag’s ignorance bespeaks of an innocence to which no one has a right anymore, Bataille’s is a second naivete that we must earn the right to have once again. Bataille’s ignorance is not constituted by the gaps within knowledge that are waiting to be filled. Instead, ignorance comes from “having first been to the end of the possibilities of knowing” (150). It is something derived from coming up against the limits of knowledge (as a limit experience), and it can in no way be considered as a moral defect. In contrast to Sontag’s version, ignorance of the type that goes beyond knowledge inhabits this photographic discourse of death and the sovereign loss of its meaning by necessity, and it is in a state of such ignorance that an anguished laughter bursts out. For the consequences of nonknowledge lead to the reversal of any grim apprehension of these images. In “The Consequences of Nonknowledge,” Bataille babbles: “Faced with nonknowledge, I experienced the feeling of performing in a comedy, of having a kind of weakness in my position. At the same time, I am in front of you as a babbler, offering all the reasons I would have for keeping my mouth shut” (The Unfinished System 115). Unlike Sontag’s Regarding, Bataille looks to these deathly images in terms of an ethics of the impossible and risks bringing together nonknowledge, laughter, and tears.²⁰
 
The comically repressed returns with a vengeance, however, at the end of Regarding the Pain of Others. For the photographic encounter with nonknowledge and the question of sovereign laughter (laughing at nothing) invades Sontag’s final analysis of Jeff Wall’s theatrical tableau, Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992. Interestingly enough, Dead Troops Talk is the only avowedly fictional and staged photograph that is analyzed in the book, and perhaps this is what gives Sontag the license to speculate and to imagine at the limits and to move beyond the “truth-telling” approach to photography that guides her reading of the lingchi images and of the numerous photojournalistic images that depict the horrors of war. But before turning to a closer analysis of Wall’s image, it is necessary to review (and to question) Sontag’s theorization of the photograph and her arguments as to why and how the photograph offers a privileged mode of representation. Sontag emphasizes here that Bataille’s object of contemplation is a photograph rather than a painting, an indexical trace of the real rather than an iconic likeness governed by mimesis, and she consciously differentiates it from Titian’s mythological painting of The Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1575). It is “a photograph, not a painting; a real Marsyas, not a mythic one—and still alive in the picture” (Regarding 98). It could be argued that the sobriety of Sontag’s account is derived in large part from her assumptions about photographs as bearers and witnesses of the truth of the world and in providing documentary evidence of its atrocities. It also should be noted that Sontag asserts this point of view in spite of the fact that she recounts a few well-known historical examples of manipulated war photographs in the book. But Sontag’s discussion of Alexander Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (1863) and of other staged images is still predicated on the assumption that the photograph is indexical of truth. So while we may be “surprised to learn [that] they were staged, and always disappointed” (Regarding 55), the existence of such images in no way challenges the view that even these photographs are tied to the (falsified) real. Sontag asserts that the superiority of photography over painting and other earlier modes of representation is derived from its status as a physical trace and that this is particularly important when dealing with the remembrance of things past and in respect to the dead. “Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death. Because an image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens, photographs were superior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past and the dear departed” (Regarding 24).
 
In keeping company with death in this way, photography forges our being-in-common and utters the truth of community. This recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s definition of community in (and of) The Inoperative Community. Nancy writes, “A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth” (15). In recalling death as the (groundless) ground of community, photographic theory that is responsive to such “community exposed photography” affords another approach. This is a point of view that is less concerned with Sontag’s emphasis on indexical reference and much more interested in photography as that which exposes the limits of our knowing. An expository approach to photography, with its emphasis on exposure (as being posed in exteriority), provides being-in-common with both the medium of its sharing and the incompleteness of its sharing. In The Tears of Eros, Bataille moves away from indexical concerns (e.g., the acknowledgement of the veracity of photographic representation) toward the way in which these images of torture touch him in a visceral way and expose him to the anguish and intoxication of the mortal truth of community. Such an exposure is accompanied by a distribution of the sensible that fails to make sense. Confronted by this state of unknowing, Bataille comments that “this straightforward image of a tortured man” opens up “the most anguishing of worlds accessible to us through images captured on film” (Tears 205). These Chinese torture photographs foreground for Bataille the experience of limits situated at the precipice of non-knowledge, laughter, and tears. They leave us with question marks and lay bare the disquieting magnitude of a horror at the heart of being human that remains very difficult to accept or comprehend fully. Contemplating the same torture photographs in Guilty, Bataille asks rhetorically: “Who can accept that a horror of this magnitude would express ‘what you are’ and lay bare your nature?” (39).²¹ While Sontag’s book certainly does review how images of war and torture induce a range of emotions from horror to numbness to compassion, such considerations move analysis away from the concrete moral knowledge obtained from the contemplation of these images as photographic indices. In contrast to Bataille’s naked exposures of a loss or surplus of meaning, Sontag’s focus on (and regarding of) the pain of others seeks to make sense of suffering and loss and to ask “What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering” (Regarding 99).
 
In reviewing Sontag’s writings on photography, one notices that Regarding the Pain of Others is just one of a number of occasions when Sontag relies on a medium-specific binary opposition between painting and photography and in a way that privileges photography and its relationship to truth or reality. In “The Heroism of Vision,” Sontag offers the conventional wisdom that the photograph represents the truth that painterly mimesis cannot hope to capture, locating the basis for this position in nineteenth-century discourses and aligning this belief with the ethics of realism found in both “literary models” and “independent journalism.” Sontag writes:
 

The consequences of lying have to be more central for photography than they ever can be for painting, because the flat, usually rectangular images which are photographs make a claim to be true that paintings can never make. A fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism.”
 

(On Photography 86)

 

Here Sontag opens up photography to the larger discursive spaces of the nineteenth century and argues that it shares the space of “truth telling” with the empirical sciences, investigative reporting, literary realism, and the disciplinary practice of history itself. All of these discourses share a belief in the transparency of their signifiers (whether using language, laboratory equipment, or images) to access the truth of the real. In delivering the physical trace of the referent in its images, photographic realism again grounds its claims to truth telling in its indexical status. By insisting upon the further dichotomy between “beautification” (derived from the fine arts) and “truth-telling” (derived from the sciences), Sontag finds yet another way to contrast photography and painting and to reinforce the binary opposition between the photographic index and the painterly icon.

 
This semiotic distinction between photographs and paintings as two distinct types of signs has its source and fullest expression in the writings of Charles Saunders Peirce at the end of the nineteenth century. Peirce differentiates photographs from mimetic likenesses or icons because photos are direct emanations and/or physical traces of the referent. Peirce writes, “this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection” (106). As smoke is to fire or as a footprint is to the foot that deposited it, so is the photograph to its reference. In “The Image World,” Sontag alludes directly to one of Peirce’s examples and adds another of her own (in a way that furthers the relationship of photography and death) as she again privileges the photograph over painting on account of the material structure of the trace.
 

[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
 

(On Photography 154)

 

From a postmodern perspective, this is a bold and dangerous claim because it would keep photography immune from Nietzsche’s famous dictum that there are “no facts, only interpretations” by granting it a sacred space of registration and emanation that is somehow exempt from either a logic of mediation or an ideological contest of positions. Nietzsche’s dictum is useful for challenging any dogmatic acceptance of photographic facts because it insists that the facticity ascribed to photography by Sontag on account of its indexical status is virtually meaningless without its immediate immersion into a field of interpretative contexts and possibilities. One can apply Nietzsche’s query in The Genealogy of Morals to Sontag as follows: “What does that mean? For this fact has to be interpreted: in itself it just stands there, stupid to all eternity, like every ‘thing-in-itself’” (107). The invocation of Nietzsche here is also particularly apt for a critique of the author of Regarding the Pain of Others in that Nietzsche does not believe that even pain is immune from the work (and play) of interpretation and the specificity of context. To recite The Genealogy of Morals, “I consider even ‘psychological pain’ to be not a fact but only an interpretation” (129). With an absolute insistence on the photograph as the material trace of the absent referent, Sontag uses the medium of photography to make a claim about knowledge (and certainty) that is a far cry from Nietzsche’s ongoing suspicion of the claim to the noumenon (and the numinous) or from Bataille’s incessant and insistent practice of unknowing. The aforementioned quotation from Sontag, with its privileging of photography over painting on the grounds of indexical registration and emanation, would also be rather troubling to Bataille in light of his views on sovereignty and loss. It is as if Sontag wants to use this presumption about the certainty of the index as a means to catapult discussion about photography beyond troubling questions that come with representation and the opening of a necessary gap between the referent and the indexical trace. But there always has to be an excess of or loss in photographic representation, and one can argue that this is exactly the type of irreducible loss that defines the sovereignty that is championed by Bataille. As Uziel Awret puts it, “For Batailles [sic], ‘sovereignty’ denotes a form of theoretical thinking that accounts for the irreducible loss in representation and meaning that any representation entails” (28-29). The fact that Sontag remains immune to the possibility of such a contamination of the real and its transparency by the apparatus of representation points to the ultimately modernist presuppositions of her photo-critical project in Regarding the Pain of Others.

 
Another pressure on the truth claims that Sontag attributes to the photographic index has come with the rise of digital photography. Digital media are closely connected to a painterly and iconic mode of rendering even if they visually simulate the indexical signs of photographic media. This relation has been widely theorized by writers on digital photography such as Florian Rötzer, Lev Manovich, and Peter Lunenfeld. Lunenfeld’s essay “Art Post-History: Digital Photography and Electronic Semiotics” is particularly relevant for this discussion because he specifically takes up this rupture with the Peircean legacy in the section “Semiotics, Photography & Truth Value of the Electronic Image.” Lunenfeld argues, “The inherent mutability of the digital image poses a challenge to those who have striven to create a semiotic of the photographic” (94). Taking his cue from Hollis Frampton and putting pressure on indexical truth, Lunenfeld invokes the phrase “dubitative” (or inclined to doubt) to characterize the digital image and its reinsertion of the painterly icon into photography. “What has happened to this class of signs, and to the semiotics of the image in general, with the advent of digital photography? With electronic imaging, the digital photographic apparatus approaches what Hollis Frampton refers to as painting’s ‘dubitative’ processes: like the painter, the digital photographer ‘fiddles around with the picture till it looks right’” (95). The rhetoric of the dubitatively digital and the doubt it tends to produce would appear to be more in line with Bataille’s affirmation of nonknowledge and his suspicion of “a certain stability of things known” (The Unfinished System 133).
 

