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[A]t the beginning of an AIDS literacy workshop in Echo Park, Los Angeles, we announced that we would perform Cage’s composition [4’33”]—”The most important piece of American 20^th Century music”—proceeding to sit in restrained stillness while the workshop participants, working class Latino men living with HIV and AIDS, looked on in bemusement.
 

— Ultra-red, “Ultra-red: Organizing the Silence”

Audience member to Cage: “Silence equals death.”
 
Cage: “Everything you open yourself to is your silence.”
 

— qtd. in Jones 665

 
In a large gallery space sits a long table dressed with a white tablecloth, around which several people are seated in front of microphones. Hovering near the end of the table is a reproduction of one of Rauschenberg’s famous White Paintings, completing a stripped-down, somewhat clinical interior. After a small audience settles into place, one of the seated individuals speaks into a microphone, announcing, “Four Thirty-three as composed by John Cage.”
 
“Time,” the announcer says, following four and a half minutes of silence.
 
The announcer calmly proceeds, speaking to the others seated at the table. “Good evening. What did you hear?”
 
“Silence,” a woman responds.
 
At this point one may wonder why Cage’s composition, a work in which no intentional sounds are to be made, is followed by a direct interrogation of its audience members. And while it is typically performed in a concert hall, Cage’s composition is here presented in the absence of the traditional piano or musicians in any ordinary sense.
 
“Good evening.”
 
The questioning proceeds.
 
“When was the last time you were in this space to talk about AIDS?”
 
Emerging from a larger body of work interrogating the relationship between the aesthetic and the political, art/activist collective Ultra-red² create unique “performances” of John Cage’s well-known silent piece 4’33” (1952). Ultra-red’s work SILENT|LISTEN (2005-6) consists of a series of events in which statements made about the AIDS epidemic—”where it has been, where it is now, and where it is going” (“SILENT|LISTEN”)—are recorded following a performance of Cage’s composition. A set of these statements, referred to by the collective as “the minutes,” is then played back as part of a subsequent event. Accumulated from eight locations over the course of two years, these statements, made by health care professionals, community organizers, activists, and other individuals, form a network linking each successive site through the collective staging of listening and vocality.
 
SILENT|LISTEN can be seen to parallel the artistic strategies of appropriation central to the history of AIDS activism. Yet while utilizing the strategies of contextual specificity and tactics of dissemination found in those practices, SILENT|LISTEN distinctly draws upon specific concerns regarding the historical status of Cage’s indeterminate composition. Crystallized in his 1952 work 4’33”, was Cage’s silence affirmative, indifferent, or a political strategy of negation employed during the homophobic oppression of McCarthyism and the Cold War era (Katz)? By referring to the militantly anti-homophobic slogan of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), “SILENCE = DEATH,” Ultra-red point to the possibility of a consonant historical lens through which Cage’s piece can be read, while using this lens to frame their contemporary intervention into the AIDS crisis. Interpreting Ultra-red’s intervention through the focal points of AIDS activism and related artistic practices, this essay attempts to tether the appropriation art strategy introduced by SILENT|LISTEN to the historical and music-specific use of Cagean silence. Ultimately, Cagean silence becomes refigured as a symbolic marker of homophobia in concert with the slogans of ACT UP and in dialogue with the imagery of Gran Fury. SILENT|LISTEN turns on the formal musical problem of Werktreue—the issue of “faithfulness” or adherence to an original score—while mutually implicating musicological and art historical frames of analysis. Necessitating this kind of cross-disciplinary engagement between music and visual culture, my analysis of Ultra-red’s intervention challenges recent theoretical attempts to isolate “sound” (as is often found in sound art discourse) from the historical and formal specificity of musical practice.
 
Let us return to the opening description. The speaker continues, “It is Wednesday, August 9th, 2006. The record for the Art Gallery of Ontario is now open. Will the first speaker please approach the table and enter her statement into the record? Please note the time, your name, and any affiliation you wish to declare.”
 
A woman approaches the table and, in a collected and somewhat somber tone, speaks into the microphone:
 

The time is 7:34. My name is Zoe Dodd. I am a harm reduction outreach worker and Hepatitis C support worker at Street Health Nursing Foundation…. I mainly work with the homeless drug-using population. In May of 2006, Street Health received a call from a client. He’s lived on the streets for fifteen years…. He is an active drug user. He has AIDS, and he is co-infected with Hepatitis C.

The woman proceeds to describe an incident involving her client: arriving at the client’s apartment to discover that he had lost over 40 pounds in less than one week, she was unable to convince the subject to seek medical attention. “He would not go,” she insists, “because he [was] like many people, especially drug users … discriminated within our healthcare system …” She continues to report that as a Hepatitis C worker, her position has not received funding in Canada for over four months. Finally, she concludes that after a lengthy struggle the client received the medical attention he needed and lived.

 
The above description recounts a version of Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2006. The collective presented similar versions throughout 2005-6 at seven major North American art institutions. Founded in Los Angeles in 1994 by AIDS activists Dont Rhine and Marco Larsen, Ultra-red now incorporate members from across North America and Europe; the collective has consistently straddled the often conflictual worlds of art, music, and activism by staging direct political interventions, creating recordings and art objects, and producing performance installations such as SILENT|LISTEN—as well as their recent What is the Sound of Freedom?, presented as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial—which often involve participatory and dialogical components.
 

Authentic Appropriation

 
On the surface, SILENT|LISTEN may be said to conform to the logic of appropriation art. With theoretical roots in the writings of Benjamin, Foucault, and Barthes, and particularly in the latter’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” appropriation art’s emergence is usually traced from the New York art scene of the late 1970s and 1980s through to contemporary practice. Douglas Crimp’s influential 1977 Pictures exhibition, which foregrounds “processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging” against essentializing notions of medium (“Pictures” 87), is a touchstone. Often cited as a precursor to appropriation art practices, Guy Debord, in his 1956 essay, “Directions for the Use of Détournement,” defines two types of détournement. Through the application of “corrections,” or alterations introduced in original materials (Debord and Wolman 35), both methods rely on a new context for the generation of meaning. A “minor détournement,” according to Debord, “draws all its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed,” while a “deceptive détournement” relies upon the significance of the element itself (35). As much as there may be something added, or “corrected,” there is also that which is drawn out in Debord’s “deceptive” mode. When an object is cast retroactively into a context alien to its origin, a new valence is produced. “Plagiarism implies progress,” begins literary theorist Paul Mann’s own double plagiarism of Guy Debord and Isidore Ducasse, “which is also progress toward a death already immanent in every repetition” (Masocriticism 187). Rehearsing the birth of the reader or repeating a critic’s (unoriginal) claim about the artist’s unoriginality need not take center stage. Following the unidirectionality of death, appropriation can figure as a multiplication of authors—a collectivity. The death of the author is the prenatal condition for the multiple. Indeed, as Crimp notes in his own work with AIDS activism, collective production emerges as authorship undergoes assault (Melancholia 161-2).
 
Appropriation frames; it reconstitutes and refigures historical substance. Permeating the landscape of artistic production, appropriation’s historical reach has indeed been vast: “not just one strategy amongst many,” David Evans contends that appropriation is “the very ‘language’ in which the postmodern debate [of the 1980s and 90s] was conducted” (14). And yet while it is generally conceived as an expansive genre, appropriation is not without its limits, however seemingly imposed. Evans, for example, excludes “re-enactment” from the purview of appropriation, refusing to admit the work of Jeremy Deller or the re-performances of Marina Abramović due to these artists’ alleged emphases on “unauthorized possession” (16). While also sharing the characteristics of re-performance, and without precluding the category of appropriation as such, the distinctly musical structure engaged by Ultra-red’s appropriation of Cage’s 4’33”—one of writing/composing, performing, listening—indeed mandates an extended analytical frame.
 
Aligned with an appropriation conceived along collectivist lines, SILENT|LISTEN engages the additional set of concerns inherent to music and the performer’s fidelity to the score. Debates around the performer’s adherence to the set of instructions put forth by the composer have centered on the question of “historical authenticity,” or so-called Werktreue, referenced above.³ The “Werktreue ideal” is said to have emerged, according to philosopher Lydia Goehr, in the music and performance practices of the early nineteenth century, following the solidification of the “work-concept” toward the end of the 1700s, an idea governing the relationship between composition and performance (among other things) which gives shape to a unified musical “work” (115). Coterminous with the arrival of the autonomous musical work (and with the advent of copyright laws), this conception of authorship effectively forbade the promiscuous use of scores that had proliferated in Renaissance practice. A new apparent “duty” bound the allegiance of performers to works and their composers (231). If, in Goehr’s account, the music of modernity inherits a work-concept structure from Romanticism, then it has also remained committed to the Werktreue ideal.
 
This structure has recently found its most significant challenges in the crisis initiated by Cage’s indeterminacy, defined as the acknowledgment of the inherent unpredictability of performance, or, more significantly, as the extension of the contingency of a performer’s score interpretation. The latter category is referred to as indeterminacy with respect to a composition’s performance (Cage, Silence 35-40). Opening onto interpretation in the expanded sense, this form of indeterminacy more significantly threatens the established relationship between performer and composer. Performing a score becomes an act of interpretation, in the literary sense. As in Barthes, primacy is given to the reader. Consider the consequences then of a “birth of the performer” in contemporary music/art practices: rather than a mandate from the composer, the score may instead provide something to be inhabited, to be activated, to be used.
 
Interestingly, Goehr cites pieces like Cage’s 4’33” as offering ambivalent challenges to the work-concept: “paradoxically situated in a practice that is regulated by the very concept they want to challenge” (260), she questions whether musicians’ interventions like Cage’s offer any meaningful effects on what she calls the “force” of the work-concept (262). While she does list “compliant performance” as one supposed “target” of what Cage “seems to want to challenge” (262), the ramifications of the rupture introduced by Cage’s indeterminacy have yet to be fully charted, especially from the perspective of the less-than-allegiant performer. While discussions of Werktreue have indeed occupied musicologists and critics for decades, little has been said about the specific ways in which ruptures or revolts against the historically subservient structure of the musical work may apply to contemporary artistic practice. With some notable exceptions (see, for example, artist/musician Adam Overton’s manifesto “Ripe for Embarrassment” (2013)),⁴ the possibility of a disruptive use of musical scores is under-theorized if not under-practiced. In Ultra-red’s practice, the Werktreue problematic is furthered through an application of the logic of appropriation or détournement. Ultra-red engage the problematic of Werktreue through their appropriation of artistic and activist practices associated with AIDS. Their collective intervention becomes a question of exercising a certain kind of agency, rather than purely an act of subversion.
 

“Silence Equals Death”

 
Near the end of his life, Cage was accosted at a public symposium by an attendee who, repeating ACT UP’s well-known slogan, exclaimed, “silence equals death” (qtd. in Jones 665). To the agitator’s opportune détournement of Cage’s own program of silence by the silence of AIDS activism, the composer responded, “in Zen life equals death,” and added, “Everything you open yourself to is your silence” (qtd. in Jones 665). While for Cage silence does not equal death, death seems to haunt his reflections on silence. “Until I die there will be sounds,” Cage proclaims, following his telling of the oft-repeated Harvard anechoic chamber anecdote, “[a]nd they will continue following my death” (Silence 8). For Cage, silence is impossible outside of “the silence of death” (Cesare-Bartnicki 133).⁵
 
While silence has been framed as both a modernist strategy of erasure and the “silencing” of social import, or, alternately, valued for its acoustic properties or conceptual implications, a generation of scholars (Caroline Jones, Philip Gentry, Jonathan Katz) rigorously advocates a historically specific consideration of Cage’s project intimately tied to the subject position of a gay male artist responding to the heterosexist culture of the Cold War era. For Caroline Jones, silence plays the role of a Sedgwickean “closet-in-view” for Cage, a kind of surface-level bodily absence that serves as a “muting”—indeed a critique—of the abstract expressionist ego (651-2). In his analysis of the cultural politics of 4’33”, Gentry explores three possible contexts for situating Cage’s sexuality: the direct political activism and homosexual pride mobilized by the 1950s homophile movement and the Mattachine Society; the post-Stonewall identity politics implicated in a conception of the “closeting” of (presumed-to-be-stable) sexual identities; and the “queer commuter” phenomenon elaborated by Henry Abelove in which gay and lesbian artists often chose to self-exile to more tolerant locations as a strategy of resistance. Gentry argues beyond these narratives, however, in privileging a model of “anti-identitarian identification” in which “Cage’s subject position was often more subtly articulated than a simple ‘closeted’ model of sexuality would give us” (36). Acknowledging the influence of Zen while arguing for the primacy of Cagean silence as a queer strategy of resistance during the Cold War, Katz posits silence as part the development of a postmodern non-authorial voice that prefigures the “death of the author” (235). Cage would of course go on to become a master appropriationist, with his recombinant texts free-mixing McLuhan, Duchamp, Thoreau and others (Empty Words 3-20). Coterminous with his move toward Zen, however, Cage’s turn to chance and silence, as Katz intimates, was part of a complex set of responses to the composer’s failed marriage and frustrations with psychoanalysis as his relationship with Merce Cunningham began to take shape.
 
Cage spoke openly about his relationships with men and women alike, though according to Katz, the composer never fully came out as gay or bisexual (231). In an interview with Thomas Hines shortly before the composer’s death, Cage describes his earliest sexual experiences with Don Sample, a young American he met in Europe as a teenager. This relationship, which eventually became “promiscuous” according to Cage, overlapped with his affair with Pauline Schindler and continued on through his marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff. That marriage dissolved after a ménage à trois with Cunningham during which Cage realized that he was “more attracted” to Cunningham (Hines 99n60). Though one of Cage’s close friends was Harry Hay, the renowned gay rights activist, Cage insisted on silence when it came to representations of homosexuality. Not only were Cage’s sexuality and related political stances not generally intended expressions of his artwork, but, as I will demonstrate, the composer was openly hostile to performances of his works which foregrounded the abject or the sexual.
 
As mentioned earlier, along with silence, a crucial development for Cage was the practice of indeterminacy. Most clearly related to silence is the type of indeterminacy in which a composition is “indeterminate with respect to its performance” (Cage, Silence 35-40). Once fully exploded, the practice of indeterminacy permitted vast differences in the interpretations of Cage’s works. It was clear that for Cage—even in the cases of his “open-ended” compositions—certain interpretations of his work were deemed acceptable while others were not.
 
As though realizing the defiant reproach of Cage’s activist-cum-heckler, Ultra-red attempt to short-circuit Cagean silence with the politicized voices of AIDS activism. Along with this reframing of Cage’s composition, Ultra-red refer to the durational frame of the concert situation to contextualize their version of Cagean indeterminacy. Departing from the agitprop imagery of groups like Gran Fury, while still in dialogue with the slogans of ACT UP, Ultra-red explain that they sought to explore temporal and performative forms that facilitate social processes. In their 2005 essay subtitled “The AIDS Uncanny,” Ultra-red describe their intention to create “work that suspends resolution and employs duration to construct spaces in which our loss and grief can acquire a critical language directed against dehumanization” (“Time for the Dead” 91). “In the current proto-fascist historical moment,” they contend elsewhere, “SILENT|LISTEN invokes affective responses other than rage as constitutive of collective action” (“ps/o8publicmuseum”).
 
The collective’s use of Cage’s silent composition as an immanent temporal container is crossed with the iconicity of silence, a crucial concept in the fight against AIDS. Silence in this context represents the undermining of valuable information that saves lives, the negligence and unwillingness of governments in responding to the epidemic on a public and global level, and an index of the violent effects of stigmatization exacerbated by the constant threat of criminalization faced by people living with AIDS. Ultra-red’s project contextualizes 4’33” in light of the AIDS epidemic, while situating AIDS activism—metonymically invoked through reference to ACT UP’s slogan SILENCE = DEATH—within the frame of Cage’s silent piece.
 
