Tracy Lassiter (bio)
University of New Mexico-Gallup

A review of Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

Stone is a book to engage with on one of those days: a day when something happens to make you feel your age, or when a series of mundanities is sufficient to wear you out, or when banality or harsh weather makes you crave something poetic and imaginative. Read some passages from Stone and before long you compare your human age against lithic formation. Or read it to recognize that the mundanities that wear on you are even more fleeting than your life, and question whether they’re truly worth your exhaustion. Pick up Stone to ponder lines such as this one: “A dense nexus of unpredictable relation-making, stone discloses the enchantment inherent to things, the powers of which cannot be reduced to history, use value, contextual significance, or culture” (165). Decide for yourself if you agree that this is so, and to what degree.

How wonderful, to pause at the idea of the enchantment inherent to things. Cohen’s lyrical style makes its way into your thinking with statements like these, and soon you find yourself taking life’s matters at a slower, more considered pace. More importantly, Stone is, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen admits, “something of a thought experiment, attempting to discern in the most mundane of substances a liveliness” (6). A Medievalist by training, Cohen mobilizes the belief in rock as a living entity to which we are connected in holistic ways:

Medieval writers knew well that the world has never been still . . . [H]umans may dream a separation from nature, may strive to exalt themselves from the recalcitrance of stone, but remain earth formed from earth, living upon the earth through alliance with earthen matter, returning at death to earth again. (6)

In contrast with contemporary literary scholarship that focuses on the post-human, the cybernetic, and the dystopic, Stone reminds us of our fundamental terrestrial and lithic connection, a connection that begins with the very composition of our bones. In this and other ways, Cohen wishes to remind us that stone is never completely inert. It remains a living substance in some regards, even though our comparatively short lifespan alongside lithic formations means we often fail to apprehend this. Cohen’s book follows similar object studies he has undertaken, such as those included in Inhuman Nature, an anthology of essays based on an “ecologies of the inhuman” roundtable held in 2012.

Stone‘s text is often as dense as its namesake. It forces you to move through it slowly, in a style reminiscent of glacial creep or of the time it takes water to erode a rock face. This is no accident. As Cohen states in the introduction, “Because of its density, extensiveness, tempo, and force, there is something in rock that is actively unknowable, something that will not surrender itself to stabilities…. In that reproach inheres a trigger to human creativity and a provocation to cross-ontological fellowship” (8). Departing from other texts like Manuel DeLanda’s “Inorganic Life,” Cohen is interested in recognizing stone as an ally in humanity’s long history of material production; Stone wants to remind us that nature is not separate and apart from human life. Thus, in Stone we see the geological, the ontological, the material, and the epistemological. It’s a large undertaking, but one that Cohen handles thoughtfully, using literary and cultural-studies analyses to help readers gain a perspective of geologic time and relative human existence.

Earth’s cosmological history is difficult to grasp beyond the superficial understanding that its age contains a lot of zeroes. It’s like trying to get one’s head around the national debt: thinking in terms of trillions is rather abstract until the figure is fully written out, down to the fourteenth digit. Likewise, it’s difficult to apprehend Earth’s formation and evolution from the perspective of our own comparatively recent emergence from the primordial soup. Cohen uses cultural references, including to literature and architecture, to help us realize that long view because he connects human experience with the terrestrial. While geology as a field attempts to give us a sense of Earth’s ancient past by demarcating epochs, strata, and materials, Cohen’s approach is humanistic, not scientific. He moves from the teleologic to the ontologic, linking stone’s history with moments from human history, so our sense of the eons becomes more discernible. Reckoning with such scales of time can be unsettling, as Cohen acknowledges when he writes, “Stones are the partners with which we build the epistemological structures that may topple upon us” (4). Cohen believes it’s important to showcase “an aeonic companionship of the ephemeral and the enduring, the organic and the material” (17). Cohen offers us an important reminder that the earth will survive long past us. Scientists and others¹ argue that considering the Anthropocene and its consequences requires an epistemological shift, one that notes that climatic and other environmental processes, as well as geopolitical borders, are irrelevant. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have made an irreversible mark on the global biosphere. Stone reminds us that lithic materiality is largely immune to this impact, despite our interaction with and use of it.

As we ponder the lithic, so much that makes us human becomes evident. We use stone to build houses and cathedrals; we use stone to heal and to punish; we mine stones; we use stones for exchange, memorials and recreation; to sculpt, to dam waters, to pave roads. So many things that reflect our cultural–our human–values begin with stone, yet this book reminds us that stone will endure beyond us and any human society that interacted with it. Cohen’s study presents examples that reveal the myriad ways we have connected with stone throughout our history. He sets up the book’s chapters not chronologically or by genre but according to poetic ways he considers stone–in a chapter subtitled “the weight of the past,” for example, or “a heart unknown.” I especially enjoy his analysis of events or stories we’ve long heard about but never paid particular attention to with regard to stone’s role. For example, in his chapter “Soul,” Cohen analyzes Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, noting the scholarship that connects the ancient rocks in the tale to the Welsh people whom Chaucer never acknowledges; instead, he relegates them to a past that pre-dates him. Such instances of “Chaucerian appropriations occur only to petrify the British history from which they are plundered . . . What stirred for a moment—geological and indigenous history, the possibility of enduring geological and indigenous life—is stilled into drowned stone” (199-200). The erasure of the Welsh from Chaucer’s text is one example of how cultures have been written out of—or used to “petrify”—literary or cultural history. In another essay, Cohen explains that, to medieval citizens, minerals and gems were far from inert or immobile; rather, stones could influence the world and even sought alliances with organic beings (“Stories” 59). In the example above, Cohen revives Chaucer’s stone from its “drowned” past by reminding us of stone’s “in/organic alliance” with the human and, thus, the latent stories it may contain (Stone 198).

Other of Cohen’s arguments leave me less interested as when, for example, he uses his personal travel as an opportunity to discuss stone. In the book’s conclusion, Cohen describes visiting Iceland, because to “journey Iceland is to traverse a landscape thick with story, a topography known already through medieval sagas” (253). Cohen has visited Iceland, he claims, in order to finish writing the book, but besides noting that the “[h]uman trace is far more recent” there than in landscapes in Ireland, Britain, and France, he concludes that due to its volcanic activity and mountains of ice, “Iceland reminds that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient” (255-56). Cohen references volcanic activity because it suggests stone’s “liveliness,” and he sees in the rocky terrain “art catalytic to the project’s instigation” (255). However, his analysis ends here without providing a literary connection–to, say, one of the Icelandic sagas he mentions–that makes reading the book so informative. Instead, the connection of the human to the lithic is glossed, with Cohen remarking simply: “Except for the occasional remains of a farmstead’s hearth, fire and stone collaborating to send story forward, the landscape holds few lithic communication devices” (256). After insisting so long that the lithic seeks alliance with the organic in “cross-ontological fellowship,” it seems odd that Cohen would focus on where that connection is absent. Here, stone is simply a remnant, marking its temporary usefulness in a home.

Additionally, Cohen strays from his purpose with some of his analyses. For example, he includes a scene from History of English Affairs where a passerby hears a party taking place inside a small hill. The traveler is welcomed into the party by the revelers, and as soon as he drinks the cup that’s offered to him, he flees, taking the goblet with him. Cohen poses a series of rhetorical questions concerning the narrative—e.g., “What would have unfolded if the drunken traveler had joined the celebration instead of pilfering the tableware?”—yet the episode has little to do with stone per se except that the celebration is held underground (204). The goblet is made of an unknown material, which perhaps could be a reference to an unusual clay or other earthen material, yet the passage seems to focus on “otherworldliness” and the subterranean as a potential portal to such a place. In contrast to many other instances where Cohen makes the lithic central to the literary or cultural encounter, it seems the role stone plays in this event is oblique. He is retelling the story and so has no control over its content. However, had the goblet been created from a particular stone that was believed to contain certain powers, or had it included precious gems, it would have seemed more in line with earlier examples. Cohen uses the scene to suggest that the hillock has been transformed “from a local landmark of no great significance to a space at once alien and racialized” given the multiplicity of partiers (205). Yet this seems a tenuous connection to stone, which otherwise features so substantially in his other analyses.

Stone appears at a literary time when humanity’s connection to natural and virtual worlds is diversely fictionalized and analyzed. As Cohen states, Stone can, therefore, serve as “an interlocutor in some lively critical conversations: ecotheory and environmental studies, posthumanism, medieval studies, and the new materialism” (16). The recent Dirt: A Love Story also focuses on material earth. The scientists, authors, artists, and others who contributed to that anthology consider soil from myriad perspectives, just as Cohen does with the lithic. Like Dirt, Stone‘s various perspectives provide scholars with multiple ways to academically, morally, and philosophically consider the natural world that surrounds us yet remains unseen. A similar text is Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, a transdisciplinary anthology that invites readers to “encounter ants, lichens, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste” and other forms humans share the planet with in this environmental stage. But scholars have studied the relationship between organic and inorganic life for decades, analyzing how they work together in the sort of alliance medieval citizens envisioned. In “Nonorganic Life,” for example, DeLanda describes the “[s]elf-organizing processes [that] drive the geological cycle,” and argues for taking the time to study rocks, which appear to remain stable and permanent but really contain “migrating atoms” and fissures that constantly form and propagate (142). Studying these processes is said to allow us to gain the “‘wisdom of the rocks,’ a way of listening to a creative, expressive flow of matter for guidance on how to work with our own organic strata” (143). What distinguishes Stone from DeLanda’s work is Cohen’s sole focus on stone and his emphasis on the organic-inorganic alliance. He combines his knowledge of Medieval paradigms with scientific scholarship to show how this alliance might be manifest, such as with crystals or other stones that have healing powers. The scope of Cohen’s material, from biblical texts to modern film, demonstrates how much work like this remains unexplored.

Roger Caillois published The Writing of Stones in 1970, two decades before DeLanda’s work. In Writing, he analyzes rock samples and cross-sections and ascribes to them an ability to tell stories, create microcosmic landscape “paintings,” and depict planetary orbits. Caillois offers what he calls “a series of reflections on what I have learned from familiarity with certain stones,” interpretations that seem to be based less on rationality than on “mysticism”—or the simple human impulse for pattern recognition (ix, xiv). Cohen’s work is more rational than Caillois’s in that he shows the long interconnection between the human and the stone through minerals and elements, but also through history and culture. He doesn’t impose humanistic interpretations on geologic formations, like seeing a “landscape painting” in mineral formations, as Caillois does. However, he does seem to take from Caillois a sense of the poetic. While Caillois states, “Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so” (1-2), for Cohen “the lithic offers passage into action, a catalyst, a cause” (5). It is easy to believe that Cohen took inspiration from Caillois, and indeed his text, like DeLanda’s, appears in Stone‘s bibliography.

If the future is more cybernetic, our connection with the earth will become even more profound as metals and elements-based wiring support human life systems more fundamentally and organically than they do now. As scholars consider the Anthropocene, the posthuman, the virtual and the natural worlds, Stone reminds us of our connection to the lithic—its presence in our life and our alliance with it. If one were to ask Cohen about our human-lithic connection, I imagine he would say it’s a beautiful thing. After all, as he notes, “We love stone, and the marks we make upon stone, and the marks stone makes upon us. Stone insists not because it is so different from we who build families of whatever kind against cataclysm, but because of its deep affinity, its enduring tectonicity . . . its strangely inhuman (I don’t know what else to call it) love” (73).

Footnotes

1. For example, see Crutzen and Stoermer and Schellhuber (cited in Peter Verburg, et al.) and Louis Kotzé.

Works Cited

• Caillois, Roger. The Writing of Stones. Translated by Barbara Bray, U of Virginia P, 1985.
• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Stories of Stone.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1-2, 2010, pp. 56-63. doi:10.1057/pmed.2009.1.
• DeLanda, Manuel. “Nonorganic Life.” Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone, 1992, pp. 129-167.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elain Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

Martin Harries (bio)
University of California Irvine

A review of Rounthwaite, Adair. Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

Audiences speak. This assumption is essential to the method and to the argument of Adair Rounthwaite’s Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York, and around that assumption the book’s considerable strengths and occasional weaknesses constellate. In her commitment to pursuing archival traces of audience responses, Rounthwaite produces a textured account of a carefully selected set of works. Her pragmatic attachment to what individuals say or have said about their experiences as part of an audience also raises questions about what it means to speak for, or to speak as, an audience. Do audiences speak?

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Rounthwaite is interested in art that foregrounds the potential for participation. “Participatory” might seem redundant when applied to art, but here the word takes a strong form. Participation is at once a description for the kind of engagement audiences commit, and a goal to which certain kinds of art aspire: participation is responding to art as doing or praxis– or, at the very least, as dialogue. Asking the Audience, then, describes both the mode of certain kinds of participatory art and the method of this book, which is to ask members of audiences to speak about what they thought about events in which they participated. Rounthwaite’s focus is compellingly narrow. Her objects are collectively curated exhibits put together in 1988 and 1989 by the Manhattan collective Group Material, and a similar exhibition from 1989 by the artist Martha Rosler. These exhibits happened at the Dia Center, and marked departures both for the artists, who unusually affiliated themselves with the wealthy institution, and for the Dia, which had been, and largely remains, dedicated to a more austere abstract and minimalist tradition, what Rounthwaite calls Dia’s “antisocial sublime aesthetic” (77). She is especially interested in the “town-hall meetings”–Rounthwaite herself uses quotation marks when first using the term–that were part of these exhibits. At these town-hall meetings, the artists invited people to talk about issues relevant to their exhibits, including education in New York City, homelessness, and AIDS. Archived recordings of these meetings are crucial to what Rounthwaite calls her “archivally substantiated understanding of audience experience” (7).

A critique of existing art history grounds her practice: “Contemporary art history is dominated by accounts in which scholars and critics align themselves with the radical goals of the artists without paying equally close attention to how those goals turn out in practice” (11). Close attention to the archival traces of “audience experience,” she contends, can illuminate “how these goals turn out.” The projects on which she focuses are notable for the sheer volume and remarkable richness of the archives that concern them, but surely she is right that more scholars could seek out and pay close attention to more extensive archives of responses to works beyond the reviews of a few privileged critics. (This criticism applies well beyond her field of art history.) For Rounthwaite, this task is also urgently specific to her objects because the kind of participatory art she studies explicitly makes the claim that audiences or viewers participate– and yet rarely do the archives of such participation receive much scholarly attention. Participatory art, she writes, “confronts the scholar with living people” (25). That these works anticipate what Nicolas Bourriaud has dubbed “relational aesthetics” to describe the practice of such artists as Thomas Hirschhorn is also important to the stakes of this argument and points beyond the moment of Group Material and Rosler. Rounthwaite, indeed, sees this moment as an important precedent for a range of art practices since the late 1980s, the period on which she focuses.

Living people confront the scholar, but in what form? Mediated in what ways? Rounthwaite’s unpublished archive includes two main sources: recordings and other written, printed, and photographic remains; and interviews conducted and emails exchanged in the years leading up to the publication of her book. Her archive, then, is substantially divided between records in several media from almost forty years ago and interviews conducted thirty-five or more years later. The contemporary records illustrate the contentious and sometimes tumultuous exchanges around these pieces. Rounthwaite’s documentation of interventions at the town-hall meetings is especially intriguing; the recordings she consulted show that participants sometimes responded in rebarbative ways. Her discussion of the artist Cenén’s contribution to the town meeting on “Homelessness: Conditions, Causes, Cures”–a contribution that included a scream–is a vivid example of the thick description that follows from her painstaking listening and attention to archival traces of powerful affect (67-70).

A central term here, “participation,” remains under-theorized. Or it may be that the term is multiply over-theorized: so many accounts of what participation might be attach themselves to the term that one is unsure in the end what the word means. Participation involves the generation of information (8, citing Hans Haacke); participation is a matter of co-presence (57) and “live input” (87); of “an affective materiality generated by the audience” and of the connections produced by affect (23); of sheer proximity (64); and so on. It is around the ideal of participation that Rounthwaite does not escape the critical trap she describes so well: assumptions that stem from the critic’s alignment with “the radical goals of the artists” she studies are taken as axiomatic. A longer passage illustrates both the skepticism that Rounthwaite brings to her analysis and the axiomatic thinking underlying it:

On the one hand, the collaboration between Group Material and elite Dia … raised legitimate questions about how the project’s socially engaged address related to its institutional frame. Group Material members, with their own investments and positions, also retained a privileged role relative to audiences. On the other hand, Group Material’s choice to set in motion a democratizing process by bringing attention to the audience’s input and live experience staged the impossibility of ever achieving experiential satisfaction relative to that goal. What exactly does a democratizing process feel like? … Not only does pedagogical-art-practice-as-open-ended-communication resist measurement in terms of concrete outcomes, but the participatory artwork collapses any distinction between the work itself and how it feels to participants. (96)

The axiom shared by artists and critic here is the belief that, for all its faults, Group Material had put a “democratizing process” in motion. But is “bringing attention to the audience’s input and live experience” itself such a process? Shared affect becomes itself a measure of potential praxis. The notion of the collapse of the distinction between the artwork and “how it feels to participants” recalls the phantasm of theatrical participation that Jacques Rancière critiques in “The Emancipated Spectator.” Rancière’s description of the desire driving much theatrical activity after Brecht and Artaud applies also to Group Material: “Even if the playwright or director does not know what she wants the spectator to do, she at least knows one thing: she knows that she must do one thing–overcome the gulf separating activity from passivity” (Rancière 12). Rancière’s intervention challenges just this opposition:

Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting: when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms the distribution of positions. (13)

Rancière’s recuperation of viewing does not solve the problem of how to theorize the politics of embodied art forms, but his questioning of the desire for the transformation of spectatorship into action, and of the binary between passive spectatorship and salutary action that underwrites this desired transformation, might have provided a way to rethink the theory of participation here. Rounthwaite never claims that attendance at one of the town meetings was simply political action as such, and she is bracingly self-conscious about her own desires for what these works might have been (e.g., 189). An oscillation between descriptions that assume a democratizing politics and theoretical passages skeptical of these very assumptions is a mark of the critical self-reflexivity of this book; this oscillation is also, sometimes, frustrating.

Partly because of the archival richness of their documentation, the town meetings are the focus of much of Rounthwaite’s book. But one senses that she also devotes so much space to them because they seem to her the most vivid demonstration of “the democratizing impulse.” Around the town meeting especially a few terms cluster that indicate the shape of the problem: democracy, social space, community, exchange, dialogue. The artist Tim Rollins’s boyhood in a small town in Maine appears to have inspired the use of the town-meeting form (87). No doubt there is some danger in romanticizing this political form– and Rounthwaite might have thought more about the history of, and fantasies surrounding, this form of local government–but from the start, the “town meeting” staged in downtown Manhattan can only distantly resemble the town meeting in a small town. Do town meetings have “audiences” at all? What town met under the auspices of Group Material, and what decisions could it make? In what were those present participating? The works of Group Material and Rosler, Rounthwaite writes, “mark the first public emergence at Dia of an explicit articulation of the importance of audience conceived as a broad, nonspecialist public” (33). What emerges, in public, is a conception of the public: the almost tautological shape of that formulation indicates a blurring of the difference between the desire for a certain public and actually reaching or producing that public. Some pages later, the words of a grant application submitted to the NEA by Dia are somewhat jarring: “while the primary audience must necessarily be the New York art community in all their diversity, artists and the art world as they are represented across the country will be involved as much as possible” (61). Is this town the art world? What system represents “artists and the art world”? While Rounthwaite is alert to the contradictions that might underwrite such engagements with publics, she largely remains committed to an ideal of art as a “goad” to democratization: her implicit argument that these works achieve that ideal is not fully convincing. This commitment is most visible often not when she reflects theoretically, but when she describes pieces: sometimes description, a mode she champions, erases theoretical caveats and complexities, as if the works had subsumed difficulties of which she is otherwise aware.

The unexamined axiom that underlies Rounthwaite’s project as a whole is the association of other forms of aesthetic experience with non-participation; these forms are even, simply, outside of public experience. “For Group Material, outreach and dialogue were the artwork” (110). By contrast, and thinking immediately of the other kinds of work Dia sponsors, she writes: “the minimalist sublime that forms its aesthetic heart is conceptually and practically antonymous to publicness as such” (108). Richard Serra is Rounthwaite’s representative figure of this anti-public sublime aesthetic (108). There is no doubt something to this, but the history of what counts as public and what doesn’t is a complicated one. In the decade leading up to the experiments of Group Material documented in this book, Serra was, indeed, a key figure in debates about public art in New York: the controversy around the destruction of his Tilted Arc, a massive sculpture in the city’s Federal Plaza, was, to use Rounthwaite’s terms, about whether that “minimalist sublime” was indeed “conceptually and practically antonymous to publicness as such” (cf. Weyergraf-Serra and Buskirk). Surely those who dismantled the sculpture agreed that it was practically opposed to their conception of what public art should be and of what “the” public is. The “outreach and dialogue” Group Material and Rosler fostered and the kind of publics that interest Rounthwaite are of a very different order from what Serra imagined as the public of his monumental public art. All the same, it might be more useful to think of antinomies between kinds of publics–about publics and counter-publics (Warner)–rather than asserting that one aesthetic is plainly “antonymous to publicness as such” while another encourages it.

The ideal of the town meeting is inextricable from Rounthwaite’s notion of what makes a real public: “The town-hall meetings held for Democracy created a relational plane for live social interaction at the heart of the work itself” (201). The exhibit “ran from September 1988 to January 1989 and was followed by Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here . . . from January to April, 1989″ (1). There were four separate town meetings during this period; the archives of those meetings are very rich. But these vivid records of speech and dialogue also raise the question of what has become of all those experiences that left no trace in the archives, of the visitors who came to Dia when town meetings were not happening, and did not attend the meetings, or of those who attended them and did not speak. Were they excluded from “the heart of the work”? Did they not participate?

Works Cited

• Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2009, pp. 1-23.
• Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2002.
• Weyergraf-Serra, Clara, and Martha Buskirk, editors. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. MIT P, 1991.

Carol Colatrella (bio)
Georgia Institute of Technology

A review of O’Gorman, Marcel. Necromedia. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

My engagement with information technology encompasses necessity and distraction. Times I am frustrated by my inability to stop engaging with social media alternate with periods of appreciation for technical capacities to increase my productivity and to be aware of unfolding events. Most recently, I learned from Facebook that a college classmate has a friend who inherited a Miele vacuum cleaner from Jean Stapleton; my former classmate posts amusing collages of the deceased actress, his dog, and the vacuum. His creations prompted me to think about whether my household’s Miele vacuum will last beyond my death: “will I take care of my vacuum so that it has a life beyond mine?” This question bedeviling me is a quotidian, overly personal, and rather morbid version of the one posed in the publicity release for Necromedia: “Why does technology play such an important role in our culture?” Marcel O’Gorman’s latest book falls in a genre of critical theory works that consider how technology and cultural anxiety become linked in digital and material objects and theories about them.

Examples of similar critical works include Mary Anne Moser’s and Douglas MacLeod’s Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (1996), Peter Lunenfeld’s Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (2001), Margot Lovejoy’s Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age (2004), Richard Rinehart’s and Jon Ippolito’s Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (2014), and Melissa Langdon’s The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation (2014). These texts, some anthologies and some monographs, look at the ways in which digital technologies and art are enabled and constrained by their technological and social legacies. Other recent works in media studies discuss the convergence of media technologies–computer, television, mobile phone, e-reader, printed book, video game–in identifying design conventions and opportunities such as Janet Murray’s Inventing the Medium (2012) and in distinguishing specific products within the field of media archaeology such as Augusta Rohrbach’s Thinking Outside the Book (2014) and Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces (2014). These critical texts provide systematic considerations of digital media, explaining the interrelationships of design aesthetics and cultural values and referencing humanistic debates about the evolution and immortality of technology; however, they skirt the central topic of Necromedia, which provides a distinctive account of digital technologies related to human fears of death.