 

Returning to Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk, it is important to point out that the artist has used digital photography for many years and that this particular image evinces its dubitative quality and iconic characteristics. The digital aspect of Dead Troops Talk must be stressed over and above the overt staging and theatricality of this famous 7 ½ × 13 feet photograph, displayed in a light box, that resonates with the genre of grand history paintings. Breaking with the rhetoric of the index, Wall discusses the “hallucinatory image that [he] wanted to make” in a recent interview. He confesses that “this was one of the first or second things that I ever did with a computer” and that it was “photographing things that could never have happened” so that it became a “kind of a release of all the constraints of the actual photography.”²²Dead Troops Talk is also described in the recent Tate Modern retrospective on Wall’s photography as follows: “The figures were photographed separately or in small groups and the final image was assembled as a digital montage.”²³ While Sontag refers to Dead Troops Talk as “the antithesis of a document” (123) in Regarding the Pain of Others, she does not mention that digital manipulation is part and parcel of its fabrication. This oversight further illustrates that while Sontag can acknowledge the constructed nature of this photograph (because this does not challenge the index, only suggesting that some photographers do lie), she does not acknowledge that Dead Troops Talk is actually a digital photograph because of the risks that the dubitatively iconic image brings to the truth claims of the indexical photograph.

 
Jeff Wall’s photograph stages a ghastly scenario where Soviet soldiers killed in an ambush in the war in Afghanistan in the mid-eighties seem to rise up from the dead to speak of the horrors of war. In looking at Wall’s image, one is reminded of Bataille’s “The Practice of Joy Before Death” and its affirmation of an explosive laughter that cannot recuperate violence, destruction, and general havoc. One overhears a divine laughter capable of affirming its own demise and ruin when Bataille writes the following: “There are explosives everywhere that perhaps will soon blind me. I laugh when I think that my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them” (Visions of Excess 239).²⁴ In this hallucinatory vision, one sees the dead soldiers talking, joking, and laughing with each other. One of these ghoulish characters even holds up a rat to the face of his companion as if to underscore that one must laugh in the face of death. But Sontag’s review of Dead Troops Talk avoids the mention of any such prankster antics on the part of the dead troops and offers a more somber reading that is devoid of Bataille’s anguished gaiety. While touching on the impossible and on the limits of saying, Sontag imagines for us what Wall’s “stupor troopers” would say about the horrors of war if they were to return to the land of the living. She does this by staging an archetypical scene that founds community around the death of others, which recalls Maurice Blanchot’s idea that “[i]f the community is revealed by the death of the other person, it is because death is itself the true community of mortal beings: their impossible communion” (11). But in stark contrast to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “inoperative community” and its resistance to the communal fusion of the mass subject, Sontag assumes the voice of being-in-common such that she becomes the medium that channels these dead talkers. (This is a doubly ironic scene when one considers that an image has been asked to do the talking.) Paradoxically, Sontag intervenes to speak their silence and to speak for all of us in this rather totalizing and presumptuous gesture: “What would they have to say to us? ‘We’—this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes” (Regarding 125-126). Finally, the communication cuts off so that Sontag’s transmissions from the dead break down and lose their subjects: “Can’t understand. Can’t imagine” (126). From Bataille’s perspective, Sontag’s gesture is a classic pedagogical ruse that plays at imagining what cannot be imagined (what comes from the dead), and that feigns and simulates the teaching of death from the land of the living. To recall Bataille’s remarks on this impossible subject: “We often imagine ourselves in the position of those who we see dying, but we can only justifiably do this on the condition of living” (The Unfinished System 119). Sontag turns from the dead to those lucky enough to be alive as she concludes: “Can’t understand. Can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right” (Regarding 126). Following Bataille and his laughter, the last sentence of Sontag’s book offers her final recuperation of the unimaginable (and its sovereignty) into the service of righteous knowledge (and its mastery).
 
In these ravings from beyond the grave that signal the incommensurability between the living and the dead, between the photographic witness and the war victim, as well as between lordship/mastery and sovereignty, the death sentences of Dead Troops Talk on their loss of subjectivity recall another line from Bataille’s impossible text “The Teaching of Death” (1952). “Of course,” Bataille intones, “talking about death is the most profound practical joke” (119). One can only wonder what a different text Regarding the Pain of Others would have been if Sontag had incorporated here and elsewhere in her book the morbidly witty lesson of Dead Troops Talk as they touch upon the impossible and as they expose themselves and their viewers to Bataille’s triple threat of unknowing, laughter, and tears. What if a more self-ironic Susan Sontag had taken Georges Bataille’s and Jeff Wall’s profound lesson of nonknowledge to heart when writing about this image and about all the other images in the book classified as documentary photographs that cloak themselves in the “reality effect” of the index and, in this way, hold themselves sacrosanct? But these horrific images—for all their ethical demands and their calls for decisive action—cannot defend themselves against the debilitating effects of unknowledge and the surge of derision (and indecision) that they bring in their wake and in their unworking. Thus Bataille’s unknowing and his anguished gaiety ponder the profound practical joke that has been played on Sontag’s Regarding. “Reflection on death is much more seriously derisive than living, it is always scattering our attention, and we speak in vain about exerting ourselves, when death is at stake” (119).
 

Illustrations

 

 

• Figure 1. Anonymous, The Chinese Torture of One Hundred Cuts, ca. 1905.
• Figure 2. Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk, 1991-1992. Silver dye bleach transparency in aluminum lightbox, 229 × 417 cm.

 

I.

 

What monstrous new being appears in the gaze of a person watching another at a computer that is connected to unknown, unseen, untold others?
 

–Mark Poster

 
San Marino, California, 1949. A little girl falls down a well. Rescue crews are soon on the scene, and for a grueling 52 hours, working night and day, they try to save the girl. News media cover the story as it unfolds, unaware, however, that they are covering not a rescue but an exhumation: the girl had in fact died before the cameras, crews and spectators arrived.
 
The death of Kathy Fiscus is considered a watershed in media history, as this story was the first to be broadcast live, with uninterrupted coverage, for a full 27 hours, by television news. Transfixed viewers stayed up all night to follow the story, and the news sensation is credited with single-handedly boosting sales of TV sets, still a novelty to households in 1949. Hopes dimmed as the night wore on, and viewers began to fear the worst. The race against time, covered live and shared by viewers around the world, masked a bitter irony. The first live TV coverage was not live but belated; viewers were held in suspense not by the present, or even by a future revelation, but by the uncanny and retrospective temporality of what will have been. Live TV news is born in this Orphic turn that captures not the present instant but only a belated moment and a spectral presence. One can speak in this case of a paradoxically belated horror; the future anterior haunts the spectacle, and the moment of the girl’s death returns to haunt those who unknowingly participated in her wake. If we have inherited this haunted legacy of TV, we have not yet settled accounts with the ghost that was broadcast from San Marino.
 
Today we see in the Kathy Fiscus story the first rehearsal of now-familiar staples of television: prurient coverage of “human interest” topics, exploitative violence, permanent distraction from politics, and passive consumption. It is indeed tempting to see this media-event as the origin of our sensationalistic mediascape. Looking back this way, however, we may only repeat the Orphic turn that haunted viewers in 1949. When did media come to saturate the public sphere? How to heal the breach that makes the live moment always doubled by its alienating spectacle? How to rescue the singular life broadcast from San Marino across the world? The race against time, the struggle of life against death turned out to be unfortunately “too late” for Kathy Fiscus. But a more unsettling belatedness haunts this story. This belated horror resembles that described by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida as he pores over the photograph of a man condemned to death. Barthes is gripped by the convergence in the image of two disparate times: the man will die, and yet he has already died (96).¹ Jacques Derrida refines this insight to claim that the poignancy of the photographic image lies in its status as impossible referent and evanescent presence. Speaking of Barthes’s punctum and its haunting temporality, Derrida asks, “is not Time the ultimate resource for the substitution of one absolute instant by another, for the replacement of the irreplaceable, the replacement of this unique referent by another that is yet another instant, completely other and yet still the same? Is not time the punctual form and force of all metonymy – its instant recourse?” (Mourning 60).² Every moment, even “live,” Derrida suggests, is made spectral by this “resource” and “instant recourse”: whatever appears appears “as” itself, yet masking the instant duplication that haunts the image. There is no source, in this light, that is not a re-source. The well in San Marino is such a haunted source; what the viewers saw as the “tragedy” of Kathy’s death–thus fully narratable, if only by an abuse of genre–covers over the poignant and punctual re-source that always and already replaced her, as live television spectacle. As such, the Kathy Fiscus “story” is an allegory of television. Viewers were drawn into a spectacle that evoked primal fears and elementary struggles, but also the consolations of community reduced to the bare essentials of myth. Here at the well we seem to see the very source of community. The re-source of the well, however, escapes from view, making the viewer the haunted carrier of a visual secret, the poignant belatedness of the live image.
 
The aim of this essay is to bring out ghosts that haunt community in such mediatic spectacles. In so doing, I articulate a notion of community that is expanded to a global scale. I explore the figure of the viral in tandem with that of the ghost to advance a theory of the ethics of spectatorship. The ghost, I argue, emerges as the figure of community’s impossibility, indexing a confrontation with what it both banishes and aims to manage, contain, and lay to rest. The death of Kathy Fiscus is an instructive example here; it brought together a community of viewers in a spectacle of death, a redemptive, if painful, experience of common loss. As we will see, this scenario, including its haunted well, is compulsively repeated in narratives of mediatic communities. This would seem to echo René Girard’s claim that social collectivities ground themselves in the sacrifice of one of their number. And yet behind the single victim of the spectacle there looms a vast number; it is worth noting that Kathy Fiscus was born August 21, 1945, a mere twelve days after the Nagasaki strike. The race to save the little girl’s life is shadowed in this way by a global necropolitical force that relegates other people’s lives to the category of collateral damage. It may seem ungenerous to ascribe such an anti-morality of survival to the well-meaning spectators of Kathy Fiscus’s story. And yet a necropolitical logic binds together the spectators of the events in San Marino. To defend life at home is not merely to hold death at bay, but to enforce the distinction between valuable and disposable lives. Moreover, as Dina Al-Kassim argues, the figure of the innocent girl victim provides a frequent and reliable “link between social consensus and repressive force” (52), by means of which the “cultural production of innocence” both infantilizes the public sphere and legitimates the state’s discriminatory policing of minorities (53). An illusion of community, a phantom public, is conjured in this blind act of necropolitical enforcement. This illusion of community is alternately a phantom public of mass mediatic spectacle, and the phantom of a global context, the untold millions who never amount to a story, but only haunt the edges of the scene as its blindly excluded.
 