SILENT|LISTEN should also be read in relation to the ambivalent attitudes Cage himself held regarding performances of his indeterminate, “open-ended” compositions—not simply to answer the question as to whether Cage would have approved of SILENT|LISTEN as a realization of 4’33”, but, rather, in the interest of drawing out a politics of musical interpretation applicable to Cage and his broader project of indeterminacy. This task must not only chart the performative boundaries specific to Cage’s composition, but also explore the historical and political implications of his artwork. Was Cage’s silence emblematic of his broader turn to an “Aesthetics of Indifference” during the 1950s, or, conversely, did Cage utilize a “politics of negation” by employing silence as a “historically specific [mode of] queer resistance” during the homophobic oppression of McCarthyism and the Cold War era (Katz 241)? An attempt to draw out this kind of political substance arguably already present in Cage’s piece turns on the question of Werktreue, or “historical authenticity,” in music performance. Clearly departing from conventional realizations of Cage’s composition, SILENT|LISTEN invites a consideration of the limits of performances of Cage’s works. SILENT|LISTEN, while proffering a distinctive refiguring of 4’33”, can perhaps nevertheless be said to include a genuine realization of Cage’s composition. While engaging the problem of “historical authenticity” and its relation to Cagean indeterminacy, however, it is also important to situate SILENT|LISTEN within the context of the rich and varied lineage of visual art strategies related to AIDS activism.
 
Before continuing a discussion of the musical specificity of Ultra-red’s use of Cage’s 4’33”, it is necessary to acknowledge the longstanding and significant connections between AIDS activism and strategies of artistic appropriation. One notable example is General Idea’s series Imagevirus, which, beginning in 1987, consisted of a series of widely disseminated images and objects, each containing an often differently colored version of Robert Indiana’s iconic L-O-V-E painting respelled as A-I-D-S. According to one commentator, the intended target of General Idea’s appropriation was not originality or authorship; rather, their goal was to mimic the behavior of the HIV virus itself—its transformations, travels, and proliferations (Nicholson 53). While not unequivocally consonant with the AIDS activism of the 1980s,⁶ Imagevirus shares in the emphasis on language and the contextual specificity of the strategies of ACT UP and Gran Fury. Infecting “large portions of the signifying field,” Imagevirus, Gregg Bordowitz contends, “connects gallery to museum to street to public transportation” (17).
 
The caustic wit and culturally parasitic attitude emblematized in Imagevirus are echoed in many of the various artistic practices encountered throughout the history of AIDS activism. In their detailed description of the early graphics of ACT UP, Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston explain that “[w]hat counts in activist art is its propaganda effect; stealing the procedures of other artists is part of the plan—if it works, we use it” (15). Reiterating similar statements made by theorists of postmodernism and the avant-garde,⁷ Crimp argues that, especially in the context of the AIDS activist movement, “[a]ssaults on authorship have led to anonymous and collective production” (Melancholia 160-1). Along with Rolston, Crimp further characterizes an appropriation art “in which the artist forgoes the claim to original creation by appropriating already-existing images and objects,” by showing “that the ‘unique individual’ is a kind of fiction” and that the self is constructed through a series of “preexisting images, discourses, and events” (18).
 
ACT UP’s iconic SILENCE = DEATH logo, with its white Gill sans-serif font set against a black background underneath a hot pink upward-pointing equilateral triangle, contains perhaps the most well-known instance of appropriation within AIDS activism.⁸ Rather than stealing from another artist, however, the emblem references the badges used in Nazi concentration camps to mark gay men who were exterminated by the thousands. Adopted by the gay and lesbian movement in the 1960s, as Ultra-red’s Robert Sember explains, the pink triangle used by ACT UP creates continuity between historical struggles against homophobia and contemporary mobilizations against AIDS (Sember and Gere 967). A geometric inversion of the downward-pointing triangle badges used in the concentration camps, the pink triangle used in the SILENCE = DEATH design also points to rampant governmental neglect and failure in responding effectively to the epidemic as an act of genocide (Sember and Gere 967). The slogan also evokes mathematical equivalence, conjuring the numbers of AIDS statistics—death as numerical data. Bringing together the terms of silence and death separated by a mediating equals sign, the synchronic symmetry of SILENCE = DEATH—more emphatic and immediate than pure causality; not simply resulting in death, silence equals death—is counterposed by the diachronic geometry of the pink triangular emblem, which points back to a history of struggle while signaling a future in which AIDS is no longer.
 
Inspired by a SILENCE = DEATH poster hung on lower Broadway, New Museum curator Bill Olander, who had AIDS and was also a member of ACT UP, invited the group to create an installation for the New Museum’s window space in 1987. The result was the highly influential Let the Record Show…, an artistic intervention that sought militantly to counteract public misconceptions around AIDS and to address the enormous failures of the US government to respond adequately to the epidemic. Critical of the kinds of “elegiac expressions that appeared to dominate the art world’s response to the AIDS crisis” (“AIDS” 15), Crimp considers Let the Record Show… a participatory act in the struggle against AIDS that significantly departs from the “traditional idealist conception of art, which entirely divorces art from engagement in lived social life” (Melancholia 31). Adopting the trope of a trial or hearing, the work consists of a series of life-sized cardboard cutouts of public figures, each posed behind a corresponding printed “testament”: US Senator Jesse Helms (“The logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected“); televangelist Jerry Falwell (“AIDS is God’s judgment of a society that does not live by His rules“); and Ronald Reagan (whose testament was left blank, referring to his six-year refusal to speak about the epidemic while president); among three others. Each figure is placed directly in front of a large photomural of the Nuremburg trials, over which a scrolling LED text beginning with “Let the record show…” rebuts each of the figures’ statements (ACT UP).⁹ All of this staged under a large neon sign displaying the original SILENCE = DEATH design.
 
Following their Let the Record Show… installation at the New Museum, members from The Silence = Death Project would go on to join Gran Fury, the group that would serve as “ACT UP’s unofficial propaganda ministry and guerrilla graphic designers,” in the words of Crimp and Rolston (16). In their large-scale photomural ad campaign project, Kissing Doesn’t Kill (1989), Gran Fury pictures three couples kissing across a horizontal frame. Each couple formed a different combination of genders and races, and over their images a text states: “KISSING DOESN’T KILL: GREED AND INDIFFERENCE DO.” Interestingly, in a more specific indictment, the original rejoinder text reads, “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference Make AIDS a Political Crisis.”¹⁰ With their vibrant and impressively polished aesthetic, Gran Fury “simulated the glossy look and pithy language of mass-market advertising to seduce the public into dealing with issues of AIDS transmission, research, funding, and government response, issues that might otherwise be avoided or rejected out of hand” (Meyer 236). As with other artistic interventions centered on the AIDS epidemic, including Ultra-red’s work, context becomes all-important: “When affixed to the side of a city bus, Kissing Doesn’t Kill functions as a mobile advertisement, traveling through neighborhoods of the city rather than remaining within the bounds of any one community or subculture” (Meyer 236). Activist art, highly circumstantial and contingent as it is, implicates, as Crimp argues, not only the “nature of cultural production,” but also the site—the context—of cultural production and dissemination (Melancholia 38).
 
Noting the resemblance of Gran Fury’s work to United Colors of Benetton advertisements—which the brand itself appropriated from artists of the time, and which were also placed on the sides of buses—Chantal Mouffe describes Kissing Doesn’t Kill as an instance of “re-détournement” (“Democratic Politics”). Indeed, there are significant resonances between Gran Fury interventions like Kissing Doesn’t Kill or Let the Record Show… and the work of Debord. Summarizing the Situationists’ theory of détournement, Debord explains that, rather than being concerned with the creation of the new, “critical art can be produced as of now using the existing means of cultural expression” (164). “Critical in its content,” he continues, “such art must also be critical of itself in its very form” (164). According to Debord, there were no Situationist works of art, “only Situationist uses of works of art” (Bishop 83).
 
While abandoning the avant-garde project of radical critique, Mouffe’s conception of “critical art” may be seen as an extension of Debord’s perspective. Asserting that traditional modes of artistic critique have been recuperated by neoliberalism and incorporated into the logic of post-Fordist networked production, Mouffe asks whether, in the wake of the avant-garde, current art practices have the ability to play a critical role in a contemporary society marked by the blurred difference between art and advertising, and by the appropriation of formerly countercultural strategies by the dominant regulatory modes of capitalism. “Today artists cannot pretend any more to constitute an avant-garde offering a radical critique,” she claims, “but this is not a reason to proclaim that their political role has ended.” Rather, Mouffe asserts, “[t]hey still can play an important role in the hegemonic struggle by subverting the dominant hegemony and by contributing to the construction of new subjectivities” (“Artistic Activism” 5). Mouffe’s own term “critical art” refers to artistic practices that actively contribute to “questioning the dominant hegemony” (“Artistic Activism” 4). Citing it as supplemental to her broader “agonistic approach” to the political, Mouffe writes: “critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” (“Artistic Activism” 4-5). She stresses, however, that “the aim of critical artistic practices should not consist in dissipating supposedly false consciousness in order to reveal the true reality; for this would be completely at odds with the anti-essentialist premises of the theory of hegemony, which rejects the very idea of true consciousness…and asserts that identities are always results of processes of identification” (“Beyond Cosmopolitanism”).
 
What is shared by the perspectives of Debord and Mouffe, and by the appropriation art strategies of AIDS activism, is the notion of immanent critique. Instead of operating at a distance from, outside, or above the target of their critiques, the strategies referenced above are wholly embedded within a social context and work through engaged practices of reconfiguring, reactivating, and politicizing existing cultural elements. Not simply purporting to “unveil” an ideologically inflected premise, Gran Fury’s critical art practice renders actual social reconfigurations. Their interventions break up and reorganize stultified hegemonic structures, working within the contextual specificity of site and through the generality—and “viral” nature—of language and images.
 

Appropriating Indeterminacy

 
Ultra-red extend the terrain of artistic intervention around AIDS—centered primarily around images, language, and direct political interventions—to include the domain of music (and its negation, silence) through their appropriative use of Cage’s 4’33”. They posit an engaged musical practice not unlike the visual art practices elaborated by Crimp, such as Gran Fury. Important, however, are the ways in which Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN works as both a continuation of and a departure from the appropriation art of AIDS activism. Unlike the relation between, for example, Robert Indiana’s LOVE and General Idea’s Imagevirus, in Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN Cage’s 4’33” can be said—to an extent—to retain its identity as such.
 
What does it mean, then, to consider SILENT|LISTEN as an “authentic” realization of 4’33” when it so drastically departs from David Tudor`s performance of the work in Woodstock, New York in 1952? Roger Hallas contends that SILENT|LISTEN “paradoxically resists solidification into a permanent archival object,” and that despite Ultra-red’s “systematic use of archival discourse—’testimony’, ‘statements’, ‘the record’, and ‘the minutes,’” SILENT|LISTEN nevertheless employs the “durational process of conceptual art and the ephemeral quality of performance art” (247). Along with Let the Record Show… and the ACT UP Oral History Project, SILENT|LISTEN emphasizes recordkeeping and archiving, but departs from these earlier projects in its continually developing, “open-ended” character—its incorporation of indeterminacy. One might suggest, however, that while Cage’s 4’33” is ostensibly distinct from archival artwork and apparently closer to the “ephemeral quality of performance art,” its score is also rooted in a kind of recordkeeping. Indeed one recalls the meticulous performance note contained in Cage’s 1961 version of the 4’33” score, in which he explains:
 

The title of this work is the total length in minutes and seconds of its performance. At Woodstock, N.Y., August 29, 1952, the title was 4’33” and the three parts were 33″, 2’40”, and 1’20”. It was performed by David Tudor, pianist, who indicated the beginnings of parts by closing, the endings by opening, the keyboard lid. However, the work may be performed by an instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time.
 

(4’33”, Henmar Press, 1962)

 
4’33” insists upon the disparity between the absolute “openness”—a malleability—that characterizes its realizations, and the unshakable precision demanded by its score. Similarly, though more broadly, indeterminacy seems to reside in the contradiction between the command structure necessary for a score to exist—a score demands determinate action, providing it with an identity—and the potential within the score for the complete undermining of certainty, the obliteration of authority (and at times authorship) in favor of chance or the subjective will of the performer. Ultra-red’s framing of Cage’s 4’33” is distinct in that it functions simultaneously as a realization of 4’33”, and as an appropriation similar to the work elaborated above. Through the specificity of the musical score, SILENT|LISTEN figures as an impactful (re-)politicization of 4’33”, a performance of Cage’s piece that reads the work’s history into its interpretation as a focal point. The problem of fidelity to Cage’s score is thus redoubled, not only because of the political implications of Cagean silence, but also because of the contradictory relationship indeterminacy posits between score and performance.
 
Ultra-red may be viewed as a recent addition to a history of performers whose artistic strategies have sought to re-envision the role of the performer. In some cases involving Cage, the use of such strategies has resulted in performances deemed unacceptable by the composer. In his recent work, for example, Benjamin Piekut analyzes the series of performances Charlotte Moorman gave of Cage’s 21’1.499″ for a String Player during the 1960s, which included (in response to the score’s indications for non-string sounds) various references to tampons, orgasms, condoms, and Planned Parenthood, along with her use of the “human cello”: Moorman’s bowing of a kneeling, semi-nude Nam June Paik. Cage, in the end, coldly dismissed Moorman as having “murdered” his composition (Piekut 143). For Piekut, Moorman’s controversial interpretations of Cage turned on the question of subjective agency: Moorman treated the score “as a set of rules to be performed, inhabited, and experienced” (143). Beyond themes of subversion or “[t]ropes of obedience and disobedience,” Piekut insists on the question, “How did Moorman use Cage’s piece?” (172).
 
In 1975, at the June in Buffalo music festival, Julius Eastman and other members of the S.E.M. Ensemble performed an interpretation of Cage’s Song Books (1970) that has remained obscure and thoroughly underappreciated.¹¹ Interjected into a panoply of other sounds and activities, Eastman began his interpretation of the instruction, “In a situation with maximum amplification…perform a disciplined action”—a “paraphrasing” of 0’00” or 4’33” No. 2 (1962), one of the several smaller works comprising Song Books—by introducing himself as “Professor Padu” and delivering an elaborate lecture demonstrating a new “system” of erotic love. Suited, and in a mockingly off-kilter performative style, Eastman directed his sister and then-boyfriend to engage in a series of erotic acts to illustrate his “sideways-and-sensitive” approach to an unsuspecting Buffalo audience. The following day, during one of the festival’s seminars, Cage responded by banging violently on a piano in the room and scolding performers who had more generally, in his view, interpreted his indeterminate instructions as an invitation to do “any goddamned thing” they wanted.¹² He further condemned what he characterized as the “homosexual dimension” of Eastman’s performance. According to Cage, “the question of homosexuality” that he perceived as an emphatic element of Eastman’s performance was at odds with his intended premise of the work, namely that “we connect Satie with Thoreau” (qtd. in Schlegel 31)—two influential figures for Cage. An irony arises here, not only in relation to Cage’s own sexuality (however reluctant he was to disclose), and not only in light of his contestable objection that “neither Satie nor Thoreau had any sexual connection with anyone or anything” (qtd. in Schlegel 31), but also regarding Cage’s project of indeterminacy and its critical challenge to the authority otherwise traditionally invested in the composer. Eastman’s intervention underlines a critical shortcoming of Cagean indeterminacy: its inability to extend beyond the form of the Western musical work. In contending with the Werktreue ideal of the score, Eastman’s transgressive performance of Song Books effectively exhibits the resolute failure of Cage’s broader project of indeterminacy.
 

Performing Silence

 
Pertinent to Ultra-red’s historical re-framing of 4’33” is the question of whether Cage’s silence is to be read as a modernist “end game” strategy in which meaning is erased, or as part of a more subtly elaborated political program. In his analysis of 4’33”, for example, Douglas Kahn notes Cage’s self-purported shift during the 1960s “from musical to social issues” (557). Kahn concludes, however, that for Cage, “there was no corresponding shift to reconceptualize the sociality of sounds” (557). Interestingly, Kahn attempts to question Cage’s ideas “from the vantage point of sound instead of music,” and more generally casts music as a conservative site over which sound should be privileged (556). Along with this fixation on “sound,” there are clear drawbacks to Kahn’s self-conscious overinvestment in Cage’s views on his own work. For two perspectives that do not “[take] Cage at his word” so strictly (Kahn 557), we turn to the noteworthy debate between art historian Moira Roth and queer theorist Jonathan Katz.
 