O’Gorman’s book focuses on technology’s abilities to distract us from mortality and to help us withstand its blows. A volume in the Minnesota series Posthumanities, Necromedia alternates the author’s accounts of diverse digital media projects, including his own, with his careful theorizing about how technology and culture are intertwined in our own day around our interest in death. Chapters in Necromedia build on concepts from media theory, posthuman animal studies, and the philosophy of technology, including object-oriented ontology, to pay “close attention to two universal and inevitable elements of human being: death and technicity” (4). Although O’Gorman explains that technology falsely promises us “immortality,” a state “facilitated by our technologically mediated ability to vanquish time and space” (10), he also offers diverse examples of how technology enables humans, consumers, to manage the finitude of human life, at least virtually.

Since popular culture’s fascination with death and the after-life serves as the basis for many narratives, O’Gorman discusses popular television programs looking at death. He claims that “on any given night I could watch a death program on cable television” (38). He sets aside gangster shows like The Sopranos, pointing instead to shows that depict the business of death: Dead Like Me (2003), a Showtime series about “a lovable grim reaper”; Six Feet Under (2001), a HBO 2001 show about “a terminally dysfunctional group of undertakers”; Family Plots (2004), an A&E series about “a quirky and lovable family of undertakers”; and the HBO mini-series Angels in America about the AIDS crisis in New York (38). O’Gorman also notices a broader set of media and popular cultural products that “register technological anxieties”; he coins “the term necromedia as a philosophical neologism to describe the relationship between death and technology” and uses it “to describe films, literature, and other cultural artifacts” (39). Necromedia is a category including murder mysteries, procedurals, hospital drama, or shows incorporating supernatural figures such as zombies, vampires, or ghost hunters. Following Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2004), O’Gorman considers cultural anxieties about death in postmodernist theories related to spectacle (Guy Debord), surveillance apparatus (Michel Foucault), and hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard). The book’s comprehensive bibliography and useful topical index enable readers to trace references to these and other theorists.

O’Gorman describes the development and reception of some fascinating digital art projects, including his Border Disorder based on filming his border crossing from Canada to the US in the days following 9/11 (chapter 2), his research presentation Dreadmill performed while he ran on a treadmill (chapter 4), and his collaboration Myth of the Steersman, which incorporated restoring a cedar-and-canvas canoe as part of an exhibition about the disappearance of “the iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson” (chapter 8). Discussions of his own art and of media art created by others are touchstones for O’Gorman’s philosophical meditations on technology. Addressing contemporary cultural concerns about terrorism, political inequality, and sustainability, along with reminding us of historical circumstances affecting the development of media technologies, O’Gorman’s blending of art and media criticism with philosophical, historical, and cultural analyses could become tedious in its piling up of references; however, the book’s compelling personal anecdotes and its rigorous, careful analysis of art, media, and culture sustain its focus on the question of how technology staves off and reminds us of death.

A number of critical theorists and philosophers inform O’Gorman’s account. He finds inspiration in the work of Ernest Becker and draws on Cary Wolfe’s discussions of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the specter applied to recording, David Wills’s recognition that such an archive enables human memory, and Bernard Stiegler’s claim “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized technologically” (12), which is a claim for immortality. A discussion of the film American Beauty becomes “an excellent backdrop for investigating the role that technology plays in the cultural pathologies laid out by Kierkegaard and Becker” (43), while acknowledging the technophobia surrounding the development of the telephone. O’Gorman describes our current “collective consciousness”: “Technological gadgets of all sorts—driven by an economy that capitalizes on human attention and abides by the law of progress—are designed to distract us from any sort of existential contemplation,” a claim that builds on Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about technologies as “social extensions of the body” and Sherry Turkle’s conclusion that “individuals seek to be alone and distracted” (47). Later in the book, O’Gorman describes Nicholas Carr’s claims that the printing revolution caused cognitive changes in human consciousness and that our current preoccupation with “the Internet, which fosters sound bites, video clips, text browsing, and hyperlinking, is transforming our print-oriented brains” (144). Carr’s claims about the inability of students to read whole books match what Katherine Hayles and O’Gorman see in their classrooms.

O’Gorman has a clear political goal for his readers: to resist “the commodification of attention demanded by a capitalist technocultural system” (24). He regards Necromedia as proposing “a technical therapeutics that treats the toxicity inherent in our current technocultural hero system” (25). Applying “the cognitive habits of humanities research” could be part of the prescription, while another element involves encouraging humanities scholars to “learn to think and work more like artists,” without sacrificing traditional humanities research (143). In addition to paying “attention to language, deep reading, and history” as Alan Liu recommends, O’Gorman argues in the chapter titled “Digital Care, Curation, and Curriculum” that “applied media theory takes shape through an integration of phenomenology and poesis, research and creation” (148).

The final chapter of Necromedia, “From Dust to Data” builds on the book’s preceding considerations of thinking about things and making things to take up “a discussion of the relationship between terror, horror, technoculture, and contemporary philosophies of being, including, but not limited to object-oriented ontology” (172). O’Gorman connects ethical concerns about the non-human (who speaks for the dust?) while distinguishing between terror and horror. He does so by tracing the history of the distinction from Anne Radcliffe and Edmund Burke to Adrianna Cavarero’s comparing suicide bombing and the Holocaust and to Cary Wolfe’s statement agreeing with Cora Diamond that nonhuman animals should not be thought of “as bearers of interests or rights holders but rather as something much more compelling: fellow creatures” (184).

The ethical dilemmas raised by digital technologies are shaped by and shape human understanding of one’s own identity when confronted by death, whether real or virtual, and one’s sense of social responsibility. For example, Michael Nitsche’s 2008 Video Game Spaces describes a video gamer who establishes a “growing relationship with the game world” by playing Silent Hill (Kitao and Gallo 1999), a game that “takes the player into ever-deeper pits of horror,” forcing one of Nitsche’s friends to decide whether to “kill” a “formerly friendly game-controlled character” that turned into a “zombie character” (47); the gamer found this dilemma tested his human capacities. Evoking Anastasia Salter’s What Is Your Quest? (2014), a history of quest games, Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel The Female Persuasion (2018) provides an imagined example of a compelling video game that would bring a player in contact with a deceased loved one. Wolitzer’s character Corey Pinto pitches his idea for a game to a prospective angel investor: “What if you were on a quest to find the person you love, who’s died? . . . You search and search, trying to find the person through dreams. . . . through whatever means you can find. . . But in the game version, in our version, which for the moment I’m calling SoulFinder, you might actually stand a chance of finding them” (418). The prospect of using technological mechanisms to overcome death has been the basis of fictions since Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), which represents the deadly consequences of a budding scientist’s attempt to create life within a plot that connects birth and death. If we accept Janet Murray’s persuasive claim that “All of human media can be seen as an elaboration of the baby’s gesture of pointing at something in order to draw the caregiver’s attention to it” (14), we recognize that a caregiving relationship, with its ethical obligations, is foundational for developing and appreciating the context, content, and design of media.

Such concerns about how the prospect of death affects human relationships and ethics are woven through O’Gorman’s work. In sum, Necromedia offers an elegantly argued account of how technological innovations and cultural preoccupations with mortality define humanity in the age of the posthuman. The author threads discussion of other media theorists, artists, and philosophers whose ideas help contextualize the provocative digital media projects showcased in alternating chapters. Necromedia provides a useful overview of digital humanities practice and theory that promotes the value of incorporating artistic creativity into humanistic study of where technology and culture meet. The book has helped me to better understand the needs driving many of us to use social media and teaches that being playful with media–creating, constructing, and curating it–ought to be the drivers that guide our engagement with technology.

James Belflower (bio)
Siena College

Abstract

The psychoanalytic trope of “unsettlement” in American postmodern documentary poetry typically aims to narrate the emotional intractability of historical records into an impasse: a position of emotional unintelligibility designed to interrupt a reader’s conventional modes of empathic identification with trauma. However, the affective dimension of this impasse—and its capacity to reconfigure the emotional negotiations required for empathic response—remains largely under-examined. This essay theorizes that impasse by arguing that Charles Reznikoff’s documentary poem Holocaust rewrites it as an affective surface on which emotional contracts are unsettled by a textual materiality inflected by affect’s somatic “touch.”

Can a poem have a surface? Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that it can. He frames a mingling of sensory surface and sign as a system formed in part from language’s material dynamism: “words are nature and matter, order of place, changing place and force” (Fortino 113). Words swell and undulate, pressing on consciousness and touching us in a very physical way: “Words exert pressure. They go straight ahead of meaning, pressing at its sides: they sway themselves. The poem is a swaying of words” (Fortino 113). At the distended thresholds of the poem, the motion and matter of language’s pressure disclose its lively materiality and transmute it into sensory expression; the poem is a place where “words are no longer just words, language is no longer just language. It touches its limit, and displays it” (Nancy, Finite 28). In this essay, I ask what constitutes the sensory pressures of this limit and how it displays the material maneuvers of language that “move” the reader in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), an exemplar of one form of American postmodern documentary poetics. American postmodern documentary poetry “moves” the reader by drawing attention to the materiality of this limit as a genre trope.¹ In this essay, genre operates through Lauren Berlant’s definition of it as “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take” (847).² For Reznikoff’s Holocaust, and documentary poetry generally, the material of this affectual contract consists of found text from corporate, governmental, and/or institutional archives. The text is typically reorganized and scored, then juxtaposed with more figurative language to narrate and excavate “diverse constituencies”: alternative discourses, emotions, and social injustices from within the unspoken or silenced voices that linger in the historical record.³

The sensory limit of the documentary contract is equally defined by narrating maneuvers—the motions of Nancy’s “sway”—which predict that readers will undergo processes of emotional signification. Chief among these processes is the event of emotional emplotment: the organization of linguistic trajectories that attempt to forecast a reader’s emotional response to the text. Although emplotment plays a large role in much postmodern documentary poetry, the techniques I focus on gravitate toward the fragmentary end of the spectrum, where the cause and effect sequences common to conventional forms of emotional emplotment are disrupted. Though diverse in their approaches, poets working in this vein (such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Robert Fitterman, and Mark Nowak) generally employ linguistic configurations that attempt to “unsettle” vicarious adoptions of the victim(s’) subject position, no matter how mundane or extreme the subject matter.⁴ However, these approaches often result in an emotional impasse, a threshold at which the narrative of emotional identification is occluded by language’s failure to voice it. For much documentary poetry, this event of the “unspeakable” is ultimately designed to elicit empathy from the reader. However, because this impasse is typically theorized linguistically, it disregards sensory experiences that remain untranslatable but crucial to the reading event. Encountering such unintelligible emotional impasses, the text seems to suggest, is to realize the breakdown of emotional codification that aims toward empathy and thereby represent trauma’s extremity more accurately. But the emotional impasses predicated on this breakdown are better understood as perceptual contact zones, sensory transactions that ultimately form a surface of affect. Affect is, of course, distinct from emotion; it cannot be intended, but its perceptual atmosphere can be shared socially.⁵ In addition to inflecting matter, its sensory dynamism presses on words and their referents. As Brian Massumi explains, language “can resonate with and amplify [affective] intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant . . . Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static—temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (25-26). For this essay, affect emerges in the way words distend their semantic fields when they are pushed to the limit of their capacity to qualify emotion. By mapping this affective “sway” in the text, I reveal its capacity to inflect alternative forms of transaction between reader and text, and demonstrate how these transactions alter the typically narrow contractual prediction that emotional emplotment must lead either to identification or to unintelligibility.

In Reznikoff’s Holocaust, affective maneuvers are often transversal, splitting referential seams, eroding cause and effect narratives, and flickering after images of violence through presupposed emotional contracts to reveal that the impasses defined by these transactions are not decided, but are yet-to-be-determined experiences, guided as much by asignifying perceptual phenomena as by signifying processes. Holocaust chronicles the Jewish experience of World War Two, from the forced deportation of German Jews in 1933 to the few prisoners and students who escaped to Denmark in 1945. Unlike more popular accounts such as Elie Wiesel’s Night trilogy, Holocaust is composed exclusively of court transcripts from the Nazi Criminal war trails in Nuremberg (1945-46) and the Adolf Eichmann Trial (1960). Although Reznikoff had used similar methods in his two volume Testimony: The United States (1885-1900), he did not reduce that source material as drastically and left much of it in prose. For Holocaust, he employed a meticulous practice of “selecting, editing, scoring, and rewriting” over 100,000 pages of court transcripts (Franciosi 249).⁶ He did not add new imagery or language. Editing consisted mostly of redacting traces of authorial interpretation and judgment from the testimony by eliminating rhetorical embellishments and reducing emotional signals. Using techniques from his early training as a journalist and writer of trial summaries for the law encyclopedia Corpus Juris, he organized much of the testimony into short, pithy scenes, where surprising juxtapositions of time, space, and violence are linked, delinked, and reshaped by the gaps that separate them.

What remains is a book-length poem so stripped of rhetorical appeals to emotion that Reznikoff’s wife, Marie Syrkin, claims it expunges “any subjective outcry” over the violent torture and genocide of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust (Syrkin 64). Paul Auster’s description of the pre-verbal world of Holocaust is comparable, though more generous: Reznikoff’s Holocaust “yields a style that is pristine, fastidious, almost stiff in its effort to say exactly what it means to say” (161). Robert Alter challenges the book’s purpose, arguing that it lacks the imagination necessary to repsychologize its traumatic history: “the ultimate breakdown of his whole problematic relation to the past is starkly evident in the flattened landscapes of disaster that take the place of round imagined worlds” (132). And David Lehman asserts that Reznikoff “leaves unspoken the emotions” so that a reader “may be counted on to provide [emotion] for himself” (39). Though their diction—”flattens,” “stiff,” “expunged,” and “unspoken”—speaks to their attitude toward Reznikoff’s rhetorical choices, it also implies an empathic emotional structure necessary for approaching the text: emotion that manifests itself through subject/object recognition is “expunged;” emotion cannot be produced in response to a style that does nothing to elicit it, and emotion remains unspoken without imagination. Lacking this emotional architecture, it would seem that Holocaust is flat; it does nothing aesthetically to frame the “round imagined worlds” required to predict empathic encounters. However, by attending to the emergence of affect that resides in these same configurations, I suggest that an empathic encounter confronts the reader with a surface where emotional limits meet affect’s insistent sensibility.

Affect’s Tonal Seams

Throughout Holocaust, Reznikoff stacks tonal registers edge to edge. Like his sentences, these registers operate paratactically, binding and loosening emotional connections to the content like an affective seam. This content is generally presented in a detached tone: almost clinical descriptions of the horrors of daily camp life. For example, the diction in the section titled “Gas Chambers and Gas Trucks” remains relatively impartial in the first two lines of the passage. Its tone is informative and objective, the traditional voice for legal documents designed to reduce tonal fluctuations almost completely. However, because it is the voice of a speaker, we must consider that alternative tones linger, and that they unsettle the objectivity of this narrative of Nazis industrial genocide.

The bodies were thrown out quicklyfor other transports were coming:bodies blue, wet with sweat and urine, legs covered with excrement,and everywhere the bodies of babies and children.Two dozen workers were busyopening the mouths of the dead with iron hooksand with chisels taking out teeth with golden caps;and elsewhere other workers were tearing open the deadlooking for money or jewels that might have been swallowed.And all the bodies were then thrown into the large pits dug near the gas chambersto be covered with sand. (Reznikoff 31)

The passage describes the plundering of Jewish bodies by Sonderkommando, and although it begins impartially, a subtle sense of urgency floats into the speaker’s voice as it indicates that the bodies were thrown out “quickly.” ⁷ This urgency reappears when the speaker describes the “busy” scene where “two dozen workers” dissect the dead for valuables. In both instances, clinical diction describes the decay of the bodies, their color (blue), the types of excrescence that occurred during and after death, and how they were mined for valuables. At first, this visceral content eclipses the subtly urgent tone of the opening passage. However, the frank diction of violent dissection—”opening … with iron hooks,” “chiseling… teeth,” “tearing open”—inflects that urgency with a note of despondence. For this reason, it is difficult to interpret whether the speaker has witnessed so many identical scenes that typical emotional reactions have been exhausted, or if the objective voice of the court glosses other, more subdued tonal timbres in the testimony. In both examples, the objective/despondent tone resonates in part from the generalization of “bodies,” signifying an unknown quantity and identity. However, after the first colon, the coordinating conjunction (“and”) distinguishes specific bodies—”women” and “children”—who are “thrown out” from the transports into an unspecified space, and the tone changes. The awkward syntax of the speaker—who places “everywhere” before identifying specific bodies—delicately contributes to the timbre of despair by amplifying its tone of hopelessness, quelling further emotional motion as the speaker is confronted with the magnitude and rigor of the scene. Despair murmurs again in the final line, a grainy sigh that reverberates into the inevitable future (“to be covered”) with the sound of sand sliding into the mass grave as it covers the dead.

These small modulations of tone stacked using coordinating conjunctions reveal where the seams of emerging emotional structures separate from narrative forms. To put it another way, the tonal sway throughout this scene fluctuates so minimally that it almost completely eliminates emotional expression in the passage. Although tone is minimized, its micro-fluctuations form an intensive series, Gilles Deleuze’s term for a sequence of motions that tend toward a critical instant (Cinema 1 87). As tone minimally emplots emotion into the speaker’s narrative, it also marks how it unfastens determinate exchanges of feeling and resists establishing an emotional contract with the reader in spite of the passage’s visceral subject matter. The scene “moves” me, but not because its narrative sequence predicts my capacity to respond emotionally; I can’t determine much of its emotional motion. So what moves me? Affect moves me here, tonally pushing me against the magnitude, mass (both size and material density), scale of genocide, and efficiency of murder. To be clear, I am “moved,” but I do not move, because that would require emotional cognition. The tension of exchange remains, for I cannot yet identify the emotional currency of this scene. Rather, for a moment, I am wound in the seams of its affective economy by the absence of the expected motion toward emotion.

Of course, the passage requires further analysis to identify its emotional trajectories, which would, no doubt, yield further labels. The important point, however, is that affect accompanies these tonal undulations, rending obvious emotional trajectories from narrative flow. In this more autonomous condition, affect signifies emotional static. A similar indeterminate suspension of emotional motion often emerges with(in) more overt tones, as in this description of an honorary dinner for the Nazi officials of the camp:

At a dinner to honor the officials of this camp—and others like it—the Professor of Public Health was making a speech:”Your task is a duty, useful and necessary.Looking at the bodies of all those Jewsone understands the greatness of your good work—all its greatness! Heil Hitler!“And the guests shouted, “Heil Hitler!“(Reznikoff 31)

In this scene, the “Professor of Public Health” gives a speech that reframes the brutal business of the previous episode into a National Socialist narrative of “good work.” The tone of the Professor’s speech is overt; its diction is celebratory, lauding the camp officials (“your task is…useful and necessary”), and decidedly exuberant when the guests and the Professor exchange salutes. In addition to the Professor’s tone, at least two other tonal strata in this passage correspond with the witness and reader. The narrative starts with an unidentified speaker, who we might assume also witnessed the atrocities in the previous stanza. The speaker’s tone is flat, objective like the previous speaker’s, and only quietly supplemented with another tone of despondency when s/he mentions the large number of camps “and others like it” (Reznikoff 31). This flat tone is stacked in blunt juxtaposition to the celebratory salutes of “Heil Hitler” (Reznikoff 31). A third tonal stratum emerges if the reader aberrantly decodes the Professor’s speech as an expression of verbal irony, an interpretation implied by the genocidal labor in the first stanza, where “Good Work” becomes a euphemism for state-sanctioned “Public Health” services.⁸ However, it is not possible to determine whether the speaker who expresses this quotation inflects it with irony. As a result, the tone is doubly encoded and registers meaning not by antiphrasis, but by a relational process of differentiating and combining both explicit and implicit meanings that emerge from at least three different discursive contexts. The first discourse is judicial and flattens the tonal peaks into the objective voice of the witness. The Professor’s diction in the second discourse is earnest, evoking a range of emotions from his sense of national fraternity (“your task is a duty”) to feelings of collective pride (“one understands the greatness of your good work”) (31). In the third discourse, verbal irony becomes situational irony; readers are confronted with the fact that they perceive the Professor’s tone ironically, although no rhetorical devices support this reading. Tone thereby becomes structural, maneuvering a rhetorical surface on which affective seams flatten a movement toward emotional “depth:” the capacity to adopt perspectives from tonal emplotment that lead to identification (or—in the case of the Professor—the attempt not to adopt them).

Instead, in this passage, tone both rubs against and opens onto moments of affective intensity, drawing attention to the problems inherent in how we appraise the emotional structures through which we feel what another person feels. In the passages I have examined so far, emotional vantage points remain subdued, suggesting that empathy does too. However, empathy is a highly elastic phenomenon—so elastic that affect’s unfastening of the necessary rhetorical conventions of situational irony in the previous passage might undercut a move from emotion to empathy. This cut reveals another dimension of empathy, one with less access to the cognitive or emotional possession of another’s subject position, in which we feel the affective seams between these perspectives whether or not we can empathically adopt the viewer’s or the speaker’s perspective. Affective seams “move” us by suspending empathy’s adoptive vantage points and instead instantiating functionally redundant feeling that binds us sensorily in the moment: “two sidedness as seen from the side of the actual thing” (Massumi 35).

Affective Erosion

Affect also emerges in Holocaust through the erosion of humanizing and dehumanizing referents. In an episode that shows more of the genocidal labor of the camps, one prisoner drags another toward a wagon that will carry his body to a mass grave. Note the repetition of many different pronouns, but particularly the way the identifying terms “man” and “body” erode into near meaninglessness.

From “Work Camps”

Once a transport came from another camp.
Something had gone wrong with the gas chambers there
and those who came spent the night in the open courtyard.
They were almost skeletons:
did not care about anything 5
and could hardly speak.
When beaten, they just sighed.
The Jews working in the camp
were ordered to give them food;
but those who had come had trouble just sitting up 10
and stepped on each other
to get what little food they were given.
Next morning they were taken to the gas chambers.
In the courtyard where they had spent the night
were several hundred dead. 15
Jews of the camp they had come to were told:
"Undress the bodies
and carry them to the wagons.
"But these Jews were too weak to carry the bodies on their shoulders
and had to drag them, 20
take them by the feet and drag them along;
and the Germans beat those who dragged to go faster.
One Jew left the body he was dragging to rest for a moment
and the man he thought dead
sat up, 25
sighed and said in a weak voice,
"Is it far?"
The Jew dragging him
stooped and put his hand gently around the man's shoulder
and just then felt a whip on his back: 30
an S.S. man was beating him.
He let go of the body—
and went on dragging the man to the wagons.
                                                                                                   (Reznikoff 42-43)

Starting in line three with the demonstrative pronoun “those,” the iterations of “man” and “body” alternately humanize and dehumanize the various stages of a prisoner’s dying moments. “Bodies” [17] refers to the dead who had arrived and died overnight. The second iteration of “bodies” [19] refers to the previous “bodies” [17]. However, the third repetition [23] destabilizes this link, strongly associating the dragged “body” with connotations of death and the erect “man” with connotations of life: “One Jew left the body he was dragging to rest for a moment / and the man he thought dead / sat up” (Reznikoff 25). A similar destabilization occurs in the final iterations. As the Jewish prisoner comforts the dying “man” [29], referring to the “man he thought dead,” he is whipped by the S.S. “man” until he continues dragging the “body” and “man” to the wagons [30-33]. The pronouns here are not exactly reversed; instead, the tragic absurdity of the dragged man’s question (“is it far?”) perturbs this binary relationship. “Body” in this iteration is paradoxical, implying a kind of living death. As the prisoner lets go of the “body,” the term also releases any humanizing associations accumulated in its previous iterations. In the final iteration, “man” returns like a hyponym of “body”; a “man” becomes a type of body, its humanizing diction eroded, and, like the bodies thrown into the wagons, made indistinct from them in the semantic field of the poem.