The TV reporter on the scene in San Marino, Stan Chambers, seems haunted by the events he covers. A young man at the time, this cheerful and popular reporter has never stopped paying his respects and giving credit to the little girl who made his name, indeed his “celebrity” (KTLA 31). His unfinished mourning indicates the burden of an unpaid debt. There is indeed an awkward, though fitting, irony in the fact that television would profitably extend its “news hole” into the night by continuing to cover the fatal story of a dark well. Sixty years later Chambers revisits the story in his autobiography. “The evolution of extended television news coverage happened overnight in that open field in San Marino,” the veteran reporter says (23); one newspaper credited his coverage as “one of the greatest reporting jobs in the history of television” (28). Chambers quotes from a letter he received following his reporting of the story:
 

Until that night, the television was no more a threat to serenity than any other bit of furniture in the living room. Now you have utterly destroyed this safety forever …you and the epic which you have been part of this weekend have made us know what television is for. You have made many of us know that we belong to the world. Through your own dignity and your recognition of the dignity of others, you have given us a flash of people at their best, as we remember them in the battle, or as I’ve seen them at Negev outposts in Israel.
 

(27–8)

 

This letter, the only one Chambers cites from his files, is oddly ambiguous, thanking the reporter precisely for destroying the viewer’s safety and invading his home. Television, it would seem, is the gift of the Unheimlich. And while the letter proffers the lofty moral that “we belong to the world,” it concludes, awkwardly, with an heroic evocation of Zionist war. A fleeting insight into shared precariousness–accidents happen, we are all mortal, like Kathy Fiscus–inflates into an “epic,” and ultimately inverts into a valorization of armed conquest and colonization. The spectacle of community, of people gathered together around the well and around the TV set, morphs into that of a band of fighters facing a common enemy. While it was a common feature of the news of the time that the costs of the 1948 war went virtually unreported, what is less clear is how a book published in 2008 could skirt so casually over what many now understand to have been the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.³ We can only speculate that the author sees the Israeli context as somehow still “relevant” today–though surely not in the way he intends.

 
A postwar necropolitics of American television news is sketched out here. Between the story of the girl in the well and the larger global scene there is a striking disparity in the valuing of human lives. In this, the news media support and broadcast the state’s management of what Talal Asad calls “the distribution of pain” (508). One might add that it is local media–here, the provincial Los Angeles media–that best performs this unequal distribution in its focus on stories of local “human interest.” But this local focus only exacerbates the contradiction opened up by the extended reach of television, its widening news hole, and the global scene. This other scene haunts the spectacle of the girl in the well, for while a common accord binds together the spectators in hoping to save the girl, the very definitions of the “local” and of “community” are implicitly thrown into crisis. What rises to the level of a television “story”? Who deserves saving? And can community cohere where the audience expands beyond the local? It would seem that only the figure of an innocent white girl can suspend these contradictions, if only for a moment.⁴ But in so doing, the televisual public sphere reveals itself, in Alexander Kluge’s words, as a “universal provincialism,” claiming to encompass all voices yet blind to its constitutive exclusions (Liebman 44).
 
These exclusions are subtly perpetuated even in what seem the most humane expressions of cosmopolitan fraternity. As one editorial of the time has it, “A little girl falls down a well in California and the news sweeps across oceans, waking untold millions to eager, anxious sympathy” (Chambers 29). We may recognize here the postwar American discourse of “The Great Family of Man” ironized by Barthes’s critique of media and consumer culture, Mythologies (100). Barthes shows how hypocritical sentimentality and gross abstractions of shared humanity serve to elide more concrete issues of history and politics. Barthes’s diagnoses still resonate with a broad range of arguments, most notably those of Jürgen Habermas, that media, merchandising and ideology have corrupted the public sphere. As critics of Habermas have pointed out, however, the notion of the death of the public, or a “phantom public sphere,” often grounds its critique in the nostalgic premise of an ideal state of communication that is questionable if not unfounded (Robbins viii). On the other hand, as these authors have argued, the idea of a “phantom public,” to be taken seriously, may help account for the elusive promise and phantasmatic potential of public discourse as a field of subversion, emancipation and desire. Beyond the discourse of communicative norms and nostalgia for community, such a notion of a phantom public lays bare the contradictions and exclusions that sustain the public as a vital illusion. These two versions of the phantom public reflect the main schism in leftist cultural studies: the Adornian indictment of mass culture as thoroughly complicit in the economics of exploitation, and the search for dissident and emancipatory forces within the society of the spectacle. This argument is potentially endless, given that the two sides tend not toward a dialectical synthesis but to the stalemate of a liberal politics exemplified by the collection edited by Bruce Robbins, The Phantom Public Sphere.
 
Other ghosts, however, haunt the phantom public, and the catastrophic legacy of the Kathy Fiscus story is carried on even by media’s sharpest critics. Mary Ann Doane, for instance, argues that live TV coverage is intimately linked to the spectacle of catastrophe. “The lure of the real” sustains TV’s claim to “urgency” and “liveness,” but in so doing exposes its own failings as a medium devoted to “forgetting” and “decontextualization.” As Doane says, “the ultimate drama of the instantaneous–catastrophe–constitutes the very limit of its discourse” (“Information,” 222). Doane invokes Tom Brokaw’s coverage of the Challenger disaster, a live report complete with unscripted moments that fall in the lineage of Stan Chambers’s original broadcast.⁵ “It is not that we have a ghoulish curiosity,” Brokaw lamely apologizes, as he reruns the disaster footage (232). Live TV, Doane argues, is drawn to events that defy representation, which in turn reinforces the medium’s occlusion of deeper causes and political contexts that remain unrepresented. In this sense, then, the spectacle of catastrophe is a turning away from politics and the systemic causes of disaster. Doane thus contributes to an understanding of how capitalism exploits crisis as opportunity, indeed thrives on sheer catastrophe: a condition that has more recently been dubbed the “shock doctrine” (Klein). Interestingly, however, Doane’s essay betrays a similar turning away, as if TV’s fascinating “catastrophe machine” draws the critic into its own specular economy (234). “The Challenger coverage,” Doane says, “demonstrates just how nationalistic the apprehension of catastrophe is–our own catastrophes are always more important, more eligible for extended reporting than those of other nations. But perhaps even more crucial here was the fact that television itself was on the scene–witness to the catastrophe” (231). For Doane, the crucial issue lies in TV’s participation as mediatic witness of the disaster; live TV thus reveals its problematic entanglement in a general state of political-economic crisis it fails to account for. However, Doane’s claim that the presence of cameras on the scene is “even more crucial” than the show’s nationalistic bent is almost tautological, since it inadvertently reinforces the “always more important” choices critiqued in the foregoing sentence. Doane clearly does not condone those editorial choices, but she makes her own dubious decision as to what is most “important” in the scene, and in so doing, skirts the vital function of the spectacle in supporting the “distribution of pain.” As a result, Doane enacts the very “slippage” she indexes in her definition of the catastrophic media event: “There is often a certain slippage between the notion that television covers important events in order to validate itself as a medium and the idea that because an event is covered by television–because it is, in effect, deemed televisual–it is important” (222). The slippage on the critic’s part seems to follow the fateful lure of TV’s supposedly self-reflexive nature, and demonstrates how media criticism can reinforce the closed loop of TV’s self-interested perspective: “television,” Doane says, “incessantly takes as its subject the documentation and revalidation of its own discursive problematic” (226).
 
In contrast to Doane, we might assert that the catastrophic spectacle is not a postmodern exemplum of the media-event, but rather the symptom of a technological monopoly that turns eyes inward and away from the global scene. Further, that global scene is not an additional scene that cannot fit into the broadcast slot or the critic’s commentary, but its haunting double, always present if only as lapses and asides. Doane’s own lapse may seem minor, but it is symptomatic; it may be seen as well in her reference to economic crisis: “Catastrophe makes concrete and immediate, and therefore deflects attention from, the more abstract horror of potential economic crisis” (237). Her reference to a deflected “potential economic crisis” itself deflects from catastrophe on the other scene, where crisis is not “abstract,” “intermittent,” or “potential,” but the actual realm of predatory capital; not the scene of the occasional NASA mishap, but the economic proving ground of the military-industrial complex. Doane goes so far as to say that “economic crisis does not appear to meet any of the criteria of the true catastrophe. It is not punctual but of some duration, it does not kill (at least not immediately)” (236). This last qualification is especially telling, as it betrays the limitations of the critic’s temporal emphasis which, much as it critiques the sham liveness of TV coverage, envisions economic crisis either as one of long duration (and thus unspectacular) or as temporally deferred. We can, however, restate her formula instead in spatial terms: economic crisis, in other words, does not kill (at least not here). Indeed, we might say that space haunts the critic’s analysis as its disavowed category; in this way, the argument subtly reinforces the presentness of the here even as it contests the liveness of the now. The space of the not-here, spectral and non-present, haunts both the critic and televisual catastrophe. This disparity in the coverage of disaster reflects Achille Mbembe’s trenchant formula for necropolitics as the division between “those who must live and those who must die” (17).
 
Mbembe’s “necropolitics” draws on Foucault’s theory of biopower as “that domain of life over which power has taken control” (12). Mbembe argues, however, that modern disciplinary power over subjects is always accompanied by its necropolitical other. This entails a challenge to the normative liberal theory of a public sphere grounded in freedom, reason, and autonomy, and expressing itself in the common exercise of sovereignty (13). Mbembe argues instead that this sovereign power is always also a force negating the life of others. The double injunction that some must live while others must die reflects the twin but disparate exercises of sovereign power over populations at home and populations abroad. Race provides the persistent rationale for this distribution of the power of life and death, whose history extends from early modernity into the present.⁶ Plantations, colonies, occupied territories and targets of neo-imperial wars are the sites of “death worlds” that relegate other populations to the status of “the living dead” (40). “If power still depends on tight control over bodies,” Mbembe says, “the new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the maximal economy now represented by the ‘massacre’” (34). A sinister anti-morality results even for those who survive death, Mbembe says; survival becomes another means for the perpetuation of necropolitics. As Mbembe says, “in the logic of survival one’s horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead” (36).
 
For Mbembe, the necropolitics of survival are realized in their most complete form in occupied Palestine, where the first world and an advance guard of settlers abut a population in enforced destitution. The invasion of Gaza in 2008–9 seems to confirm Mbembe’s diagnoses by both ratcheting up the violence and underscoring the failed response of the media and the international community. Occupied Palestine, strangely invoked in the Kathy Fiscus story, reflects the logic of haunted community I pursue in what follows. In each case, community casts itself in the lurid terms of a battle of life against death. At the center of this struggle is the figure of the settler and the frontier, narrowing down to the figure of the frontier well. As we will see, the figure of the well supports a dubious mythology of autonomy and self-sufficiency. The autonomy of the frontier homestead allows the community to identify itself as similarly bounded, sovereign and independent. Gathered at the well as if in the forum of a town square, the community tries to save a threatened life, and thereby reaffirms its communal bonds. However, such scenes are haunted by a necropolitics they disavow; as a result, community takes shape as a phantasm haunted by ghosts of which it is only dimly aware.
 