Grouping together a handful of influential artists from the New York avant-garde scene of the 1950s—including Duchamp, Johns, Rauschenberg, Cunningham, and Cage—Roth locates an “Aesthetic of Indifference” in their work: a tendency toward critical paralysis in the face of the ardent anti-Communist fervor and political oppression of the McCarthy period. These artists, she claims, were partly responsible for the “bizarre disjunction of art and politics that emerged in the 1960s,” having adopted the “cool” stances of neutrality, irony, and negation in the context of the oppressive political climate of the 1950s (Roth and Katz 35). Cage was, in this milieu, no minor player: “If Duchamp was the fulcrum of this new movement,” Roth contends, “Cage was the lever” (37-8). And according to Roth, Cage’s chance operations, along with 4’33”, exhibited an “extreme passivity” (40). Meanwhile, Katz counters that Roth’s criticism of these artists’ supposed non-involvement assumes that they simply could have chosen to become involved. Arguing that the period was one of the most violently homophobic decades in American history, Katz contends that for Cage and company, “[s]ilence ensured survival” (53). For gay men in the ’50s, Katz argues, “[i]t mattered how you crossed your legs, how you spoke, and which pronouns you let slip” (54-5). As a historically specific mode of queer resistance during McCarthyism, “this is not silence at all,” but rather “the performance of silence” (53); with silent music, Katz argues, Cage performed a “statement of nonstatement” (62). Katz substitutes for Roth’s pejorative “Indifference” a more positively elaborated politics of negation, which for him is coterminous with Derrida’s notion of undecidability: “First, negation avoids the recolonizing force of the oppositional-that which permits the opponent to solidify and suture through recourse to the excluded other. Second, negation operates as a closeted relation, mediating between the negating and the negated in such a way as to exclude all who are not already at the very least sympathetic to its case” (Roth and Katz 64).
 
However speculative Katz’s argument may appear, it can be viewed as positing a critical space within which Cage’s political orientation is thought beyond intentionality-as is the case with indeterminacy. Thus the political thrust of Cage’s work may even be understood as running counter to his own stances regarding his work. It is also interesting to note that for Katz, Cage’s enactment of this politics of negation relies on a specifically musical context; just as Rauschenberg’s white paintings depend on the frame of traditional painting, silence needs the context of concert music for its effect. Perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in music does silence negate a mandate to make sound (Roth and Katz 64). I argue (pace Kahn) that it is through this negational act of silence-precisely in music-that Cage’s work acquires its genuine sociopolitical force. Reading Debord alongside Mouffe’s conception of critical art, Cage’s silence, despite the broader failure of indeterminacy, may be understood as a kind of proto-critical music. “[C]ritical of itself in its very form” (Debord 164), through its situatedness in the context of music, Cagean silence resisted the hegemony of the 1950s through the logic of negation.
 
If we take this view, Cagean silence may be read as a reappropriation of silence as a symbolic marker of homophobia in a manner not unlike The Silence = Death Project’s subversive reworking of the pink triangle. Ultra-red’s rereading of Cagean silence serves, in this sense, as a kind of alternative realization of the SILENCE = DEATH slogan—as a performance of SILENCE = DEATH. Simultaneously, SILENT|LISTEN is presented ostensibly as containing a performance of Cage’s 4’33” ; yet while SILENT|LISTEN indeed provides a distinctive context for Cage’s 4’33”, it doesn’t directly manipulate the piece in the same manner that occurs, for example, in General Idea’s Imagevirus. Rather, it is the proximity of 4’33” to the AIDS statements that effectively contextualizes Cage’s piece. SILENT|LISTEN performs a duplicitous role as a détournement and an exemplary interpretation of Cage’s piece by continuing the critical/negational thrust the work posited in its inception. SILENT|LISTEN is positioned at the edge, at the limit of an authentic realization of 4’33”.
 
In addition to the question of authenticity, Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN engages historical forms of musical organization, particularly as they relate to collectivity. Not primarily concerned with subjective expression or agency, SILENT|LISTEN builds out a kind of social framing which relies less upon sound as such, instead referencing (and literally using) the concert situation as a container for collective organizing. Ultra-red notably locate this potential already within Cage’s work. “What 4’33” composes,” they contend, “is not so much sounds but listening as an experience of collectivity in its raw potential” (“Ultra-red: Organizing the Silence” 201). They continue:
 

SILENT|LISTEN began as an investigation into silence, fueled by an urgency to organize silence. Over time, the project became a practice of distinguishing between organizing the silence and collective listening—an investigation into organized listening. This distinction focuses us on the terms by which we are organized by our politics. For us, one such term remains the commitment to reconnecting notions of revolutionary change (i.e. anti-capitalism) with organizing.

(195)

Conflating the silence of Cage’s 4’33” with the muted, suppressed voices of dissent involved in the struggle against AIDS, Ultra-red posit an “organizing” which simultaneously points to the modernist conception of music as “organized sound,”¹³ while also describing the tactical orchestration of activist mobilization. Similarly, “listening” resonates with the privilege given to aurality by Cage and by contemporary experimental music, while simultaneously invoking its meaning within activist groups. Ultra-red go further, uniting both terms in their positing of an “organized listening.” Relevantly, in his discussion of SILENT|LISTEN, Hallas explains that Ultra-red reframe the silence in SILENCE = DEATH through Paulo Freire’s “discipline of silence,” in which silence is prefigured as the site for listening and in which “listening [i]s the condition for action, since it enables genuine reflection and analysis” (248). Punning across the historical vocabularies of music and AIDS activism, Ultra-red create a conceptual-linguistic short circuit between the two contexts while directly appropriating music’s material organizational form—”collectivity in its raw potential” (“Ultra-red: Organizing the Silence” 201)—as a container for collective action. Ultra-red redeploy organizational and formal modes specific to music as critical instruments in the fight against AIDS.

 
Ultra-red’s deployment of Cage’s 4’33” as a container—a “transparent” presentation of its surroundings—suggests that historical context is inseparable from a work’s performance. Considering its broader relevance, Ultra-red’s intervention makes explicit a 4’33” that frames and is framed by its context, leveraging the negational power of silence while creating a temporal space for the unfolding of social process. If 4’33” is about the opening of the musical frame onto the noise of the surrounding world, then the outside penetrates, shines through, is never neutral—whether that outside comprises McCarthyism, the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, or the dismal scene of today, in which the futures of American programs like PEPFAR, HOPWA, and Ryan White are in constant danger of budget cuts that threaten the lives of thousands; in which the lack of public health care in the US is responsible for a single death every 12 minutes (Heavey); in which there are more than three deaths from AIDS every minute globally; and in which the rate of new HIV infections is steadily rising, such that half of all men who have sex with men will be HIV positive by age 50.¹⁴ With its indeterminate and mutable boundaries, 4’33” opens onto that which surrounds it. Ultra-red’s realization implicates both the historical frame from which the work emerges and the temporal present of its performance.
 
SILENT|LISTEN stages the interpenetration of temporal frames—from the McCarthy-era origins of 4’33” to the third decade of the AIDS crisis—while appropriating the musical frame as a collectivizing force in the political struggle against AIDS. Interestingly, while ostensibly conceived as staging an open-ended social process, SILENT|LISTEN may also be said to share in the confrontational character found in Cage’s 4’33”, despite Ultra-red’s intentions. The “shocking” effect Cage’s silent piece had on audiences in the 1950s,¹⁵ echoed throughout historical avant-garde movements and experimental music traditions, invites questioning. There is an unresolved dimension in the “bemusement” of the working-class Latino men who were implicated in the staging of SILENT|LISTEN, mentioned in the epigraph of this essay. In this sense the “exclusionist” tendency of SILENT|LISTEN ironically figures as too faithful to 4’33”‘s 1952 premiere, failing to revise Cage’s work enough.
 
Returning to a consideration of artistic interventions around AIDS outside the “open-ended” process foregrounded by SILENT|LISTEN, there is a clear value to the kind of affective rage employed by Gran Fury. For not only rage, but a distinctively subversive wit, is found in Gran Fury and ACT UP’s history of interventions, one reclaimed in demonstrations such as the recent “Boehner Occupation,” a collaborative action by members of ACT UP New York, ACT UP Philadelphia, and Queerocracy. In response to proposed cuts to foreign and domestic AIDS programs, activists entered US Speaker of the House John Boehner’s office, stripped naked, and—playing on the near-homophones “Boehner” and “boner”—chanted slogans like “Boehner, Boehner, don’t be a dick, your budget cuts will make us sick.” Several of the Naked Seven, as they were later dubbed, chanted and demonstrated with inverted pink equilateral triangles painted on their backs, chests, and genitals.¹⁶ Yet while the musicality of that group’s refrains was undeniable, the strength of Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN lies in a different kind of musical specificity.
 
Ultra-red’s work stages a deep continuity with the politics of Cagean silence; it opens 4’33” onto a critical confrontation with the present while threading together the musical and visual activist strategies of the recent past. SILENT|LISTEN insists on the import of both musicological and cultural framings of Cage’s work while co-implicating art historical debates central to AIDS activism and related art practices. Exceeding the concerns of sound as a medium, Ultra-red’s use of Cage’s 4’33” problematizes the historical form of the musical work and the politics of (its) performance. Turning on the music-formal problem of Werktreue, Ultra-red’s intervention precludes an attempt to recuperate the work within the frame of a “sound art” conceived apart from the formal and historical specificity of musical practice. If Cage’s indeterminacy paved the way for a kind of absolute interpretive openness—anything can be done in the name of a score; silence equals the resolute death of compositional determinacy—then in Ultra-red’s collective realization of 4’33” the formal stakes are redoubled. SILENT|LISTEN confronts the Werktreue problematic through Ultra-red’s performance of Cage’s silent composition. In their (re)casting of Cagean silence as a historically specific mode of queer resistance, as opposed to side-stepping music, the art form becomes central to Ultra-red’s strategy of critical negation. Rather than attempting to escape the formal limits imposed by the frame of musical performance, the latter is tactically appropriated as such.
 

 
“There are,” the biologist Richard Dawkins wrote, “many different ways of being alive,” but there are “vastly more ways of being dead” (qtd. in “Graphs” 52).¹ Franco Moretti refers to that remark in the third installment of his now seminal “Graphs, Maps, Trees,” but in a way the quip could serve as a motto for much of the critical work Moretti has undertaken over the past decade. In a series of essays now collected in two volumes—Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005) and Distant Reading (Verso, 2013)—Moretti has been practicing as well as preaching a form of literary history that relies less on the reading of individual texts than it does the mapping of literary production along the lines of a biological population. Just as understanding the evolutionary history of a living specimen means knowing something about the versions that have fallen by the wayside, so too, Moretti argues, should our literary-historical accounts be able to situate the survivors (the Austens, the Dickenses, the Doyles) within the larger context of the forms that failed to prosper, or to prosper for long. The history of Pride and Prejudice (1813), in this view, involves seeing not only its relationship to, say, Waverly (1814) but also its connection to (and difference from) far lesser known texts like The life of Pill Garlick; rather a whimsical sort of fellow (also 1813—who knew?). The story of culture’s happening, Moretti has been arguing, can’t really be separated from a history of cultural mishap. No creation, as it were, without some correlative destruction.
 
It is fitting, then, that Moretti’s most recent book, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, should present itself as the account of an extinction. “Not so long ago,” the book begins, “this notion [of the bourgeois] seemed indispensable” (1). But these days “its human embodiment seems to have vanished” along with the term itself, even among historians of economic culture. Only a few decades ago, Moretti explains, Immanuel Wallerstein called the bourgeois the “main protagonist” in the “story” of “this modern world of ours” (1). Now, suddenly, he is nowhere to be found. How is it that we’ve ended up, as if inserted into Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, in a story without a hero?
 
The question that starts the volume—Where did the bourgeois go?—asks for a historical answer. But the bourgeois has always been hard to pin down. Thus Moretti cites a number of thinkers (including Wallerstein, Perry Anderson, Jürgen Kocka, Peter Gay, Aby Warburg, Simon Schama, and Dror Wahrman) who see the bourgeoisie’s defining trait as its lack of any. At one point, for instance, Wallerstein defines the bourgeois as a kind of gap or blank space in the class structure: the bourgeois is the thing that is “not a peasant or serf” but that’s also “not a noble” (qtd. in The Bourgeois 8). Add to this the bourgeois reformulation of rights as negative freedoms and its emphasis on economic and social mobility (a formulation only intensified with the coinage of middle class) and the titular object of Moretti’s study begins to look all the more elusive. It’s a big question whether there is anything we can call the sine qua non of the bourgeois. Sometimes it’s a particular relation to capital (e.g. ownership of the means of production). Other times it’s a temperament or a style (e.g. industrious, serious, self-restrained)—but styles, like keywords, change. It’s not surprising, then, that it is via a variety of indeterminacies that historians have defined the bourgeois. Permeability, dissonance, contradiction, multiplicity, porosity, weak cohesion, and inherent vagueness—for the thinkers Moretti cites, these are the characteristics (if that’s the right word) of our “protagonist.”
 
Moretti cites these views, but one can still sense—even in the absence of any direct attempt at refutation and lots of signs of his admiration for the people who hold them—that he’s not all the way on board. Yes, of course, he seems to be saying—there’s no transhistorical essence to the bourgeois—but, on the other hand, the bourgeois isn’t exactly nothing. “Incognito” (12) isn’t unknowable. But how to talk about a discontinuous and, worse, strategically self-effacing entity over time? Well, by producing a map of those extinctions and effacements, the “consequences (and reversals)” (12) that comprise the course of a thing whose life seems like nothing but a series of adaptations. This is the real aim of The Bourgeois: a morphology (though it’s interesting and a little surprising that the term does not appear in the book) of the social class that, as Marx and Engels saw long ago, made “constant revolutionizing” into “the first condition of existence” (Marx 67). The goal is a kind of negative image of a moving object: to “reverse-engineer” our way from “resolution” back to “a living and problematic present” (14).
 
The inherent changefulness of its object and the necessary flexibility of its method make for a book that reads like a collection of brilliant vignettes. The book is divided into five chapters plus a chapter-length introduction, but each of the chapters is divided into subsections (sometimes only three, sometimes as many as nine), and some of these subsections contribute not only to the chapter of which they are immediately a part but also to a couple of threads of trans-chapter meditations (there are six subsections on prose scattered across the first three chapters, and there are seven subsections on various keywords across the first four). The effect, and maybe the strategy, is to produce an argument that doesn’t accrue mass so much as, in good morphological fashion, swivel against and then obliquely mirror its earlier segments. “Closely connected,” Moretti says early on, “though not quite the same; this is the idea behind The Bourgeois.” And you can see that idea epitomized in a sentence like this one: “In the years immediately following [Dostoevsky], Ibsen’s realistic cycle performed exactly the opposite experiment—and reached the same conclusions” (168), in which the most recent development (Ibsen) manages to entirely contradict and entirely repeat its predecessor (Dostoevsky) in one fell swoop.
 
This way of proceeding plays to Moretti’s critical strengths. As a critic, Moretti has long been committed to the immanent development of the idea (to just seeing where things go if you follow them for a while), totally happy to rely on the formulations of others (who tend to appear almost in the form of soundbite), and utterly willing, when the interest of any configuration starts to fade, to let things trail off into an ellipsis. With distant reading, he’s been giving the most attention to the part about relying on others, since there’s no truly big data from tiny first-persons.
 
But whatever Moretti says publically about close reading, many moments in The Bourgeois make clear that Moretti remains one of the best noticers working in contemporary literary criticism (right up there with D.A. Miller, who has been very clear about his commitment to proximity, and to whom Distant Reading is dedicated). The readings of the Vermeer paintings that lead off chapter two (“Serious Century”), for instance, could hardly be more compelling rivers of thinking and rethinking. Noticing how a single idea (leisure) drops out of a list when Robinson Crusoe repeats it or how a character’s commitment to abstraction is signaled by his odd propensity for words like “ponderation,” “stupefaction,” “distinction” (163): it’s hard to imagine doing this sort of thing from a distance.
 