This type of referential disruption is common in postmodern documentary poetry. Among other things, it revives the materiality of the language, foregrounding alternative connections within its semantic field. Additionally, emotional emplotment is disrupted when referents are delinked and reoriented, and emotional structures founded on cause and effect relationships are often reconfigured, as when the prisoners who have just arrived to the camp “just sigh” in response to beatings (42). In many cases, this disruption can lead to emotional impasses in the text, areas where emotional identification is muted because its emplotment appears arbitrary. However, following my reading of an affective materiality in Holocaust, these impasses can also be read as formalized affect. To understand this from the vantage point of affect, we must recall that the prisoners who sigh when beaten are historically called Müselmann. Jean Améry describes the Müselmann’s condition in the camps:

The so-called Müselmann, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. (qtd. in Agamben 41)

Without the capacity to cognitively structure reality using emotional responses, the Müselmann’s sigh indicates the erosion of a typical cause and effect relationship with the brutal beating. Although the sigh may be read as an emotional signifier, this reading overlooks the fact that even though it is elicited by the beating, it is equally an asignifying noise, a merely physical function: two sidedness as heard from the side of the person.⁹ In fact, the Müselmann’s sighing sonically expresses Améry’s condition of dissociation by formalizing the physical convulsions of affect. Read in this way, the sigh testifies through sensory non-language to the inadequacy of language to represent the Müselmann’s condition, and likewise to the auditory potential in noise to give witness to that condition without reducing it to the expression of a psychological state. This is an important point, because if the affective sigh discloses the threshold where language erodes into noise, then by attending to what was considered extraneous to the system (the sigh), language can insist on this threshold as a crucial part of redirecting empathic processes of identification along this affective seam.

Affective After-Image

With haptic seams that tighten and loosen empathetic bonds, and noise that erodes and inflects the signification of emotional trajectories, affect interrupts our felt responses, revealing the complexities of the emotional contract we enter into by reading Holocaust. In addition to these affective structures, Reznikoff also employs an after-image of the face, a flickering image more felt than seen that troubles the legibility of one of the most semantically-encoded signifying systems in literature.¹⁰ Historically, the face is considered the most complex signifying surface of the body because its features are assumed to express the activity of the mind behind it. As a literary trope, the face is typically understood to represent the internal psychology of a character through a wide range of facial expressions. Faces appear throughout Holocaust, often in encounters directly preceding murder: “The German looked into their eyes / and shot them both” (Reznikoff 20); “And he lashed her across the face with his whip / and drove her into the gas chamber” (30). Many encounters show that the face of the victim was forcefully attacked or destroyed, but other scenes do not mention the face, instead focusing on small motions of the head: “Then he aimed at her: took hold of her hair / and turned her head around. / She remained standing and heard a shot / but kept on standing / He turned her head around again…” (21). These scenes usually operate antithetically; they imply parts of the face through synecdoche, initiating the empathetic exchange commonly associated with viewing a face only to have that moment of identification cut short. Yet, rather than end the exchange there, in the lingering after-image I propose, parts of the face emerge through motion toward a trajectory of emotion, without forming a “round imagined” image. The following scene is no exception:

As always, S.S. men were walking about with pistols loaded
to shoot at those too weak to climb the steps leading to the vans.
And one of those on the night shift
saw a girl about ten
coming from a heap of dead bodies 5
and beginning to walk feebly—
an S.S. man shot her in the neck;
saw a little boy,
half naked,
quietly sitting in the middle of the path. 10
The S.S. man, head of his group—
the Jews among themselves called him "grandfather"
because he was elderly—
tried to shoot the little boy in the neck.
The little boy turned his head 15
and just managed to say the first two words of the prayer orthodox
Jews about to die say
when he was killed,
and his body thrown on one of the trucks.
                                                                                                        (Reznikoff 35)

The murder of a young girl and boy in this episode are particularly violent moments, because they emplot a more recognizable emotional series that aims the reader toward a tragic encounter with the young boy’s face. Synecdoche associates the girl’s execution style “in the neck” with the proximity of her face, and anticipates the identical execution style of the little boy later in the scene (35). Likewise, the spatial intimacy required for the guard to carry out such specifically targeted executions shares an oxymoronic conceptual closeness to the familial nature of his moniker: “grandfather.” Lest we dismiss this as verbal irony, which we could not do in previous passages, Reznikoff includes the reason behind the guard’s moniker: “because he was elderly.” As in other passages, he abuts a banal detail against the objective description of the guard’s murderous “familial” narrative, suspending a judgmental tone that might sharply define and thus elicit a presupposed emotional response.

Any determinate emotional state is further suspended because the familial associations signaled by “grandfather,” combined with his murderous narrative path through the scene, initially parallel the emotional trajectories leading to the visual intersection of the gun and the after-image of the boy’s mouth in prayer. However, the intersection of these trajectories does not ultimately qualify an emotional event, but an intensive, affective one. Reznikoff’s editing destabilizes the parallel trajectory between emotional and narrative motions in this passage. Of utmost importance to this disruption is the fact that the boy’s face is not initially seen in the final sentence, but rather evoked through synecdoche, causing a facial outline to emerge. In contrast, Reznikoff subtly troubles the narrative certainty of his death, noting that the guard tries “to shoot the little boy in the neck,” his weapon aiming at the turning profile of the child’s head as the boy speaks (35). The sequence of sensual perceptions—the turning outline of the bewildered boy’s face, the movement of his mouth in prayer, the resonance of his spoken words, the crack of the gun, the damage to the boy’s face, his falling body, and his body being thrown onto the trucks—does not result in an imaginative leap into a round imagined “I,” through which an image of the boy’s face responds to or expresses an emotional state. Instead, the series of uncertain movements, particularly the boy’s minor ones—turning head and moving mouth—assemble into an affective after-image of his sensory presence that lingers after he is killed.

Crucially, just as the boy’s face never entirely appears, the spoken words of the boy’s prayer are not included in the text. The first two words of the Hebrew Vidui—the prayer before dying—are “I acknowledge,” a declaration that brings the boy’s mouth, and the associated after-image of his face, into greater conceptual and visible relief. This statement (“I acknowledge”) is one of the most affirmative enunciations of a prisoner’s identity in the text. Yet because the boy’s final utterance remains unwritten, which also effaces his capacity for (a culturally recognizable) subjectivity, readers are obligated to “fill in the blank.” In this way, the after-image operates like the affective seams discussed above. While the flickering outline of the boy’s face stitches readers into a contract of confrontation with the affective after-image of the boy’s face, the fact that the prayer’s text is not printed reworks this contract by distinguishing readers who do not know Orthodox Hebrew custom from those who do. In a sense, their act of response—mouthing the words of the Orthodox prayer or trying to imagine what that vocalization might be—visually and vocally stitches them into a “witnessing” position. And this is vantage point which has become more of an intensive series than a qualitative one because it lacks a qualifying emotional configuration. Much as they do the Müselmann’s non-referential sigh, readers feel the visual and auditory transition from a signifying to an asignifying chain in this affective moment more than they can identify its emotive demands.

Because of the overt sensory nature of the boy’s after-image, this intensive series establishes a relationship between affect and ethics. The boy’s flickering profile evokes Emmanuel Levinas’s well-known theory of the intersubjective encounter. Levinas argues that perceptual judgments can become capable of justifying murder, because they rely on a reductive logical grasp of the profusion of sensory experience. In opposition to this reductive grasp, affect is a type of perceptual “interruption” that counters sensory logics predicated on control and domination.¹¹ In this system of control, the face is as much a sensed affective intensity as a qualifiable sensory experience, and thus always exceeds the grasp of perception. For Levinas, the resistance of this affective excess to qualitative logic produces an ethical resistance to murder. The resulting “epiphany of the face” exceeds consciousness, and as a result, actualizes an intensive insistence—an undeniable, unqualifiable encounter with the presence of another that is as affective as it is material (Levinas 199). The after-image of the boy’s face is this actualized affective insistence. The boy’s after-image “interrupts” perceptual judgment’s qualifying narrative and emotional clutches to emerge affectively. His face flickers to the extent that its insistence remains felt more than cognizable. And this affective flicker of the face appositionally accompanies the delicate narrative indeterminacy Reznikoff weaves through what is an otherwise inevitable sequence of murder. In essence, this perceptual unsettlement is the affective material of the ethical, the “unique matter” of the face that inherently resists the industrial ideology of murder in this scene and throughout Holocaust (Levinas 199).

The Surface of the Document

I have argued that Holocaust formalizes a surface of affective blocks, seams, and after-images by unsettling presumed intersections between emotional and narrative emplotment. This reading reveals that the contract between reader and emotion is affectively formed and unsettled by the sensory surface of American Postmodern Documentary Poetry. Most importantly, noting documentary poetry’s affectual contract with trauma in Holocaust reveals how affect can redistribute what we sense in a text and reorient emotional structures of response; we haptically sense a young boy’s after-image in the moment of his murder, we hear the testimony lingering in a Müselmann sighing, and we feel the sensory sway of National Socialist fervor. In reading for affect, I do not suggest that emotional structures are inadequate for interpreting Holocaust. Rather, I claim that by contending with the seamed, eroded, and after-imaged unsettlement of presumed parallels between narrative and emotional trajectories, our reading does not culminate in impasses, but instead travels across affective surfaces on which presupposed emotional exchanges are renegotiated. Emotional contracts in this exchange resemble a “sustained ‘act of attention,’” in which active listening, feeling, and seeing constitute as much or more of our engagement with the representation of suffering than does identification (Gubar 9).

But what do we gain by revealing a type of affective cognition in the surface of this genre of documentary poetry? What is the benefit of tracing the seams, erosion, and after-images that formalize affect’s pressures? And, in attending to these fluctuations between typical emotional structures, what do we learn by showing how affect resists the impulse for identification through emotional classification? Reading Holocaust as a text with a surface discloses a “nervous system” connecting the somatic and the social, demonstrating how the public voices of eyewitness testimony intertwine the private embodied experience of the reader within a larger socius.¹² The testimonies demand that we contend with the contiguity of representation and represented—think body/human. To be sure, affective cognition emerges from this contiguity, specifically from the growing awareness that reading embeds us in an event that both inflects and reorients the ways in which we identify with its content. As Michael Davidson believes, Reznikoff’s use of eyewitness testimony from court transcripts “produces a kind of collective witness” that can “transcend [a reader’s] local conditions” (151). In addition to Davidson’s focus on the symbolic dimension of this collectivity, I would argue that an affective contract musters this collectivity and presses readers into the apposition of representation and represented. Given that the surface of much of American postmodern documentary poetry is crisscrossed by the transmission, translation, and transformation of affect, it might plausibly capture affective residue across time and space. Theresa Brennan, theorizing the transmission of affects, suggests that they are contagious, “carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the other and the social in the system” (139). Similarly, affect could be transported by a linguistic contagion transmitted with, through, and across readers embedded in affect’s transhistorical seams, erosion, and after-images. Read this way, Reznikoff’s Holocaust discloses “the presence of the other and the social” in the historical document by establishing the conditions for a collective event of emotional negotiation that exceeds socio-cultural and historic boundaries, because its affective intensity lingers in the document whether it emerges or not. What Reznikoff transmits through Holocaust is thus the potential for a type of affective cognition to reinscribe the historical particulars of the court transcripts into a contingent materiality, a surface that, because of its unsettled nature, is capable of transforming a reader’s emotional contract to the Holocaust by confronting them with the influences of affect on their emotional production. Ultimately, Reznikoff’s emphasis on the surface of the document—where affective cognition reorients the processual nature of empathetic identification—reveals how an emotional relationship to the victims of the Holocaust must begin anew in each episode through one of the many faces of testimony.

Footnotes

The excerpts from Holocaust cited herein are © 2007 Charles Reznikoff/Black Sparrow Press.

1. The American postmodern documentary poetics I examine share these aesthetically productive techniques for sequencing, rearranging, and selecting from the historical document with “Investigative Poetics,” the genre defined by Ed Sanders in his manifesto Investigative Poetry (1976).

2. Raymond Williams’s seminal work on the “structures of feeling” in Marxism and Literature (1977) also inflects my essay. Throughout this analysis I emphasize the nascent formation of Williams’s explanation. Structures of feeling are “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined by exchange” (131).

3. In Ghostlier Demarcations, Michael Davidson describes a similar sensual contract with Reznikoff’s text, noting that the work is composed of “surfaces of identification” on which understanding is constructed (138). These surfaces are also political for Davidson. He explains that in the 1930s, the new documentary culture of the American Left, of which Reznikoff was a part, read “American history not as a narrative of Adamic discovery and perfectibility but as a material record of diverse constituencies” (140).

4. “Empathic unsettlement” is Dominick LaCapra’s term for aesthetic techniques in a text that trouble empathic modes of identification that tend toward an occupying strategy of victim subject positions.

5. Theresa Brennan looks primarily at the social forces of affect in The Transmission of Affect, but her argument that affects are “carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the other and the social in the system” does support reading as an historicizing moment of meaning making, and therefore a part of the social forces she theorizes. For my purposes, this means that reading documentary poetry draws us into a particular type of presence of the other and thus makes possible a particular type of affective transmission (139).

6. In “‘Detailing the Facts:’ Charles Reznikoff’s Response to the Holocaust,” Robert Franciosi describes Reznikoff’s four-part writing process:

Selection: This involves the reading of many volumes of law records (in the case of Testimony literally thousands of volumes) to find suitable material…Editing: Reznikoff cuts the selected testimony to a core of material that he feels has poetic value. Often he reproduces the legal language verbatim, but he does not hesitate to alter it for the sake of clarity and direction. Scoring: The edited law case is lineated, typed out as verse. Those details Reznikoff wants to emphasize are strategically placed, both within the line itself and in the entire selection. Rewriting: This process may consist of a number of drafts and is essentially a honing of the rhythms, lines’ and details in order to enhance the intended emotional and poetical effects. (249)

7. The SonderKommando were work units made up of prisoners. They were composed almost entirely of Jews who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid in the plunder and disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust.

8. “Aberrant decoding” is Umberto Eco’s term for interpreting a text or other communication with a different code than the source code used to create it.

9. In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben describes the Müselmann’s erosion through “biopolitical caesuras,” the Nazis’s state sanctioned reduction of a prisoner’s biological continuum to the point at which there is no more possibility for degradation. For Agamben, the Müselmann’s existence testifies to “the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be divided by another caesura” (85). Though he emphasizes the biopolitical dimension of this degradation, his concept applies equally to the reductive linguistic movement I have traced in the passage above. There, the reduction of identifying terms to an indeterminate position between functional and non-functional reference diminishes their capacity to identify a particular subject or be further divided with semantic distinctions. In other words, by the end of this passage, the terms “man”/”body” do not evoke a psychological depth characteristic of emotional or intellectual signification. In this limit condition, they “identify” the Müselmann as an organism to which orienting terms can only loosely adhere. Ultimately, to think the Müselmann is not to fix the terms into a designation that establishes a classical subject, but to attend to the ways the transition from signification to its limit sustains a tensile surface of indecipherability between language and extra-linguistic intensities.

10. I draw on both Gilles Deleuze’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s theorizations of the face in this section; respectively, they delineate the two fields of theory from which my analysis benefits: film and ethics. I employ Deleuze’s framing of the face in cinematic terms as a “reflecting surface” where “micro-movements” create intensive affective series that tend toward the open-ended processes of virtual and material actualization. I employ Levinas to frame the face as an ethical encounter with the affective and signifying dimensions of another’s face. See Deleuze 87-101 and Levinas 194-219.

11. Levinas writes, “The very distinction between representational content and affective content is tantamount to a recognition that enjoyment is endowed with a dynamism other than that of perception” (187). Although Levinas recognizes the pleasurable aspects of affective content, his explanation of the affective dynamic interruption of perception can equally be applied to trauma.

12. “Nervous System” is Michael Taussig’s concept for a text’s stylistic embodiment of the relationship between content, historical event, and reader. “[The Nervous System] calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being represented and not suspended above and distant from the represented—what Adorno referred to as Hegel’s programmatic ideas—that knowing is giving oneself over to a phenomenon rather than thinking about it from above” (10).

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, 1999.
• Alter, Robert. “Charles Reznikoff: Between Present and Past.” Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis. Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977, pp. 119-135.
• Auster, Paul. “The Decisive Moment.” Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. National Poetry Foundation, U of Maine at Orono, 1984, pp. 151–165.
• Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 4, Winter 2008, pp. 845-860. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/alh/ajn039. Brennan, Theresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004.
• Davidson, Michael. Ghostlier Demarcations: modern poetry and the material world. U of California P, 1997.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, U of Minnesota P, 2006.
• Franciosi, Robert. “Detailing the Facts: Charles Reznikoff’s Response to the Holocaust.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1988, pp. 241–264. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/1208439. Gubar, Susan. Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Indiana UP, 2003.
• LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. John Hopkins UP, 2001.
• Lehman, David. “Holocaust.” Poetry. vol. 128, no. 1, 1976, pp. 37-45, JSTOR, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=128&issue=1&page=49. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Edited by Simon Sparks, Stanford UP, 2003.
• —, and Virginie Lalucq. The Overflowing of the Poem. Translated by Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue, Omnidawn Publishing, 2004, pp. 100-189.
• Reznikoff, Charles. Holocaust. Black Sparrow, 2007.
• Syrkin, Marie. The State of the Jews. New Republic Books, 1980.
• Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. Routledge, 1992.
• Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1978.

Murray Leeder (bio)
University of Calgary

Abstract

This essay discusses the declining academic and continued popular currency of Carol J. Clover’s concept of the Final Girl, and examines the term through X-Ray or Hospital Massacre (1981), a film of the first slasher cycle with a more mature protagonist than most. It extends Clover’s ideas by showing how X-Ray is heavily concerned with medical issues, in particular the Foucauldian “medical gaze.” The titular X-ray becomes a structural model for the invasive, destructive gazes deployed throughout the film, both by its villain and by the medical environment itself.

Carol J. Clover’s phrase “the Final Girl” has penetrated public consciousness in a way few academic terms have. Introduced in her 1987 article “Her Body, Himself,” it was popularized by her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. In recent years, there have been films called both Final Girl (2015) and The Final Girls (2015). The page for Final Girl on the popular culture website TvTropes.com has hundreds of entries and only a smattering of acknowledgements of Clover. The concept itself is simple: a slasher film supplies many “girls,” most of whom are killed off by the slasher until only one remains:

She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; who we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. (Clover, Men 35)

And yet she is also generally the one who battles the killer, alone or with help: “Finally, although she is always smaller and weaker than the killer, she grapples with him energetically and convincingly” (40). Arguing that she is boyish–often with an androgynous name, like Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween (1978)–and phallicized, Clover resists reading the Final Girl as legitimately female, but rather sees her as a figure of transvestitism, a boy in drag: “to the extent that she means ‘girl’ at all, it is only for purposes of signifying male lack . . . To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development . . . is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking” (53). Although Clover’s concept has come to roost in popular culture, it has been roundly critiqued in academia. Barbara Creed argues that the Final Girl should not be understood as the phallicized “false boy,” but as an incarnation of the femme castratrice (158). Other scholars have tried to recuperate the Final Girl as a potential figure of female or feminine agency and resistance, against Clover’s objections (e.g. Pinedo 1997, Short 2006). Perhaps the most trenchant critiques–for example, by Richard Nowell and Janet Staiger—suggest that the concept is simply not accurate, that Clover’s corpus of films is too small and her interpretation of the character type too selective. In slasher films, Staiger writes,

[w]omen are usually the victims and the heroines, but they are not always ‘Final Girls’ in the strong sense Clover implies. They may be quite feminine. Boyfriends, fathers or father figures, even other women and children, often support and aid them. They learn from those people so that they do take control of their battle with the killer. And they are rewarded not just with survival but also with romance. (222)

Similarly, Jeremy Maron notes the presence of male characters in the structural position of the Final Girl, and suggests that “Final Subject” is more apt.

The decline of the Final Girl as the dominant explanatory framework for the slasher film is a positive development, allowing us to explore the genre’s diversity more fully. But do we still need the Final Girl paradigm, or should we consign it to popular culture? I argue that critics should not discount Clover’s ideas altogether, but rather explore their possible extension through connections with other discourses. Here, I examine an obscure slasher film that both fits within and extends Clover’s model of the Final Girl. Directed by Israeli director Boaz Davidson and distributed by exploitation specialists Cannon Films, it was released both as X-Ray and Hospital Massacre in 1981, in the thick of the first slasher cycle triggered by Halloween.¹ Never discussed by Clover or other early thinkers on the slasher film like Vera Dika and Robin Wood, X-Ray is almost absent from the now-voluminous scholarship on the slasher film. Certainly, many of the character dynamics of Clover’s model are at play in X-Ray, especially in the relationship between the “assaultive” and “reactive” gazes. Yet its setting in a thinly-populated urban hospital—in contrast to the rural and suburban settings of most slasher films, but constructing a similar dynamic of isolation—permits those gazes to operate within the paradigm of a Foucauldian “medical gaze.” In so doing, X-Ray invokes a range of anxieties about masculine medicine, its spaces, and its practitioners.

Medical Gaze, Medical Horror

Wood distinguishes between two related cycles in the 1970s and 1980s that he calls the “teenie-kill pic”—largely coterminous with the later constellation of the slasher film—and the “violence against women movie,” a higher-rent and glossier (though often more misogynistic) variant associated with filmmakers like Brian de Palma (194). X-Ray is a hybrid of the two: it borrows structurally from the slasher film, but involves older characters;² has the stock sexually frustrated villain, but no emphasis on virginity or promiscuity; and sexualizes its protagonist Susan (Barbi Benton) significantly more than most slasher films sexualize their protagonists, making her the only woman to appear naked in the film. X-Ray also fits within a longer history of horror in medical contexts. Its villain echoes the deranged surgeons of Golden Age films like Mad Love (1935) and The Raven (1935), both motivated by twisted, impossible love for a virtuous woman. Later films also play up the fear inherent in medical settings, as in Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Horror Hospital (1973). The key director associated with medical horror is David Cronenberg (especially for films like Rabid (1977) and Dead Ringers (1988)),³ yet the slasher film had its dalliances with medical settings too. In his book on the slasher film, Adam Rockoff dismisses X-Ray and Visiting Hours (1982) as “inferior films which effectively killed off the minor trend of hospital slashers” (129) alongside the better-known Halloween II (1981). X-Ray‘s most significant predecessor might actually be Coma (1978), Michael Crichton’s more mainstream Hollywood medical thriller and certainly one of Wood’s “violence against women” pictures. X-Ray echoes Coma in its chases through sparsely-populated medical facilities and in its third act, in which the female protagonist (in both films named Susan (Geneviève Bujold in Coma)) is strapped to a medical table for an unnecessary procedure meant to kill her.⁴ Though the lofty considerations of medical ethics in Coma are nowhere to be found in X-Ray, Davidson’s film contains many of the same anxieties about the hospital space, masculine medicine, and (especially female) bodies that are on display in a less intellectual fashion.⁵ The formal differences between Coma and X-Ray are instructive, especially in terms of their medical settings. Coma‘s mise-en-scène favours brightly-lit, self-consciously bland modernist spaces with brutalist influences; the dark conspiracy at the centre of the film ironically goes on in spaces of apparent transparency. By contrast, the hospital in X-Ray is a gloomy place full of narrow corridors, vacant floors, implausibly low-key lighting, cluttered, dangerous areas, and grotesque patients. It epitomizes what Clover calls the “Terrible Place” (30), redolent of Victorian medicine crossed with torture and sadism (echoes of Jack the Ripper and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Thomas M. Sipos observes that the film (as Hospital Massacre) “draws much of its terror from a mise-en-scène that magnifies all our paranoid fears about doctors and hospitals” (45); furthermore, a careful deployment of a horrific variation on the medical gaze is a major part of its queasy effectiveness. Not only does X-Ray take place almost entirely in a hospital, but its villain is a medical professional: the seemingly helpful intern “Harry” (Charles Lucia), who disguises his identity behind a medical mask and manipulates medical imaging to his vile purposes.