We have said that the Kathy Fiscus story ushered in a new era of television news. Forty years later, in October 1987, another mediatic era began with cable television’s coverage of a similar story. The Jessica McClure story seemed to replay the events of San Marino, though on a much larger, indeed hyperbolic scale. In a milestone in sensationalistic TV coverage, CNN chose to run the story around the clock, with the result that the upstart cable channel claimed its highest ratings ever, joining overnight the ranks of established television news channels. CNN’s famous scoop of Operation Desert Storm is often seen as signaling the shift toward cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, but the decisive turn in fact happened earlier, in the backyard of the McClure house in Midland, Texas. Iraq and Midland are linked, however, in more uncanny ways; Midland, Texas, after all, is George W. Bush’s “home town,” and at the time of the Jessica McClure story he had only recently left town to help in his father’s election campaign and to embark on his own political career. A boomtown of millionaires, Midland’s politics and fortunes are linked not only to its local wells and derricks but to the global geopolitics of oil and empire. As in the Kathy Fiscus story, a larger global scene haunts the phantom public’s spectacle of life and death in Midland. What emerges from the well in Midland is not only a girl miraculously saved from death, but a new force in media news, a channel whose sensationalistic bent will prove its worth in the coming years with the rise of neo-liberal empire and the security state. And while the young girl in Midland was finally rescued from the well, her story seems to have left a curse, as Lisa Belkin suggests: her rescuer committed suicide some years later, and one of the police officers on duty was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child. The curse of the Jessica McClure story does not, of course, derive from anything occult, but rather from the toxic saturation of exploitative infotainment. Moreover, the victims of this story are far more numerous. The phantom public conjured by CNN in Midland is bound together in a shared drama of intimate danger and survival, yet blind to its necropolitical participation in a broader mediatic state of emergency.
 
As covered by CNN, Midland was not the geopolitical center of neo-liberal empire, but a middle America where political issues give way to a story of mere human interest: an ordinary white working class family confronting a private tragedy. In this way media coverage of the Jessica McClure story conveys a drama with which everyone can presumably identify, converting a “personal accident” into a “national catastrophe,” as Patricia Mellencamp puts it (252). Here lies also the characteristic ruse of the televisual spectacle of catastrophe: “TV administers and cushions shocks,” Mellencamp says, in a duplicitous “mastery and discharge” of trauma (254, 246). Not only did Jessica become “everybody’s baby,” as the film devoted to her story had it, but Midland was cast as a typical American small town, a microcosm of the country as a whole. This very restriction of focus lends a mythic political dimension to the drama, evoking fantasms and fears of the frontier, the homestead, and the embattled settler family.⁷ The well itself, focal point of the drama, suggests a frontier well, symbol of autonomy and belonging, gathering place of family and friends. Gathered in turn around the televisual well, viewers share in the intimate circle of this frontier myth. The well becomes a televisual agora, a collective forum embodying the nostalgic promise of the traditional public sphere. As a point of televisual gathering, this frontier well is deeply ironic, however. Its potent symbolism of self-sufficiency is, of course, a mere anachronism in a time of public water agencies and complex networks of water distribution; in suburbs across the United States, ersatz wells are planted in front yards to produce a similarly vain illusion. The spectacle of the well holds firm to this anachronism, however, in its appeal to a community of shared grief and hope. But that larger mediatic community is in contradiction with the intimate scale of the spectacle it wants to observe. Television viewers are thus viewers of the very obsolescence of community; their pious concern and fear are the ambivalent affects of a desire for community and the unknowing recognition of their impossible participation. This is not to discount, moreover, a pervasive ambivalence of the spectatorship of death and disaster: the spectacle appeals to the viewer’s sympathies, but as spectacle, it is enjoyed at a distance. Mediation thus allows both for sympathy and dissociation, though purveyors of disaster stories rigorously disavow the latter. It seems that the mediatic power of such stories lies in their ability to channel the trauma of the viewer’s ambivalence in the spectacle of another’s trauma. As Michael Warner argues, the mediatic spectator is necessarily abstracted from any corporeal, face-to-face community exchange, and in a compensatory reflex, it gloms onto the body of another in pain. Mediatic scenes of horror thus do not so much forge common bonds of sympathy as express “the mass subject’s impossible relation to a body.” As Warner argues, “the mass subject cannot have a body except the body it witnesses. But in order to become a mass subject it has left that body behind…. It returns in the spectacle of big-time injury” (Warner 250).
 
The latent political significance of the Midland well as symbol of American imperial politics has been harnessed by the right-wing website, “Jessica’s Well,” which, headquartered in Midland itself, sports the patriotic logo-image of a frontier homestead. A toxic swill of hate-mongering ethnocentrism, militarism and religious fundamentalism, “Jessica’s Well” exemplifies the politics of George W. Bush’s political base. As discussion forum and gateway to like-minded extremist sites, the website exploits the connectivity of the internet while defending the mythic autonomy of the frontier home. The website epitomizes a radical failure of the American public sphere: knowledge is strictly partisan, and community (white, Christian and Zionist) is bound together in a war of defamation against all other ideologies, countries, religions, and races. “Jessica’s Well” is perhaps only a fringe element in a larger American public sphere, and yet it underscores the tacit politics of CNN’s nominally centrist position and that of the other dominant media outlets that manage the mediatic public sphere.
 
There are, of course, venues that hold to a different model of civil discourse on the web. The most influential of these is none other than the WELL, “The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link,” founded in 1985 in Sausalito, California, and the first internet community on the web. After 25 years, the WELL still stands as a model of literate, cosmopolitan, informed discussion and debate; its image of the well supports a left-leaning ethos of community, creativity, and mutual sustenance. But even on the left, one finds echoes of the frontier mythology of Midland’s well. These are suggested by the WELL’s name and logo, but are explicitly advertised in Howard Rheingold’s history of the WELL, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. If Rheingold seems unconcerned about the unfortunate implications of his frontier metaphor, he might be excused for employing a well-worn figure. And yet no-one today brandishes the figure of the “plantation” with such political insouciance. The difference, of course, is that while contemporary American free enterprise seeks its profits in outsourcing, in sweatshops and call centers abroad, it takes as its favored metaphor not the plantation but the more heroic figure of the frontier. For the metaphor to “work” in leftist discourse, it must harness the adventurous spirit of the settler while at the same time denying its genocidal implications. And indeed, in Rheingold’s history of the WELL, the spirit of the entrepreneur vies constantly with a political world it implies and yet disavows. This conflict makes his “virtual community” another version of the “phantom public” we have explored so far.⁸ And as in those media turning points, this community centers on the figure of a young girl in mortal danger: a girl fighting for her life in the WELL.
 
The Virtual Community offers a history of the rise of our new mediatic world of internet connectivity, and its opening pages rehearse a familiar claim to community haunted by a world it would exclude. The first chapter, titled “The Heart of the WELL,” tells how the author sought medical advice for his ailing two-year old daughter from the online “Parenting conference,” which quickly provided him vital information before his own doctor could call him back. This forum, “a small but warmly human corner of cyberspace,” has a particularly intimate and social character, Rheingold says; there is “a magic protective circle” around this part of the WELL. “We’re talking about our sons and daughters in this forum, not about our computers or our opinions about philosophy, and many of us feel that this tacit understanding sanctifies the virtual space” (1). The “magic protective circle” of the forum is defined, then, by numerous exclusions: politics, philosophy, computing–in fact the core of the WELL’s larger conversations–are all staved off. Community, imagined here as all-embracing and far-flung, narrows down to shared concerns about the nuclear family. Rheingold invokes a virtual consensus in which the liberal and leftist ethos of the WELL merges with the mentality of the security mom.
 
Rheingold cites at length from the post of a member of the Parenting conference watching over his ailing 14-month old daughter. The father, Jay, appeals to the online community from the darkness of this quiet room in Woods Hole. “Woods Hole. Midnight. I am sitting in the dark of my daughter’s room. Her monitor lights blink at me. The lights used to blink too brightly so I covered them with bits of bandage adhesive and now they flash faintly underneath, a persistent red and green, Lillie’s heart and lungs” (3). Interestingly, even as he connects to the outside world, the scene he describes contains technical prostheses of connectedness, here more ambiguous and unsettling: “Above the monitor is her portable suction unit. In the glow of the flashlight I’m writing by, it looks like the plastic guts of a science-class human model, the tubes coiled around the power supply, the reservoir, the pump.” Jay continues, “Tina is upstairs trying to get some sleep. A baby monitor links our bedroom to Lillie’s. It links our sleep to Lillie’s too, and because our souls are linked too, we do not sleep well.”
 
The line “we do not sleep well” echoes strangely with Jay’s observation that, unlike other friends and communities, “The WELL was always awake” (4). To connect to the forum is to bring others into the circle of a vigil where no-one sleeps well. Here, at the heart of the virtual community, its metaphoric well is incarnated in the “power supply, the reservoir, the pump” connected to a young body in crisis. Like his daughter connected to the tubes, pumps and monitors, Jay’s online connectedness is vital, and that connectedness is felt most keenly in a state of emergency and a time of need. In this way, the Parenting conference proves its worth as more than a mere venue for conversation. Its stakes are higher: the Parenting conference is a lifeline, connecting a community in a struggle to preserve life. But if the vigil of connectedness is a fight for life and survival, Lillie’s connectedness is more ambiguous. Even as her connections sustain her life, they subtly replace it as well. In the sentence that describes the lights that monitor her vital signs, two clauses are apposed, linked only by a comma that suspends the vital connection: “a persistent red and green, Lillie’s heart and lungs.” Likewise, the “science-class human model” is a prosthetic double that suggests Lillie’s replacement by her life support. As emblematic example of the virtual community, the story of Lillie and her family conveys more than a moral of friendship and support, suggesting as well a disquieting dislocation of subjects in technological life-support. Moreover, the natural family reduced to its mere essentials is at the same time a fully mediated technological interface. These tensions provide of course the pathos of Jay’s posting and Rheingold’s use of it as moral allegory of the virtual community. Cyberspace may alter the space, time and media of communication, Rheingold tells us, but contact on an intimate and emotional level is still very much possible. And yet, if connection and communication are the keys to Jay’s post, those terms are strikingly ambiguous. Community is forged precisely in the frail bonds that are alternately connecting and disconnecting, and in the substitution of electronic monitors with the “souls” of the family. Connectedness, for Lillie, carries the ambivalent meanings of both remedy and curse. Suspended between life and death, Lillie is a prosthetic survivor, a haunting figure of the virtual community’s contradictions.
 