The interest of these individual insights cannot, though, quite mute the lingering question about how—if at all—they should be understood as part of a larger structure. Even morphology—in fact, especially morphology—needs some notion of connective tissue, and in the fourth section of the introduction Moretti offers a “synopsis” (13) of what’s holding it all together. The line Moretti sketches runs from bourgeois origin (in the first chapter, on Robinson Crusoe), to the bourgeois expansion in the first half of the 19^th-century (“the island has become half a continent” [13]), to its bewildered dominance in the second (“he has gained power, but lost his clarity of vision” [13]), and, finally, to its eventual subsumption under capital itself (“capitalism triumphant, and bourgeois culture dead” [22]). A shapely narrative, then, of origin, ascent, and a doggedly-resisted but finally inevitable extinction in the face of the very “spirit of capitalism” that had brought the bourgeois into being and with which, for a while anyway, he had seemed entirely identified. The Bourgeois reads like a Communist Manifesto—in which the bourgeois is discovered to have been digging his own grave—but done this time via the history of aesthetic form.
 
One can see why, especially if he wanted to call it The Bourgeois, Moretti would have been eager to discern in the aesthetic data the same satisfyingly clean arc that lends the Manifesto its prophetic clarity. Translated into literary form, the story is no less compelling: the rise of double-entry book-keeping hooks up nicely with a realist prose that wanted everything in its place, which in turn hooks up nicely with the Victorian emphasis on a sober, clear-eyed precision that—and this is the crucial break—turns out to be unsustainable in the abstracted landscapes of modern capital. Still, it is possible to wonder about the pressure which the curve of capital’s bildung exerts on our interpretation of aesthetic developments. Look, for instance, at Moretti’s reading of the massive increase in what he calls “fillers” in 19^th-century narrative. The interesting formal observation here is that, as opposed to the heroic eventfulness of an earlier literature, bourgeois narrative becomes obsessed with the in-betweens, with fillers. Pride and Prejudice, for instance, is a long story with only a handful of events. And the rest is filler: stretches of story in which people “talk, play cards, visit, take walks, read a letter, listen to music, drink a cup of tea…” (71). Unlike events (proposals, marriages, affairs, wars) which one can count, fillers are, by definition, a little shapeless and hard to measure. “It is not easy,” Moretti writes, “to quantify this sort of thing.” But then what are they doing in bourgeois narrative? Well, Moretti answers, fillers succeed “[b]ecause they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life” (81). And from “regularity” we can make our conceptual way to a host of familiar, bad-bourgeois principles and affects. First, “Hegel’s prose of the word: where the individual ‘must make himself a means to others’” (75); then “that analytical style…where the world is observed as if by an ‘impartial judge’” (76); then “an oppressive everyday” (77), plus “sadness” (78) and sobriety (80); then we get the “laborious” and the tamed (81); then the desire to “escap[e] from vagueness” that is the “reality principle” (86); and then last, but not at all least, we get “the most beautiful invention” of double-entry book keeping that “forces people to face facts” (86). The trajectory is convincing from one morphological step to the next. But we can also see that a lot hinges on that initial decision to read “fillers” in terms of regularity, since it’s that move that carries us from what is, at bottom, a pretty weird thing for a fiction to do (get rid of events) to the bourgeois world of laborious restriction we feel like we already know. Once that first decision is taken, we can move pretty quickly (15 or so pages) from narrative “filler” as that which resists quantification (the “hard to quantify”) to the filler as the foremost sign of a will toward regularity so indomitable that everything must be counted not once but twice.
 
Does it have to go that way? Maybe. But filler-as-regularity is, after all, not the only (or even the most obvious) answer to what it is that fillers mean. Why not see them, instead, as a giant reduction in regularity (serfs, after all, know their place, but how the folks in Mansfield Park wander: Where is Fanny?), or as signs of decline in the shaped-ness of time? Obviously, emphasizing this aspect of the filler would set it not just outside of but against the usual bourgeois suspects of domination, accountability, and industry. The filler, that is, would be not just a stage, but (or but also) a glitch in the curve of bourgeois development. And the shapeless filler would thus find a home next to the curious formlessness Moretti notes as the condition of Robinson Crusoe‘s resolutely plodding prose. Compile a bunch of details and you get, Moretti says, “Defoe’s shapeless story…the great classic of bourgeois literature” (35). Look, Moretti enjoins, at the strange sublimations of the novel’s grammar. The novel is full of sentences that say “having accomplished X, I did Y, to do Z.” On the one hand, Moretti says, such sentences—”past gerund; past tense; infinitive” (53)—encapsulate the purely purposive action and instrumental reason of the bourgeois. On the other hand, though, Moretti also notices that the infinitive—the “stroke of genius” (53)—that concludes the series offers a strangely unconditioned opening: “Finally, to the right of the main clause, and in an unspecified (though never too distant) future, lies the final clause, whose infinitive—often doubled, as if to increase its openness—embodies the narrative potentiality of what is to come.” “Never too distant” because Moretti won’t let the bourgeois (and maybe the bourgeois doesn’t want to) abandon its commitment to the “short-term teleology” of instrumental reason (51). But still “unspecified,” and, when something is unspecified, who knows how distant it is? Neither the bourgeois nor the morphological imagination is in a position to know in advance what will turn out to have been the decisive adaptation, what will turn out to have been instrumental. Maybe this thing—this piece of string, my opposable thumb, whatever—will turn out to be useful. Or maybe not: “My paddles,” says Robinson in a passage Moretti quotes at length, “signified nothing: and now I began to give myself over for lost…” (qtd. in The Bourgeouis 62).
 
It’s a little hard to fit these moments of shapelessness, openness, and unquantifiability into our standard account of the bourgeois as a positive ideology of clear-eyed focus and rigid attention to detailed account—and it’s not clear exactly what Moretti himself wants to make of them. We might, to be sure, see them as yet more of the contradictions that riddle capitalist existence, or choose instead to see them merely as the remnants of that first negative move (neither serf nor noble) that launched the bourgeois but couldn’t, in the end, stay unconditioned for very long. However we make sense of them, though, their presence testifies to a second story percolating throughout Moretti’s account. This is not the more prominent one, in which bourgeois realism is overtaken by capitalist abstraction and sober individualism replaced by the structural megalomania of personified markets. It is, rather, an earlier (and maybe longer-running) extinction of an openness or absence of condition that seems, however briefly, to have belonged to the bourgeois. The world of Wilhelm Meister is the world of means and ends, but the novel’s prose is, at least for a while, “curiously mixed with a strong sense of possibility” (75). Crusoe, similarly, is comprised of almost nothing but work, but “there is a subdued, elusive sense of enjoyment that pervades the novel….But enjoyment of what?“(44).
 
Maybe it’s naïve to think that the question—”enjoyment of what?“—could really stay unanswered, or to imagine that the surplus of “possibility” could escape realization. Time itself would probably be enough to ruin it. Sooner or later, even Proust’s “éternel imparfait” (77) will appear as a span that can be measured and Robinson will return home to learn that his plantations have been pouring money into his accounts all along. Then, “signified nothing” will be just another way to say useless. Still, thinking about these looser moments suggests a slightly different history, one in which we can see that what was pernicious about capitalist instrumentality was not only its insistence that, as Hardy put it, “inches of land had value,” but (way worse) its ability to transpose those things that used to feel like alternatives to its operations—things like elusive, objectless enjoyment; the hard to quantify fillers; a sense of possibility; life’s shapelessness—into the heart of its operations (Hardy 18). The hard to quantify, the too shapeless to measure are now (cf. the fine print on your credit card agreement; cf. the tax loophole; cf. the too-big-to-jail) primarily useful as “camouflage” for keeping one’s surpluses locked down (144). Exactly the same experiment, then, with exactly the opposite conclusions. That, too, is the (maybe even sadder) idea behind The Bourgeois.

 
Founded in 1852, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (the V&A) is an established museum of decorative art and design. Recently, and controversially, it has moved the focus of its major exhibitions away from shows made up from its massive permanent holdings (around 4.5 million objects) towards ones curated using external collections. These new shows have concentrated on contemporary or recent cultural phenomena that have popular appeal but that have developed out of elite, subcultural or avant-garde styles or movements. The “From Club to Catwalk” exhibition is one example; it aims to show the influence of ’80s British nightclub and street style on both haute couture and retail fashion.
 
In adopting its new exhibitions policy, the V&A is following a global cultural and business trend. Major museums operate in an ever more competitive international field in which income is key. They have to put on lucrative shows to afford their acquisitions, which have become increasingly expensive since the 1970s, when art prices began to boom. Museums now show artistic and/or cultural movements that not only have popular appeal (in film and television representations or on calendars, posters, and fridge magnets), but whose reach is also supplemented by an original elite or avant-garde cachet—impressionism, for example. The result is blockbuster exhibitions that exponentially increase financial and cultural capital. An early and important example was the hugely successful Royal Academy Monet exhibition of 1999, which turned the “R.A.” from a snooty if credible artists’ club and gallery into a major international museum player. Museums’ playoff of elite and popular, avant-garde and mainstream, subcultural and establishment elements can take many forms, as demonstrated by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show. Economically, the strategy seems to have paid off. Like the international art market, the global museum market is booming. Yet the consequent enrichment is arguably less cultural than financial, as the following shows.
 
The museum-world context is important in reviewing David Bowie Is. On the face of it, Bowie looks like a perfect subject for a contemporary blockbuster art show. It’s hard to think of a popular musician who has been both as successful as Bowie and so patently influenced by a number of major ideas, movements, and techniques in modern and postmodern art. Bowie has, for example, worked in painting, installation art, video art, performance art, and digital art. He has often said that he sees himself as an “artist” rather than as a musician, and he has the canvases, costumes, and art world connections to prove it (he is an editor of Modern Painters). What’s more, Bowie has avant-garde and subcultural credentials. Many if not most of his popular creations have drawn on work that was or is countercultural, experimental, elite, or obscure. Examples of his influences include dada, surrealism, the theatre of alienation, fluxus, live art, beat writing, motorik music, and noise. When Bowie gave the V&A access to his archive, it must have seemed like a real gift, much of which was turned into David Bowie Is. The exhibition is a sell-out and its organizers are confident enough of its global appeal to have arranged a tour. After London, the show is visiting Ontario, São Paolo, Chicago, Paris, and Groningen. The public appears to be accepting enthusiastically, even gratefully, what they’ve been given.
 
Yet as Derrida has pointed out (as both Sartre and Genet did before him), gifts are never free; they always involve costs, or losses. The cost of David Bowie Is is partly financial, especially for the public. They’ve had to pay for expensive tickets, particularly if they’ve bought them from online agencies, “ticket touts,” or “scalpers,” who have increased face value prices by up to five hundred percent. There’s also an odd, uncanny loss implied in the show’s tour, which, like the show, comes in the wake of The Next Day (2013), Bowie’s first album in a decade. Album releases almost always precede concert tours by the musicians who have made them. Yet in this case, Bowie, who has a heart condition, will not be performing live shows (or giving interviews). His global audience will have to make do with a tour of his garments, recordings, icons, and relics in the conspicuous absence of the being who inhabited and/or created them.
 
There is a further cost to David Bowie Is that isn’t so much financial as cultural and critical. This is not to say that the show is low culture. It deals, in fact, with genuinely interesting and significant cultural phenomena, albeit inadequately. The exhibition doesn’t sufficiently explain or even show the important aesthetic, historical, and political dimensions of the field in which Bowie is engaged. In addition to the lack of cultural context and critical insight, the show lacks curatorial logic. It is stuffed – arguably overstuffed – with fascinating exhibits including Bowie’s drawings, paintings, song lyrics, costumes, posters, album covers and videos. Yet these aren’t arranged according to any clear narrative, critical perspective or sound topology. Instead, the exhibition collapses the two commonest curatorial strategies – historical and thematic – to no clear purpose. The effect is incoherence.1
 
The show is laid out in three main rooms (each containing sub-rooms, or cases). The first room tracks Bowie’s musical and stylistic development from the mid-’60s up to his first “hit,” Space Oddity, in 1969. Yet Bowie didn’t really “develop,” during this period, in which his influences and strategies were not so much eclectic as confused. He didn’t know whether he wanted to be a mod (he was better at designing the clothes than he was at playing R&B), a hippy (his silk kaftans and velvet loons were too flamboyant), a Buddhist (he was too ambitious to be egoless), or a folk singer (“a cockney Bob Dylan,” in his own disparaging words). Still, the mythic narrative of artistic development requires a cataloguing of influences, and the first room of the show is a reliquary of such in material form. Here, then, is Bowie’s Harptone acoustic guitar, his Grafton acrylic tenor saxophone, his sketches of what his imaginary bandmates might wear, and the Tibetan Buddhist print that graced his bedroom wall.
 
A second room jump-cuts from Bowie’s biography to his influences. This is a massive and irreducibly complex theme, as I show shortly. Suffice to say that Bowie’s “sources” are so numerous and various, yet so fundamental to his art and character as to be almost impossible to present in one way – let alone in one room. The popular 1950s entertainer Anthony Newley does not sit easily alongside Friedrich Nietzsche, and neither of them would be at home wearing Bowie’s “man-dresses” or his quilted, skintight, crotch-hugging, Clockwork Orange-influenced Buretti suits (with matching moon-boots). Yet here they all are, in a room containing objects whose interest is in inverse proportion to the coherence with which they’ve been arranged.
 
The final room “celebrates Bowie as a performer.” This facilitates some impressive spectacle, notably Mick Rock’s becoming-iconic “Jean Genie” video projected massively alongside a recently discovered live TV performance of the same song. Yet Bowie’s “performance” is presented without nuance, any sense of its ambiguity, its implication in the quotidian or passive, or its self-conscious inseparability from “life.” His performance, in other words, is presented independently of its “performativity.” But Bowie was smarter about this, and often indulged in anti-performance, or, as he would have called it, “anti-theatre,” which he discovered and practiced in Germany in the ’70s (as Fassbinder had in the ’60s). Hence the cover of his 1977 album Low, on which the title sits above a profile of the artist, producing a verbal/visual pun: “Low Profile.” On his subsequent world tour, Bowie performed much of the set dressed conservatively and standing stock still behind a synthesizer, often not singing. Both “events” are represented (via a photograph and a “live” video), but apparently without any sense of the performative contradiction they present. The contradiction presented by this “performance” room is inadvertent and relates to its implied narrative place in the show. It contains objects that are “later” than those in the first and second rooms (which have more objects from the ’60s and ’70s, respectively), and thus persists with the idea that the show has a clear telos that in fact it does not and that it can’t have sustained after the chaos of the second room. The third room thus represents a final and decisive instance of the curatorial illogic behind the exhibition.
 
Such illogic aside, there are two linked claims that David Bowie Is makes about its subject. Neither is unheard of, but both have slowly come to light as a result of increasing historical perspective and biographical and analytic work on Bowie. David Bowie Is makes one of these claims clearly and the other in an implicit and rather problematic fashion. The first claim is that Bowie is an artist in the broadest sense and not just a musician. Here are his sketches, drawings, paintings, woodcuts, journals, verbal experiments, costumes, mime performances, stage sets, film scripts, film performances, posters, album covers and even hairstyles to prove it (the music, of course, is here too). Bowie didn’t produce all these things on his own, but he did play a primary generative role in the creation of all of them. Sometimes this role was conceptual rather than practical (he got others to “work his ideas up”), so Bowie is partly a conceptual artist in the tradition that was begun (some would say continued) by Andy Warhol, whom Bowie admired (the admiration wasn’t reciprocated, although there’s a film record of their meeting on exhibit to confirm the influence). The second key claim of the show is that Bowie is “postmodern.” His work is multimedia, multifaceted, subversive, referential, self-conscious, trend-setting, and stylish. One can easily (indeed glibly) attribute all of these characteristics to postmodernism, a term that can describe most of Bowie’s output. Simply by collecting a lot of this output in three rooms, the V&A show demonstrates Bowie’s postmodern credentials. This isn’t an earth-shattering achievement, but it’s not an insignificant one. Indeed, the name of the show could have been credibly extended to David Bowie Is a Postmodern Artist, and Bowie is clearly worthy of consideration alongside others who have been granted this status. The book that accompanies the V&A exhibition states as much and the exhibition itself shows it (285).
 