The film also develops its paranoia through a recurring emphasis on the medical gaze. In using this term, I am of course evoking a concept introduced by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic (1963). What has been variously rendered as the “medical,” “clinical” and “observation gaze” is a feature of Foucault’s modern episteme as it emerges around the beginning of the 19^th century; “[f]acilitated by the medical technologies that frame and focus the physicians’ optical grasp of the patient, the medical gaze abstracts the suffering person from her sociological context and reframes her as a ‘case’ or a ‘condition’” (Hsu and Lincoln 23). The gendering here is no mistake; in reducing the patient to a passive position or even rendering her corpselike, the medical gaze makes its subject essentially feminine. Graeme Harper notes that “in Anglophone film circles, we must be wary of interpreting Foucault’s translated discussion of the clinical ‘gaze’ too literally as a primary version of the filmic gaze. The French word Foucault uses is ‘regard’ which can mean a gaze or a look or an expression or a glance” (99-100). This caveat actually suits my argument here, because the “medical gaze” on display is not limited to an individual character—indeed, almost every medical practitioner in the film falls far short of the standards of objectivity, although empowered by those standards—but is rather attached to the clinical environment itself. The ur-slasher Halloween transforms the town of Haddonfield into a haunted environment in which Michael Myers’s gaze is implicitly unpinned from his physical body and becomes omnipresent.⁶ X-Ray does something similar with less supernatural coding; it detaches the gaze of the killer from Harry and attaches it instead to the hospital itself, creating a space replete with many “gazes.” Almost all of these gazes are pointed at Susan, and like the X-ray itself, they ultimately aim to penetrate her body.

In the X-Ray

In this paper, I use the title X-Ray over the more descriptive Hospital Massacre, partly because the 2014 Blu-Ray/DVD release from Shout! Factory uses X-Ray, and partly because it is the more poetic and evocative, and in a strange way, more appropriate title. True to its name, the film’s opening titles unfold over a succession of X-ray images, blue and luminous as if displayed on a light box. The first is a skull, its empty eye sockets staring directly “towards” the camera. Already the spectatorial theme formulaic to the slasher film is emphasized. The next image shows a pelvis; as with the eyes, genitals are suggested by their absence, introducing a sexual theme (although the sex of the body is not clear from the image—shades of Clover’s discussion of gender ambiguities in the slasher film).⁷ Following this image, a skull appears again, this time in profile and facing right. The fourth image shows vertebrae, with something denser than bone alongside them: a stethoscope, alluding to the film’s medical setting (perhaps this is an image of the film’s villain). Next, a skull in profile again, this time facing left. Then a rib cage, another view of the pelvis, and lastly the skull again, over Boaz’s director credit.

Accompanied by a nervous synthesizer-heavy score, the title sequence establishes the medical gaze as a key theme and taps into the cultural history of medical imaging in general and of X-rays in particular. The X-ray was unexpectedly discovered by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895; relatively easy to replicate and largely circulating through the popular press rather than scientific channels, it triggered an “X-Ray Craze” that threatened to overshadow the debut of cinema that same year (Crangle 1998). X-rays were mindboggling, unthinkable, and arrived in a fin de siècle climate hungry for novelty. The “living” skeleton was previously a contradiction in terms and served mainly as an artistic representation of death, but with Röntgen’s discovery, it was suddenly observable. The tensions raised by the technology were articulated by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924), when Hans Castorp’s glimpse of his own X-ray triggers a profound reckoning with his mortality and corporeality:

Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness.(215-6)

Yet the X-ray did not so much show the skeleton as turn bodies inside out, reducing “solid” flesh to a ghostly but still perceivable half-presence. As Catherine Waldby writes:

The surface of the body, its demarcation from the world, is dissolved and lost in the image, leaving only the faintest trace, while the relation between depth and surface is reversed. Skeletal structures, conventionally thought of as located at the most recessive depth of the body, appear in co-registration with the body’s surface. (91)

Of course, the “deathly” qualities of the X-ray would take on a different inflection once it became clear that the rays were dangerous, capable of inscribing themselves on living bodies and causing nausea, hair loss, and burned or peeling skin. Most experimenters ultimately displayed these symptoms to some degree, and the numerous victims of the X-ray entered the annals of medical history as martyrs who suffered and even died to advance scientific research (Herzig 85-100). The only female “X-Ray martyr,” Elizabeth Fleischmann-Ascheim, was exalted as “America’s Joan of Arc” after her death, sanctified much as Marie Curie would be as a fellow experimenter and victim of radiology (98).

As unsexy as skeletons might appear, the X-ray developed a powerful erotic potential in its apparent ability to dissolve all those layers of Victorian clothing.⁸ An 1896 letter to the Pall Mall Gazette complained of the “revolting indecency” of the ability to “see other people’s bones with the naked eye” (qtd. in Goodman 1043), and other texts expressed anxiety about “the X-Ray’s perceived capacity to dissolve sexual identity by figuratively decomposing the organs and flesh” (Cartwright 119), rather the same way that the opening images of X-Ray are at once sexualized and de-sexed. The deathly/erotic dynamic of the X-ray is also on display in The Magic Mountain, where Castorp makes a fetish of an X-ray image of Clavdia Chauchat. Simultaneously, the X-ray is associated with destruction, invasion and penetration. Akira Mizuta Lippit writes: “To see and to burn. The two functions and effects are fused in the X-Ray, which makes the body visible by burning it. The extravisibility of the X-Ray is an effect of its inflammatory force . . . It sees by burning and destroying” (50). In X-Ray, the villain embodies the looking/destroying duality of the X-ray: a spectatorial agent of the gaze in familiar slasher villain form, with a penetrating medicalized force that destroys as he gazes. If the tensions concerning X-rays seem to have been soothed by the 1980s, X-Ray makes the interesting decision to evoke them from its opening moments. A literal X-ray plays a brief if crucial role early in the plot, serving to mislead and manipulate, and makes a third act cameo long enough to be splattered with blood. The film exploits many of the issues that the X-ray and the broader culture of medical imaging have raised historically: professionalism, eroticism, privacy, interiority and exteriority, and death.

What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?

In her study of the “stalker film,” Vera Dika notes a conventional two-part structure derived from Halloween. Its initial setup occurs in a section marked as the past:

1. 1. The young community is guilty of a wrongful action.
2. 2. The killer sees an injury, fault or death.
3. 3. The killer experiences a loss.
4. 4. The killer kills the guilty members of the young community.

X-Ray replicates this structure. It opens with a short sequence that establishes who the killer is and why he targets the “Final Girl.” A title card identifies “SUSAN’S HOUSE, 1961,” and the setting’s “pastness” is signaled formally by a slight, gauzy overexposure. The sequence is full of hearts–conventional Valentine’s Day hearts have been cut out and placed all over the young Susan’s (Elizabeth Hoy) house–and it soon introduces a gaze. The boy Harold (Billy Jayne) is looking in the window at the object of his precocious obsession, accompanied by a point-of-view (POV) shot zooming in to her face. Harold leaves a bright red envelope on her doorstep, matching the color of his coat and a pattern on his shoes.⁹ He knocks thrice and flees, and then watches as Susan and her friend David (Michael Romero) open the envelope. Inside is a red heart-shaped note. The words “BE MY VALENTINE” are written crudely on the outside, and on the inside it says, “TO SUSAN FROM HAROLD” and, barely visible, “I [HEART SYMBOL] YOU.” Susan and David laugh at the discovery that the card is from Harold, crumple it, and toss it on the floor. When she goes to the kitchen to slice a birthday cake with an overdramatically huge knife,¹⁰ she returns to find that David has been murdered with surprising speed and quietness, hanged from a hat rack; she turns to see Harold grin maniacally from the window and then run away. The camera lingers on the literal “broken heart” on the floor.

X-Ray joins Halloween, New Year’s Evil (1980), You Better Watch Out (1980), Prom Night (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), Graduation Day (1981) and more in taking place on a holiday, or more precisely on two different Valentine’s Days. Be My Valentine . . . Or Else is given as an alternative title for the film (a pre-release title, according to the Internet Movie Database; perhaps it was discarded because the film was not released in February).¹¹ Valentine’s Day plays an almost literal background role in X-Ray through the mise-en-scène of the hospital festooned with banners and hearts. Curiously, Susan never mentions the murder she witnessed on a Valentine’s Day two decades before (are we supposed to conclude that she has repressed the memory?),¹² but the heart symbol ties in with the killer’s motivation: to claim Susan’s heart. In keeping with the emotional stunting of slasher film villains, Harry fails to discriminate between poetic metaphor and corporeal reality. Martin Kemp writes that, despite a tendency to insist that the heart symbol bears little resemblance to a real heart, in fact, “[t]his lack of resemblance is considerably overplayed” (85).¹³ The symbol does derive from the shape of a literal heart, with its two atria in place and much else excluded. The heart symbol migrated from anatomy to become an easily commoditized symbol of romantic love; Harry has reversed that trajectory.

As X-Ray continues past the opening sequence, another title card reads “19 YEARS LATER” over the base of a skyscraper; as in so many slasher films, the tree-lined suburban streets of Halloween vanish after the opening. Here we are introduced to the adult Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton), and find that she is unlike the virginal cliché of the Final Girl. She is a divorced woman who has a daughter, a bitter relationship with her ex-husband, and a current boyfriend. Her dark red business attire and the thick binder she carries associate her with success and professionalism.¹⁴ This Final Girl is distinctly a Final Woman. Indeed, all the victims in the film are adults, except the pre-pubescent boy of the opening sequence. But while other women are killed in X-Ray (doctors and nurses), none are Halloween-style “friends” of hers, and with some she never comes into contact at all; Susan is afforded a “specialness” they lack. In part, that specialness is carried over from off-screen. Benton was best known as a Playboy model, having been on the cover of the magazine three times by then (and again in 1985), as well as being Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend for a period in the 1960s and 1970s. The most obvious precedent for casting her as the lead in a horror film is Marilyn Chambers in David Cronenberg’s Rabid. Though Chambers was a hardcore pornographic film actress and Benton a nude and semi-nude model, both carry their extra-cinematic star personas through to the comparative “mainstream” horror film.¹⁵ Chambers’s and Benton’s characters are replete with the “to-be-looked-at-ness” that Laura Mulvey famously ascribed to women on screen (809), in each case deployed within a medical arena. Like most Final Girls/Women, Susan is not only the subject of the look of the killer (and other males), but increasingly possesses an investigative gaze of her own.

The Eye of (Medical) Horror

Clover suggests that horror is, “intentionally or unintentionally, the most self-reflexive of cinematic genres” due to its compulsive thematization of looking (Men 168). She discriminates between the masculine “assaultive gaze,” often represented by POV camerawork, and the feminine “reactive gaze,” linked to femininity and vulnerability. However, she argues that “over and over, horror presents us with scenarios in which assaultive gazing is not just thwarted and punished, but actually reversed in such a way that those who thought to penetrate end up themselves penetrated” (Men 194). X-Ray certainly does not match the complexity Clover finds in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960)–itself interested in the long-term consequences of the medical gaze of the protagonist’s psychiatrist father–but it does something interesting in its own right by affiliating the typical voyeuristic-sadistic killer’s gaze of the slasher film with the “medical gaze.”

From the moment Susan arrives at the hospital, where she needs to pick up test results required for a new promotion, she is being watched. As a quick tilt and zoom reveals, an unseen man in surgical garb observes her from a hospital window when she enters the building for her tests; later we see his POV in a darkened room, caressing a framed portrait of Susan as a child with an elastic-gloved hand. When Susan checks in, a creepy janitor leers at her undisguisedly, drumming his fingers on a desk. Soon we realize that the killer has causal control over the environment of the hospital, trapping Susan in an elevator and luring Dr. Jacobs (Gay Austin) to a deserted floor of the hospital with the intercom. Jacobs is spooked by a skeleton, a medical specimen seemingly “staring” at her, and by a medical dummy stretched out on a table like a corpse, but she overlooks the real danger; she is jumped from behind and knifed to death, plumes of blood squirting onto the killer’s surgical garb. With her dies the hope of a “feminized” medical establishment.¹⁶ Susan loses the regular physician with whom she feels comfortable and is thrust into the “care” of a range of sinister male doctors, especially the decidedly unprofessional Dr. Saxon (John Warner Williams), whose diffident manner leads us to suspect he may be the killer. Before meeting Susan, Saxon is introduced taking off a medical mask and stashing it in a drawer in which medical instruments are casually stored–but he is not actually the murderer. Though he is a red herring in narrative terms (and is himself murdered), he is central to the film’s deployment of the medical gaze, which feels leering and prurient under the barest pretense of medical objectivity.

The purpose of Dr. Jacobs’s murder, we later learn, is to tamper with Susan’s files so that she is required to stay longer than necessary in the hospital. Several other murders, including that of Saxon, occur when characters come close to uncovering Susan’s actual (healthy) medical status and thus allow the pathologizing of her body to persist. Later, when Saxon examines her X-ray, he finds a huge mass of what looks like snakes or worms in her abdomen. One by one, male physicians look at this (putative) image of Susan’s body and react with contained horror (including Harry, who logically must be playing along). Her apparent condition is not disclosed to her right away; they contrive to detain her for further tests, and—rather like the female protagonists of Dark Victory (1939), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) and The Nun’s Story (1959)—she is “benevolently” misled about her apparent malady by the masculine medical establishment.¹⁷ More specifically, she is denied a certain variety of reactive gaze–the ability to look on images of her own body and make decisions accordingly. This exchange follows:

Susan:
But this whole check-up is just a . . .
 
Saxon:
A what? 

Susan:
A simple formality. I've been promoted and I just need some sort of medical certificate for my new insurance. 

Saxon:
No check-up is ever just a simple formality, Miss Jeremy.

Next we are shown most of the film’s themes in miniature. Saxon insists on an examination, instructing her to “get undressed” and adding only a half-hearted “please” to his order. Up to this point in the film, Susan, having come to the hospital directly from work, has worn business attire (it only reappears in the very last scene, signaling the return of her independence from the masculine medical gaze). Her low-key battle of wills with Saxon ends with her reluctantly giving into the authority of male medicine, her own agency compromised. Susan undresses behind a scrim; backlit, her silhouette reveals the contours of her body, and in pure Mulveyan fashion, Saxon stands and watches, the audience sharing his gaze.

Fig. 1.
Dr. Saxon (John Warner Williams) observing Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton) undress. Still from X-Ray © Shout! Factory, 1981.

This striptease–and so it appears, a performance for an audience rather than simply a character undressing–is reminiscent of a peepshow, or even of the “keyhole films” of early cinema like Esmé Collings’s A Victorian Lady in Her Boudoir (1896) and Georges Méliès’s Après le bal/After the Ball (1897), in which a woman undresses before the implied gaze of a male spectator whose perspective is shared by the viewer (Nead esp. 186-94). The sequence feels like a pornographic scenario thinly repurposed for a horror film.¹⁸

Yet the film then begins to establish the significance of a counter-gaze: Susan’s own. Dr. Beam (Den Surles) casually intrudes. He and Saxon first discuss the disappearance of Dr. Jacobs and Saxon says that he wants to explain “this,” at which point he shows Beam the suspect X-ray of Susan. At this point we switch to Susan’s perspective, gazing out from behind the scrim, giving us her POV shot, a narrow view of the two men. The doctors’ voices become inaudible from her perspective and the object of the male gaze suddenly becomes an investigative gazer herself, even as the men scrutinize what is purportedly an image of her body. This scene is echoed later when she observes the killer from behind a similar scrim. It is the Final Girl’s formulaic act of “reversing the gaze” (Clover, Men 241), here literally looking past the medical establishment. As Beam leaves, Saxon summons Susan over to the table. He removes her gown (literally unveiling her), exposing her breasts, and reaches behind her to adjust her hair, gestures that feel intrusively sensual rather than professional and clinical–as if he is reorienting her for his personal gaze rather than for any medical reason. Donning his stethoscope (and recalling the opening sequence), Saxon listens to her heart and takes her blood pressure (heartbeats on the soundtrack add tension and increase our affiliation with Saxon’s perspective); the shot starts behind Susan and tracks around in a semicircle to reveal her breasts. “Lie down on the bed,” Saxon says, once again adding a perfunctory “please.” The examination couples the visual gaze and auditory examinations facilitated by medical technology to a tactile exploration of Susan’s body. Roy Porter explains that physical examinations emerged in the 18^th and especially the 19^th century and, despite having a relatively limited utility, “the sick have so far come to expect being physically examined . . . that they regard the doctor whom omits ‘hands-on’ examination as negligent” (179). Despite her obvious discomfort, Susan reflexively permits the unannounced touching of her body by Saxon as a necessary feature of the medical environment. He runs his hands up her leg before probing her abdomen. The camera follows up the length of her legs and places her breasts fully in frame as he moves his stethoscope about, repeating “in, out” in an unmistakably sexualized fashion.

We then see a face at the window, peeking through a gap in the curtains. It is another red herring character, a drunken mental patient named Hal (Lanny Duncan) whom Susan encountered earlier; the film alternates between his leering face and his POV gazing at Susan, framed by the askew curtain and the edge of the door to emphasize the theme of voyeurism.

Fig. 2.
A voyeuristic shot of the examination from Hal’s point of view. Still from X-Ray © Shout! Factory, 1981.

But Hal’s voyeurism is itself public; a nurse says, “I see you” and asks what he’s doing. He says, “Nothing . . . sight-seeing.” She orders him back to his ward, but he barely makes it a few steps before he paws at another female patient and then resumes peeping at Susan. Hal is still presumably watching the remainder of the examination unfold, though we get no further shots of him to confirm as much–his gaze diffuses into the medical environment itself.¹⁹

An extreme close-up of Saxon’s stethoscope applied to Susan’s stomach returns us to the examination. Dr. Saxon places his hands around her neck, presumably to check nodes but framed as if to strangle her; the camera holds on her frightened expression. The next cut is elliptical, moving to a POV shot from Susan’s perspective of Saxon’s eye that rack-focuses to an ophthalmoscope he switches on, beaming a bright light into the camera; we cut to her eye dilating as the light is trained on it. A blood sample follows; he slowly ties an elastic around her arm and just as slowly reaches for the syringe. As he uncaps the needle, it is framed against her eye, the focus racking between her face and the needle in his hand–another striking visual of Susan’s double status, as subject and object of the medical gaze. Saxon swabs her arm and the film edits between her flinching, his obsessive expression, and the needle’s insertion. Susan momentarily loses her composure and flinches (a classic example of the reactive gaze). The needle fills with blood and the final shot of the sequence shows in extreme close-up Saxon extracting the needle, which results in a small, orgasmic spray of blood–foreshadowing the penetration and extraction that Harry intends for Susan. The interplay of Saxon’s assaultive gaze and Susan’s reactive one in this overwrought medical examination is so paramount that it approaches self-parody. The scene could be described as a piece of empty titillation with next to no narrative justification (why does she have to be topless throughout, exactly?), and yet it also taps into a set of powerful images of male science dominating a female body. Although Saxon is putatively checking her body for evidence to support the conditions indicated by the X-ray, his professional aim is thoroughly obscured by the film’s presentation of the examination, which stands firmly at the juncture of horror and pornography. Meanwhile, Susan’s counter-gaze begins (however tentatively) to scrutinize the medical gaze deployed against her. The themes in this sequence become literal at the film’s climax.

Nature Unveiling Before the Slasher

In her book Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ludmilla Jordanova examines the theme of “unveiling” a female body through Louis-Ernest Barrais’s 1899 statue of “Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science.” The statue depicts a young woman veiled except for her breasts, which she is in the process of uncovering. Jordanova writes that the statue “mobilizes . . . a number of devices commonly used over many centuries: personification, veiling, the use of breasts to denote femininity, the gendering of both science and nature” (87). The affiliation of science with masculinity and nature with femininity obviously resonates with the examination scene, where Saxon is “probing” Susan’s body for non-existent secrets and imperfections hidden within her idealized body. Jordanova notes that medicine has historically evoked masculine sadism towards women, but also that “an idealization of women is as prominent a theme as violence–possibly these two constitute two sides of the same coin” (62). X-Ray idealizes Susan’s body as an image of feminine perfection that Harry’s machinations have transformed into an object of scrutiny. From the examination scene on, Susan wears a thin, translucent hospital gown that suggests “veiling” in its skimpiness and draws attention to Susan’s body (and to Benton’s) even as it conceals it. The recurring use of scrims, which simultaneously conceal and reveal bodies, functions similarly.

Themes of the gaze and female bodily idealization versus degradation also inform X-Ray‘s strangest subplot, that of the three old women with whom Susan shares a hospital room. They echo mythical and literary witch trios (the Graeae in the myth of Medusa, the “weird sisters” of Macbeth, etc.) and are associated with Christian imagery (rosaries and icons of saints). They stare at, taunt, and judge Susan. After overhearing Saxon finally tell Susan (without specifics) that she may have a serious illness, they have this exchange: “They say she’s terribly sick.” “But she’s so young and lovely.” “Young and lovely on the outside, maybe, but old and rotten on the inside. Putrid, foul . . . All her bones are decaying and her organs are all rancid and her blood is malignant as slime.”²⁰ The puzzling trio plays a minor role in the conclusion, accidentally distracting the killer long enough for Susan to escape, but their principal function is thematic. Philip Brophy suggests that “the contemporary horror film tends to play not so much on a fear of death but of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it” (8). The women’s dialogue externalizes Susan’s (ultimately unfounded) fear of a loss of bodily control, and, like Dr. Saxon’s nurses, they function as patriarchal women who perpetuate the system that constrains them. Their barbs articulate a key, perverse theme of internal and external natures in X-Ray that ultimately applies to Harry, both in his self-preservation (the façade of a trustworthy medical professional concealing the psychopathic murderer) and in his goal (the extraction of Susan’s heart).

Several of the film’s themes come together in the climactic image of Susan lying on a medical table while the killer pants behind his identity-concealing facemask. The atmosphere is inexplicably smoky, functioning formally to echo the overlit glare of the opening sequence. The killer fondles dissection equipment and holds a serrated tool aloft. Susan pulls off his mask, revealing Harry: “It’s not Harry, it’s Harold,” he says, “It’s Harold,” cuing a black and white montage that ends with the broken Valentine’s heart from the opening scene. “What do you want?” Susan asks, and Harry answers, “What I’ve always wanted.” The film cuts to her face and hair being fondled by his latex-gloved hand before he adds, “Your heart.”

Fig. 3.
Harry (Charles Lucia) plans his dissection of Susan. Still from X-Ray © Shout! Factory, 1981.

The image of Harry looming over Susan while clutching the tools of dissection echoes a body of 19^th and 20^th-century artwork that Jordanova discusses, in which one or more figures of medical science stand over the body of a beautiful young woman preparing for an autopsy. Jordanova draws attention to the paintings of anatomist-artist John Wilkes Brodnax (1864-1926), preoccupied with such scenes of erotic dissection, sometimes depicted as dreams and including skulls and other symbols of death.²¹ A poem written by Brodnax—published posthumously in a college yearbook and entitled, curiously enough, The X-Ray—reads:

This comely maiden, once buoyant in life 
            By the dread hand of disease expires,
Is now subject to the dissector's knife,
             To carve and mutilate as he desires. 
                                                                                       (qtd. in Jordanova 104)

Jordanova understands Brodnax “not as reveling in or celebrating male medical power over the female corpse, but as attempting to come to terms with what appears obvious to him: the relationship between anatomist and anatomized is quintessentially gendered” (104). In X-Ray, Harry is a version of the slasher villain (“permanently locked in childhood” (Clover, Men 28)) crossed with Brodnax’s obsessed anatomist. In formulaic slasher film fashion, not only is he a penetrator but is also himself penetrated. Susan snatches up a knife and stabs him before escaping. In the subsequent chase through the hospital’s vacant corridors, she douses him with a convenient “flammable liquid” sitting lidless on a shelf and flees onto the roof. She beats Harry with a metal pipe; again formulaically, he does not die, but grapples with her one last time. In unmistakably sexual imagery, he climbs on top of her (her legs visibly splayed), wielding the knife he has extracted from his own body, and they struggle before she uses a lighter to set him on fire. The film’s last indignity to the human body is one of overt conflagration rather than the subtler “burning” implied by the X-ray, now turned back onto the medical “gazer.” The blazing slasher makes one last run at Susan before falling off the roof and collapsing spectacularly to the ground.