As such, the girl in the WELL expresses a pervasive tension, indeed an “ethical contradiction,” as Rob Latham puts it, that congeals in monstrous pop-cultural icons of youthful cyborgs and vampires (14). The figures of the vampire and of the cyborg reflect twin facets of the economic conscription of youth, Latham argues, conveyed in the double meaning of his book’s title, Consuming Youth. On the one hand, youthful bodies are vital to the economics of production, “consumed” by the imperatives of labor and production, as Marx portrays it. “The worker,” Latham says, “essentially becomes a cybernetic organism–a cyborg–prosthetically linked to a despotic, ravening apparatus” (3). On the other hand, in the post-Fordist era of increasing consumption, the “mass-market fetishization of youth” (16) encourages the insatiable appetites of youthful consumers. These two facets of “consuming youth” reflect not only an historical distinction, but a continuing conflict between labor and leisure, consumption and production. Moreover, while deriving from an earlier time of factory production, the vision of a “prosthetic and predatory” world of automation clearly remains with us today, as fantasy, sci-fi and horror films amply indicate.⁹ Rheingold’s parable can only address these concerns symptomatically, but in Lillie’s state of suspended animation we can discern the latent figure of the “vampire-cyborg as a twinned metaphor for youth consumption” (20). The prosthetic Lillie seems, then, to signal a problem endemic to the contemporary mediasphere: the media market strives increasingly to target children, prying little consumers from the control of their parents. Lillie’s frail body stands implicitly as symbol of online children threatened by predators, identity thieves, marketers and manipulators of public opinion.
 
It is striking that fears of this kind can accompany a technophilic text such as Rheingold’s, but as Mark Poster shows, this is a pervasive feature of commentary on the internet. The advent of the web was accompanied by a panicked discourse in the media that focused on the figure of the online child, alternately monster and victim of the web. Poster shows that such technological fears follow a script typical of previous media innovations (106). Fearful commentary on the internet revolution thus repeats fears of mediation as such; as a result, the discourse of crime and perversion is marred by its unexamined presumptions of innocent and unmediated communication outside of the technological sphere. Rheingold’s text copes with such threats and fears by composing a moral tale of the online community as extension of family and forum of connectedness. Lillie survives her illness, we learn, but in what seems a substitutive narrative sacrifice on Rheingold’s part, another member, less innocent than Lillie, dies by the end of the chapter. “You aren’t a real community,” Rheingold pointedly concludes, “until you have a funeral” (24). What the author narrates in this way, however, passes over–and passes on–a more haunting death-work that defies his narrative choices and moral fables. Lillie’s suspended life and Jay’s lonely postings speak to a disturbing mediation that links death and deferral to the messenger’s vital signs. Life in crisis is the very mode of survival, but this ambiguous survival is only intimated in the inarticulate gaps and disjunctions of the message. To respond to such a haunted message is to pass it on, since the reader cannot realize the author’s intent without betraying it or making choices. The posting from Wood’s Hole calls for witness and response; it appeals to the support of the community. But its haunting message is not settled in narrative morals or in funeral rites. As I will argue, the responsibility for such a message is passed on precisely by means of its own inadequacy and, indeed, failure.
 
In this sense, then, the story of Lillie’s near-death is an allegory, a parable of the origin of community, the WELL’s very source. As allegory, moreover, it organizes nagging doubts and questions that make each community member, like young Lillie, the transmitter of primal enigmas of life, death, community and identity. The WELL as forum is a gathering around the dark center of those unanswered questions. Such primal scenes tend to resolve themselves in pious claims to sacrifice and losses redeemed, and this is the moral message that irresistibly concludes Rheingold’s chapter. As in all allegories, such answers lend a consoling order to something that fails to maintain a coherent structure. Allegory attempts to cover over discrepancies that lie at the origin, and in so doing, its answers fall short of responsibility to those motivating gaps. Jay’s posting is rife with inarticulate moments in which vital questions of death, mediation and community are at stake. What is conveyed in such inarticulate relays is the non-point source of allegory, a poison or pollution that, outside the economy of sin, grounds communication in an inescapably viral mode. How, then, to respond to such relays without falling in with the pieties of community morals and their inevitable symptoms, the violent disavowal of “sin”? Responsibility should be sought less in moral choices than in the relays of deferral and failed responses that pass on like a virus the lack of structure at the heart of community. Paradoxically, then, responsibility must remain inarticulate, to the extent that it passes on the lack of structure to which it answers.¹⁰ To respond is not to put a question to rest, but to be haunted by that question and to ensure its survival.
 
In the life and death struggles we have examined, survival inevitably bears the marks of community morality. Moreover, this morality of survival can easily accommodate even the amorality of necropolitics. And yet another notion of survival can avoid the tragic dimension of the life and death struggle. Derrida advances the notion of survival in such terms, as a feature of life that escapes the fateful binary couple of life and death. Survival, like deferral, is an originary dimension of existence, in which whatever exists is bound to negation. That negation is not simply opposed to life, but intertwined with it, to the point of calling life itself into question. Survival, then, is “a complication of the opposition life/death,” a spectral prosthesis of life, its inevitable deferral or mediation (Learning 51). This mediation of life entails for Derrida an ethics of hospitality to the ghost, in which the ghost is not the fearsome figment of moral tales, but the spectral manifestation of the subject’s paradoxically vital finitude. In what follows, I pursue the implications of this radical ethics in readings of media communities. The ethics and responsibility of mediated life require that we listen to a different ghost haunting our stories of death and survival: the spectral trace of community in the deferrals and disjunctions of the moral fable.
 

II.

 

I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another. I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed.
 

Primo Levi

 
The stakes of a postmodern ethics of survival are dramatically staged in a set of recent horror films that echo in an uncanny way the mediatic theme of the haunted well. Among the most terrifying and haunting films of our time, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) and its American remakes The Ring (2002) and The Ring Two (2005) deliver a new kind of ghost: a vengeful presence whose means of persecution are television and videotape. A young girl who has died at the bottom of a well sends a cryptic video message whose viewers are condemned to die seven days after seeing it. The terrifying effect of the films is compounded by the duplication of the means of haunting by the viewing experience itself; in front of the TV set, the viewer of The Ring occupies the place of the victim stricken with death. In this way, the viewer’s own television becomes a haunted medium. This shared horror, moreover, relays what is perhaps the most disturbing feature of the narrative: the delegation of killing by one viewer to another. As we learn by the film’s end, only those who duplicate and spread the fatal message are spared its punishment. The fatal videotape thus spawns a viral logic of death.¹¹
 
The last word in cinematic terror, Ringu and its sequels suggest a postmodern allegory of the viewership of death. The viewer of the films is not merely in a position of metaphoric or analogical substitution with the fictional viewer of the fatal message; rather, he or she repeats, in allegorical fashion, a fatal error of viewing, and this error is what is passed on by the survivor in the viral duplication of the message. The survivor does not solve the riddle of the enigmatic message but merely repeats it; to delegate death is to survive one’s own incomprehension and pass it on to another. In this way, The Ring‘s horror narrative captures graphically a necropolitical logic of televisual viewership in the age of interactive communications, file sharing, and viral video. Like Pulse, One Missed Call and Shutter, among other films, The Ring taps into technological fears that have accompanied the internet revolution, channeling the dark side of Facebook and YouTube, and making its viewer the receiver of unknown online threats and the broadcaster of the curse he or she would ward off. The Ring‘s haunted message is emblematic of viral video in the age of web-based interactivity.
 
This new media environment and its haunting features are the implicit context of The Ring, which however conveys its televisual haunting through a wide array of media. The film features not only TV and videotape, but also telephone, photography, microfilm, drawings, and rayographs. The primary medium of the haunting message is videotape, rather than the more contemporary DVD; in this way, the film reinforces the idea that there is an uncanny materiality to the medium of the haunting message. Likewise, the first photos we see in the film are anachronistic Polaroids. This materiality is crucial to the film’s motifs of the embodiment of the specter and the passage from an intangible to a tangible realm. Moreover, these recently outdated media reinforce The Ring‘s effective use of early film as conveyor of the ghost. The haunting video message is silent and largely in black and white, its images seeming to derive from a fairly distant past. Montage, jump cuts, and static camera positions evoke the early pioneers of the moving image, while disturbing shots of animated objects suggest Surrealist film. Further, the closing shot of the haunted well can be taken for a still photograph; it is only late in The Ring that this image discloses its horrifying truth, as the ghost of the dead girl emerges from the lip of the well. The horrifying appearance of the girl confirms the narrative’s building suspense; uncanny premonitions and mounting clues foretell her murderous intent. The image of the well, however, speaks to a primal visual uncanny. In breaking with the static photographic image, the girl’s emergence seemingly recapitulates the birth of cinema. The static image becomes one of movement, and the viewer’s horror at this emerging specter is grafted onto the visual delusion, shared by all film viewers, that still images are animated, and animated images are alive. In the film’s most terrifying moment, the girl’s emergence from the TV set itself confirms this delusion, but only in the mode of horror: what reveals itself is neither alive nor dead, but a spectral entity that defies either state. The TV screen becomes the equivalent of the edge of the well; what emerges from the screen is the truth of the viewer’s delusion. And yet, as we will see, this emergence bears the marks of a different encounter between viewer and image; as Ariella Azoulay puts it, “One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it” (14).
 
This passage across the screen seems to place the viewer in a position akin to that of early cinema viewers, confronted with the astonishing modern spectacle of animated images. In one of the Lumières’s first films, a train approaching the screen was seen as bearing down on the viewers’ space itself. Accounts of these early screenings lead us to believe that the spectators mistook the image for reality, that they actually feared a collision with the cinematic train. However, as Akira Lippit points out, there is reason to doubt this account of naïve belief and misperception, which may in fact serve to disavow one’s own delusions and the uncanny “shadow optics” we share with those viewers. Lippit argues that it is not so much the emerging train that was feared as the illusion of deep space that seems to lie beyond the screen: “what awaits the spectator at the projected point of collision is an imaginary depth, a volume that opens onto the spectator from the other side of the screen” (65). In this light, one might say that the fear of an emerging specter in The Ring masks a more unsettling fear, that of one’s absorption by the deep space of the image. “The spectator is swallowed by the image, as if it were an oral cavity, as if the image, in this instant, revealed an interiority, vast and terrible” (65). For Lippit, this deep space is a figure of the unconscious, of the self’s interiority dimly sensed as invisible and bottomless. “Cinema generates a spectacle of the unconscious,” Lippit says, “rendering its viewers unconscious spectators” (63).
 