Yet as indicated above, the exhibition doesn’t illustrate or explain Bowie’s postmodernism in detail or with any attention to what it might exactly amount to or mean. As readers of this journal know, “postmodernism” is contentious and difficult to pin down. Different definitions and periodizations of the term contradict as much as complement each other. The theoretical definition of postmodernism is tricky, and bears on its denominational, actual, and material instances: postmodern art, postmodern culture, David Bowie’s output, or whatever. The V&A exhibition doesn’t address this question of definition, or even raise it very clearly. Yet the question is unavoidable in so far as Bowie is postmodern, as the exhibition shows. Thus the problem of postmodernism besets both the exhibition and Bowie in crucial ways, dogging the show historically, aesthetically, and politically. The best way to reveal all this is to return to the show’s “narrative” (or lack thereof) and its exhibits.
 
For much of his career, Bowie has turned his diverse influences into coherent art by blending them into successive and distinctive personal audio-visual styles. Three well-known examples from one decade are the alien rock star of the early ’70s, the chic and decadent soulboy of the mid-’70s, and the arty and stylish minimalist of the late ’70s. These styles were embodied in theatrical personae inhabited and enacted by Bowie, the best-known of which is Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy was a mythical rock-god who was elevated and destroyed by fame. Bowie’s real-life models for him were Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan, representations of whom are unaccountably missing from the V&A show. Bowie borrowed Bolan’s camp and flash and Hendrix’s dandyism and showmanship. He added his own otherworldly androgyny, and Ziggy was born. Ziggy’s romantic and tragic story was recounted on the album that made Bowie famous: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972; see Bowie pictured with the Spiders from Mars here). In the album’s narrative, Ziggy becomes suddenly famous, but is disturbed by his fans’ impossible love for and expectations of him. His distress is compounded by his own hedonistic self-destruction, and all of this affects his eventual career suicide (and possibly his actual suicide). As well as telling this story on the Ziggy album, Bowie acted it out on stage on a year-long UK/US tour. He also acted it out hysterically in the real (in its strict Lacanian sense) through copious drug-use and bisexual sex. The elision between Bowie’s art, life, and performance was extreme. Bowie was living Ziggy’s fate as he narrated and performed it (he “killed off” Ziggy – and thus a part of himself – at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on 3 July 1973). Ziggy/Bowie’s degree of reflexivity was nothing if not postmodern, but the V&A exhibition shows this only inadvertently by containing some of the objects and images that contributed to Ziggy’s creation (and destruction). The postmodernism of this creation is not illustrated by the show’s curation or explained in its literature or captions. Apart from Bowie’s costumes from the period, the main Ziggy-item in the show is the original artwork for the album’s front cover – a Brian Ward photograph colorized by Terry Pastor. This is undoubtedly beautiful and unarguably iconic, but it says more about Bowie’s ability to make good aesthetic choices than it does about the postmodern “logic” of his art.
 
The reflexivity of postmodernism, first identified by Fredric Jameson, is far from the only aspect of it attributable to Bowie.2 Key features of postmodernism are also evident in Bowie’s collaborations. A common characteristic of postmodern culture is its fashioning by multiple hands and its concomitant irreducibility to any single author (thus feature film is often presented as prototypically and typically postmodern).3 Bowie’s art is no exception. The lynchpin of his Ziggy-era band (called, inevitably, The Spiders From Mars) was Mick Ronson, a prosaic but beautiful rocker from Hull whom Bowie forced into a silver catsuit and fluorescent makeup. Ronson was a skilled and exciting guitarist (and thus Bowie’s Hendrix-substitute), but also knew his way around a mixing desk. His production skills are only now being recognized as essential components of Ziggy and Bowie’s success. The V&A show doesn’t record this, but instead falls back on Mick Rock’s publicity shots of Bowie and Ronson, including a famous one of the former fellating the latter’s guitar. Rock’s shots are pioneering in pop photography for their use of both color-saturation and stark black and white. Yet they are presented here in the same mythologizing way in which they were made – as homage to Ziggy rather than as testament to his mutual creation by Bowie and others. This works to efface the way in which Bowie constantly “used” collaborators, including both Rock and Ronson, to perpetrate the various fictions on which his artistic career was built. Brian Eno’s collaboration with Bowie on his “Berlin Period” albums (Low, “Heroes,” Lodger [1977-9]) is better known, and the exhibition does devote a little space to it (a photo of Eno, his “oblique strategy” cards, and his AKS synthesizer are here), but in general the extent of Bowie’s collaboration was greater and more significant than David Bowie Is shows. This raises inevitable questions about the degree to which Bowie’s output was “his own.”
 
Such questions are of course familiar in debates about postmodernism, which approach it alternatively as informed and knowing or as unoriginal and inauthentic. On one side there is Charles Jencks’s celebration of the ironic, the informed, and the epistemologically plural character of postmodern architecture and art. For Jencks, postmodernism is diverse, cosmopolitan and playful. The fact that it draws on so many other sources is all to the good.4 On the other side is Jameson’s contention that postmodernism is pastiche, understood by him as a stylish but ultimately insignificant recycling of borrowed (or stolen) motifs. For Jameson, this lost significance is in part political; postmodern culture is commercial, superficial, and politically void. Depending on one’s preferences and prejudices, Bowie’s art can be placed on either side of this argument. Though the argument is worth having and may even be essential to Bowie, sadly David Bowie Is doesn’t engage in or even seem aware of it.
 
The general question of Bowie’s postmodernism and the particular questions of the originality and aesthetic and political significance of his art (or lack of same) are all apparent in his influences. Many of these influences are drawn from the modernist European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. For instance, many of Bowie’s sketches, drawings, stage-settings, and album covers are heavily influenced by German expressionist art and cinema. Notable examples include the cover of “Heroes” (1977), which is taken from a sketch by Bowie that resembles a woodcut by Emil Nolde; Derek Boshier’s cover for Lodger (1979; see Fig. 1 below), which is like a photographic reconstruction of a drawing by Egon Schiele (see Fig. 2 below); and the set for The Diamond Dogs tour (1974), which was inspired by the sets of Robert Wiener’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
 

 

 

Click for larger view
 

Fig. 1.

Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait Standing (1910) Creative Commons. Lodger album cover (1979)

© Derek Boshier. Used by permission.

Bowie’s own painting and drawings are specifically influenced by a key German Expressionist group – “Die Brücke” – of which Ludwig Kirchner was a founding member. The V&A exhibition includes a patently Kirchner-ish portrait by Bowie of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima (1977). Mishima wasn’t a participant in the first-wave of the early twentieth-century European avant-garde, but rather developed aspects of it outside Europe in the late twentieth century. Bowie’s painting thus not only reveals his knowledge of and interest in the culture of the avant-garde, but also its influence, extent, and dissemination – in a word, its history. As well as being aware of early European avant-gardism, he is au fait with the revival that took place in Japan and the US as well as Europe in the ’60s and ’70s, and is cognizant of the links between the proponents of this revival and their forbears. So, for example, he has drawn on the work of William Burroughs and Gilbert and George, but also understands what they have taken from surrealism and dada before them. Of course, in self-consciously integrating both the sources and the legacy of the avant-garde into his own art, Bowie is a sort of post-avant-garde artist himself.

 
This twentieth-century avant-garde influence on a post-avant-garde Bowie is implicit in some of the exhibits included in David Bowie Is. Yet little is made explicit and none of it is assessed, either through the arrangement of the exhibits or in their captioning. Some influences are even catalogued incorrectly in the show, for example, in its display of a “verbasizer”: a computer program that Bowie developed with Ty Roberts in 1995 (for use on his underrated Outside album of the same year). The programme is fed sentences from sources of any sort (news stories, journal entries, poetic musings) and then randomly rearranges the words it receives into new phrases that can be used to compose or inspire song lyrics. The process is a digitization of a technique Bowie had been employing for years: the “cut-up” method. This involved using material print sources (newspapers, advertisements, poems) that Bowie literally cut up and rearranged into new and random configurations. He copied the technique from Burroughs, who had taken it from his friend Brion Gysin, but who also recognized its origin in the collage techniques of Berlin dada. The V&A show includes a print interview between Bowie and Burroughs, but it doesn’t explain the “cut-up” link between them. It also misses the opportunity of showing Bowie creating a cut-up, as he does in Alan Yentob’s 1974 documentary Cracked Actor (another section of this documentary is used elsewhere in the show, to no great effect), and when the show does allude to “cut-up artists,” it wrongly includes James Joyce among them.
 

 

 
Click for larger view
 

Fig. 2.

David Bowie and William Burroughs (1974)

© Terry O’Neill. Used by permission.

 
It’s important that all these influences are accurately reflected, because judging Bowie’s art – and even his politics – depends on them. If Bowie’s art is merely the sum of his borrowed influences, then it is little more than the pastiche that Jameson abhors – a superficial, commercial and depoliticized popularisation of genuinely avant-garde sources. The most cynical version of this view holds that Bowie may know a lot about the avant-garde, but has an approach to it that is appropriative, exploitative, and disavowedly commercial. On this reading his attitude to artistic philosophies, movements, and styles is like his youthful attitude to his friends, which, according to Ronson, involved placing “blind faith in them for a year then dumping them” (Sandford 134-35).5 Michael Rother of the German experimental electronics band Neu! felt as if he were a victim of this sort of treatment after he worked with Eno in 1976, and then heard Eno and Bowie’s transposition of the “Motorik” sound he had pioneered on Low the following year. What he heard was a more accessible and commercial version of his own creation, but he never heard from Eno again. In a 2009 BBC documentary, both Rother and Dieter Moebius (Rother’s collaborator in the band Harmonia) imply that Bowie might have “used” them and their art cavalierly.6
 
Yet there is a strong counterargument to Bowie’s “exploitation” of the avant-garde. His creations have never been reducible to an overlay or series of plundered styles. They’ve always added something ingenious (and arguably genius) to the mix of influences that make them up. This something has often been “avant-garde” itself, as when Bowie appeared supine in a dress on the cover of the first UK release of The Man Who Sold The World (1971); he was self-consciously presenting himself as a sort of pre-Raphaelite transvestite.7 He played a variation on this theme a year later on the back cover of Hunky Dory, on which he assumed a pose copied from Greta Garbo. The shot was in black-and-white and evoked Garbo’s Northern-European and silent-movie heritage as well as her probable bisexuality. Bowie’s poses were about the most subversive imaginable in U.S.-influenced, denim-clad, masculinist, heterosexist, dick-and-guitar thrusting British rock culture of the early ’70s.8 He was being no less radical when, in the late ’70s, he embraced synthesized sound, minimalism, and electronic dance music just as Western pop was being purged by the noisy, analogic, rock-fundamentalism of punk (a movement that Bowie had helped to create in any case).
 
Despite, or rather, because of his avant-garde borrowings, Bowie was incredibly innovative and influential in the field of popular culture in the ’70s. His ’70s work continued to be a dominant influence in the ’80s. Cutting-edge white musicians frequently followed Bowie’s lead, whether they were groundbreaking and commercially successful (like Talking Heads or Human League) or experimental and cultic (like 23 Skidoo or The Screemers). The great resurgence of black musical forms (led by house and rap) in the popular musical mainstream of the ’80s and ’90s was less patently influenced by Bowie, though he at least prefigured it by giving his music over to Soul and R&B during the mid-’70s and by producing a best-selling dance album (Let’s Dance) in the early ’80s. Additional evidence of Bowie’s role as influential innovator of a specifically postmodern sort was provided in a recent V&A exhibition titled Postmodernism. The show was replete with “postmodern artists” who were (or are) self-consciously and declaredly influenced by Bowie, including Madonna, Damien Hirst, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leigh Bowery, and Boy George. Thus Bowie’s postmodernism can be defended as a dynamic continuation of modernism. Its recycling of modernist motifs is informed, ingenious, and transformative, and generally corresponds with Jencks’s definition of the term as continuing and extending radical modernism, particularly its avant-garde sensibility. In this sense, it does exactly what Jean-François Lyotard (no less) thinks postmodernism should do.9 Of course, recognizing the reproductive ingenuity of Bowie’s artworks and/or the integrity of his avant-garde revivalism doesn’t automatically acquit him of the charge of having exploited people like Ronson and Rother. Yet it should be said in his defense that his biographers (including the non-hagiographic ones) nearly all represent him as someone who has become more decent, warm, generous, and attributive with age. Bowie seems increasingly to have paid his dues.10
 
These references to Bowie’s integrity, creativity, and influence defend him as a postmodern “hero” and respond to the charge that he is a postmodern dilettante and/or exploiter of modern sources and talent. But the difference of opinion about Bowie’s “postmodern worth” – about whether he is a good or a bad example of postmodernism and whether postmodernism as exemplified by him is a good or bad thing – is not entirely settled by explaining or justifying each side, nor even by evaluating his “art.” There is an obvious and important reason for this, as indicated above: the different views of Bowie’s postmodernism are predicated on a prior (and “deeper”) argument about postmodernism per se, one that is both theoretical and ontological. This argument precedes, instructs, and structures everything that might lead one to have any opinion about postmodernism at all, inclining Jameson to represent postmodernism as an abuse and exhaustion of modernism, and Jencks to cast it as a continuation and revivification of modernism. For Jencks, postmodernism is good because it is hyper-referential and multiply meaningful, whereas for Jameson it is bad because it is derivative and superficial. These oppositions furthermore underlie Jencks’s and Jameson’s accounts of what postmodernism is, and inform any consideration of postmodern phenomena that they might draw on; they also allow critics to cast Bowie as an agent of one or other of these forces. Because postmodernism is a good thing (for Jencks), Bowie can be seen as a creative, innovative, and “well-read” post-avant-garde exponent of it. Alternatively, because postmodernism is a bad thing (as Jameson describes it), Bowie can be seen as a plagiaristic, commercialising, superficial, apolitical, and insignificant postmodern artist. We are ostensibly free to choose between these different evaluations of both Bowie and postmodernism, but that choice can’t be entirely free (or impartial, or individual, or objective) because it will always already be instructed by the oppositions through which different accounts and evaluations of postmodernism are set up.
 
If we want to step away from (if not get beyond) this argument, we need to do more than assess its object (postmodernism) through its exemplar (Bowie). We must undo and re-think the oppositions that structure and sustain it; one way to do so is through a deconstruction of the term (and the “idea” of) postmodernism. What has been said so far here about “postmodernism” has taken the term to name something, whether an idea, a period, a movement, a historical phenomena, a style, a sensibility, or a business strategy. (This is all in keeping with the broadly ontological approaches to postmodernism identified above, which presume that it is a pre-existent phenomenon that can be named, even before it is explained). Whether the term postmodernism has been deployed to represent something rich or something derivative, it has been used to describe a thing. In other words, the term has been used in a “literal” way. Without dismissing or forgetting this approach, it’s worth employing another one that might treat “postmodernism” in a different (though not unrelated) manner, and that might begin to alter the structure of the argument in which it has become stuck. This approach involves treating the term postmodernism figuratively, and taking account of what figurative and literal treatments – including figurative and literal treatments of postmodernism – are and mean. Crucially, it means showing that such treatments aren’t just opposed to each other.
 