Leaving the Hospital (Massacre)

X-Ray‘s climax is standard slasher fare, and its medical setting becomes all but irrelevant once the chase moves to the roof. Its denouement is oddly sudden: a few seconds of Susan collecting her wits on the hospital roof, and then a cut to a daytime scene of her leaving the hospital, wearing the same dark red business attire she wore on the way in and being greeted jubilantly by her daughter. A freeze frame of their embrace while the ex-husband stands nearby remains on screen as the credits roll. The film is putatively without what Vera Dika calls the “but the heroine is not free” ending that she finds structurally vital to the “stalker” film (60); instead, it insists unconvincingly on the restoration of normalcy and on Susan’s resumption of the role of mother and perhaps of wife in the potential reconciliation with the ex-husband. Her victory anticipates a more “triumphant” strand of the Final Girl, emblematized by Stretch (Caroline Williams) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): Final Girls who do not simply survive, but win. At the same time, however, the normalizing tendencies of X-Ray‘s ending are opposed by the tensions it articulates about the medical gaze, which outlast Harry, the “hospital massacre,” and the film. One can read into its truncated conclusion a certain restless unwillingness to deal finally with its own implications. On some level, it is difficult to dispute Rockoff’s assessment that X-Ray is a minor, “inferior” slasher film, in part because of the film’s unintentionally comedic tone. Many sequences—for example, when blood appears to drip onto Susan’s shoe, but is revealed to be ketchup from Hal’s hamburger—seem more appropriate for a parody like Student Bodies (1981) or Scary Movie (2000). In the interview accompanying the Blu-Ray release of X-Ray, Davidson says that he tried to direct the film straight, but got compliments that suggest it was received as a comedy.²² The film’s tonal ambiguity lends it a sickly quality that goes well beyond the killer’s individual pathology, and is attached instead to the entire medical establishment. X-Ray may not be some lost subversive masterpiece, but from its messiness comes a peculiar fascination that remains unblunted by the normalizing, formulaic ending.

As I have noted, the apotheosis of the Final Girl in popular culture has been in almost direct opposition to its declining academic credibility. X-Ray is an example of a film in the first slasher cycle, but one that doesn’t fit Clover’s model neatly; the slasher film, even in its definitive stage, is a more diverse form than Clover and others have articulated. A person so inclined could create a checklist of Final Girl characteristics that do and do not apply to X-Ray: “[s]he . . . is the only character to be developed in any psychological depth” (44), check; “her inevitable sexual reluctance” (48), no check. Conversely, one could see X-Ray and films like it as a reason to discredit the Final Girl altogether. Neither approach is ultimately productive. Rather, as I have tried to show, the path forward lies in extending Clover’s ideas and linking them to related discourses, in this case, to discourses of medical horror and to the medical gaze.

Footnotes

1. Richard Nowell terms Halloween a “trailblazer hit” (48), the unexpected success of which ensured a wave of imitators. He mentions X-Ray only in passing.

2. Barbi Benton was in her early 30s when filming X-Ray, and her character Susan is clearly meant to be around the same age.

3. One can also point to later slasher-influenced films with medical settings like Dr. Giggles (1992), Anatomie/Anatomy (2000), and Valentine (2001). The latter seems to show X-Ray‘s influence through its hospital and Valentine’s Day setting.

4. Elizabeth Cowie has shown that Coma‘s “strong woman” protagonist is actually narratively undermined by the film’s deployment of its conspiracy/mystery structure (36-71).

5. Coma‘s more legitimate descendants include medical thrillers like Flatliners (1990) and Extreme Measures (1996).

6. See Leeder, Halloween, esp. pp. 44-54.

7. See Clover, Men, esp. pp. 27-30.

8. See Leeder, The Modern Supernatural and “Eroticism and Death.”

9. Allan Cameron observes that, in a horror film, all uses of the color red tend to suggest blood (89). The many red objects in X-Ray‘s opening foreshadow the blood to come.

10. Though it perhaps foreshadows her eventual stabbing of the villain, the cake-cutting is a cringe-inducing bit of misdirection that briefly suggests X-Ray might be a killer child movie; indeed, the same actress, Elizabeth Hoy, starred as a 10-year-old murderer in Bloody Birthday (1981) the same year.

11. The West German video release was called X-Ray: Der erste Mord geschah am Valentinstag; rather prosaically, “The First Murder was on Valentine’s Day.”

12. At one point, Susan stares at a photograph of a heart extraction on Dr. Saxon’s wall, both a bit of foreshadowing and a gruesome counterpoint to the stylized hearts casually strewn throughout the hospital.

13. For more on the heart icon and the broader role of the heart in Western culture, see Vinken (2000) and Young (2003).

14. While it’s possible to read Susan as being “punished” for her status as a career woman and divorced mother, the film does relatively little to support that interpretation.

15. See Moreland (2015) for a discussion of porn-horror stardom.

16. Dr. Jacobs contrasts strongly with the two nurses who do Dr. Saxon’s bidding throughout; while superficially feminine, they act as instruments of the masculine system. This is most dramatically apparent when they strap her to a bed, insisting that “it’s for your own good.”

17. Later, the film takes on the Hitchcockian “no one believes the truth” structure. Susan’s increasingly distraught behavior (because she rightly believes she is being stalked) is misread as hysteria by the doctors and nurses; this development is deeply reminiscent of the way hysteria (derived from the Latin “hystera,” “womb”) has been used as a rhetorical device to subdue “rebellious” women (Showalter esp. 145-64).

18. For the classic treatment of the propinquity of horror and pornography, see Williams (1991).

19. The interview with director Davidson contained in the DVD release indicates a gaze of a different sort. It notes that the staff was all in attendance when Benton’s nude scene was filmed: “Everybody was there. Even the catering people came to the set.”

20. Compare Mother Nature’s (Tracey Ullman) excoriation of plastic surgery in Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007): “You can jump and peel and nip and tuck but your insides are still rotting away.”

21. For comparable research, see Bronfen (1992) and McGrath (2002).

22. Davidson is better-known as the director of sex comedies like the Israeli Eskimo Lemon or Lemon Popsicle series (1978-1982) and The Last American Virgin (1982).

Works Cited

• Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester UP, 1992.
• Cameron, Allan. “Colour, Embodiment and Dread in High Tension and A Tale of Two Sisters.” Horror Studies, vol. 3, no.1, 2012, pp. 87-103.
• Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1995.
• Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, vol. 20, 1987, pp. 187-228.
• —. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992.
• Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Crangle, Richard. “Saturday Night at the X-Rays–The Moving Picture and ‘The New Photography’ in Britain, 1896.” Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema, edited by John Fullerton, John Libbey & Company Pty Ltd., 1998, pp. 138-44.
• Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
• Davidson, Boaz, director. “Interview with Director Boaz Davidson.” X-Ray, 1981, Shout! Factory, 2013.
• “Final Girl.” TvTropes, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FinalGirl. Accessed 5 May 2017. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Vintage, 1994.
• Goodman, Philip C. “The New Light: Discovery and Introduction of the X-Ray.” American Journal of Roentgenology, vol. 165, 1995, pp. 1041-45.
• Harper, Graeme and Andrew Moor. “‘Either He’s Dead or My Watch Just Stopped’: Medical Notes in 1930s Film Comedy.” Signs of Life: Medicine & Cinema, edited by Graeme Harper and Andrew Moor, Wallflower P, 2005, pp. 92-104.
• Herzig, Rebecca M. Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America. Rutgers UP, 2005.
• Hsu, Hsuan L. and Martha Lincoln. “Biopower, Bodies . . . the Exhibition, and the Spectacle of Public Health.” Discourse, vol. 29, no.1, Winter 2007, pp. 14-34.
• Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. U of Wisconsin P, 1989.
• Kemp, Martin. Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford UP, 2012.
• Leeder, Murray. “Eroticism and Death: The Skeleton in the Trick Film.” Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema, edited by Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore and Louis Pelletier, John Libbey, 2012, pp. 176-83.
• —. Halloween. Auteur P, 2014.
• —. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
• Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). U of Minnesota P, 2005.
• Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E. Woods, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
• Maron, Jeremy. “When the Final Girl is Not a Girl: Reconsidering the Gender Binary in the Slasher Film.” Offscreen, vol. 19, no.1, 2015, http://offscreen.com/view/reconsidering-the-final-girl. Accessed 19 August 2018. Moreland, Sean. “Contagious Characters: Cronenberg’s Rabid, Demarbre’s Smash Cut, and the Reframing of Porn-Fame.” The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul, edited by Gina Freitag and André Loiselle, U of Toronto P, 2015, pp. 249-69.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Oxford UP, 1985, pp. 803-16.
• Nead, Lynda. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900. Yale UP, 2007.
• Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. New York: Continuum, 2011.
• Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State U of New York P, 1997.
• Porter, Roy. “The Rise of Physical Examination.” Medicine and the Five Senses, edited by W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Cambridge UP, 1993, pp. 179-197.
• Rockoff, Adam. Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film. 1978-1986, McFarland, 2002.
• Short, Sue. Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
• Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980. London: Virago, 1987.
• Sipos, Thomas M. Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. McFarland, 2010.
• Staiger, Janet. “The Slasher, the Final Girl and the Anti-Denouement.” Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, edited by Wickham Clayton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 213-28.
• Vinken, Pierre. The Shape of the Heart. Elsevier, 2000.
• Waldby, Catherine. Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. Routledge, 2000.
• Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no.4, Summer 1991, pp. 2-13.
• Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. Columbia UP, 2003.
• Young, Louisa. The Book of the Heart. Doubleday, 2003.

Lucia Mulherin Palmer (bio)
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

In the torture porn film Undocumented (Chris Peckover, 2010), protagonist Liz is a character descended from Carol J. Clover’s Final Girl—she is forced to watch the torture and murder of her peers, while her wit and resilience help her survive. However, the body count surrounding Liz is not composed of sexually active white teenagers, but rather primarily of Mexican migrants. Using Undocumented as a case study, this piece argues for the continuing importance of Clover’s analytical framework and of the Final Girl as a trope, but insists on taking her race, class, and nationality into account.

Three decades ago, Carol J. Clover made a crucial intervention in feminist horror scholarship when she defined the trope of the Final Girl. In the decades since the Final Girl’s first appearances in early slasher films, she has persisted in various iterations that reimagine the slasher subgenre, often self-reflexively or creatively. She continues to materialize in updates and remakes and bleeds into other horror genres and cycles such as the zombie film. In her numerous reappearances, the Final Girl has challenged and reaffirmed Clover’s foundational insights, and remains an entry point into examining sociocultural anxieties, as well as a gauge of feminism’s impact in Western society.

A number of scholars have built on Clover’s work, noting the importance of her intervention as well as providing some important critiques and corrections, especially around Clover’s characterization of the Final Girl in terms of masculine aggression and phallic agency. Nowell argues that characterizing the Final Girl as boyish is a misinterpretation, providing evidence that the characters frequently fit more “conventionally feminine” norms (134). Other scholars are concerned about the utility of the Final Girl’s description as a masculinized proxy for a young male spectator, a structure that Sue Short worries excludes female audiences. Short argues that the character can provide a point of identification not because of her masculinization but because Final Girls are survivors capable of overcoming adversity, who thus “provide an image of self-sufficiency and resilience that sets them apart from female characters generally seen in cinema” (48). Rather than phallic, the Final Girl’s transformation is a rite of passage that makes her a responsible, self-reliant, and capable adult. Pinedo similarly intervenes with a concern for the female viewer, arguing that the Final Girl’s interpretation as a “male in drag” seriously restricts the potential for female agency (Recreational Terror 81). Her actions may be normatively coded as masculine, but they are nonetheless enacted by a young woman, a turn that troubles gender binaries in potentially progressive ways (84). However, the trope of the Final Girl remains relatively unexamined in terms of intersectional identity formations and socio-political struggles. In particular, the ways in which she is constructed in relation to race, class, and nationality are often overlooked, despite her reiteration again and again as a white middle-class US woman.

Although little has been written critiquing Clover for overlooking intersections between gender, sexuality, and race, Kinitra Brooks problematizes the normativity of whiteness embedded in the trope of the Final Girl. The Final Girl, Brooks argues, is compelling because of her ability to subvert Western patriarchy, becoming an agential character who survives due to her capability and intelligence (464). Brooks points out that this relies on her normalized whiteness, through which she is figured as “plucky” (464). This is made clear when contrasted with the stereotype of the “strong black woman” whose survival strategies are pathologized as innately too masculine and aggressive (464). Brooks questions Clover’s reliance on a model of gender as exclusively binary, ignoring its differential manifestations as well as gender’s intersection with race (465). Following Brooks’s insights into the overly binary treatment of gender relations in horror scholarship, this paper calls for deeper engagements with intersectional identities and social constructs in horror film studies. Even self-critical horror films that actively highlight and/or subvert the genre’s sexist and racist tropes¹ reiterate the Final Girl in whitewashed terms. And while the Final Girl might challenge oppressive demands for “proper” Western womanhood and femininity,² she does little to challenge the normativity of whiteness and white femininity and to show how these constructions intersect with normative ideas of US-based “Americanness.”

These tensions, anxieties, and intersections are made visible in writer/director Chris Peckover’s 2010 film Undocumented, a graphically violent horror film that follows a group of mostly white male documentary filmmakers as they travel with a group of undocumented immigrants clandestinely crossing from Mexico into the United States. After the group crosses over to the US side of the border, they are kidnapped by psychotic vigilantes resembling the real-life militia groups that formed part of the Minutemen Project on the Arizona border. The vigilantes take the kidnapped immigrants to an abandoned slaughterhouse where they are undressed, chained, and selected one by one to be tortured and killed. Meanwhile, the vigilantes hold the film crew captive and force the crew members to document the torture and brutalization of the Mexican immigrants with their cameras and audio equipment. Thus, the crew members are coerced into becoming passive witnesses to the vigilantes’ racist violence and are threatened with death at any sign of intervention. Soon the filmmakers themselves become the targets of this psychotic aggression, and are picked off slowly through psychological torment and excruciating physical trials.

Importantly, the film crew includes one female member, Liz (Alona Tal), who emerges as the protagonist most capable of keeping her cool, speaking back intelligently to the captors, assessing their ever-changing captivity, and finally enabling the escape of the remaining captives. Liz is recognizable early in the film as a Final Girl, distinguished from her goofball male crew members by her level-headedness, caution, and responsibility. Like other Final Girls before her, Liz is white, middle-class, and from the United States. This is a significant aspect of her character’s identity and of the film’s narrative, as Liz is not only differentiated from her male peers in the film crew, but also from the Mexican immigrants who are silent victims. Liz’s racialized, classed, and national difference, and the ways in which these intersecting identities enable her empowerment, are further reinforced when juxtaposed with the other female characters in the film, all of whom are of Mexican descent or women of color. Liz’s whiteness must be deconstructed in order to understand how it is rendered the norm for empowered femininity and how this is enabled through her juxtaposition with abject women of color.

A close reading of Undocumented‘s most resonant and longest torture scene, in which a Mexican woman’s body is slowly dismembered as a punishment for her husband’s inability to prove his Americanness while the witnessing crew is unable to intervene, makes visible the intersecting social hierarchies embedded in character development and the mechanics of spectatorship. What emerges is a concealing of “normal” whiteness in contrast to an abhorrent white supremacy, while white, US-centric feminism is written through Liz, the Final Girl, in ways that exclude women of color. The dismemberment of the Mexican woman demonstrates the ways in which national identity and citizenship are formed in relation to the gendered bodies of women of color, as she silently functions as a plot device to reemphasize her assimilating husband’s struggles, Liz’s empowerment, and the psychokiller’s monstrous deviancy. This essay examines the systems of meaning and sociocultural hierarchies embedded in Undocumented in relation to its expressions of certain societal fears and anxieties at this moment of increasingly potent nativism in the United States. Undocumented‘s Final Girl, her relationship to her fellow captives and victims, and her relationship to her psychokiller captors are the primary sites for this investigation. How does the figure of the Final Girl function as an empowered white female protagonist when placed on the US-Mexico border in the context of ever more visible nativist anxieties? How do the layers of identification structured around Liz, her crew, and the abject Mexican immigrant victims rely on normalized racial hierarchies? How do white masculinity and white supremacy manifest on the border, motivated less by a psycho-sexual rage than by a psycho-nativist fury? These central questions look at generic horror tactics in Undocumented to reveal crucial social dynamics that manifest in sometimes progressive and often problematic ways.

Torture Porn and National Anxieties

Undocumented belongs to the recent cycle of horror films commonly known as “torture porn,” a subgenre descended from the slasher that plays with tropes of explicit gore, psychokiller antagonist(s), and sexually charged violence. The slasher’s gusto for bodily pain and horrific violence paves the way for torture porn, a body of work that features abduction, captivity, and torture as its central narrative and aesthetic tactics of fright. Torture porn is identified by film franchises such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), as well as low-budget films like Wolf Creek (2005) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005), all of which demonstrate the potential popularity and profitability of films vividly displaying torture and torment (Edelstein 1; Lockwood 41). In Undocumented, Peckover uses torture porn conventions to grapple with issues of border militarization, chauvinistic nationalism, and xenophobic racism.

Undocumented has a clear lineage in the slasher subgenre, which can be seen through Liz, a character that draws on the Final Girl trope. For Clover, slasher films express the shifting sexual attitudes of their time, and the anxieties unleashed by second wave feminism’s undermining of traditional gender roles (Men, Women, and Chain Saws 62). As she maps out the slasher film’s key elements—the Final Girl, the psychokiller, the Terrible Place, the phallic weapon, and the sexually active victims—Clover also unpacks the ideological components and anxieties that are embedded in these characters, narratives, and cinematic mechanics. Undocumented inherits the slasher’s sexualized violence, especially its tendency to linger on and spectacularly display the deaths of women; its longest and most resonant scene involves the slow dismemberment of a woman’s body. However, torture porn films contain important generic deviations related to post-9/11 anxieties around the penetration of national borders (Edelstein; McMann; Pinedo). In Undocumented, these fears are played out through the cruelty and madness of the film’s psychokillers, the powerlessness of the documentary crew, and the torture of captive undocumented immigrants.

Evidenced by the cycle’s emergence in the new millennium and its preoccupation with claustrophobic captivity and intimately rendered bodily violence, torture porn is closely connected to national fears and debates in the United States after 9/11 and in relation to revelations about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (Edelstein; Gartside; Lockwood; Pinedo). Ben McCann understands torture porn as “politically charged allegory” working “to tap into national trauma” by addressing concerns about national invasion written onto the vulnerable human body (33). The spectacularly gory imagery in torture porn films excites audiences, but it is also important that the “attacks on the physical nature of the body allegorize fractures in the national body politic” (31). Thus, in the process of privileging bodily ruination and bloody violence, “the fear of the Other, the fear of invasion, and the fear of corporeal pollution all come into sharp focus” (43). Pinedo argues that torture porn is a “symptomatic and supple genre” that “tap[s] into social anxieties,” therefore helping us deal with disturbing fears and emotions in the context of war, terrorism and concerns over national borders (“Torture Porn” 359).

Torture porn emerged in the United States during a period marked by increasing apprehensiveness about the nation’s southern border with Mexico and a preoccupation with perceived threats from Central American immigration (Chavez). The new millennium witnessed increased visibility of nativist sentiments in the United States, nowhere more evident than in the spectacular performance of border insecurity by the nativist militia groups labelling themselves the Minutemen (Oliviero). Beginning in 2005, these volunteer-based groups patrolled the US-Mexico border in search of unsanctioned border crossers. The armed volunteers claimed to be nonviolent, but nonetheless their militarized demonstrations made visible nativist anxieties about border penetration as well as patriarchal impulses toward aggressive protectionism (Oliviero). These militia groups commanded media attention and inspired or terrified popular discourse surrounding them, desires and fears that are picked up and fleshed out in Peckover’s Undocumented.

Undocumented: Torture Porn on the US-Mexico Border

Released in 2010, Undocumented comes in at the tail end of the peak of the torture porn cycle, but it undeniably belongs to this subgenre due to its excessive aesthetic depictions of the pain and violence of captivity and torture. The reception and reviews of Undocumented tend to focus on its political subject matter, described by the president of IFC Films/Sundance Selects, Jonathan Sehring, as “part of the great tradition of political horror flicks that find the scariest things don’t have to be made up, because they exist within our society” (qtd. in B. Brooks). This description of Undocumented as “political horror” recirculated in numerous press releases and festival promotions for the film, accompanied by descriptions that privilege its themes of immigration and border crossing. Even as recently as 2017, director Chris Peckover continued to situate the film in the context of these national debates and aligned the film with progressive politics.³

Undocumented links its fictionalized cruel violence with the invisible quotidian violence of migration and exploitative labor relations, featuring small characters that speak briefly about dangerous working conditions or unfair wages and tying elements of the story’s torture and captivity to real-world issues (the torture of a drug mule, the administration of a citizenship test, the execution of a smuggler, the removal and commodification of organs, etc.). By bringing the hidden violence embedded in banal practices and processes to light, rendering them in spectacular displays of pain and terror, Undocumented dramatizes material issues in ways that might unroot them from the commonplace. Following Pinedo, we can understand the film in relation to the way cinematic horror “disrupts the world of everyday life” and “explodes our assumptions about normality” (Recreational Terror 18). This upheaval can function on ideological levels, questioning the status quo by recognizing its monstrosity.

Undocumented may help to make explicit the repressed monstrosities that underlie the policing of national borders, presenting psychokiller vigilantes that repulsively mirror a national self and overtly express the nativist racism and colonialist violence that threaten to erupt into the quiet of the everyday. The rhetoric used by the vigilantes continuously mimics real-life nativist discourse circulating in the public sphere, as well as more institutionalized terminology mobilized to justify aggressive border enforcement by the state. This mirroring begins when the immigrants and film crew are kidnapped while being smuggled in the back of a truck and brought to the vigilantes’ lair. Upon arriving at the lair, the truck containing the captives is unlocked and blinding floodlights are aimed at them (a tactic used by the Border Patrol) as a voice in Spanish declares authoritatively, “You will be detained, processed, and judged” (see Fig. 1). This scene mimes the language and the actions of the Border Patrol, but instead of being detained, the immigrants are chained and held hostage in a slaughterhouse.

Fig. 1. The arrival of the kidnapped group at the vigilantes’ lair, where they are told that they have crossed into the United States illegally and will be “detained, processed, and judged.” Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

While the undocumented crossers await violence, the vigilantes separate them from the documentary crew and command the crew members to continue filming, documenting their self-proclaimed “patriotic” practices and philosophy. This request directly contradicts the aims of the film crew’s in-progress documentary, which critiques the labor oppression and quotidian violence enacted on undocumented immigrants. The vigilantes commandeer the media narrative, forcing the progressive aims of the documentary to mutate into a film that passively observes violent nativism lashing out at the bodies of captive immigrants. The first torture scene that the crew is forced to document is that of a male drug mule, who is stripped down, chained to a chair, and forced to swallow a condom full of cocaine while a vigilante yells “take it all!” (making explicit the sexualized implications of this violent oral penetration). After the man vomits the drugs, a vigilante beats the condom into his face with a metal tool, killing the man while yelling that immigrants are destroying the United States and tearing apart American families. The film crew watches in horror and disgust and Liz tries to intervene, shouting “enough, enough of this!” in a futile effort to save the mule’s life (see Fig. 2). Although Liz is spunky, smart, and brave, in this early scene she is unable to contend with the phallic aggression of the vigilantes.