This invocation of a space that swallows the viewer is strikingly apt in the case of The Ring; the cursed message turns the TV set into a well, and the viewer is doomed to fall, like the girl herself, into its gruesome space. The Ring thus reawakens primal terrors of early cinema, and turns the TV set–the familiar domestic “tube”–into a threatening well, opening an uncanny portal in the heart of the home. Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny’” reminds us that the home (heim) is always haunted by the monstrous and unfamiliar; indeed, at the point of deepest privacy, the home inverts into its other, heimlich into unheimlich. As Freud shows, this ambiguity lies within the term “uncanny” itself which, at a certain point, becomes indistinguishable from its opposite. In a strange semantic slippage, privacy and intimacy tend to converge with secrecy and mystery; the most intimate is also the most alien. Welling up from the depths, the unheimlich is “like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again” (198). The image of a “buried spring” reprises Freud’s favored metaphors for the unconscious and the return of the repressed: what is cast into the unconscious is buried alive, and always insists on returning from below. The image of a buried spring resonates with that of a well, which is, after all, an artificial spring buried underground. In The Ring, we discover that the well lies directly beneath the cabin floor. It is this hole that threatens to swallow each viewer, once the haunting video is played at home on a private TV set.¹²
 
For Freud, the uncanny and its monstrous effects ultimately call for therapeutic cure; the patient is called on to recognize that what appears as alien and frightening is only the product of an alienating repression. This psychoanalytic insight agrees with a moral dimension common to ghost stories, and which derive from the folklore of many cultural traditions. People wrongly killed return to haunt not only their killers, but a larger complicit community. To exorcise the vengeful spirit requires a labor of sleuthing and a confrontation with a buried past. Like such narratives, The Ring seems to conclude with exorcism once the girl’s murder is fully brought to light. We learn that the girl was killed by her mother who dropped her into the well, though she survived for seven days in her premature grave. Accordingly, seven days of life are allotted to the viewers of her message. It is at this point, however, that the narrative defies the logic of redemption, cure, and exorcism. The dead girl is never avenged, but insists instead that her haunting be perpetuated. The videotape is more than a message from the dead, it is a viral agent of killing that spares no innocents. The narrative of exorcism and redemption thus gives way to that of the curse.
 
This mixture of the logic of redemption with that of the curse is a feature of some of the most haunting ghost stories, and what results is a complication that defies both psychoanalytic cure and moral resolution. The passing on of the ghost story becomes a modality of the curse, reinforcing the impression that as readers caught in an abyssal structure, attempting to interpret a series of passed-on messages, we may ourselves inherit it. Such haunting seriality opens Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, with its initial scene of assembled guests, an exchange of tales, and the relating of the ghost story passed from the governess to a pair of narrators, one framing the other. In a masterful reading of The Turn of the Screw, Shoshana Felman tracks the infectious “ghost-effect” of James’s story in the critical literature soon after its publication. Two camps dominate this body of writing: those who subscribe to the occult happenings in the tale, and those who ascribe to the narrating governess some form of hysteria or madness. These camps reflect two inextricable facets of the ambiguous narrative, and in this way the text perpetuates itself in the symptoms of its readers. Of particular interest to Felman is how suspicious readers, those who doubt the occult version of the story’s events, inadvertently find themselves “duplicating and repeating the governess’s gesture” (“Henry James” 219). If such readers, the supposedly enlightened “non-dupes,” would blame the governess herself, rather than the ghosts, for the killing of young Miles at the end of the story, duplicating her gesture would amount to a repeating, or at least seconding, of that murder. “We are forced to participate in the scandal,” Felman claims (199). This fatal participation is noted by one of the story’s first critics, who complains that “one has been assisting in an outrage upon the holiest and sweetest fountain of human innocence, and helping to debauch–at least by helplessly standing by–the pure and trusting nature of children” (198). Tellingly, the critic’s plaint invokes the image of a pure source that has been sullied; the innocent children, metaphorized by that source, are debauched by the author and his guilty readers. An odd equivocation mars this righteous diatribe, however, since the reader is cast as both “helping” and “helpless.” Here, at the very source of goodness, and confronted with “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature,” the reader’s implication in the story’s evil doings is curiously ambivalent, and virtually hysterical. However, a pathologizing diagnosis–whether of the governess or of the story’s critics–skirts too quickly over the story’s contaminating ambivalence. This ambivalence may instead converge in the lure and promise of a singular source of evil, one that the text defies, defers, and denies at every step. The quest for this source ends only in the repeated confrontation with a divided point of origin. Dupe of the text, the reader can only repeat its dizzying duplicities. The unparalleled atmosphere of haunting in The Turn of the Screw lies, then, not so much in its imagery, psychological conflict, or narrative drama as it does in its textual ghost-effects, whereby any statement or act is accompanied by its alternate meaning, its immediate self-duplication as other than itself. For Felman, this makes the text eminently allegorical, understood as the mirroring, in the act of reading, of the narrative’s inadequation with what it claims to relate.
 
In James’s story, as in The Ring, seriality, duplication and repetition are at the heart of the narrative. Both stories pass on a curse that condemns the reader or viewer to “duplicating and repeating,” as Felman says, the guilty acts at the heart of the story, and each defies the reader’s attempt to sleuth out the crime and its causes. Felman is not, of course, content to merely assent to the text’s contaminating force. However, unlike readers who are bent on solving the mystery and closing the book on the scandal, she resists the desire to assign a single meaning or cause to the governess’s story. In this way she avoids the moralizing plaints of the offended readers, as well as the pathologizing judgments of vulgar Freudians. The discourse of sin and morality give way in her analysis to the recognition of a common and shared error. Attuned to the haunting duplicity of narrative, this practice of reading informs an ethical practice of interpretation Felman has developed in her more recent Testimony. Testimonies of crime, torture and suffering are seen as orienting the reader toward a truth that is not a mere referential datum, but a discourse that is inherently duplicitous, and which must be repeated, duplicated and disseminated by the reader. Responsibility thus lies not simply in faithful recording but in bearing witness to a truth that is never simply referential. Indeed, as she argues, it is the very duplicity of the “truth” that allows for its duplication, and thus its communication to others.
 
Ross Chambers draws on Felman’s Testimony in his reading of Laurie Lynd’s R.S.V.P. (1991), a short film dealing with a death from AIDS. Before his death, Andy makes a request to a radio show to broadcast a song of Berlioz, “Le spectre de la rose,” which, based on a poem by Gautier, is itself about death and survival. The song is broadcast after Andy’s passing and thus becomes a message from beyond the grave to his lover Sid who, hearing it on the radio, records it on his stereo. This leads Sid to contact Andy’s sister by phone, who tells Andy’s parents to listen to the radio broadcast as it plays later that day, in their time zone. Chambers insists on the mediatic relays, delays and repetitions that mark the transmission of the haunting message: answering machines, telephones, and radio assure the afterlife of Andy’s message, and allow for a final reconciliation between Sid and Andy’s homophobic parents. Chambers reads this process of delay and relay as the death-work that sanctions any discursive act. Deferral passes on the message, but at the cost of its author’s singular énoncé; the énonciation that survives its author does so at the cost of its author’s singular intent and control. “A message survives,” Chambers says, “but subject to an effect of deferral that prevents it from becoming ‘the’ message that remains forever potential” (17). From this results an ethics of “responsiveness,” as Chambers says, which is aware both of the loss of the original message and of the inadequacy of the response, and is caught up in “a relay of inadequacy” (18). “Our inadequate responses thus take the form of deferral, as the passing on of the message, relay-fashion, and each time in a modified form. Each retransmitted message will be in some sense continuous with the message to which it responds but also, and inescapably, discontinuous with it” (23–4).
 
R.S.V.P., like The Ring, concerns a message from the dead, one that is broadcast and retransmitted through multiple media. But Chambers’s model of ethical responsiveness is hard to square with The Ring‘s horror narrative. The moral dilemma The Ring‘s protagonist confronts is whether, in order to save her son, she should have him duplicate the videotape as well. In choosing to do so, she makes the boy into yet another source of the tape’s murderous intent. This moral dilemma is heightened by the implication of the protagonist’s own latent violence in the transmission of the message, a plot element in The Ring that departs from the original Ringu; her first victim is her own ex-husband, against whom she manifestly harbors resentment, and possibly an unconscious urge to kill. In this way the mother herself, not unlike the dead girl, is a femme fatale.¹³The Ring does not fully resolve this contamination of the heroine, though two versions of feminine power separate off into the monstrous and the (more or less) respectable. The young boy, for his part, has telepathic qualities that not only channel the dead girl’s thoughts but seem to identify him with her dangerous powers.
 
In this way, the duplicators of the message do not merely reproduce a source, but disseminate it. Indeed, that dissemination calls into question the well as source and origin. Fittingly enough, a well is precisely an artificial source, tapping a natural one. The Ring‘s terrors and its moral dilemmas plunge the viewer into an abyssal field of dangers without simple origin; even as it insists on the haunting source of our fears, The Ring haunts us with the idea of a viral message beyond the logic of duplication and representation. We might then speak, using the vocabulary of pollution, of a non-point source of the virus. The viral video belongs to a regime of simulation and virtuality according to which reproduction occurs in the absence of any original source.¹⁴ This is not to dispense with the moral dimension of the story, which graphically confronts the viewer with her or his tainted responsibility. At the same time, by tampering with the source, the viral logic of The Ring takes us beyond the comfortable distinctions of pollution and innocence, betrayal and fidelity, and even life and death. The Ring is a postmodern allegory of ethics in an age of simulation and virtuality.
 