In his 1974 essay “White Mythology,” Jacques Derrida considers the general way in which metaphor is understood and the particular way in which the idea of it is articulated by philosophers.11 He notes that metaphor is often conceived as something “abstract” and associative. To take an example from the current text, we might describe Bowie as a “star.” To do so would be to use an abstract association between Bowie and an illuminated astral body, and to illustrate the qualities of the former with reference to the latter. The association is abstract because there are no literal and physical links between Bowie and any actual star. Yet it works to “enlighten” us about Bowie.12 Thus metaphor can have a particular sort of “use”: one of abstract enlightenment. Derrida points out that philosophers (including Anatole France and Aristotle) present this use as something that yields a metaphysical gain. A metaphor gives us an understanding that is more abstract, but that is also more precise and more resonant, both clearer and richer. In a number of respects, then, metaphors are ideal. They are more lucid and true. They are thus akin to ideas as conceived by Plato, which are pure and eternal in contrast to their mundane and imperfect embodiments or enactions. According to this sort of account, metaphor transcends the physical by going beyond it. It is metaphysical, as is its general description by philosophers.13
 
Yet as Derrida points out, philosophers also note other aspects of metaphor that are to do with its “use,” which is more ambiguous and troubling than it at first seems. Now it’s already been shown that metaphor has a metaphysical “use”: it enlightens things. This use depends upon an associative and abstract reference. The celebrity becomes transcendent by being referred to as something else: the star. Yet this reference is also to something material: the body in space. Philosophers worry that this material reference is effaced, that it is both hidden and “used up” in metaphorical reference. As the term “star” comes to mean celebrity rather than “illuminated body,” its latter and literal signification becomes increasingly forgotten and the term loses some of its meaning. Philosophers (like France) think that this explains why metaphors eventually become “over-used,” “dead,” or “worn out” like clichés or old coins that eventually cease to have value. Yet the metaphysical movement of metaphor also depends on the materiality it effaces. The metaphorical meaning of star could not exist without its literal derivation. Thus, as well as prioritizing and idealizing the former, philosophers harbor a guilty sense that metaphor “exploits” the latter. Just as one might “use” or “exploit” the energies and talent of a laborer (or indeed any other person) for financial or personal gain, one might “use” and diminish a metaphor’s literal reference (and hence something of its materiality) in realizing its metaphysical aim (enlightenment, clarity, transcendence). Philosophers overlook, disavow and/or “talk down” the extent and effect of such “exploitation” in their accounts of metaphoric formation, which allows them to idealize metaphor. Derrida first addresses this “issue” or “contradiction” by pointing it out: by subtly “exposing” it. He then reformulates the philosophical notion of metaphor such that it manifestly includes both and all aspect of its functioning, suggesting that metaphor not only involves an (ideal) gain, but also a (material) loss. It has a creditable “use” but also “uses” its literal other. This has to be so, because the literal has a necessary and supplementary relation to the metaphoric.14 One specific and important implication of this is that metaphor is always already literal. To sum up, metaphor is both effective and exploitative, involves both a gain and a loss, is both good and bad, and is literal as well as metaphoric.
 
Now if the term “postmodernism” can be used “metaphorically” or “figuratively” as well as literally, then the characteristics of metaphor – more exactly deconstructed metaphor – can be attributed to it. Neither Jameson nor Jencks come to this conclusion; although they describe postmodernism differently, they both only describe it “literally” as “something” that is one way or another. Were they able to think about it another way, they might do so “figuratively,” as something that is made meaningful by reference to something else or as something that is other than what it is. This is of course what a metaphor “does”: it gets its meaning abstractly and associatively, enlightening one thing by likening it to another. Postmodernism thought figuratively would thus not be one thing or another; it would be one thing with (or with reference to) another – one thing and another. Apart from anything else, this means it could have apparently opposite attributes. Postmodernism could be derivative and original, good and bad. And just as deconstructed metaphor is always already literal as well as metaphoric (and is conversely metaphorical as well as literal), so postmodernism thought “figuratively” would be both metaphorical and literal too. This is all in keeping with Derrida’s argument that deconstructed metaphor would register doubly: as literal and metaphoric, as useful and usurious, as good and bad, and so on. Of course, these registrations are multiple as well as double. It follows that postmodernism thought figuratively would be multiple and double too. One could thus claim that it is good and bad in a number of respects: original and imitative, mundane and transcendent, profound and superficial. In each case, furthermore, one could claim that postmodernism is the former because it is the latter and vice versa (original because imitative, imitative because original, mundane because transcendent, transcendent because mundane, and so on). This last point is not an insignificant one.
 
An important logical implication of the above is that postmodernism can be thought of as both derivative and innovative, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, a deconstruction of postmodernism by figural means allows that it is innovative because it is derivative. There is no better illustration of this than Bowie, or rather Bowie as influence. There are numerous examples of “original” artists who have been influenced by Bowie as well as by his influences (if unknowingly). Many of the dark, spiky, dance pop-bands of the ’80s (Pet Shop Boys, Blancmange, Soft Cell) and their contemporary alien techno-disco artists (Moroder, Eurhythmics, New Order) were self-conscious late twentieth-century Bowiephiles, but they were also (whether they knew it or not) channeling and extending an alienated expressionism that was conceived in Dresden in 1901. They were continuing this form because what they were doing derived from it, yet they were also making it new. This derivation was at one remove (it came via Bowie) and was fairly unrecognisable (even, quite often, to them); they were practicing a new “postmodern” expressionism.15 Without Bowie’s “original” borrowing from expressionism, these “new” derivations wouldn’t have happened in such a vital way. Bowie’s “imitators” were original because he was derivative, and derivative because he was original.
 
Now, this explanation is derived from a deconstruction of postmodernism that permits it to be thought of as “good” despite or because it is also conceivable as “bad.” More specifically, it demonstrates that “original” postmodern art may be so because it also isn’t so. Of course the properly deconstructive corollary to this “fact” is that postmodern art can be “bad” despite being good and that its “badness” could be connected – even intimately connected – to its goodness. This particular possibility is most apparent and “useful” in explaining the political aspect of Bowie’s art. Bowie’s politics have sometimes seemed questionable or even reprehensible; some of his views have even been reactionary. Others have seemed to display a “bad” postmodern attitude; they’ve seemed superficial, contradictory, or suspect. David Bowie Is neither challenges nor mentions many of Bowie’s questionable political views. This isn’t because Bowie’s politics are unquestioned or beyond question; it’s more the case that they’re not questioned now, which is partly Bowie’s doing. Although he has implicitly or explicitly adopted a number of quite different and sometimes extreme political positions throughout his career, his art and his commentary on the world have gradually (if irregularly) moved towards a liberal-democratic (rather than, say, neo-liberal or socially liberal) position, one that broadly advocates human freedom and equality. This sort of position amounts to a sort of liberal-democratic humanism and conforms with the default political consensus in the states in which Bowie lives and mostly works: the US, the UK, and Europe. It thus seems good or at least neutral in those territories, and so is largely uncontroversial there. This is why nobody mentions Bowie’s politics now.
 
Bowie’s current “political” position thus seems to have integrity, or at least it seems inoffensive. This appearance of integrity and acceptability is maintained as long as both Bowie and his celebrity “image” are “liked,” loved, and idealized. Right now, they are. A certain reduced, mythic, and uncritical representation of Bowie’s life and work currently holds sway in popular culture. This representation is sustained, even promoted by David Bowie Is, which presents him in the best possible light and even implies it is the light of genius. The world “music press” and media are happy to concur. They have a good new Bowie album to enthuse about, a major Bowie show to pore over, and thus an apparent Bowie “renaissance” from which to generate positive copy. This renaissance coincides nicely with a significant historical phenomenon: the hyper-mythologization of certain rock stars currently being undertaken by the Western media.16 Like a number of other continuing and/or returning late middle-aged rock stars – Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who – Bowie is now being idealized and canonized in order to take his confirmed and final place in popular music mythology before he dies.17 In both popular and “alternative” contemporary media, Bowie can do no wrong, even though he might have been deemed to have done so in the past (his ambitiousness, drug-taking, and sexual promiscuity are all grist to the myth-mill in this regard). Both Bowie and the industry will reap significant financial benefits from his mythologization. None of this is to say that he doesn’t deserve to be mythologized, but it is to stress that current representations of him are mythic and that they therefore erase all of the flaws and contradictions of his life, art, and career, including the political ones. The Bowie myth holds as long as one doesn’t subject it to any sort of meaningful critique, including and especially a historico-political critique. David Bowie Is fully accedes to this proviso, but what follows doesn’t.
 
As indicated above, Bowie has striven since the early ’80s to align himself with a sort of liberal humanism. This has involved a sort of cultural pluralism. 1983’s Let’s Dance (both the song and the video, if not the whole album) makes many references to non-Western cultures and is explicitly anti-racist. Yet this stance can be seen as having rescued his career in the wake of the bad publicity Bowie got for advocating fascism in the ’70s (the influential Rock Against Racism movement in the UK was formed partly in response to this).18 Since then, he and his apologists have downplayed his “fascist” tendencies, which they’ve attributed to historical, psychological, personal, or situational lapses. It’s claimed that in the mid-to-late-’70s, Bowie was poorly advised, naïve, mismanaged, misunderstood, confused, and suffering from cocaine addiction. All of this is true, but doesn’t quite get him off the hook. If we take Bowie’s artistic literacy seriously (and we should), we have to admit that he nurtured crypto-fascist influences from early on. He had been making lyrical references to the Nietzschean Übermensch since 1971, quite directly in the chorus of one of his best-known and most popular songs, “Oh You Pretty Thing” (from Hunky Dory), whose chorus contains the line “You gotta make way for the homo superior.” This reference is usually missed, but the active term in it – “homo superior” – has been taken to equate to the notion of the Übermensch. This notion is sometimes understood as having inspired the idea of the “strong man” or “strong leader” that was promoted by fascist groups in Europe during the early to mid-twentieth century, and that was particularly and obviously embraced by the Nazis in their submission to and idolization of Adolf Hitler. Bowie linked the idea of the “homo superior” to Nazi-era style and fantasized about being a “strong political leader” himself from about 1975 onwards. His “Thin White Duke” character – who embodied this style and who Bowie played onstage and in his albums of the period (particularly Station To Station and Low from 1976) – was later described by him as “a very nasty character indeed” (Sandford 243). What’s more, a number of the “narratives” that underpin Bowie’s ’70s albums (like Diamond Dogs) are dystopian ones that contain far-right ideas (this is also true about some non-’70s albums like Outside from 1995). Bowie’s ’70s art is certainly more of a product of far-right ideologies and fantasies than it is of left-liberal ones.19
 
David Bowie Is effects a massive repression of Bowie’s historic far-rightism and does so by not mentioning it. This repression turns to disavowal when inadvertent crypto-fascistic symbols show up among the exhibits. The worst example is John Rowlands’s 1976 photograph of Bowie in a Weimer-era (Ola Hudson) suit, one arm extended in a salute-like gesture, adopting the sort of neoclassical pose beloved of the Hitler Youth (a signed copy is available in the V&A bookshop). Bowie still suppresses, represses, disavows, or avoids any possible assignation of fascistic political beliefs to his current or previous work. The recently published list of his “100 Favourite Books” contains some revealing omissions in this regard. It doesn’t include any books by Nietzsche, even though Bowie was patently and declaredly influenced by him throughout the ’70s. Even more surprisingly, it leaves out Burroughs, who not only directly influenced Bowie’s ’70s’ work, but also inspired some of his most striking work of the ’90s, namely, the Outside album and “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” video that was made for a song from it (see Fig. 3 below). Burroughs advocated the genetic engineering of an all-male, anarchistic master race (precisely a homo superior) and the concomitant ridding of female and other “weak” elements from human association.20 By not mentioning him, Bowie’s booklist avoids evoking Burroughs’s extreme libertarian and part-fascistic beliefs. The list was elicited from Bowie by one of the curators of David Bowie Is and was displayed in the show in Toronto. By displaying the list and using it for publicity, the show is complicit (once again) in Bowie’s suppression/repression of his rightist past.21 This complicity might be excusable if inadvertent, but it would then be displaying an ignorance that compromises the credibility of the show. In other words, the curators of David Bowie Is either know about Bowie’s temporary fascism, in which case they’re suppressing it, or they don’t know, in which case they should.
 
Yet how is Bowie’s “fascism” best understood and how, particularly, can it be understood in relation to his postmodernism? Bowie’s engagement with “fascism” (and with related right-wing ideologies) is best described as a flirtation, understood in its full sense. This full sense is an ambiguous one, so it’s worth articulating carefully; in the process, the term flirtation will undergo a sort of deconstruction. Flirtation is something that is and isn’t serious. On the one hand, it is taken to be superficial or empty, and so it doesn’t really “mean” anything: to flirt with someone does not mean that one will have sex with them. On the other hand, flirtation signals desire, which can be very serious (for example, in a psychoanalytic sense); it drives human behavior and can have enormous destructive as well as creative effects on human and non-human life. We need only think of the desire for power or the “death drive” in this regard.22 Indeed, it is because flirtation is a manifestation of desire and because desire is so serious that one speaks of “flirting with danger” or even “flirting with death.” Thus Bowie’s flirtation with fascism was both serious and not. On the one hand, he genuinely thought England in the ’70s was in a state of decline that only a fascist government could allay. On the other hand, he liked the uniforms and the haircut suited him. His “fascism” operated in a “double” register that exactly corresponded with the deconstructed “postmodernism” attributed to him above: it was serious and superficial at the same time. This registration was not only double; it was also reversible. Bowie’s “fascism” was not only superficial as well as serious (and vice versa), but also superficial because it was serious (and vice versa). These last points need some explaining.
 
The double registration (one might say duplicity) of Bowie’s “fascism” can be traced to his influences once again, and to his knowledge about those influences (or lack thereof). It’s already been shown that he is very well versed in the European artistic avant-garde and its “postmodern” developments, particularly expressionism, post-expressionism, surrealism, and their legatees. Some of this knowledge came via Bowie’s high school education, in which he specialized in and was good at art. Yet much of it was acquired by him subsequently through his own interests and research.23 Bowie had no higher education. He is well-read, but (largely) self-educated. Although some of his interests have been well-informed, others haven’t: they’ve been apocryphal, populist, and mythological. This is especially true about the influence of fascism. Bowie never formally studied politics, philosophy, or history, and his early understanding of all of them was incomplete, inaccurate, or distorted. His references to and transpositions of Nietzsche’s ideas exemplify this. The term “homo superior” is not a good translation of Übermensch and is not used by Nietzsche’s respected translators. It is a popular term, most often been employed in science fiction and comic-book literature to designate genetically improved or highly evolved beings that have “superhuman” qualities (of which Superman is the best-known example). There is indeed some “Nietzscheanism” in the concatenation of ideas that have led to the imagination of such beings in popular art and literature, but it is mixed up with genetic and futuristic fantasies and other science-fictional notions of all sorts.24 Bowie’s own interests in Nietzsche and fascism coincided with his belief in UFOs, his fascination with and practice of the occult, and his love of sci-fi. All of these interests were contemporaneous with a psychotic breakdown he had around 1976-78. In the intellectual and psychological chaos and drama of this breakdown, he came to the conclusion that there was a plot against him involving his friends, his manager, and some aliens. He thought that he could only protect himself against this plot with occult practices. Alongside this, he came to some other conclusions: that Nietzsche was a fascist and that fascism was a good thing. He decided that it should be introduced in England and that he might be the person to lead its development there. Disastrously, he began to say all this – directly and indirectly – both to people around him and to the music press.
 
Bowie’s ’70s “fascism” is an example of how something serious can be spoken about in a shallow and wrong-headed way, and yet get exposure and have influence. For some commentators, it is precisely an example of what is wrong with postmodernism (namely, that superficial or naïve views held by uninformed celebrities can have real effects). Yet it is even more involved a phenomenon than this, one that shows that postmodernism is complex. Demonstrating this means extending the deconstruction of postmodernism begun above, to demonstrate the way that something “bad” (e.g., “fascism”) can come out of something that is (at least ostensibly) “good.”
 