Fig. 2. Liz attempts to intervene in the oral penetration and beating of a drug mule in the first torture scene. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

The film sympathizes with the politics of the film crew, and particularly with Liz, and associates nativist ideologies with unjustifiable violence. The vigilantes adopt commonplace nativist rhetoric while enacting torture, rhetoric that is routinely used in the United States to advocate for more aggressive border patrolling and militarization. The mirrored language and affect between the vigilantes and more quotidian forms of nativism link anxieties over national borders with extreme manifestations of these sentiments. But even as the film may work to question the normalization of violent ideologies, it also maintains many of their assumptions. In particular, the film reproduces racialized and classed hierarchies by leaving the privileging of white, middle-class molds of “American” identity unquestioned, embodied in the white crew members with whom the audience is encouraged to identify. These dynamics are nowhere more evident than with Liz, Undocumented‘s Final Girl. She is the most capable, most resourceful, and most aware. And she is also the most willing to stand up and protest, to fight against the violence she watches enacted on others. In the following discussion, it becomes clear that her empowerment is constructed in relation to the women of color in the film, rendered as voiceless victims. Liz embodies white, Western feminism, assumed as an ideal progressive version of womanhood that is capable of fighting against and surviving a regressive patriarchal order. The normalcy with which she emerges as the leader and survivor speaks to the ways in which her white, Western feminist manifestation is the invisible norm of female empowerment in horror cinema.

The Victims, The Psychokiller, The Final Girl

The viewer is first introduced to the documentary crew members as they ride in a van through southern Texas, affably joking with each other as they head to their next filming location. The dynamics in the van immediately establish the lead characters. Liz is distinguished instantly from her male colleagues, sitting apart from the rest of the crew in the front seat and abstaining from their antics. She displays a no-nonsense attitude, using a kind but authoritative tone of voice to cut short their distractions and keep them on schedule. She bickers with Travis (Schott Mechlowicz), the other lead character and her love interest,⁴ who commands much of the camera and dialogue in the film alongside Liz. As the documentary’s narrator, his viewpoint is also privileged and his monologues help drive the exposition forward. Third in line, in terms of character development and command of perspective, is the film crew’s only person of color, Mexican-American Davie (Greg Serano). Davie is the crew’s lead camera operator and Travis’s best friend, as well as the cousin of some of the immigrants who will become captives. Finally, the two remaining crew members, Jim (Kevin Weisman) and William (Tim Draxl), are both sympathetic characters; they are given emotive reaction shots but are rarely in command and have little narrative agency. This first scene’s jovial dialogue sets up the crew as a tightknit group of friends, each member immediately likeable, thus making them easy and comfortable characters for viewer investment. The early narrative follows the crew members as they drive through south Texas and make their film, eventually journeying into Mexico in order to travel clandestinely back across the border into the United States with the undocumented immigrants.

The horror commences in full after the crew and the immigrants are kidnapped during their crossing. The cameras and crew members are led through the setting of their captivity, revealing the immigrants in their undergarments bound by chains, their skin soft against the cold, industrial tile, the mise-en-scène filled with metal and concrete. The women are in one room bound to the floor, and the men are in another, strung up like animal carcasses with their hands over their heads. It is soon revealed that the setting is an abandoned industrial farm, a location that emphasizes the dehumanizing treatment of the immigrants.

As they walk among the confined bodies, the crew are horrified and exchange nervous glances with one another. A dominating masculine voice is heard just outside of the frame commanding that they “Come here, come closer.” The camera turns the corner, and the viewer is invited to behold the spectacle of the masked vigilantes. The leader and head psychokiller, Z (Peter Stormare), sits in a chair in the middle, surrounded by his compatriots like an entourage for a king (see Fig. 3). The vigilante group is composed of masked men who stand menacingly, directly facing the approaching camera. The camera comes to a halt when confronted by their threatening presence. The vigilantes’ fair skin shows through their masks and clothing, and each is coded in class-based visual markers as embodying a white working-class model of masculinity.⁵ Z is the epitome of this, wearing a black mesh hunting mask, a tan cap, a camo-patterned T-shirt covered by a red flannel shirt and a jean vest. These markers fit with stereotypes of nativist nationalist sects in the US population, in particular by playing with slippages between men who hunt (Z is outfitted head to toe in hunting gear), rural political conservatism, and working-class white men.

Fig. 3. The crew confronts the vigilantes for the first time. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

In constructing the villains as stereotypes, the film separates the liberal, well-educated film crew distinctly from the vigilante killers. This visual division associates white supremacist violence exclusively with forms of Othered whiteness, contrasted with the crew’s rationality and empathy. The vigilantes embody exaggerated forms of white nativism through their dress as well as their speech: they continuously comment that the immigrants are diseased, criminal, and contaminating. Much of what they say codes them as ignorant, as when a vigilante feeds some apples to a captive woman like a pet while calling her “Maria” because he cannot understand her actual name. The distinct contrast drawn between the group of violent white vigilantes and the sympathetic and progressive (mostly) white documentary crew encourages spectatorial identification with the protagonists. The documentary crew members are the only captive characters with enough agency to end the violence. While the immigrant captives are chained and remain largely silent, the crew moves through the facilities documenting the violence, able to see the threats that await. The narrative is rooted in their thoughts and actions, as they not only observe but also react, think, protest, and try to find a way out. And the primary instigator among the crew is Liz, the member who most frequently speaks out against the violence and the natural leader of the group. Like other Final Girls’, Liz’s power comes from her intelligence, level-headedness, and ability to act while her peers succumb to fear, anger, and defeat. She challenges Z in particular, especially in reaction to his diatribes about the ills of immigration during violent scenes of abuse and dismemberment. After witnessing the removal of a man’s kidney, for example, she accuses Z and his group of targeting vulnerable people, saying that, “This is just racism posing as patriotism.”

Point of view shots and subjective camerawork in Undocumented align the viewer with the documentary crew, and especially with Liz. Critical outcry against the slasher genre of the 1970s and 1980s often centered on the alliance created between the spectator and the psychokiller through subjective point of view camerawork, suggesting that the viewer might be experiencing misogynistic and sadistic pleasures as the killer stalks and murders his victims. But, as Clover demonstrates, identification can be slippery, and pleasure can also come from identifying with the character who resists, fights, and survives—the Final Girl. For Clover, the Final Girl’s climactic battle with the psychokiller depends on her adoption of an active investigative gaze.

Like earlier slasher films, Undocumented uses subjective camerawork that directs the audience to watch the murders from the point of view of the characters. But unlike the films from the 1970s and 1980s, Undocumented never aligns spectatorial identification with the psychokiller. Over the course of the film, the story unfolds through a mix of omniscient objective camerawork and handheld subjective shots from the crew members’ cameras. Using a documentary-style aesthetic popularized in horror films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008), the film shows much of the action through the perspective of an “I-camera,” handheld by one of the crew members. The viewer, like the crew, must watch the group’s atrocities, see the pain of the immigrants, and find comradery in the horrified reactions of the other crew members. This is also an uncomfortable position for the viewer because as the crew is forced to watch the unfolding torture and murder passively, their inaction renders them complicit in the violence.

The reactions of the crew members demonstrate their discomfort, disapproval, and disgust, but they remain largely silent and safe behind their camera lenses. Importantly, the “I-camera” in this film does not function to give the spectator a degree of narrative agency, but rather to create a sense of incapacitation, the feeling that the viewer is trapped in a passive position as the psychotic vigilantes torture and murder. While in the traditional slasher the victim is unaware of the psychokiller’s (and thus the spectator’s) gaze, in Undocumented all parties (killers, victims, and observers) are aware, and the privilege of observation is one that is coerced and thus robbed of much of its agency. The only crew member who is frequently depicted without video or audio equipment is Liz, who, as the producer, must stand and watch but is not forced to document the violence. Instead, Liz often becomes a point of identification in scenes of violence where she gets the most prominent reaction shot and is the site of emotional investment, her face shown unhindered by equipment. Her reaction shots become spaces for spectatorial identification, and her protests provide opportunities to experience brief moments of agency in a film structured around claustrophobic camerawork (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Liz reacts to the cruelty of the vigilantes, situated amidst disrobed Mexican immigrant women chained to the floor. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

The viewer’s alignment with the crew—seeing what they see through their camera lenses, and watching them as they watch the violence—is significantly different from the viewer’s positioning in relation to the Mexican immigrant victims. The victims are dehumanized following their abduction, shackled, disrobed, and treated as animals awaiting slaughter (see Fig. 5). This device highlights the cruelty of the vigilantes and could encourage a critical awareness of the apathy and degrading treatment meeting Mexican immigrants in the United States. But it also works to occlude spectatorial identification, structuring a relationship between the spectator and the voiceless immigrants as one of pity. The violence enacted on their bodies is despicable and painful to watch, but it does not elevate the immigrants from their subhuman representations. The documentary crew members are also held against their will, but they are only locked in a room, remain fully clothed, and are periodically released and allowed to move unhindered by chains. Unlike the immigrants, the crew members are captives but can interact, discuss their situation and work toward escape.

Fig. 5. Shackled Mexican women immigrants, huddled on the floor. S Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Liz and Travis are the only crew members left alive at the climax of the film; fully realized and fully human, they are able to act as white saviors, unchaining the immigrants as they escape. The deaths of their fellow crew members are graphic, depicted aesthetically much like the deaths of the immigrants, with lingering close-ups of blood and gore. William is shot in the head after attempting to help supporting character Alberto (Yancey Arias), Davie is bludgeoned to death when he tries to intervene in the vigilantes’ violence, and Jim is encased in a giant piñata and beaten with a spiked bat. However, unlike the immigrant captives, they are not anonymous or interchangeable. Further, Liz enables the climactic release and escape of all the captives. Near the film’s climax, Travis breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably from the weight of the preceding violence. Liz, remaining level-headed, comforts and grounds Travis, cradling him and then finally kissing him.⁶ They are interrupted by one of the vigilantes who demands that Liz come with him. Travis attacks the vigilante, losing control as he repeatedly slams his head into the ground, blood and viscera flying. Liz again brings him back to reality, instructing him to grab his keys. When they leave the room, Liz initiates the final kick to the vigilante’s head, ensuring that he cannot follow them. The two free the rest of the immigrants and eventually escape.

An important dynamic of identification is also constructed through Liz’s relationship to the female Mexican characters in Undocumented. The vigilantes keep some of the women as slaves, dressing them in maid costumes and forcing them to clean the facilities. They are represented scrubbing and mopping the bloodied floors, figures hovering in the background in numerous scenes and locations. These domestic slaves symbolically critique the everyday exploitation of feminized domestic labor, positions that are often filled by undocumented immigrants. Liz watches disapprovingly when she encounters the enslaved maids for the first time. The camera shows a maid’s back as she cleans quietly in the background, while in the foreground we see shock and disgust in Liz’s facial expressions. Liz and Z confront each other when she voices her disapproval, after which she refuses to eat and instead continues to glare at her captors, while the silent immigrant woman cannot speak or protest. The racialized gender dynamics are crucial here. Like the maid, Liz is also subject to patriarchal aggression from Z, but unlike her, Liz is able to voice her disapproval and take resistive action. The female Mexican immigrant, unable to save herself, must rely on the white woman to speak for her, to defend her, and to look after her and her wellbeing.

The two best-elaborated captive female Mexican characters, Maria (Carmen Corral) and Selina (Lorél Medina), are only allowed limited development. Their characters are attended only in relation to Alberto, who, as Davie’s cousin, is the most well-developed Mexican immigrant character in the film. Maria is introduced as his wife and Selina as his daughter, but they remain simple figures circumscribed by their relations to Alberto as their husband/father. Their framing is contained within the supporting roles of wife, mother, and daughter, and the violence enacted on their bodies is registered most resonantly through Alberto’s anguished reactions rather than their own. Selina disappears from the film after the vigilantes pretend to let her go in an act of mercy, but during a later escape attempt she is found dead, face down in barbed wire surrounding the compound. Maria’s character development is confined to demonstrations of nurturing care or abject emotional distress, first when she must watch her daughter leave the compound, and later when she is slowly tortured to death in front of her husband. Maria is therefore limited by conventions of domesticity, matrimony, and motherhood. Liz’s empowerment and her capacity to fight back in Undocumented are enabled by her rejection of the submission and self-sacrifice that these roles demand in traditional patriarchal structures, roles that Undocumented writes onto the bodies of the captive Mexican women.

The Scene of Torture: Race, Gender, and the US National Imagination

The complex relational positioning of the various characters according to intersecting racial, class, and gender hierarchies is concentrated in the longest torture scene of the film, which features the opening of Maria’s body, the psychological torment of Alberto, and the crew members’ excruciating angst and fear. The eight-minute-long scene opens with a shot of one of the vigilantes standing in front of an oversized American flag, seen through a handheld camera that signals the witnessing presence of the crew. The camera pans left and down to reveal Alberto, stripped down to his underwear and bound to a chair, captive in front of the prominently displayed flag. The scene cuts to a tight close-up of Maria, whose face is lit in heavy shadow and partially obscured by her dark hair. She seems exhausted and distraught, while behind her bits of metal and chain hint that she is bound. It cuts back to a more tightly framed shot of Alberto, the American flag still conspicuous in the background, as he cries and emotes, looking directly into the camera with pleading eyes. The full threat of the violence that awaits is finally revealed to the viewer with a shot that starts at the ceiling and tilts down, revealing a torture device that spans the full height of the room, stretching all the way to the floor. The menacing device is black, metallic, and hard, composed of chains, gears, and angular bars. Maria is chained to the device, her arms extended and feet restrained, mimicking a crucifixion (see Fig. 6). The device is in shadow while a light hits Maria from beneath, showing her almost-nude body, her pinkish underwear and skin emphasizing her fleshiness next to the stern metal contraption. She seems to glow angelically, in contrast with the industrial cruelty surrounding her, heightening the suspense. She is flanked on both sides of the device by two anonymous vigilantes dressed in black, ready and waiting.

Fig. 6. Maria is chained to a torture device. Z enters the room in command of the coming violence. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Fig. 7. Alberto, disrobed and strapped to a chair, begins to realize what awaits when Z explains the rules of their citizenship test. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Z enters and sets up his sadistic game, explaining that Alberto will need to answer questions from a US citizenship test. The vigilante standing next to Alberto, poised behind a podium, explains the rules: for every question he gets right, they will undo one of Maria’s wrists, but each wrong answer will result in cranking the device (see Fig. 7). The first question asks how many representatives there are in congress, and when Alberto fails to answer correctly, the test administrator bangs his gavel and begins the torture. The shot cuts to the torture device as tense music heightens the suspense, the noisescape swelling with sounds of the machine grinding, flesh and muscle stretching, and Maria’s screams and moans in pain. Her face remains largely hidden, her eyes barely visible, but her mouth is open and wrenched. Her facial close-ups are cut together with tight close-ups of her hands, her arms, and the machine. Alberto shouts out and resists his restraints, unable to act. There is a pause and then a cut to a long shot of Maria’s body, now fully extended and taut.

The scene unfolds through intercut subjective camera work following the action and tightly framed close-ups of faces, hands, and the twisting and turning of the metal device. We do not explicitly see the ripping of muscles and limbs; Maria’s physical pain is conveyed through her mouth, hands, the grinding of chains, and the turning of gears. The viewer watches Alberto’s psychological torture, as his inability to answer the questions results in his wife’s slow and painful murder. Maria’s screams are audible and her body is spectacularly exposed, but her face remains largely hidden by the angle of her head and her loose-hanging hair. Instead, the film supplies Alberto’s face, twisted in desperation, as a focal point for registering the impact of the pain enacted on Maria’s body. Additionally, the scene provides reaction shots of the crew, demonstrating fear, disgust, and the anguish of coerced observation.

The levels of identification set up in the film privilege above all the perspective of the crew, who are more fully sympathetic and human, and to a lesser extent identifies with Alberto as a kindhearted husband and father trying to live out the “American dream.” At the bottom level of identification is Maria, the least developed character in the scene and the one rendered as an object, slowly mutilated into a body in pieces. The structures of identification in this scene rely on social hierarchies that are taken for granted, privileging the US citizen, middle-class, mostly white film crew, followed by the assimilating Mexican male immigrant, with the abject and victimized Mexican wife and mother last. And on the outside, separated from the sympathetic white characters, are the agents of violence, the vigilante group that polices the border and embodies aggressive forms of white working-class masculinity.

Liz steps in assertively when the inevitability of Alberto’s failure becomes clear and asks the vigilantes to stop (see Fig. 8). Z confronts her, blusteringly questioning her for defending a man who “doesn’t respect” the country he entered. Undeterred, Liz replies, “He doesn’t understand what you’re saying.” In response, Z menacingly points his finger at her, raising his voice to announce, “When it comes to fucking food stamps these people understand English perfectly well.” This confrontation, played out in front of the bound and incapacitated Alberto and Maria, reaffirms Liz and Z as leaders and nemeses. Meanwhile Maria is bound and helpless, a figure who becomes progressively more abject as the scene progresses.

Fig. 8. Liz stands up to Z, protesting Maria’s torture. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Liz emerges as a heroic figure over the course of the film not just because of her ability to survive her own captivity, but also because of her willingness to stand up against the aggressors and defend the helpless victims of the vigilantes’ violence. As a Final Girl, Liz is positioned against Z, a retrograde version of an outdated white masculinity that only tenuously conceals its violence and aggression. In this micro-battle between Liz and Z, viewers are encouraged to deepen their identification with her as the protagonist and the one who might be able to stop the violence. And importantly, this identification depends on the violence enacted on Maria; without a victim to defend, Liz could not materialize as a heroic defender. Maria remains bound also by traditional gender conventions through her character’s circumscription in the roles of wife and mother. Again, prior to this scene, Maria’s character is given screen time only in relation to her husband and daughter; during her death scene, she becomes a focal point exclusively as an object of violence (see Fig. 9). Liz, on the other hand, refuses to relinquish control to Z or to the other vigilantes, defying their models of white masculinity. Her racialized privilege is never interrogated in Undocumented. Liz embodies assumptions of female empowerment that are naturalized in Final Girls throughout the horror genre: Final Girls act out their gender-norm-defying agency while the films overlook and render invisible their US-centric whiteness.

Fig. 9. Maria in abject pain, close to death and unable to fight back. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

When Alberto has answered his final question incorrectly, the punishment is meted onto Maria’s tortured body. The crew members exchange fearful glances with one another. The gears begin again, louder than ever, and her screams are more desperate and blood-curdling than before. A series of extreme close-ups show her face in absolute pain, the chains behind her head, and the gears resisting against the pull of her body. The camera cuts to Liz, who averts her eyes, trying desperately not to panic. Again the shot cuts to Alberto before returning to Maria and the device, now suddenly accompanied by the sound of soft wetness, as her resistance gives way, the gears run smooth, and her screams cease. Immediately it cuts to Liz, looking at the ground, in absolute sorrow and terror, registering the horror as a mediator for the viewer. Thus, the scene sets up both her heroism and the full danger that she faces, and does so by enacting violence on Maria’s body. Liz’s power and strength are emphasized through Maria’s abjection and marginalization.

Conclusion

Undocumented ends on a haunting note with a brief video sent to a news station of the extremist vigilantes, with Z as their leader, demonstrating that their numbers have grown. The extremists hover at the margins of society, ready to violently burst into and disrupt the everyday, revealing the monstrous nativist underbelly of the US national project. The horrific evils in Undocumented, embodied by the vigilante psychokillers and especially by their patriarchal leader Z, are portrayed as barbaric, regressive figures, out of sync with more progressive and modern sensibilities that condemn their actions. The pleasure of spectatorship in Undocumented depends on the spectator’s identification with the white crew members and the act of witnessing from a position that condemns the violence and that is not fully culpable in the suffering of Mexican immigrant bodies. The spectator is twice removed from the torture of the Mexican immigrants, privileging the point of view of the mostly white film crew, and Liz in particular.

The gender, class, national, and racial aspects of the violence in the film go unquestioned. It appears natural that bigoted rednecks are mutilating the bodies of undocumented Mexican immigrants and that young white progressives are the ones who watch with fear and disgust. Further, the logic of Undocumented suggests that it is common sense for the white Final Girl to be the one who embodies feminist empowerment while the bodies of brown women are victimized. These hierarchies of cinematic identification are taken for granted and expected because they fit with the hierarchies upon which the US national project and global capitalism are built.

Clover interprets slasher films to indicate shifting attitudes in society and the anxieties that surround the instability of “normality.” For her, slashers express changes that accompany the women’s liberation movement and loosening sexual mores, anxieties that continue to be manifest in the recurring prominence of tropes like the Final Girl. A question this essay has tried to engage is how anxieties about gender and sexuality are manifest in torture porn, a descendent of the slasher film that draws on post-9/11 national anxieties in the United States. Undocumented plays out excessive dramatizations of nativist fears of border penetration and anxieties over national identity, making them explicit while pointing to our nation’s unsightly and potentially violent undercurrents. The vigilante killers, particularly Z, are compelling and terrifying in part because they are recognizable. They describe immigration as a plague, label immigrants as criminal, and justify hatred as patriotic—these are discourses that have circulated before and have gained currency in an increasingly xenophobic contemporary political climate. Perhaps, then, torture porn is a ripe horror cycle for exploring these frightening issues, making invisible violence explicit and working towards a reckoning of social contradictions.

However, it is important to keep in sight the construction of the victims in Undocumented and the racialized hierarchies through which they become fodder for the vigilantes. The commonsense hierarchies by which the Mexican immigrants are constructed as victims rather than as heroes, or even as Final Girls, maintain racialized logics that undergird nativist sentiments, here uncritically privileging the white, US crew members, particularly Liz, as the primary points of identification. As Clover points out, it is significant that most female characters of slasher films are objects of aggression, revealing sexist undertones that surface in horror cinema. For Clover, the juxtaposition of the Final Girl, who is gender-ambiguous and sexually abstinent, with the sexually transgressive female victims, reveals tensions between female empowerment and lingering anxieties about expanding sexual freedom. The difference in the deaths between male and female victims in terms of length, intimacy, and graphic violence is an important component that should not be overlooked and speaks to persistent misogynistic impulses toward violence against women. Similarly, it is crucial not to lose sight of the gendered and racialized dynamics at play in the victimization of the Mexican immigrant women in Undocumented. When Maria is slowly tortured to death, her nearly nude body is displayed spectacularly, stretched out in abject suffering. While earlier Final Girls are set apart from victims through their abstinence, Liz is set apart from these women through her whiteness. Behind these character contrasts are assumptions that the Mexican woman of color is trapped in domesticity, framed entirely by motherhood and matrimonial servitude, a woman confined to tradition by virtue of her skin color and nationality. These stereotypes allow Maria to be so easily victimized and pitied, while Liz is effortlessly empowered to speak, act, and save others as a consequence of her character development through white Western feminist typology. The Final Girl presents white, empowered womanhood as the ideal, an agential and powerful female character capable of resisting patriarchal violence, but at the cost of excluding women of color who remain silent and in need of rescue.

Footnotes

1. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn discusses the ways that the Scream franchise, for example, cleverly recognizes slasher tropes that punish transgressive sexuality, prey on the bodies of women, and situate nonwhite characters as disposable. Nonetheless, the films depend on Sidney, Scream‘s white middle-class heroine.