The “RSVP” of The Ring is not an appeal for recognition and response, but rather a demand that the viewer pass on the curse on pain of death. Moreover, one cannot decide whether this demand is motivated or not by a righteous cause; the girl may have been cruelly murdered, and even abused by the scientists studying her telepathic abilities, but her insatiable vengeance points as well to some irredeemable evil. It would seem, then, that there are few points of comparison between R.S.V.P.‘s message of tolerance and The Ring‘s sensationalistic horror. But I would argue that The Ring raises the stakes of R.S.V.P. by making its passed-on messages not only communicative relays but a contaminating force; an ethics of responsiveness is to be sought not merely in inadequacy but in an inherited curse. In this way, an ethics of viewing, rendered nearly moot by The Ring‘s terrifying premise, is made to confront a necropolitics of viewership in the age of the internet and globalization. This may help shed light on a persistent problem of moral discourse on the passive spectatorship of catastrophe. Writing on the televised spectacle of death in Sarajevo, Tom Keenan argues that to assume that the image of suffering speaks for itself is paradoxically to condemn it to silence. As Keenan shows, a common belief holds that the image of another’s suffering is enough to spur viewers to action; and yet, the viewer is insistently paralyzed by such scenes, as if by the evil eye (“Publicity” 110).¹⁵ What constrains moral discourse here, as in Felman’s Testimony, is the premise of an unmediated truth that can inform the public sphere. The binary correlative of the self-evident image is the equally pervasive notion of the deceptive image, inheritor of a long tradition of the image as mere illusion. Jacques Rancière has submitted the latter to an extensive critique, arguing that the image is always a “sentence-image,” object of a creative work of interpretation. In each case, ethical and political critique allows for interpretation by opening up room for error. In the horror film, this error is terror; the unconscious viewer is the viral agent of something “crucial enough to pass along,” as Carol Clover says (95).¹⁶ Clover shows that horror compulsively displays the phantasmatic lability of desire and gender; what is “uninterruptible” and “crucial enough to pass along” in the infectious thrill of horror is the persistent misreading of a violence both feared and desired in the obscure theater of primal fantasy. This viral and compulsive feature of horror is undeniably popular, and The Ring has established itself as a successful franchise in the genre. Indeed, I would argue, it is popular to the extent that it taps into a common error and shared enigma. Here viral, like infectious, carries a double meaning, as has emerged in colloquial parlance; what is viral is both popular and threatening to the community. Similarly, Rancière points to “the disruptive power of community” contained in the violence of the dialectical image (57). To promote an ethical viewership would not be to dispel the curse of the viral, but instead to follow the trace of its popular contagion, and to infect the public sphere with another death-work, one that contests the necropolitical.
 
To pursue this ambiguous virality is to read against the grain of The Ring‘s overt message that compels its viewer to assume the position of a sociopathic survivor. It is this seemingly inescapable compulsion that defines the necropolitical force of the viral video. The spectator is and must remain a survivor; accordingly, others must be eliminated. Moreover, the evil viral force mitigates the moral crime of passing on the curse, since one cannot be guilty of the curse itself, but only of circulating it. Further, the film locks the work of sleuthing and interpretation into this vicious cycle. To solve the mystery of the video is not to lay the ghost to rest or to settle scores, but only to submit inevitably to the logic of survival. According to the logic of the video, there is no other interpretation; one has no choice but to survive, killing in good conscience, or at most with a nagging sense of responsibility for a crime that, nonetheless, is never one’s own. The viewer is pressed into service by a terrorizing dictate, whose self-evidence is akin to the tautological force of ideology, one that conveys no other message than the necropolitics of survival. It is significant that the protagonist’s choice to survive is bound to the survival of her child. This allows for a saving alibi in the film, for if it is selfish and amoral to choose one’s life over another’s, to condemn another to save one’s child is less so. But the mother-bond, an arbitrary narrative choice of the film, is merely the film’s ultimate alibi, serving to naturalize the protagonist’s sociopathological acts as inevitable. A family morality is grounded in the film in a natural imperative, but not without conflating, at a certain point, the contrary options of killing and saving.
 
In our earlier examples, we have seen that the imperative of survival perpetuates economic imperatives by negating the possibility of self-sacrifice and disavowing murder. Similarly, what is strictly foreclosed by The Ring is the option of self-sacrifice. It is true that both of the girl’s parents commit suicide; on the other hand, it may be that in doing so they merely submit to the girl’s sinister force. Either way, the family relationship seems to have no bearing on the video itself, which is addressed to unknown innocent others. In this way, The Ring compels us to deny the option of self-sacrifice, which is cast unambiguously as the (impossible) choice of suicide. However, one may read suicide here as an exorbitant and paranoid denial of more ordinary political and ecological sacrifices, sacrifices invoked yet dispelled as impossible. Within the horror film’s paranoid economy, The Ring conflates “survival” with abundance and profit; to live within one’s means would amount to dying. The Ring thus confirms the theory of necropolitics, but only by grounding itself in a hyperbolic supernatural premise. If this premise seems to occlude the properly political implications of the story, it sheds light on the paranoid and fantasmatic order of the necropolitical itself. The Ring‘s necropolitical double injunction comes not from a sovereign power with which one identifies, but from an ineffable otherness that invades the home, and to which one submits. In this, the monstrous otherness would seem to be the double of the threatening others that contest one’s privilege to life and security. As a threat to one’s life, in other words, the evil figure of the girl is the alibi of the threatening others, out there and everywhere, on whose death one’s life depends. Paradoxically, then, she demands death, and her own first of all. Her inexplicable evil dictates death because she is herself the spectral manifestation of what we have relegated to the world’s zones of death. This phantasmatic misrecognition of the monster resembles that which enables the racist to see in the other someone less than human or marked for death; these misrecognized others are put to death in all innocence by people who, as Hannah Arendt says of murdering colonists, “somehow were not aware that they had committed murder” (qtd. Mbembe 24).¹⁷
 
The Ring captures the phantasmatic features of our modern mediascape, and speaks eloquently of the fears and repressions that define the phantom public sphere. Might we say, then, that by confronting the viewer with the price of his own survival, the film implicitly calls that survival into question? Would this be the moral message of the film, one we should heed in spite of our reflexes of terror? I have suggested as much, but would argue further that the claim the film has over its viewer, its monstrous appeal, defies a simple reversal of values and indeed challenges the notions of both morality and message. The most potent features of The Ring are not only the images of the cursed video itself, but also the inhuman, enigmatic insect-like sounds that accompany them. At the heart of The Ring is a message that haunts us, not simply because of its implicit threat, but rather because it remains enigmatic and opaque. And though we are interpellated by horror, we remain unconscious spectators in the face of the message from the well, misreading the film, passing over its enigma and passing it on as a curse. The disturbing sounds that accompany the cursed images–a repeated faint squeaking or muted screech–are most suggestive of this enigmatic dimension of the film.¹⁸ Here the film does not deliver a message or a clue, but only a sound that disturbs. Moreover, the sound may not even derive from the ghost herself, since it resembles the kind of faint “noise” passed on in the process of re-recording and duplication–what in French are called parasites. This sound also lends a horrifying quality to the scrambled white noise that precedes and ends the video transmission; in a moment of horror, the mother realizes her son is condemned to die when she comes upon him staring at the white noise of the video he has just finished watching. The most terrifying aspect of the film does not, then, derive from the other world, but only from the process of passing on the video. This “ghost in the machine” is and remains perfectly opaque, a signifier without a content, the zero degree of symbolic exchange.¹⁹
 
It is tempting to see this aspect of the film as conveying what Jean Laplanche calls the “enigmatic signifier.” To explore the unconscious dimension of an artwork, clinical case, or social pathology is, in Laplanchian terms, to uncover the trace of the subject’s primary encounter with the unconscious of the other. This encounter is that of a child with an adult and his or her compromised signals; the seduction of the child by the adult is the fundamental given of this primal scene of traumatic encounter (Otherness 93). Laplanchian theory allows us to refine the psychological dimension of the stories we are examining here, and to bring out their shared compulsive features: an oneiric world symbolized by the underworld; childhood innocence betrayed by sin, evil and death; and a message that defies reason and is passed on from one person to another. And while this psychological framework may not seem to illuminate the necropolitics of globalism, our horror stories show us that community is persistently figured in lurid terms richly evocative of primal seduction. Here we find the wellspring of the ambivalence expressed in the contraries of killing and saving, in the governess’s terrorizing inquisition, and in the mediatic community’s dubious fascination with children in danger. Every girl in a well seems to revive Alice’s marvelous and disturbing fall down the rabbit-hole, a journey into a netherworld of illicit desires, extravagant fears, and latent pedophilia.
 
Laplanche’s “enigmatic signifier,” deriving from the unconscious of the other, is not the index of a deep meaning the subject can ever hope to recover. At best, the subject can only interpret a signifier that was itself received in translation. Passed on as a mystery, and received as a translation of that mystery, the enigmatic signifier holds out no promise of a return to the source. This surely does not defeat the purpose of interpretation, though it does set a limit to the passionate quest for the source of one’s fears, fantasies, and suspect desires. As Laplanche argues, the quest for the origin of a fantasy always risks repeating a fantasy of origins (“Fantasy” 24–25). We have seen how some readers of The Turn of the Screw fall into a similar vicious circle by opting either for a narrative of sin or for a supernatural premise. An ethics of reading, however, works with a non-point source of sin and evil, which one translates as best as one can, passing on a contaminated message. Responsibility to the other must bend, then, to the necessity of betrayal and infidelity in a shared error that provides the basis for an ethics beyond morality. We have read The Ring as an allegory of such contaminated messages; the narrative of horror and death, as well as its necropolitical implications, spring from an insight, however compromised, into a viral error of viewing.
 
The Ring dramatizes the stakes of a postmodern ethics of viewing, in which responsibility is figured not as the choice of a moral subject but as the response to the enigmatic call of the other, a response, as Emmanuel Levinas has it, that turns the respondent into the “hostage” of the other, compelled to answer against his will. Drawing on Levinas, Tom Keenan argues that ethics is incomplete to the extent that it does not call into question the will and autonomy of the self, purported agent of moral acts directed at a separate other, object of knowledge and compassion. “Our responsibilities, somehow in excess of our knowledge if not simply opposed to it, are to the other, to the undetermined other, and our vigilance consists in the care with which we attend to the noise that precedes our question, the mark or trace to which we respond at the beginning” (Fables, 11). Keenan emphasizes that this other is not simply someone else, but also “something else,” an “undetermined other,” often a “ghost.” In this reframing of ethics, the self responds to the call of the other in terms evocative of the horror film: accused, persecuted, implicated in an other who calls one’s own existence into question. Keenan quotes from Levinas: “I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation: persecuted. The ipseity … is a hostage. The word I means here I am, answering for everything and everyone” (20). Indeed, the self who is called on is in a sense called up by a question that precedes it. Further, that self is not a singular entity but a mere placeholder for an open address. “The call,” Keenan says, “exposes me, as anyone, to an unincorporable alterity that has no interest in me as anything other than as a placeholder, as a singular substitute” (23). This post-idealist ethics radicalizes the commitment to the other by enmeshing self and other in absolute “proximity,” but at the cost, precisely, of the moral compass that habitually orients our sense of responsibility.
 