Bowie’s enormous curiosity, imagination, and creativity fed his interest in the political and aesthetic ideas that led him to fascism. His energies had already been stimulated by an earlier ethos that was non-fascist and even anti-fascist: the hippy movement of the late ’60s. Initially, Bowie had strongly identified with this movement, including its left-liberalism and collectivism.25 When the movement “broke down” and “sold out” in the early ’70s, he tried to make sense of this in a serious-minded way (in songs like “The Man Who Sold The World” and “Memories of a Free Festival”). Yet he also did so in an ill-informed way, and the conclusions he eventually came to were wrong. By the mid-’70s he had substituted National Socialism for collectivism and lumped both together with other “alternatives” to collectivism that suffused hippyism: mysticism and individualism. The result was a misguided rightist mess that had serious concerns at its root, but that engaged with them superficially and ignorantly, especially from our contemporary perspective.26 Yet Bowie’s “fascism” didn’t just contradict his “good” hippy intentions and his fair-minded political beliefs; it was also a sort of inversion of them and thus “necessarily” came out of them. In other words, Bowie’s “fascism” was both a response to the failure of hippy ideals and a reversal of the precepts they embodied.27 The general principle exemplified by this particular reversal (which would be a “deconstructive principal” if there were such a thing) is that pernicious effects can follow from good intentions. This is because they are the consequence of a misjudgment of such intentions, and/or because they are always already implied or implicated in them. These two possibilities are related, as in the case of Bowie’s “fascism.” Bowie didn’t only flirt with fascism because he didn’t understand it, but also because he didn’t understand its exact relation to and difference from (that is, its implication in) collectivism. More exactly, he didn’t understand that National Socialism is like “liberal humanism” in being a form of collectivism, but also unlike it in being autocratic. He was thus able to replace the latter naïvely with the former.
 
What this analysis tells us about Bowie’s postmodernism (and indeed postmodernism per se) is that it is complex, but also explicable according to a deconstructive “logic.” It is neither abundantly meaningful (as Jencks would have it) nor merely superficial (as Jameson would have it), but rather both. What it tells us about Bowie’s politics, as they relate both to his “postmodernism” and to its deconstruction, is that they should be tracked through, and are ultimately emanations from his art. It’s worth reiterating that David Bowie Is avoids or brushes over all this, and that it fails to address another, related aspect of Bowie’s postmodernism: Bowie’s sexual politics. Like his social politics and his art, these are complex and are complexly related to his postmodernism (and to the deconstruction of his postmodernism). Treating Bowie’s sexual politics ideally requires an article in itself, and this piece won’t deal with these politics in great detail. However, they’re important enough that one shouldn’t ignore them or treat them cursorily, as does David Bowie Is.
 
From this point in history it would be easy to make a strong political defense – even a shining example – of Bowie’s sexual politics. Bowie declared his bisexuality in 1972 and deployed his sexuality in his art creatively and strategically thereafter. He was publicly bisexual throughout the ’70s, when homophobia was common in UK popular culture and mainstream society. Bisexuality was even doubly vilified at the time, as it was often mistrusted by gay rights groups (who took some time to become Lesbian and Gay groups and significantly longer to become Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender groups). In short, the “straight” world tended to see bisexuality as another form of homosexuality and treated bisexuals homophobically as a consequence. Conversely, the gay community tended to see bisexuality as a form of imposture, treating bisexuals as temporarily or partially gay (as what Freud called “contingent inverts”) who didn’t have trustworthy sexual inclinations or identities (46-48).28 Of course, all of these terms and prejudices would be problematized and worked through in the subsequent three decades, but in the 1970s (and much of the ’80s) they were firmly “in place,” as were the prejudices that surrounded them.29 To his credit, Bowie adopted a position in relation to his sexuality that didn’t fit any recognisable political identity at the time, whether it was conventional or “progressive.” His sexuality remained quite uncategorizable in terms of the prevailing political oppositions through which sexuality was represented, understood, and lived. In this respect, he was undoubtedly a sort of queer pioneer. The treatment of this crucial fact by David Bowie Is is woefully inadequate, comprising little more than a middle-sized projection of the “Boys Keep Swinging Video” (1979) and an interview with Gary Kemp (of all people) in which he briefly enthuses about Bowie’s adoption of “the boy/girl thing.”
 
In anticipating queer politics, Bowie’s ’70s sexuality is postmodern in a rather obvious way. Yet it is also postmodern in a non-obvious – that is, a complex – way that is once again consequent on a deconstruction. This deconstruction isn’t just of “postmodernism” but also of Bowie’s bisexuality, which was both superficial and profound in exactly the way his postmodernism was. If Bowie was a (profound) sexual misfit and a pioneer, it’s also true that in some sense his sexuality was superficial, even fashion-led. It’s little known that Bowie didn’t initially identify himself as bisexual in the ’70s, but as gay.30 In this respect, his sexuality looks as if it might have been opportunistic. He was straight when it was unacceptable for a pop star to be gay (in the late ’60s), gay when it was becoming more acceptable not to be heterosexual (in the early ’70s), and bisexual when it was fashionable in some circles to be so (bisexuality had been made chic by one or two stars before Bowie, like Bolan). This looks like the height of superficiality – altering one’s sexuality according to fashion and apparently doing so for career purposes. Yet to see Bowie’s sexuality as just fashionable would be to miss a crucial and crucially meaningful aspect of it. Outside of sexual categorizations, his sexuality was radical in being distinctly and visibly non-human. Bowie adopted the figure of the alien throughout his career, from Ziggy in 1972 to the paradoxically alien Earthling of 1997. He even played an alien successfully in a high profile film: Nicholas Roeg’s remarkable 1976 version of Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell To Earth. If this wasn’t enough, Bowie has even said that the main theme of his ’70s work was alienation. Thus Bowie’s sexuality was other to any mainstream or fashionable sexual identity at least as much as it was in conformance or opposed to it. It was precisely this sexual alterity that appealed to his fans, and that was its truly radical aspect.31 This is what a deconstruction of Bowie’s sexuality properly reveals: that it was other than sexual, rather than “bisexual.” His sexuality anticipated the vicissitudes of radical sexual identities and politics for decades to come.
 

 

 
Click for larger view
 

Fig. 3.

Still from “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” (1995). Music video. Dir. Samuel Bayer (1995).

 
If one wanted to sum up very provisionally what has been shown about Bowie’s life and career above, one could say that both have been various and complex. This variety and complexity is characteristically postmodern, but also superficially so, in so far as it accords with a postmodernism that is understood too generally in terms of its common descriptive features (variety, complexity, stylishness, etc.) and not by way of a deconstruction of the logic that underpins them. What such a deconstruction discloses is a subtle cultural history, one that exceeds Bowie as much as it is impelled by him, and one in which his ghosts come back to haunt him. In one possible reading of this history Bowie’s misdemeanors (if that’s what they are), including his ‘flirtation’ with ‘fascism,’ are explicable and are product of ignorance and circumstance as much as anything else. Yet this reading, even if it redeems Bowie, doesn’t justify David Bowie Is. The shortcomings of the exhibition have to do with its omissions: its inadequate treatment of Bowie’s postmodernism, its occlusion of his flaws, its complicity with his current mythologization. If one thinks that a major exhibition has a responsibility to make one think, or to offer some critical perspective on its subject (however minimal), then David Bowie Is doesn’t do so — despite its provision of ample material for continuing stimulation of the ‘strange fascination’ that Bowie has held for so many of us for so long. This phrase – ‘strange fascination’ – is taken from one of Bowie’s best-known songs: “Changes.” It was astutely chosen by David Buckley as the title of his well-regarded Bowie biography. Another phrase from “Changes” bears even more on one of the main points this review has been trying to make, and specifically illustrates the shortcomings of David Bowie Is just mentioned;32 the exhibition isn’t ahistorical, but it is insufficiently and inaccurately so. It offers Bowie fans the opportunity to immerse themselves in a version of his career that is beautiful and comfortable, one that corresponds with ‘the stream of warm impermanence’ that Bowie repudiated in “Changes” and that bears him (and us) along in the current (and currency) of his myth.
 

 
In The New Wounded, Catherine Malabou seeks to reconcile advances in neurology and a material understanding of the brain with traditional psychoanalysis. In order to lay the groundwork for a potential revision of psychoanalysis, Malabou suggests that contemporary psychoanalytic subjects have emerged-“the new wounded”-who exhibit different behaviors than those in the traditional Freudian clinic. She explores the limits of historicity, narrative, meaning, and signification in the psychic lives of these new subjects. What new terms does the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic require in order to be effective? Malabou notes the explanatory power of contemporary neuroscience, and offers the reader a neologism: “cerebrality,” a term she then uses to suggest a new etiology of psychic trauma that accords explanatory power to the events of the brain itself. Freud’s concepts of sexual etiology, Malabou states, have in part been replaced by the brain and “cerebral events” as “the privileged site of the constitution of affects” (3). “In the same way that Freud upheld the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality,’” she states, “it has become necessary today to postulate a distinction between ‘brain’ and ‘cerebrality’” (2). This is to say that just as Freud posited a sexual etiology of neuroses, we must also find ways to articulate a “specific historicity whereby the cerebral event coincides with the psychic event” (2). By defining the term “cerebrality” and applying it throughout her study, Malabou seeks to move beyond the stalemate between neurology and psychoanalysis.
 
Rather than focus on temporalizing events that the subject can stitch into a narrative of the past, Malabou notes that there are events that sever all connections to the subject’s past and thereby lead to a disappearance of the self altogether. Malabou first cites examples of patients who have suffered brain lesions, degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, or violent head traumas, such as the classic case of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad worker who suffered an accident that forced an iron rod into his brain. The damage to Gage’s prefrontal lobe fundamentally changed his personality. He became a different person, unfamiliar to friends and family. Malabou points out that such individuals may well exist outside the reach of psychoanalysis, but she nevertheless draws connections between them and the contemporary analysand. Like these subjects, who have lost their own historicity due to organic brain damage, the new wounded—such as victims of sexual assault, terrorist attacks, or modern warfare—also become emotionally cool and disaffected, and undergo the loss of their histories due to an aleatory traumatic encounter. Instead of relying on Freud’s accounts of regression and his insistence on a return to originary traumas, Malabou dwells on these patients who instead irreversibly lose their narrative of self. She notes Freud’s difficulty with fully articulating the death drive, and asks: “Isn’t it precisely by accepting such events, which no longer fall under the jurisdiction of sexuality, that psychoanalysis can finally put itself in a position to flesh out the death drive, the beyond of the pleasure principle, and a new regime of events?” (210). Malabou argues that contemporary psychoanalysis must find tactics for dealing with those patients who have become fundamentally incapable of traditional transference and for whom their own psychic wounds do not have a clear narrative logic. The “subject supposed to know” does not carry the same weight if the analysand is cool, indifferent, and does not seek the love of the analyst: “A deserted, emotionally disaffected, indifferent psyche is not or is no longer capable of transference” (214). Rather than a loss of meaning, signification, or history, the new wounded have, in a sense, undergone a radical loss of self. Malabou examines traumatic events that cause neurological changes in the brain, events that are so intense and ultimately asignifying that they create a rupture with the subject’s own past and undermine all temporal and narrative continuity. She examines such neurological damage in part through the lens of negative plasticity.
 
For Malabou, then, traditional Freudian psychoanalysis does not sufficiently account for the idea that an identity can be wholly transformed by a traumatic event. She accordingly revisits the three main concepts of plasticity outlined in her 2008 book, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Plasticity, for Malabou, involves the capacity to receive form, the power to give form, and, less expectedly, the possibility of the “explosion” of every form, as in “plastic explosives” (17). This final aspect of plasticity becomes one of her organizing questions in The New Wounded: how can we think a negative or destructive plasticity, a radical negation of form in the psyche, and what are the implications of such a negative plasticity? Malabou writes that “There is, in Freud, no form to the negation of form” (166). Rather, Freud posits a continuous return to a “self-regulated originary plasticity” (166). That is, Freud insists on a deep narrative of self and a sexual etiology that repeats itself even in light of the most aleatory traumatic events in life. Contemporary neurology, she writes, has also avoided negative plasticity as an organizing concept. Malabou examines this limitation of neurology and notes that The Oxford Companion to the Mind takes a clear stance: “a massive and disorganized malfunction associated with extensive injury would not be referred to as plasticity” (181). But why not? Why is there not a better account of an identity radically transformed by destructive events?
 
Similarly, Malabou examines Oliver Sacks’s insistence on the role of narrative and biography, and the importance of what he calls “neurological novels” in his work. While Malabou acknowledges the “close relation between the metamorphosis of an identity that survives with a wound and the story of this metamorphosis—as if the plasticity of writing supported that of systems; as if writing itself repaired the wound that, as it repairs itself, nourishes writing,” she also questions the limits of such an approach. “Sacks,” she argues, “displays a confidence in disease that paradoxically but logically upholds his confidence in medicine and therapy themselves. It is significant, in this respect, that Sacks’s patients never cease to feel emotions” (187). Here we return to Malabou’s original question: what of patients who turn cold, who lose emotional affect, who lose the cohesiveness of their past identities after a severe event? Again she asks, how can we think a “plasticity without remedy?” (188). The suggestion here of a neurological unwriting of the subject becomes rich with potential.
 
In her final chapters, Malabou gives us the strongest arguments for what can be gained by defining “the new wounded.” She outlines the concept’s importance for the future of not only psychoanalysis, but also philosophy: “Rather than critique cerebrality from a hermeneutic or genealogical viewpoint, wouldn’t it be more interesting and more urgent to place the motif of cerebral desertion into relation with that of the disinheritance or deconstruction of subjectivity? Isn’t it time that philosophy discover the cerebral psyche as its subject?” (206). She emphasizes that Continental philosophy has rejected the realms of the material at its peril: “I continue to defend the thesis that the only valid philosophical path today lies in the elaboration of a new materialism that would precisely refuse to envisage the least separation, not only between the brain and thought, but also between the brain and the unconscious” (211-212). For Malabou, cerebrality and the related neuronal understanding of the brain must come to hold as strong a place as signification. The shift toward Malabou’s negative plasticity, and the need to seriously consider that there is a “beyond” of the “beyond of the pleasure principle,” means that contemporary analysands often do not function within the regime of an historic narrative in way that traditional psychoanalysis does.
 
In her concluding chapter, Malabou connects what she calls the “walking dead”—such as patients suffering from brain lesions or Alzheimer’s disease—to victims of geopolitical violence, whom she sees as functioning in a similarly aleatory and devastating way: “This type of transformation unto death, this survival without sublation, is not only visible in cases of severe brain lesions but also [in] the globalized form of trauma—appearing in the aftermath of wars, terrorist attacks, sexual abuse, and all types of oppression or slavery. Today’s violence,” she insists, “consists in cutting the subject away from its accumulated memories” (213). This connection between organic illness and geopolitical trauma becomes one of the most compelling points in her argument, even if it is among the least developed. Malabou claims, “The distinction between organic traumas and political traumas becomes blurred precisely because of the type of event that gives rise to them—a brutal event, without signification, that tends to efface its intentionality in order to appear as a blow inflicted upon any possible hermeneutics in general” (214). She cites the “temporal ruptures” inherent in random violence as creating similarly wounded subjects. However, is she not comparing two disparate types of trauma here, one undeniably organic and the other experiential? One way to understand her claim is to note that the geopolitical traumas in question are not symbolic or signifying events in the traditional Freudian sense, but asignifying traumas that radically reorganize the neuronal brain. As Malabou claims, “It is thus such a materialism, as the basis for a new philosophy of spirit, that determined my definition of cerebrality as an axiological principle entirely articulated in terms of the formation and deformation of neuronal connections” (212). In such a model, what will the connections between psychoanalysis and neurology look like? What becomes of the role of signification after such a violent rupture with the past self? Malabou only begins to hint at such moves in this book, but provides a point from which to launch further work.
 
As a final thought, Malabou raises the ethical and political implications of subjects who have been so fundamentally altered by violence that for them narratives of an historic self no longer carry therapeutic weight. What happens when the rupture with the past self is so severe that emotional emptiness comes to fill its void and creates patients who no longer experience transference because they “do not want either to know or not to know” (215). “Our inquiry,” she claims without hesitation, “revolves around the identification of evil” (213). The new wounded call responsibility itself into question, another provocative idea that she addresses in passing but suggestive ways:
 

The destructive event that—whether it is of biological or sociopolitical origin—causes irreversible transformations of the emotional brain, and thus of a radical metamorphosis of identity, emerges as a constant existential possibility that threatens each of us at every moment. At every instant, we are all susceptible to becoming new wounded, prototypes of ourselves without any essential relation to the past of our identities…. A form of life appears that bids farewell to all the subject’s old modes of being.

(213)

The author of the old self is in a sense truly dead. Who or what stands in its place?