2. Kyle Christensen suggests that Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street exemplifies a feminist Final Girl because she subverts traditional requirements for femininity, such as domesticity, submissiveness, purity, and piety.

3. For example, Peckover’s twitter feed includes a March 6, 2017 tweet with a poster concept for Undocumented featuring a bloodied street sign warning of undocumented immigrants crossing the road. This is surrounded by a number of tweets criticizing President Trump’s policies, suggesting that Peckover wants his film to have continued relevance in current immigration debates.

4. Liz remains distinct from her male peers through her sobriety and capability from the start. It should be noted that the prototypical Final Girl outlined by Clover differs from her friends not only by her intelligence and clear-headedness, but also through her sexual abstinence. Liz, in contrast, is not only romantically interested in Travis, but has another boyfriend at the start of the film (who is quickly forgotten). Liz diverges from Clover’s typical Final Girl by having two romantic partners. However, this characteristic has been thrown into question by subsequent media scholars such as Nowell and Christensen, who point to other Final Girls who are sexually active and have romantic storylines.

5. One of the vigilantes is later revealed to be Mexican-American, but he demonstrates the attitudes and beliefs of white nativism and speaks hatefully to the Mexican immigrants.

6. Once again, Liz differs from Clover’s formulation of an abstinent Final Girl. In this scene, Liz not only engages in romantic activity but initiates it. While this may seem to challenge Liz’s position as a Final Girl, it can be read as reaffirming the endurance of the Final Girl as a horror trope that adapts to contemporary sociopolitical contexts. Liz’s character manifests sexual norms of the new millennium, in which hegemonic femininity is tied to individual sexual liberation and pleasure in ways that can actually work to undermine feminist politics. In this way, Liz is represented as the embodiment of a model of feminist empowerment that is naturalized as white, middle-class, and Euro-American. For more on sexual post-feminism in popular culture, see Angela McRobbie.

Works Cited

• Brooks, Brian. “IFC Midnight Gets Papers for ‘Undocumented.’” IndieWire, 13 July 2011, http://www.indiewire.com/2011/07/ifc-midnight-gets-papers-for-undocumented-53272/. Accessed Apr. 2017.
• Brooks, Kinitra D. “The Importance of Neglected Intersections: Race and Gender in Contemporary Zombie Texts and Theories.” African American Review, vol. 47, no. 4, 2014, pp. 461–475. Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/article/577945.
• Chavez, Leo. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Stanford UP, 2013.
• Christensen, Kyle. “The Final Girl Versus Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, 23–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/23416349.
• Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, vol. 20, Autumn 1987, pp. 187–228. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2928507.
• —. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton UP, 1992.
• Connelly, Kelly. “Defeating the Male Monster in Halloween and Halloween H20.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 35, no. 1, 2007, pp. 12–21. EBSCOHost, doi:10.3200/JPFT.35.1.12-21.
• Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York Magazine, 6 Feb. 2006, http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/. Accessed Apr. 2015.
• Gartside, Will. “The Hostel Rhetoric of Torture: A Discourse Analysis of Torture Porn.” Projections, vol. 7, no. 1, March 2013, pp. 81–99. Berghahn Journals, doi:10.3167/proj.2013.070107.
• Kendrick, James. “Slasher Films and Gore in the 1980s.” A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 310–328.
• Lockwood, Dean. “All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of ‘Torture Porn.’” Popular Communication, vol. 7, no. 1, 2009, pp. 40–48. EBSCOHost, doi:10.1080/15405700802587232.
• McCann, Ben. “Body Horror.” To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, edited by James Aston and John Walliss, McFarland & Company Inc, 2013, pp. 30–44.
• McRobbie, Angela. “Post-feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2004, pp. 255–264. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/1468077042000309937.
• Nowell, Richard. “‘There’s More Than One Way to Lose Your Heart’: The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films, and Female Youth.” Cinema Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, 2011, pp. 115–140. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/41342285.
• Oliviero, Katie E. “Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities.” Signs, vol. 36, no. 3, 2011, pp. 679–706. JSTOR, doi:10.1086/657495.
• Pinedo, Isabel C. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State U of New York P, 1997.
• —. “Torture Porn: 21st Century Horror.” A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 345–362.
• Queenan, Joe. “Slash’n’burn.” The Guardian, 1 June 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/jun/02/features16.theguide4. Accessed Apr. 2015. Rowe Karlyn, Kathleen. Unruly Girls, Repentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen. U of Texas P, 2011.
• Short, Sue. Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
• Undocumented. Directed by Chris Peckover. IFC Films, 2010.

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (bio)
University of Barcelona

Stacy Rusnak (bio)
Georgia Gwinnett College

Autumn of 2017 marks thirty years since the publication of Carol J. Clover’s “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” The most enduring premise of this essay—which was originally included in the special issue Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy in the journal Representations and later re-published in an abridged version in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)—is Clover’s theorization of the Final Girl, a term that encompasses the common attributes of female survivor figures in slashers. As Clover famously argues, the Final Girl constitutes a powerful source of identification for the slasher’s (mostly) adolescent male audiences.¹ Through this concept Clover challenges the pervasive assumption that horror cinema is produced purely for misogynistic men in order to indulge their voyeuristic fantasies against women, advancing a radical rethinking of fundamental categories in Film Studies such as the gaze, identification, and spectatorial pleasures.

The remarkably mobile and infinitely interpretable figure of the Final Girl has evolved into an important concept for theoretical work on film, gender, and sexuality by scholars including Jack Halberstam, Isabel Pinedo, and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn. Despite its unquestionable influence on horror studies and on the directions often taken in this field in the intervening years, Clover’s model has been widely critiqued in academia. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Clover’s formulation has been the characterization of the Final Girl as a “male in drag” (216), which refers to her presumed masculine aggression and phallic agency. One of the central arguments in “Her Body, Himself”—and one that has led to many misconceptions that continue to surround Clover’s theory today—is that the Final Girl is gender non-normative or, in Clover’s words, “boyish” (204): “Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine…. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls” (204). In fact, as Clover clarifies at some point, the Final Girl is not even a girl, but an “agreed-upon-fiction” (214); she merely stands-in for male desires, a subject for a man to identify with, to use “as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies,” “an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty” (214). Significantly, and against the comprehension of the Final Girl as a strong, feminist heroine who turns the knife on the killer—an interpretative framework that has largely determined the reception of “Her Body, Himself”—Clover states: “to applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development … is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking” (214).²

Another reading strategy that has persisted in the contemporary circulation of Clover’s theory—that the very raison d’etre of the masculinized Final Girl is to become a source of identification for teenage males—was challenged by Barbara Creed as early as the 1990s in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Creed’s contribution to these debates largely pivots on her insights into the “monstrous feminine,” a concept that has turned out to be equally groundbreaking and long-standing in horror criticism. According to Creed, “the avenging heroine of the slasher film is not the Freudian phallic woman whose image is designed to allay castration anxiety … but the deadly femme castratrice” (emphasis in original, 127). The castrating woman in 1970s horror films, such as the rape-revenge I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and the psychotic slasher Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), points not so much to male fantasies of being subjected to feminine sensations, but to men’s fear of (and, importantly, ambiguous fascination with) monstrous women. Like Clover, however, Creed is cautious of reading these images as immediately progressive: “I am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is ‘feminist’ or ‘liberated’. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (7). Both scholars agree, then, that horror cinema is about the male psyche and male desire, and does not reveal much about the female experience of watching terror.

This particular premise has been revised by Jack Halberstam in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. According to Halberstam, although the psychoanalytic tools adopted by Clover and Creed have resulted in highly productive ways of approaching horror films, especially as far as notions of fear and desire are concerned, “fear and monstrosity are historically specific forms rather than psychological universals” (24). In his provocative analysis of the cult splatter films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986), Halberstam reads Stretch, the tomboy Final Girl of the second film, as a representation of the monstrous gender—or gender that splatters—that exceeds human categories, transforming into “something messier than male or female” (143). Pointing to the queer tendency of horror film in general—its capacity “to reconfigure gender not simply through inversion, but by literally creating new categories” (139)—Halberstam argues that the Final Girl’s femininity is recycled and transformed in new gender regimes. Thus, in his queer reassessment of the slasher film, Halberstam challenges Clover’s notion of the Final Girl as “boyish,” arguing that this approach “remains caught in a gender lock” (143): it re-establishes normative gender positions in relation to fear and violence, leaving little space for addressing identification between female audiences and the aggressor.

The assumption that the Final Girl operates as a masculinized point of identification for a young male viewer has been repeatedly questioned in scholarly writings on horror media. However, while Halberstam reads the slasher storyline as the process of “becoming-monstrous”—”enabling and activating monstrosity as opposed to stamping it out” (143)—other scholars seem to reclaim the Final Girl mainly as a figure of female agency and a potential source of female viewing pleasures. In Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (1997), for instance, Isabel Pinedo points to the productive possibilities of such pleasures: “Dancing through the minefield of the contemporary horror film, with its bloody display of the all-too-often female body in bits and pieces, is fraught with danger for women. But pleasure shares the field with danger” (69). Although their approaches differ in many ways, Pinedo coincides with Halberstam in her view that an ongoing overemphasis on the masculinization of female characters in horror films runs the risk of inscribing the genre within “a male-dominated discourse where power is coded as masculine, even when embodied in biological females” (81–2).

This revisiting of the Final Girl does not happen in a vacuum and should be considered as part of wider trends in feminist horror scholarship, which reclaims the horror genre for female viewing pleasures, usually under the assumption that it provides its viewers an aesthetic access to violence and rage, released in a previously assumed male-orientated form (Rowe Karlyn 2011, Kaplan 2012, Paszkiewicz 2018). Scholars such as Rhona J. Berenstein (1996) and Brigid Cherry (2002) offer evidence that women have always enjoyed horror, even in earlier days. In her examination of the marketing and reception of Hollywood horror films produced in the 1930s, Berenstein observes that “male and female spectators were offered a range of publicity, exhibition, and critical discourses that invited them alternately to act in line with traditional gender mores and to act out unconventional gender roles” (85). For example, classical Hollywood monsters provided spaces where female audiences could project fantasies of agency.³ Cherry, in turn, has addressed female horror fans who “refuse to refuse to look,” similarly challenging assumptions about horror film spectatorship with empirical research on processes and modes of consumption. Notably, her study references an earlier piece by Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks” (1983/2002), yet another key text in feminist horror scholarship. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s (1975) theory of the male gaze in narrative cinema, Williams suggests that horror is not a genre that can be enjoyed by women. Just as classical narrative cinema reproduces the structure of the active male gaze and the quality of the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of women, in horror film the male spectator is said to identify with the active subject of narration, exercising a controlling look, while women are denied this look or are punished for exercising it (“When the Woman Looks” 62). When the woman looks, both as a character within the film and as a viewer in the audience, she invariably “is punished … by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy” (“When the Woman Looks” 61). Because horror cinema tends to represent women as passive victims (of the male gaze), the presumed female behavior when watching these films is that of a passive spectator who refuses to look.⁴

Such assumptions were radically questioned in the mid-1990s, partly because of the broad circulation of Clover’s Final Girl as a theoretical concept that enabled such revisions, and partly because of the appearance of a new slasher formula, alongside the growing visibility of female fans. As Alexandra West argues in her study of this new slasher cycle, films like Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997), I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Danny Cannon, 1998), Urban Legend (Jamie Blanks, 1998), Halloween: H20 (Steve Miner, 1998), Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000), and Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2000) differ significantly from what came before: “The Final Girls of this cycle were the products of third wave feminism, 90s alternative culture and the more mainstream ‘Girl Power’ which allowed the focus to shift to the female protagonist, her friends and their survival” (West). All of these examples tap into what can be considered “a female experience” or, as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn calls it in her influential analysis of the Scream trilogy and its Final Girl, Sidney, “issues of particular concern for teen girls: 1) sexuality and virginity; 2) adult femininity and its relation to agency and power; 3) identity as it is shaped by the narratives of popular culture” (101–2).⁵

In addition to addressing the changes within the slasher form, considerable scholarship on the Final Girl has been devoted to the problems of definition. The most frequently quoted critiques, by Richard Nowell (2011) and Janet Staiger (2015), stress that the number of films investigated by Clover in her formulation of the Final Girl trope is too small to generalize across the subgenre. Interestingly, Nowell questions Clover’s assertion that the 1970s and 1980s slasher film was mainly consumed by young male viewers. He notes that several economic factors during the first slasher cycle already pointed to the heroic Final Girl as “being mobilized to appeal to a female youth” (128) in order to expand the potential audience and enhance box office results.⁶ Nowell suggests that Clover’s model of the Final Girl as boyish, which anchored her notion of the male viewer playing out sadistic and masochistic fantasies, fails to address the many Final Girl characters who exhibited traditionally coded feminine traits and looked glamorous (rather than “boyish”) on screen. In a similar vein, Staiger points out that Clover’s corpus of films is too narrow and selective. She expands her study to thirty-one films, and from this sample deduces that instead of being a Final Girl, the woman in slashers is more likely to be placed in the position of a “Final Victim.” Moreover, unlike in Clover’s definition of the Final Girl, this character is not necessarily masculine, a virgin, or disinterested in having sex: “Women are usually the victims and the heroines, but they are not always ‘Final Girls’ in the strong sense that Clover implies” (Staiger 222). An additional revision comes from Jeremy Maron (2015), who urges a shift away from thinking about the Final Girl as a specifically gendered female character, noting the presence of male characters in this structural position. He prefers the term “Final Subject” because it is more gender inclusive and appropriate in films where the Final Girl is identifiably gendered male, as in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985) and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Joseph Zito, 1984).

These critiques raise questions about the usefulness of Clover’s term in contemporary thinking about horror film. Although frequently dismissed as promoting a universalizing and monolithic notion of the Final Girl and for limiting itself to psychoanalytic theories of the subject, Clover’s approach has been, in fact, extremely productive in interrogating the ways in which feminist film theory (and film theory in general) understand gendered spectatorship. Clover’s take on malleable gender identity and “painful seeing” has opened up questions not only about cross-spectatorial identification and the indeterminacy of gender itself—notably in recognizing the fluidity of our responses to screen fictions and that, as Pam Cook (2012) suggests, we go to the movies to “experience the thrill of reinventing [ourselves] rather than simply having [our] social identities or positions bolstered” (33)—but also about an embodied mode of film viewing that further undoes the binary sexuality (see, for example, Powell 2005 and Rizzo 2012), questions that resonate with the recent preoccupation of film theory with cinematic affect, materiality, and film experience more broadly.

Three decades later, Clover’s work continues to be a significant reference in scholarly writing on the horror genre. It has also extended beyond the academic realm into popular culture. As Shelley Cobb and Yvonne Tasker observe (2016), Clover’s key term—along with other concepts such as Mulvey’s “the gaze” and “to-be-looked-at-ness,” or Creed’s “monstrous feminine”—found wider application in new online media and journalism, regularly appearing in feminist magazines including Jezebel, Bitch, Bust, and Feministing: “while popular feminist criticism is not in the business of providing in-depth readings of individual texts, criticism of patriarchal cinema and media culture is now widely generated by journalists and other cultural commentators who use feminist critical tools to question the circulation of sexist images and gendered value systems.” The widespread adoption of Clover’s term in popular culture is attested to by an increasing visibility of the Final Girl across a variety of media: the 2015 films Final Girl (Tyler Shields) and The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson); TV’s popular series Scream Queens, which concluded its first season with a finale titled “The Final Girl(s)” (Brad Falchuk, 2015); Clock Tower video games, whose main character, Jennifer, is crafted to be a Final Girl; Lolo’s “No Time For Lonely” lyrics, again with explicit references to the character; and Riley Sager’s novel Final Girls (2017), which plays on horror movie themes from Scream, among many others. These contemporary reformulations of the Final Girl in film, TV, fan blogs, and literature confirm the pervasiveness and flexibility of the trope, as well as the need to expand discussion of Clover’s framework beyond the traditional ruminations of the slasher subgenre that have been so central to most of research to date. While the Final Girl continues to materialize in slasher remakes, usually in a highly self-conscious way, it also circulates in other genres, such as dystopian Young Adult literature or science-fiction graphic novels, that refocus critical attention on the trope as a cross-media phenomenon (see Paszkiewicz and Rusnak, forthcoming).⁷

On the other hand, the most recent revisions of the slasher formula, such as the Oscar-nominated Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), demonstrate that discourses and ideologies of racialized identities provide even more opportunities for renewal and reinvention. Such a reinterpretation of the Final Girl model provokes questions about the racialized “Final Boy,” the oppositional gaze and black spectatorship (hooks 1992), and the capacity of horror film to mediate contemporary issues of race and racism, which are experienced, negotiated, and challenged by an audience more diverse than the white male viewership Clover described as “the majority audience” (209) for the slasher genre. The need for such analysis is particularly pressing because critical race theory has generally been underrepresented in reflections on the Final Girl. As Brigid Cherry (2009) reminds us in her study of horror cinema, “any one factor of identity cannot be analyzed without considering others: gendered identities can be strongly linked to class or racial identity, for example, and the one cannot be discussed without considering the other” (176).

While race in horror has been examined to some extent, mostly in relation to black male viewers, very little work has been done to address black female characters (and viewers) in slasher cinema even in feminist studies.⁸ Another recent film, Breaking In (James McTeigue, 2018), which alters Clover’s Final Girl model by placing a middle-class black mother at its core as a “Final Woman,” opens up a space where such issues can be reconsidered, for example by questioning the stereotypes associated with the strong black woman, traditionally represented as driven by either matriarchal or sexual instincts (Brooks 464, 467). Both Get Out and Breaking In push the boundaries of the Final Girl trope, urging us to rethink the intersections of gender, sexuality and race in contemporary horror film.

Given the abundance of onscreen material that has been produced since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems that the Final Girl, in all her guises and mutations, has yet to be accorded critical attention. This is not to suggest either an uncritical celebration of the trope, or the inevitable subversion of gender, sexual, or racial ideologies by horror’s inherent self-reinventing reflexivity. Rather, we want to emphasize the figure’s continuous inflections, and its status as a living trope, even though it frequently relies on older traditions and conventions. Therefore, our focus in this issue, on Revisiting the Final Girl, presents an engagement with two key questions: How does the contemporary horror film press us to reconsider Clover’s term of thirty years ago? And how can early manifestations of the Final Girl trope help us redefine or expand its parameters as a theoretical concept? In the process, we do not wish to discard old questions and knowledge, but to rethink, reconfigure, and revisit what is most useful from the past. What the Final Girl represents historically is a new way of seeing and thinking about identification, the gaze, and spectatorship; this idea, together with a sense of dialogue between past and present—looking backwards and looking forwards—was crucial for our purposes. We envision this temporality not as singular or evolutionary, but rather as a nonlinear, multidirectional flow of ideas that allows for a reconsideration of both our previous understandings of Clover’s term and its contemporary permutations and reworkings.

These issues are interrogated in the two essays that compose our dossier: Murray Leeder’s “X-Ray, the Final Woman, and the Medical Slasher Film,” which productively employs Clover’s theory to rewrite the slasher history, broadening the archive of films that articulate the Final Girl paradigm, and Lucia Palmer’s “The Final Girl at the US-Mexico Border: The Politics of Saving and Surviving in Undocumented (2010),” which points to present and future directions in the horror genre—notably by acknowledging the intersectionality of the Final Girl and the current popularity of torture porn, a form that has evolved from earlier cycles of the slasher. Although they build on Clover’s work, insisting on the importance of her intervention in horror studies, the two essays offer a useful exploration of her main tenets, both in terms of the Final Girl and the slasher form.

Palmer demonstrates that, while torture porn films deviate from the slasher subgenre in important ways, they certainly inherit the slasher’s conventions of sexualized violence and the spectacular display of the mutilation of women’s bodies. In her insightful analysis of Undocumented (Chris Peckover, 2010), with its longest and most poignant scene involving the slow dismemberment of a Mexican woman’s body, Palmer postulates that these generic fluctuations should be read in the context of post-9/11 anxieties surrounding the penetration of national borders and the anti-immigration rhetoric that has gained currency in an increasingly xenophobic political climate. If, as Clover argued, the 1970s and 1980s slashers expressed the shifting sexual attitudes of their time and the fears about the instability of the normal, then how are such anxieties manifest in the twenty-first century?⁹ Situating Undocumented within the context of ever more visible nativist sentiments in the United States makes it possible to interrogate not only the representation of women—whether as victim or as Final Girl—but also to ask how the conjunction. of white masculinity and white supremacy operates “when manifested as a monstrous psychokiller on the border, motivated less by a psycho-sexual rage than by a psycho-nativist fury.”

Focusing on the intersections between gender, race, class, and nationality (which, as previously mentioned, are almost unattended in the now-voluminous scholarship on the slasher film), Palmer offers new insights into Clover’s cinematic gaze, structures of identification, and painful seeing. As Palmer rightly observes, even though there are notable exceptions that challenge the normativity of whiteness embedded in the trope of the Final Girl, it “remains relatively unexamined in terms of intersectional identity formations and socio-political struggles.” The protagonist of the film, Liz, a level-headed female character who uses her intelligence to negotiate with, and eventually escape from, the white psychokillers who kidnap her and her friends from her filming crew as they travel across the US-Mexico border, proves to be yet another incarnation of a white, middle-class Final Girl. Following Kinitra D. Brooks’s critique of the predominantly binary treatment of gender relations in horror scholarship, Palmer addresses ways in which the complex layers of identification structured in the film around the Final Girl, her friends, and the abject Mexican victims rely on racial hierarchies and shows that they unequivocally reaffirm whiteness as the norm for female empowerment. Palmer contrasts the film’s camerawork with the common use of a subjective camera in earlier slashers that often aligns the viewer with the point-of-view of the killer, to argue that the use of a documentary-style aesthetic in Undocumented—which clearly evokes films such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)—allows the audience to watch the atrocities and the pain of the immigrants through the perspective of the crew members. This, together with Liz’s “investigative gaze” that questions, if only subtly, the racialized, classed, and national power relations, seems to confirm the film’s progressive stance.. However, Palmer’s careful analysis of the structures of the gaze and hierarchies of identification reveals that whiteness is rendered a precondition for challenging the racist and patriarchal status quo, both in the film and in Clover’s Final Girl model, while women of color continue to be reduced to signs of abjection in the slasher film, a facet of the genre in need of critical attention.

Leeder, on the other hand, argues that there is continued value in exploring the Final Girl in early slasher films, underscoring its surprising pervasiveness in marginal texts that are often overlooked as part of the first slasher cycle because they do not fit neatly within Clover’s paradigm. In particular, Leeder examines how Boaz Davidson’s 1981 film X-Ray—never discussed by Clover or other early thinkers on the slasher films—both belongs to and does not belong to the Final Girl model, and addresses these findings by extending the conceptual frameworks offered by previous scholarship and by engaging with debates on early “keyhole” films and pornography, medical horror, and the medical gaze in a wider sense. For instance, his analysis shows that the film fuses the killer’s sadistic voyeuristic gaze with a Foucauldian medical gaze, which reveals anxieties about spaces and practitioners of masculine medicine as they relate to the surveillance of women’s bodies. Such a revelation points to deeply embedded hegemonic discourses not usually associated with the slasher subgenre; the film’s appropriation of different kinds of gazes enriches our understanding of the Final Girl, while bringing to light highly significant issues of power and agency within medical discourses on female sexuality.

In his evocative reading of the film’s interplay between the doctor’s “assaultive male gaze” upon the female body, the protagonist’s “reactive gaze,” which positions her as the object to be “looked at,” and her brief “counter gaze” when she tentatively scrutinizes the medical gaze of the doctors, Leeder proposes that the processes of identity construction vis-à-vis the power of looking have always already been more complicated than Clover’s Final Girl model implies. Furthermore, he observes that the X-Ray‘s Final Girl—the surviving female character—is, in fact, a middle-aged “Final Woman,” and not the typical teenager of the slasher film. What Leeder’s study of X-Ray demonstrates is that there is still room to consider other slashers not included in the Final Girl paradigm and that these films might help us to rethink the definition of the trope as outlined by Clover in her original essay.