Such comparisons between Levinas’s traumatizing other and the ghost of The Ring may seem perverse, given that the horror film encourages not responsibility but murderous self-interest. Levinas, moreover, states clearly that self-preservation is no justification for murder. Judith Butler points to this aspect of Levinas as an admirable pacifism, but she also subjects his ethics to a thoughtful critique that brings out a certain violence that serves as the ground of Levinas’s own ethical imperative. Further, Butler points out that politics interferes with ethics in a public sphere that manages and exploits the face of the other. Reading with and against Levinas, Butler insists that the ethical cannot be divorced from politics; Levinas’s “face” of the other, index of sheer alterity, is made to confront those broadcast by the dominant media. As Butler says, “We cannot, under contemporary conditions of representation, hear the agonized cry or be compelled or commanded by the face. We have been turned away from the face, sometimes through the very image of the face, one that is meant to convey the inhuman, the already dead, that which is not precariousness and cannot, therefore, be killed; this is the face that we are nevertheless asked to kill” (Precarious 150). Butler’s point is to oppose an ethics to the necropolitics of these conditions of representation. By the same token, however, ethics must confront the political conditions of its agency.²⁰ This political-ethical conjuncture is one that troubles Levinas’s own positions, notably his Zionism, but it also seems to infect his more abstract formulations of ethical non-violence, which pose the stubborn dilemma of a non-violence predicated on a primary urge to kill. As Butler says, “the non-violence that Levinas seems to promote does not come from a peaceful place, but rather from a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence” (137). Though this tension seems to vitiate the prospects of ethics, it avoids the abstract claims of moral purity and innocence. Indeed, ethics gains by claiming violence as its own motive force: “The struggle against violence,” Butler says, “accepts that violence is one’s own possibility” (Frames 171). This tension within radical ethics lies at the heart of The Ring as well. The Ring answers to two aspects of the media-image that Butler hopes to turn in an ethical direction. One is the dimension of sound, cast in terms of an address that is bound to fail; the second is that of the “critical image,” which “must not only fail to capture its referent, but show this failing” (Precarious 146). The critical image captures nothing, yet captivates the viewer, who is exposed in her or his precariousness to an alterity that defies representation. I would suggest that The Ring, and especially its cursed video, contains both aspects of Butler’s sound-image. Inevitably, we turn away from or are terrified by the video, but this is itself the ground on which we meet the specter: “chasing it away only so as to chase after it,” as Derrida says, in a duplicitous act of conjuration and an always failed encounter with its enigmatic trace (Specters 140).²¹
 
A haunting message, then, is viral because enigmatic; to pass it on is a symbolic act that, however, exposes the tenuousness of community and of symbolic exchange itself. We have followed the traces of this virality in our stories of haunted wells and in The Ring‘s infectious premise. A final example here will refine what is at stake in this haunting virality. In his late work, Derrida advances a theory of immunity and auto-immunity, which emerges in the course of a discussion of religion, conceived as a practice oriented toward the holy, or heilig, which Derrida glosses as meaning unscathed, immune, safe and sound. Community at its most metaphysical is forged in a shared faith in transcendent immunity. At a certain level of analysis, this metaphysical bid is merely a compensatory illusion, which goes some way toward explaining religion’s sacred terrors, but also the terrorism and “radical evil” that concern Derrida in his essay. Derrida, however, displaces the metaphysical gambit of the afterlife to advance a theory of survival, one that implicates the life of community in an inevitable death-work. Community thus combines the contradictory features of immunity and auto-immunity, its self-preservation always simultaneously self-destructive. “There is no opposition, fundamentally, between ‘social bond’ and ‘social unravelling’. A certain interruptive unraveling is the condition of the ‘social bond’, the very respiration of all ‘community’” (“Faith” 64).²² Derrida’s deconstruction of this opposition is not, of course, a complacent acquiescence to society’s failings or to the sociopathology of The Ring; nor is it an accommodation to the notion of a phantom public sphere. Rather, the phantom is linked to one’s prosthetic survival–exemplarily in writing, as Derrida has often argued, but here in terms of automation and teletechnoscientific machines–a survival that is claimed for the purpose of immunity, but whose technical means are usually denied, repressed, and disavowed. Immunity is thus paired with auto-immunity, in the ambiguous pact of an “enemy of life in the service of life” (48).
 
An insistent motif in Derrida’s essay is that of the source, here defined as always split and divided, “two sources in one”: a source haunted by its double, indeed by its duplication and dissemination. “The same unique source divides itself mechanically, automatically, and sets itself reactively in opposition to itself” (28). Against this reactive logic, Derrida asserts that the two sources do not oppose but rather “contaminate” each other (29). Here, at the wellspring of community, its very re-source, there can be no immunity from contamination. The viral and the ghost derive from this haunted place, where self is bound to otherness, identity to mediation, community to teletechnological dislocation. While the sense of a contaminated source often spurs technophobia, fears of contagion, necropolitics, and wars of religion, it also attests to an “auto-co-immunity” that defies the vain claims to immunity, self-defense, and aggression. A secret tradition derives from this source, a “spectral tradition,” Derrida says, always haunted by its uncanny other (51). This tradition provides another means to ground community, to reckon with the phantom, and to accommodate viral contagion. “Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community <is possible> that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and in this view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival” (51). We have traced a similar spectral tradition in our history of media communities and their haunted sources; what is “crucial enough to pass along” from each instance of the well is a haunting auto-immunity that defies the script of terror and the necropolitical imperative.
 

III.

 

I do not know how long I sat peering down that well.
 

H.G. Wells

 
On December 30, 2006, three years after he was pulled from the “spider hole” where he had been hiding, Saddam Hussein was put to death. The execution was recorded on a cell phone and quickly went viral on the web; for weeks it was one of the most popular videos on YouTube. “Welcome to the sordid world of the execution chamber, brought to you by the YouTube generation,” said Amnesty International (Huggler). While Amnesty’s response to the flawed trial and execution of Hussein was morally principled, its righteous and sarcastic targeting of YouTube is somewhat less so. Indeed, Amnesty’s indignation scarcely hides its scapegoating reflex, which would blame social networking and file-sharing youngsters for the events they merely witness. And in a familiar turn, fears of internet crime, perversion and indecency are attributed to a generation of seemingly monstrous youths. These lapses on the part of the world’s preeminent moral watchdog signal a crisis, not only of the morality of online spectatorship, but also of the discourse of morality itself.
 
The YouTube execution video seems to realize the terrible premise of The Ring. A horrifying message of death is transmitted virally by seemingly amoral subjects, infecting the larger world, if not with death itself, then with the off-limits world of capital punishment. In so doing, it also makes explicit The Ring‘s necropolitical implications. The privilege of wired youths is brutally manifested as the corollary of a vengeful and opportunistic neocolonial massacre in Iraq. It is no doubt chilling to imagine that some of the video’s viewers may have enjoyed the spectacle. If so, one may assume that those who did were the hapless consumers of media manipulation that equated Hussein with Bin Laden, and thereby with evil itself. In these terms, such morally crippled viewers would be not so much guilty parties as unwitting victims of a demonizing media, agent of the state, that forges a national community with the fictional resources of terror, horror, and delusion. As children, they may submit more readily, yet surely less accountably, than as adults who accede to that ideology. The YouTube execution video is the late progeny of CNN, the monster from Midland, and the phantom public is repeatedly conjured to rally in wonder and horror at the spectacle of its secret necropolitics.
 
Amnesty’s moral lapse betrays a desire to assign blame to a particular party, even one as amorphous as a “generation.” In so doing, it passes over the complexity of the file-sharing site as venue for multiple and contradictory political interests. It is notable, for instance, that internet file-sharing allowed for massive dissemination of the controversial images from Abu Ghraib. Similarly, during the demonstrations that followed the Iranian elections in 2009, video clips of a young woman’s dying moments went viral on the web, promoted by CNN in many links and stories.²³ YouTube constitutes less a forum than the switchboard of a global public sphere, a multitude that is centripetal and centrifugal, its popularity variously pulled into the orbit of corporate power and escaping the dictates of the market, morality, and law. Here again, virality is highly ambiguous, connoting both the subversive promise of popular agency and the cynicism of marketing, which cheerfully adopts the language of disease to hawk its wares. Inevitably, then, even viral popularity is the object of manipulation. One programmer, selling his services to companies avid to monopolize the site, gloats at the host of techniques he employs to orchestrate artificial virality; in a technique called “strategic tagging,” he succeeds in “leading viewers down the rabbit hole” (Greenberg).” Cynical as it is, the hacker’s metaphor is strikingly apt: every viewer becomes a young Alice accidentally fallen into a world of primal fears and fantasies. From the live telecast from the San Marino well, to Midland, Wood’s Hole, and YouTube, media communities converge in the insistent figure of a young girl in danger. The cynicism of the YouTube hacker is a fitting rejoinder to the hypocrisy of its television and cable precedents. Despite corporate inroads on the site, YouTube, unlike television and cable, remains a broadcast site without a center. Its videos derive not from a single source or well but from global non-point sources of virality. And it is precisely this non-point source of internet “pollution” that seems to exasperate Amnesty and drive its moral accusation.
 
World-wide wells? In 1895, the futurist H.G. Wells offers such a vision in The Time Machine, a moral fable of the dangers of technology and of cultural decline. The fears and monstrosities evoked by YouTube’s excesses seem anticipated in Wells’s wells. Having voyaged far into a degenerate human future, Wells’s Time Traveler notices that the landscape of England is studded with mysterious wells that lead to a monstrous underworld. He learns to his horror that a devolved race of humans lives underground, climbing at night from the innumerable wells to prey on the happy race of the Eloi. The monstrous Morlocks, whom he at first mistakes for ghosts, are the victims of a necropolitical division of man into laborers and capitalists, and though they devolve underground, they retain a physical and mechanical advantage over their former masters. Wells’s story is a cautionary tale of political oppression, evoking as well the haunting psychic terms of Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny.‘” Futurist, moralist, and fictional inventor of the atomic bomb, Wells chose to sign with his own name the dark passage to the haunting world of the necropolitical other. Ironically, however, today Wells’s vision serves instead to rally a panicked world against that enemy. In Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), the battle against the alien species is made to echo with colonial war in the Arab and Muslim world, and in this way, the hysterical tone of the Cold War is updated to evoke the polarizing fears of the “clash of civilizations.”²⁴ The beginning of the film invokes a familiar image: in the city square, a Norman Rockwell small-town community, the townfolk gather around a hole opened up in the earth. A phantom public, conjured by Hollywood, they are spectators of an imaginary other. Out of that hole, a monstrous machine emerges, and before it proceeds to vaporize the public, it blinks a giant eye at the fascinated onlookers.