In her later work, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover claimed that a strong “case could be made for horror’s being, intentionally or unintentionally, the most self-reflexive of cinematic genres” (168) due to its obsessive focus on eyes and looking. Interestingly, both articles published in this issue offer approaches that broaden Clover’s theory beyond a psychoanalytic framework, but they do return to one of its key terms: the question of the gaze. Leeder shows that the gazes in slasher films can be attached not only to the killer and his intended victim, but also to the space of the hospital and its technologies; Palmer, in turn, underscores the complex structures of looking and hierarchies of film identification in Undocumented to bring light to intersectional identity formation and the normative positioning of the Final Girl. These two contributions to scholarship on the Final Girl demonstrate the ongoing usefulness of Clover’s concept and its surprising pervasiveness across the last thirty years, in both academic criticism and popular culture. It is our hope to invigorate the debate within Film Studies about the relationship between horror, the gaze, and identification, as well as highlight the rich and diverse facets of the Final Girl trope.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Peter Marra, whose organization of an SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) panel on the Final Girl led us to the production of this special issue. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Postmodern Culture for their useful insights on the essays.

Footnotes

1. In her new preface to the 2015 edition of Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover offers an insightful reflection on the discursive circulation of the trope, arguing that, in the course of history, the Final Girl seems to have “hijacked” the later debates on slasher media, eclipsing other figures and issues discussed in the book—such as the Final Girl’s victim-hero status, with an emphasis on “victim.”

2. Klaus Rieser, still in 2001, argues against the Final Girl as a potentially feminist figure. He suggests that scholars who have followed Clover’s model and reconsidered the Final Girl as a sign of female agency overestimate the progressiveness of the paradigm. For Rieser, the moments in slasher films when male viewers alter their identification towards the Final Girl and become “feminized” function merely as “‘playful’ intrusions into the gender field” (390) that fail to disrupt the hegemonic, heterosexist order.

3. Harry Benshoff (1997) makes similar claims in reference to queer audiences.

4. In a 2001 reflection on her earlier work, entitled “When Women Look: A Sequel,” Williams does acknowledge that the “Mulveyan paradigm” could not account for “the pleasures, however problematic, women viewers may take in this genre” and that women could learn “how to look” at horror in subversive ways.

5. While taking into consideration this revisionist impulse that turns to the female viewer, recent scholarship on gender and horror film seems more critical of understandings of the Final Girl through fantasies à la “Girl Power.” Much as it is potentially reductive to read the Final Girl in terms of a phallic woman, an unconditional exaltation of the Final Girl as a feminist subversion and/or agent of violence generates doubts about the extent to which these images can be considered empowering (see Paszkiewicz and Rusnak, forthcoming).

6. Between mid-1977 and the spring of the following year, profit margins significantly decreased for adult-centered horror films. In an attempt to increase ticket sales, the industry began targeting female youth as a cost-effective solution (Nowell 128).

7. As Ryan Lizardi argues in his study of the contemporary slasher remake, “the horror film genre has fully embraced this cinematic trend to remake, or re-imagine, its past.” It is significant, he argues, that “these remakes mostly stem from a particular period of slasher horror films, the 1970s through the early 1980s,” the era which “has been theorized heavily for its ideological issues with gender and political ambivalence” (114).

8. See Isabel Pinedo, Robin Wood, Robin R. Means Coleman, and Harry M. Benshoff on race and the horror film.

9. As Anthony Hayt has recently argued in his study of contemporary slasher remakes, “since 9/11, a common trend in horror film criticism has been to focus on the genre as a way of understanding and processing the trauma of the terrorist attacks that forever changed the cultural landscape of America, and of the world” (131). For Hayt, this approach frequently downplays gender, and he interprets it as evidence of “the misogyny of American culture at large, and of the ‘post-feminist’ era specifically, [which materializes itself in] making moves to discount the importance of upholding the vigilance of gender-based political struggle in favour of more ‘important’ political causes” (131–2). In this light, it is interesting to observe how the trauma motif is closely intertwined with gender, racial, and sexual politics in Palmer’s piece.

Works Cited

• Benshoff, Harry. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester UP, 1997.
• Berenstein, Rhona J. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia UP, 1996.
• Brooks, Kinitra D. “The Importance of Neglected Intersections: Race and Gender in Contemporary Zombie Texts and Theories.” African American Review, vol. 74, no. 4, Winter 2014, pp. 461–475. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24589834. Cherry, Brigid. “Refusing to Refuse to Look: Female Viewers of the Horror Film.” Horror, the Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Routledge, 2002, pp. 169–78.
• —. Horror. Routledge, 2009.
• Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Misogyny, Misandry, Misanthropy, special issue of Representations, vol. 20, Autumn 1987, pp. 187–228. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2928507. —. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. 1992. Princeton UP, 2015.
• Cobb, Shelley, and Yvonne Tasker. “Feminist Film Criticism in the 21st Century.” Film Criticism, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan. 2016, pp. 1–2. ProQuest, doi:10.3998/fc.13761232.0040.107. Cook, Pam. “No Fixed Address: The Women’s Picture from Outrage to Blue Steel.” Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, edited by Christine Gledhill, U of Illinois P, 2012, pp. 29–40.
• Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
• Halberstam, Judith (Jack). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995.
• Hayt, Anthony. “Moving Past the Trauma: Feminist Criticism and Transformations of the Slasher Genre.” The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Lené Hole, et al., Routledge, 2017, pp. 131–140.
• hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992, pp. 115–31.
• Kaplan, E. Ann. “Troubling Genre/Reconstructing Gender.” Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, edited by Christine Gledhill, U of Illinois P, 2012, pp. 71–83.
• Lizardi, Ryan. “‘Re-Imagining’ Hegemony and Misogyny in the Contemporary Slasher Remake.” Journal of Popular Film, vol. 38, no. 3, Fall 2010, pp. 113–121. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/01956051003623464 Maron, Jeremy. “When the Final Girl is Not a Final Girl: Reconsidering the Gender Binary in the Slasher Film.” Off Screen, vol. 19, no. 1, January 2015. http://offscreen.com/view/reconsidering-the-final-girl. Accessed 19 July 2018. Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Routledge, 2011.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, Oct. 1975, pp. 6–18.
• Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. Continuum, 2011.
• Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh UP, 2018.
• Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna, and Stacy Rusnak (forthcoming). Final Girls, Femininity and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State UP of New York, 1997.
• Powell, Anna. Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh UP, 2005.
• Rieser, Klaus. “Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 3, no. 4, Apr. 2001, pp. 370–392. Sage, doi:10.1177/1097184×01003004002. Rizzo, Teresa. Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction. Continuum, 2012.
• Rowe Karlyn, Kathleen. Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen. U of Texas P, 2011.
• Staiger, Janet. “The Slasher, the Final Girl and the Anti-Denouement.” Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, edited by Wickham Clayton, Palgrave, 2015, pp. 213–228.
• West, Alexandra. “‘Not in my Movie’: The 90s Slasher Cycle and Grrrl Power.” Offscreen, vol. 20, no. 7, July 2016. http://offscreen.com/view/not-in-my-movie-the-90s-slasher-cycle-and-grrrl-power. Accessed 20 July 2018. Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” 1983. Horror, the Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Routledge, 2002, pp. 61–66.
• —. “When Women Look: A Sequel.” Senses of Cinema, July 2001. http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/freuds-worst-nightmares-psychoanalysis-and-the-horror-film/horror_women/. Accessed 20 July 2018. Wood, Robin. Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan—and Beyond. Expanded and rev. ed., Columbia UP, 2003.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Sibley (bio)
New York University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

Graham J. Matthews (bio)
Nanyang Technological University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

Stefan Mattessich (bio)
Santa Monica College

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

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

Fig. 1. Plastron. 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 2. Origami Cube. 2012.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 4. Spirals. 2015.

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

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

Fig. 5. Untitled. 2013.

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

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

Fig. 6. Walls, installation view. 2015.

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

Fig. 7. ‘9’. 2013.

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

Adam Haaga (bio)
Memorial University of Newfoundland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

Diletta De Cristofaro (bio)
University of Birmingham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

Melinda Cooper (bio)
University of Sydney

Abstract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secular Stagnation: The Challenge to Macroeconomics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unreproductive Surplus and the Japanese Stagnation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unreproductive Surplus and the Demographic Theory of Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

3. Rosenof drives home the point, noting that

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. See Campbell; Kingston 42–43.

9. See Burtless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

• Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Duke UP, 2013.
• Balakrishnan, Gopal. “Speculations on the Stationary State.” New Left Review, vol. 59, Sept.–Oct. 2009, pp. 5–26.
• Batra, Ravi. “Wage Stagnation in Japan.” Pacific Economic Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 1997, pp. 91–99.
• Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Basic Books, 1978.
• Bernanke, Ben. “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit.” Sandridge Lecture. Virginia Association of Economists, 14 Apr. 2005, Richmond, Virginia. ———. “Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke.” Conference to Honor Milton Friedman, 8 Nov. 2002, University of Chicago. Bloom, David E., et al. “Implications of Population Ageing for Economic Growth.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 26, no. 4, 2010, pp. 583–612.
• Burtless, Gary. “Does Population Aging Represent a Crisis for Rich Societies?” The Brookings Institution. 1 Jan. 2002.
• Campbell, John. “Japan’s Aging Population: Perspectives of ‘Catastrophic Demography.’” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 67, no. 4, Winter 2009, pp. 1401–1406.
• Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Zone Books, 2017.
• ———. “The Living and the Dead: Variations on De Anima.” Angelaki – Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 7, no. 3, 2002, pp. 81–104.
• Davidson, Jacob. “This Theory Explains Why the U.S. Economy Might Never Get Better.” Time Magazine, 25 Mar. 2016.
• Dent, Harry S., Jr. The Demographic Cliff: How to Survive and Prosper during the Great Deflation Ahead. Penguin, 2015.
• Desai, Radhika. “Consumption Demand in Marx and in the Current Crisis.” Research in Political Economy, vol. 26, 2010, pp. 101–41.
• Dodig, Nina, and Hansjörg Herr. “Financial Crises Leading to Stagnation – Selected Historical Case Studies.” The Demise of Finance-Dominated Capitalism: Explaining the Financial and Economic Crises, Edited by Eckhard Hein, et al. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015, pp. 162–218.
• Douthat, Ross. “Incredible Shrinking Country.” New York Times (Sunday Review), 28 April 2012, p. SR12.
• ———. “More Babies, Please.” New York Times (Sunday Review), 1 Dec. 2012, p. SR11.
• Driscoll, Mark. “Debt and Denunciation in Post-Bubble Japan: On the Two Freeters.” Cultural Critique, vol. 65, Winter 2007, pp. 164–187.
• Eberstadt, Nicholas. “Japan Shrinks.” The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2012.
• Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.
• Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. Buccaneer Books, 1971.
• Fisher, Irving. “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions.” Econometrica, vol. 1, no. 4, 1933, pp. 337–357.
• Frangos, Alex. “Japan’s Problem: Demographics or Money?” Moneybeat blog. The Wall Street Journal, 6 Dec. 2015.
• Friedman, Milton, and Anna J. Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton UP, 1963.
• Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
• Goodhart, Charles, and Philipp Erfurth, “Demography and Economics: Look Past the Past.” VoxEU, 4 Nov. 2014.
• Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Princeton UP, 2016.
• Hansen, Alvin. “Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth.” The American Economic Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 1939, pp. 1–15.
• Herrmann, Michael. “Population Aging and Economic Development: Anxieties and Policy Responses.” Population Ageing, vol. 5, 2012, pp. 23–46.
• Hicks, John R. “Mr Keynes’s Theory of Employment.” Economic Journal, vol. XLVI, no. 182, 1936, pp. 238–253.
• ———. Value and Capital: An Inquiry into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory. Clarendon Press, 1939.
• Kalecki, Michael. “The Political Aspects of Full Employment.” The Political Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4, 1943, pp. 322–330.
• Katz, Richard. “Economic Anorexia: Japan’s Real Demand Problem.” Challenge, vol. 42, no. 2, 1999, pp. 77–101.
• Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. London: Macmillan, 1919.
• ———. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan, 1936.
• ———. “Is Britain Overpopulated?” The New Republic, 31 Oct. 1923, p. 247.
• ———. “Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population.” Eugenics Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 1937, pp. 13–17.
• Kingston, Jeff. Contemporary Japan: History, Politics, and Social Change since the 1980s. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
• Koo, Richard C. The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession. Wiley & Sons, 2009.
• ———. The Escape from Balance Sheet Recession and the QE Trap: A Hazardous Road for the World Economy. Wiley & Sons, 2014.
• Livingston, James. “Their Great Depression and Ours.” Challenge, vol. 52, no. 3, 2009, pp. 34–51.
• Lunsing, Wim. “‘Parasite’ and ‘Non-parasite’ Singles: Japanese Journalists and Scholars Taking Positions.” Social Science Japan Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2003, pp. 261–265.
• Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population, J. Johnson, 1798.
• ———. Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Application. 2nd ed., William Pickering, 1836.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1976.
• ———. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume III. Translated by David Fernbach, Penguin, 1991.
• ———. “The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850.” Surveys from Exile, edited by David Fernbach, Verso, 2010, pp. 35–142.
• McClanahan, Annie. “The Culture of Secular Stagnation.” 2016. Unpublished manuscript. Meadows, Donella H., et al. Limits to Growth: Report to the Club of Rome. Universe Books, 1972.
• Mian, Atif, and Amir Sufi. “Secular Stagnation and Wealth Inequality.” House of Debt, 23 Mar. 2014.
• ———. “Why the Income Distribution Matters for Macroeconomics.” House of Debt, 27 Mar. 2014.
• Motani, Kosuke. The True Face of Deflation (Defure no shōtai keizai wa ‘jinkō no nami’ de ugoku). Kadokawa Shinsho, 2010.
• Palley, Thomas. “Inequality, the Financial Crisis and Stagnation: Competing Stories and Why They Matter.” Real-World Economics Review, vol. 74, 2016, pp. 1–10.
• Peterson, William. “John Maynard Keynes’s Theories of Population and the Concept of ‘Optimum’.” Population Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 1955, pp. 228–246.
• Rajan, Raghuram G. Faultlines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Princeton UP, 2010.
• Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933–1993. U of North Carolina P, 1997.
• Shirakawa, Masaaki. “Demographic Changes and Macroeconomic Performance – Japanese Experiences.” BOJ-IMES Conference, 30 May 2012, Bank of Japan, Tokyo. Stockhammer, Engelbert. “Rising Inequality as a Cause of the Present Crisis.” Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 39, no. 3, 2015, pp. 935–958.
• Summers, Lawrence H. “Demand-Side Secular Stagnation.” American Economic Review, vol. 105, no. 5, 2015, pp. 60–65.
• ———. “Economic Forum: Policy Responses to Crisis.” 14th Annual IMF Research Conference in Honor of Stanley Fischer: Crises Yesterday and Today, 8 Nov. 2013, IMF Headquarters, Washington, DC. Teulings, Coen, and Richard Baldwin, editors. Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes, and Cures. Center for Economic Policy Research, 2014.
• Teulings, Coen, and Jason Lu. “Secular Stagnation, Bubbles and the Legacy of the Contraceptive Pill.” Institute for New Economic Thinking, 28 Oct. 2016.
• Toye, John. Keynes on Population. Oxford UP, 2000.
• Warnock, Eleanor. “Demographics Needn’t Mean Deflation, Argues Former BoJ Official.” Wall Street Journal, 20 Dec. 2014.
• Yamada, Masahiro. The Era of Parasite Singles (Parasaito Shinguru No Jidai). Chikuma Shobo, 1999.
• ———. “Parasite Singles Feed on Family System.” Japan Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1, 2001, pp. 10–16.
• ———. “Why Isn’t This Called a Low-Birthrate Recession? (Kore o shôshika fukyô to naze iwanu).” Shokun! vol. 30, Aug., 1998, pp. 60–69.
• Zielenziger, Michael. Shutting out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation. Doubleday, 2006.

Amanda Armstrong (bio)
University of Michigan

Abstract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Genealogy of Looting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Colony to Metropole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

3. See also Our Correspondent.

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

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

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

See also The Father of a Soldier.

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

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

8. An interesting exception, from 1861:

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

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

10. Cf. Lindqvist.

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

12. On railway imperialism, see Davis et al.

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

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

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

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

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

18. Cf. “China,” 26 Feb. 1858.

19. See also “Upper Burmah”; Hallett.

Works Cited

• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed., Verso, 2006.
• ———. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. Verso, 2006.
• Arnold, David. “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India, 1918.” Past & Present, vol. 84, no. 1, Aug. 1979, pp. 111–145.
• Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge UP, 2009.
• “The British Army in India.” Times [London], 31 May 1858, p. 6. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• “Burmah.” Times [London], 8 Jan. 1886, p. 5. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• Cape, Thomas. “Lieutenants Thackwell and Cape.” Times [London], 17 May 1858, p. 10. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• Cayford, Joanne. “In Search of ‘John Chinaman’: Press Representations of the Chinese in Cardiff, 1906–1911.” Llafur: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, vol. 5, no. 4, 1991, pp. 37–50.
• “Central America.” Times [London], 6 Apr. 1885, p. 3. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• “Central America, Although a Considerable Region.” Times [London], 7 Apr. 1885, p. 7. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• “Central Criminal Court, April 10.” Times [London], 12 Apr. 1886, p. 7. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• “China.” Times [London], 26 Feb. 1858, pp. 9+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 7 Dec. 2015.
• “China.” Times [London], 30 Mar. 1858, p. 6. Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. Verso, 2016.
• D, et al. “The Summer Palace at Pekin.” Times [London], 11 Mar. 1874, p. 12. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 15 Dec. 2015.
• Das, Dilip K., and Arvind Verma. “The Armed Police in the British Colonial Tradition: The Indian Perspective.” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, vol. 21, no. 2, 1998, pp. 354–367.
• Davis, Angela. “Race, Gender, and Prison History: From the Convict Lease System to the Supermax Prison.” Prison Masculinities, edited by Donald Sabo et al., Temple UP, 2001, pp. 35–45.
• Davis, Clarence, et al., editors. Railway Imperialism. Praeger, 1991.
• Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, 2000.
• Delgado, Jennifer. “8 Accused in Theft Ring That Took $2.8 Million in Cargo, Cars.” Chicago Tribune, 24 Mar. 2014.
• Dillon, Stephen. “Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery.” Radical History Review, vol. 2012, no. 112, Winter 2012, pp. 113–125.
• FB. “The Cyclone at Masulipatam.” Times [London], 12 Dec. 1864, p. 5. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• The Father of a Soldier. “To the Editor of the Times.” Times [London], 18 Mar. 1858, p. 10. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 7 Dec. 2015.
• Foley, George. “The Summer Palace at Pekin.” Times [London], 14 Mar. 1874, p. 12. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 15 Dec. 2015.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. U of California P, 2007.
• Goswami, Manu. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. U of Chicago P, 2004.
• Greenberg, L.J. “The Jews in Wales.” Times [London], 5 Sept. 1911, p. 8. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 14 Dec. 2015.
• Guha, Ramachandra, and Madhav Gadgil. “State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India,” Past & Present, vol. 123, no. 1, May 1989, pp. 141–177.
• Hallett, Holt S. “Blundering in Burmah.” Times [London], 6 Oct. 1886, pp. 3+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
• ———. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford UP, 1997.
• Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. Harvard UP, 2016.
• “Holborn.” The Times [London], 28 Dec. 1874, p. 4. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• “House of Commons.” Times [London], 23 Aug. 1911: 4+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed. 14 Dec. 2015.
• “House of Commons, Friday, Feb. 26.” Times [London], 27 Feb. 1886, pp. 8+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• “House of Commons, Friday, May 27.” Times [London], 28 May 1870, pp. 6+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• “House of Lords, Thursday, August 3.” Times [London], 4 Aug. 1882, p. 6. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• Hyslop, Jonathan. “The World Voyage of James Keir Hardie: Indian Nationalism, Zulu Insurgency and the British Labour Diaspora, 1907–1908.” Journal of Global History, vol. 1, no. 3, Nov. 2006, pp. 343–362.
• “India.” Times [London], 21 Apr. 1845, pp. 5+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 7 Dec. 2015.
• “India.” Times [London], 23 Nov. 1891, p. 5. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• “The Insurrection at Panama.” Times [London], 27 Apr. 1885, p. 6. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• “Latest Intelligence.” Times [London], 16 Nov. 1896, pp. 5+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 14 Dec. 2015.
• Lindqvist, Sven. A History of Bombing. Translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, The New Press, 2003.
• “London, Monday, January 28, 1861.” Times [London], 28 Jan. 1861, p. 6. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015.
• “Luggage Robberies on Italian Railways.” Times [London], 10 Apr. 1880, p. 14. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 9 Dec. 2015.
• Mitchell, Katharyne. “Pre-Black Futures.” Antipode, vol. 41, no. s1, Jan. 2010, pp. 239–261.
• “The Monster Meeting, Organized Yesterday in.” Times [London], 22 Feb. 1886, p. 9. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. U of Texas P, 2017.
• “The Nile Expedition.” Times [London], 16 Oct. 1884, p. 3. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• One Who Was There. “The Summer Palace at Pekin.” Times [London], 13 Mar. 1874, p. 6. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 15 Dec. 2015.
• Our Correspondent. “India.” Times [London], 14 Jan. 1892, p. 5. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 13 Dec. 2015.
• Our Correspondents. “(By Eastern Company’s Cable).” Times [London], 26 Aug. 1882, p. 5. The Times Digital Archive. 10 Dec. 2015
• ———. “The Destruction of Alexandria.” Times [London], 15 July 1882, p. 7. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 9 Dec. 2015.
• ———. “Egypt.” Times [London] , 24 Aug. 1882, p. 3. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• ———. “Egypt.” Times [London] , 17 July 1882, pp. 5+. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 9 Dec. 2015.
• ———. “Egypt.” Times [London] , 22 Sept. 1882, p, 3. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• “The Police and the Mob.” Times [London] , 19 Oct. 1887, p. 7. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• Premansukumar, Bandyopadhyay. Indian Famine and Agrarian Problems. Star Publications, 1987.
• Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable.” AHR, vol. 121, no. 2, Apr. 2016, pp. 377–402.
• Quousque Tandem? “Country Fairs.” Times [London], 5 Feb. 1879, p. 10. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 9 Dec. 2015.
• RL. “Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death.” Mute Magazine, 5 June 2013.
• “The Rebels and the Imperialists in China.” Times [London], 29 Sept. 1863, p. 10. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 8 Dec. 2015.
• “Renewed Riots in South Wales.” Times [London], 23 Aug. 1911, p. 6. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 14 Dec. 2015.
• “The Revolt in Cuba.” Times [London], 18 May 1895, p. 9. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 14 Dec. 2015.
• Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester UP, 1995.
• “The Social Democrats in Hyde-Park.” Times [London], 22 Feb. 1886, p. 7. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• Steedman, Carolyn. Policing the Victorian Community: The Formation of English Provincial Police Forces, 1856–1880. Routledge, 1984.
• “There is Serious Work before the New Home.” Times [London], 9 Feb. 1886, p. 9. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• “The Unemployed in London.” Times [London], 9 Feb. 1886, p. 6. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 10 Dec. 2015.
• “Upper Burmah.” Times [London], 12 Feb. 1886, p. 8. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• A Well-Wisher to Order and Liberty and West-End. “The Police and The Mob.” Times [London], 27 Oct. 1887, p. 13. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• “We Print in Full This Morning the Report of the.” Times [London], 24 Feb. 1886, p. 9. The Times Digital Archive. Accessed 11 Dec. 2015.
• Wilderson, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke UP, 2010.