 
In the beginning of The New Wounded, Malabou says it was watching her grandmother decline from Alzheimer’s disease that motivated her interest in contemporary subjects who remain outside the reach of psychoanalysis. Rather than offering a set of answers pragmatically linking psychoanalysis and neurology, she chooses to outline their limitations and asks us to focus on a further articulation of negative plasticity and the death drive. She does not offer a new therapeutic methodology, but heralds the clinic to come: “To apprehend the new wounded as figures of the death drive which would no longer derive from sexual etiology is…a very fruitful point of departure for a clinic to come—a clinic that, much like neuropsychoanalysis, would integrate the conjoined results of Freudianism and neurology” (214).
 
For Malabou, asignifying violence has the potential to rewire the brain, to create subjects of death for whom the narratives of their past lives bear little relevance to their recovery. The implications for contemporary philosophy, ethics, and politics may be equally dire: our narratives will no longer be relevant if they linger only in the realm of signification and tacitly reject the material.

 
In this book Jean Franco maps out the intersection of cruelty and modernity in Latin America by extending the conversation beyond a “narrow European perspective” (4) that centers on the Holocaust and the German concentration camps. Latin America has had its share of concentration camps, but what distinguishes this region from other parts of the world, according to Franco, is its particular history of conquest and colonialism. Antisemitism has also been present in Latin America—especially in Argentina during the 1970s—but for Franco, the principal victims of Latin American modernity have been women, children, and especially indigenous people. Although modern Latin American cruelty spans more than 500 years, Franco focuses primarily on atrocities from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the slaying of indigenous Peruvians in Uchuraccay, torture under Pinochet in Chile, rape during the Salvadoran civil war, cannibalism practiced by the army in the Guatemalan civil war, and decapitations during the Mexican “drug war.”
 
Cruel Modernity is not light reading. At its best, the book presents an insightful history of the more egregious forms of violence in Latin America. Franco’s readings of novels and films, when they are intimately connected to an historical context, produce revelatory information and strong arguments about what literature and film can do today to represent Latin America’s troubled history. This insight is clearly on display in Franco’s reading of El Infierno, a polemical testimonio by Luz Arce who, after working for Chile’s Salvador Allende, and after being tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship, collaborated with the Chilean secret police, DINA. Although El Infierno has been seen as divisive and polemical, Franco avoids either taking Arce to task because of her role as a collaborator or supporting her in her capacity as a victim. Instead, Franco notes that part of the dilemma invoked by Arce emerges from her testimonio‘s heavy emphasis on the act of torture itself, which diverts the reader from other lacunae in the book, and in particular from “her silence around events that happened after 1989 and were thus not covered by the amnesty granted to the military for their violation of human rights during the Pinochet regime” (173). For Franco, moreover, Arce’s focus on torture masks her own involvement in the disappearances and deaths, “for it is clear that her virtuoso narrative of torture acts as a cover for this other story of ‘reconciliation,’ which is, in reality, capitulation” (185-6). The point is that Arce’s dramatic story of torture functions to support a form of reconciliation that served the interests of the Pinochet regime.
 
Franco’s commitment to mapping out a historical framework for understanding violence also organizes her reading of Roberto Bolaño’s novels. In discussing Bolaño’s generation, Franco signals that what is central is not only the loss of a generation, but also the loss of an ideal: “[w]hat died with this lost generation…was the revolutionary ideal of a more just and generous society that, in his writing, is shared only by small groups of poets, poetry signifying for him an ideal and a lost cause” (233-4). These readings are firmly grounded in a certain historical moment. They also point to the way in which terms such as “victim” and “violence” are not transparent, and require a rigorous examination of specific movements and ideologies. They reveal how the insistence on violence in itself, far from making us aware of the origins of cruelty in Latin America, may in fact keep us from gaining a better understanding of it.
 
Franco opens the book with a discussion of El Masacre, also known as The Parsley Massacre, a 1937 slaughter of 20,000 Haitians who lived on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In this chapter Franco lays out the major ideas of the book: “the dehumanization of the victims, the attempted suppression of their memory, and the legacy of inexplicable loss belatedly registered in literary texts” (5). Clearly El Masacre is a story of ruthless modernity under the rule of Rafael Trujillo, but what is particularly cruel about it is that there “was no clear distinction” (33) between the Dominicans and Haitians, who share the same skin color, borderland culture, and even language. For this reason, Trujillo ordered a shibboleth on the word “perejil” (parsley), which served to divide not only the two nations, but also those who were “allowed to live and…condemned to die” (44). The event exemplifies Franco’s belief that modernization must involve the killing of innocent victims. For Franco, the six-day massacre “foreshadowed things to come” (44); that is, massacres and violence more generally are envisioned in the book as indiscriminate acts against innocent victims. At the same time, the event showcases the desire of those in power to eradicate the memory of injustices, as the Trujillo regime attempted to do by calling El Masacre a “minor incident” (Franco 26). This effort to eradicate memory was largely successful until the discovery of a buried book, El masacre se pasa a pie (The Massacre Walks By), which rescued El Masacre from oblivion. In this way, according to Franco, writing and literature more broadly serve to remember and resurrect the victims of modernization.
 
Franco chronicles numerous narratives of atrocity in the book; what follows is an attempt to discuss her larger project. We might begin by noting the tension invoked by the title Cruel Modernity. For a scholar who is interested in historicizing violence, the term cruelty offers a unique challenge, for it is a highly evocative and emotive term specific neither to one country nor singular period. It is also a term that marks a sort of transgression, an act that exceeds the limits of rationalization. The term modernity, on the other hand, is meant to rein in this excessiveness—to demystify it—showing that cruelty, for the purposes of Franco’s book, is deeply connected to the logic of modernization. Borrowing from Enrique Dussel’s theory of modernity, Franco argues that what distinguishes Latin American from European modernity is Spanish conquest and colonialism. Although the identities of the victims are different—predominantly indigenous peoples and women—the overall logic of modernity is the same: “since the barbarian is opposed to the civilizing process, modern praxis must in the end use violence if necessary to destroy the obstacles to modernization” (Franco 52). Therefore the term “modernity” aptly allows Franco to move through centuries and across Latin American geographies to discuss cruelty, but it also runs the risk of conflating different political movements, and therefore of making it harder for her to understand “the social vacuum that allows cruel acts” (22). Indeed, as the emphasis on cruelty itself signals, the book is less committed to discerning the reasons behind such cruelty than it is to producing a catalogue of the various forms cruelty takes. At the same time, this approach does permit Franco to bring much-needed awareness to some of Latin America’s lesser-known atrocities.
 
The tension between cruelty and modernity also allows Franco to argue that violence primarily occurs against identitarian groups. Franco contends that modernization comes at the expense of diverse victims, in particular countless indigenous people. The challenge here is to avoid reducing modernity to a question of identity or presenting modernity as a monolithic event that remains consistent regardless of period, geography, or actor. Nevertheless, there are several places where Franco’s text does exactly this. For example, in discussing the recent civil wars in Peru and Guatemala, two areas with large indigenous populations, she wonders whether the killings of indigenous people are a “reenactment of the conquest itself” (Franco 79). In psychologizing contemporary violence as a colonial “reenactment,” Franco describes violence against indigenous peoples as an originary trauma incessantly replayed throughout history. What her point misses is that these are no longer Spanish conquistadores killing in Latin America. In many instances indigenous and mestizo peoples are not only involved in, but also actively plan, these massacres. This is not to say that histories of conquest and colonization do not play a hand in some of the violence that takes place today, but the fact that the actors are different suggests, at the very least, that Latin America’s more recent history is also at play. Taking events like the recent dictatorships in the Southern Cone into account shows that cruelty and modernity concern not necessarily identity, but rather ideology, regardless of identity. From this position, the insistence on identity in some of Franco’s examples obscures the reasons the violence erupted in the first place.
 
Cruel Modernity represents a certain culmination not only of Franco’s own research, but also of a type of human rights work that began nearly four decades ago in Latin America and elsewhere. In The Last Utopia, Samuel Moyn argues that human rights discourse emerged in the 1970s as a utopian project, and that two characteristics of human rights discourse are its reflection of a clear crisis of the state and its insistence that resistance comes from outside the state. These two characteristics are also central to Franco’s approach to understanding violence. She imagines that violent acts reflect an “end of state-operated justice” (Franco 119) and suggests that we readers, who are outside of the state, must help victims by never “forgetting” these acts of cruelty. This vision also requires us to see violence through the “indiscriminate” lens of human rights; in other words, all victims are the same, whether they are indigenous peoples or Marxist revolutionaries. Somewhat anticipating the problem with this framework (for both indigenous peoples and revolutionaries), Franco notes that some “rightly criticize the blanket representation of the tortured, the executed, and the disappeared as victims, a term that places party members, militants, and those active in civil rights organizations under the same rubric without distinction. But in massacres, there are no distinctions; the aim is to banish the memory of the victims from the earth” (20). At this point, we come closest to understanding why Franco chooses to write about massacres, and this choice may also be the most flawed aspect of her book. Undoubtedly, massacres indiscriminately kill people, and their victims may be remembered or forgotten. Nevertheless, whatever the injustice may be, it does not erase the particular politics that drive massacres. It is as if, for Franco, massacres and a broad definition of modernity provide enough reason to endorse not only blanket representations of children and revolutionaries, but also—and more dangerously—a depoliticized account of violence. In other words, unlike the more insightful sections of her text, here cruelty and modernity serve to “banish the memory” (Franco 20) not only of the victims but also of the politics that underlie such violence and the response to it.
 
Despite these potential shortcomings in the argument, Franco’s book should be commended for its strong attempt to produce a history of cruelty in Latin America, and her text should be an indispensable work for those unfamiliar with this history. Cruel Modernity also offers compelling reading for undergraduates who seek a better understanding of violence in contexts situated outside of the United States and Europe. At the same time, the solution to the political question of violence in Latin America must involve not only a greater awareness of atrocities, but also an examination of the underlying politics that go beyond cruelty and modernity.

In the closing paragraph of a recent essay that asks “What’s Left for Latin American Cultural Studies?,” critic Sophia McClennen addresses the future trajectories of North American academics and their counterpart cultural practitioners in the region. For McClennen, the rise of Latin America’s marea rosada (pink tide) governments compels critics to reconfigure the structures of power and loci of domination that were previously assumed to fall in the hands of the right-wing dictatorships that swept the region from the 1970s onward.
 

As the overt and covert US military influence in the region gave way to “dollar diplomacy,” a number of Latin American nations found themselves led by governments that self-identified as left or socialist. Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and Cuba became part of the “pink tide” of the twenty-first century socialism movement. While the actually existing Left politics of these governments has been analyzed and critiqued, and while not all of these governments were able to remain in power, it remains clear that this is an unprecedented moment for Left politics.

(138)

Now no longer in the grips of right-wing tyranny, the state faces a categorically different challenge and, with it, so do North American cultural critics of Latin America. That challenge is to confront the new global configurations of capital under neoliberalism, which were first tested in the very Latin American countries that now resist them, and to strategize equally transnational modes of resistance that break with the now outdated leftist tradition of local armed factions and guerrilla groups. “The institutionalization of the Left that has taken place during these administrations will likely be one of the main areas of focus for future work on Latin American cultural studies,” McClennen predicts:

The currently existing forms of political activism have taken on new modes of organization that no longer track to the idealized ideas of indigenous resistance movements and guerrilla groups, and they no longer take place wholly within the nation-state. These transformations call for new ways to engage the power imbalances that stem from neoliberal free-market practices.

(138)

While the people, leaders, artists, and thinkers of the region have embraced this change, adapting their own methodologies and critiques to the new configurations of power ushered in by this supposed paradigm shift, the part of the North American academy that likes to think of itself as a critical check on Anglo-American ethnocentrism has categorically failed (or undoubtedly will fail) to follow suit. “One thing remains the same,” warns McClennen: “Latin American cultural studies will continue to be guided by polemics, internal debates, fashionable trends, and a permanent desire to create new forms of academic knowledge and new modes of critique capable of advancing an ever-changing, constantly in question Left project” (138).

 
McClennen longs for a politically involved kind of Latin American cultural studies that bridges the divide between the professorial armchair and the revolutionary actor.¹ To a certain extent, her appraisal of the situation is accurate: academics with leftist political interests often find themselves mired in the academy. But this phenomenon is by no means unique to Latin American cultural studies, and indeed one could argue precisely the opposite regarding the relationship between existing political praxis and academics who practice Latin American cultural studies. One might even go so far as to argue that Latin American cultural studies vis-à-vis its institutional counterparts in North American literary and cultural studies enjoys a relatively marked presence in political debates in the region of expertise. From the ’70s and ’80s to the present, Beatriz Sarlo, Ileana Rodríguez, Ángel Rama, Ernesto Laclau, and others have enjoyed prominent roles in Latin American politics as well as in the development of Latin American cultural studies. (Excepting Sarlo, all have held permanent positions in the North American academy and Sarlo herself has lectured widely and held numerous visiting positions in the US.) But McClennen’s critique is sharper and more directed toward what she sees as a general tendency within the discipline in the Anglo-American academic world to overlook political developments in Latin America while professing both a politically Left stance as well as interpretative authority on the region.
 
Against this backdrop of North American humanities scholars who work on Latin America while remaining disconnected from the rise to power of self-proclaimed socialist governments since Chávez in 1998, two recent books attempt to engage these regional political shifts from north of the Mexican border. Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (2010) traces the history of these shifts within the academic and activist Left, from Peronism in Argentina to Maoism in Peru, and, like McClennen, he highlights moments in this history that suggest a configuration of political struggle different than the one on offer until now. John Beverley’s Latinamericanism After 9/11 (2011) shares many of Beasley-Murray’s concerns, but largely questions the extent to which academics and activists alike must reconfigure the approach to leftist struggle in Latin America, and diagnoses such attempts at reconfiguration as one of the melancholic effects of our post-1989 world, after the end of “really existing socialism.” Yet for all their apparent and important differences, these and many other books being published in today’s North American “Latin American cultural studies” paint a very different picture of the discipline than the one offered by McClennen: polemics and internal debates are increasingly shelved in favor of thinking about existing modes of struggle—from the Zapatistas in Chiapas to the piqueteros in Argentina—that attempt to position themselves with, against, and beyond the confines of the state. In fact, recent publications from critics like Bruno Bosteels, José Rabasa, Ileana Rodríguez, and Gareth Williams, among many others, not to mention the consistent production from preeminent thinkers on the region like John Holloway and Michael Löwy, suggest attempts to reconfigure the North American academy with an eye not only to the 2008 global economic crises but also to the marea rosada governments are fundamental to updating and reinvigorating the academic Left.²
 
Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony is divided into two parts, the first critical, the second positive. The first part mounts a critique of hegemony by way of its current critical avatars in cultural studies and in civil-society theory. The variant of cultural studies that concerns Beasley-Murray is the one commonly referred to as the Birmingham School.³ Largely emanating from the Richard Hoggart-directed Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, this version of cultural studies developed in the early 1960s out of an exchange between British Marxist historians and literary critics that featured the likes of Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams. Beasley-Murray maintains that this strand of cultural studies reduces politics to hegemony, which he understands, via Antonio Gramsci, as “the notion . . . that the state maintains its dominance (and that of social and economic elites) thanks to the consent of those it dominates. Where it does not win consent, this theory suggests, the state resorts to coercion” (x). Beasley-Murray takes British cultural studies to task for obscuring processes that do not involve consent and coercion. These include habit, affect, and the multitude, concepts borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, and Antonio Negri, respectively. Habit, affect, and the multitude form the basis for the second part of Beasley-Murray’s book, which constitutes posthegemony positively as a theoretical and political project in contradistinction to current modes of thought like cultural studies.
 
In the first part of the book, Beasley-Murray concludes that cultural studies promotes populism as a stand-in for the state, thereby obscuring and, more devastatingly, becoming complicit with the state-led, antipolitical status quo. He argues that, by paying attention only to representational forms of discourse, cultural studies misses and actively ignores the pre-rational forms of oppression and domination, such as populism, that the state wields through habit and affect. Beasley-Murray’s critique of civil-society theory resembles his attack on cultural studies: civil-society theory also cannot account for pre-rational forms of domination like habit and affect and, in its ignorance of these, not only fails to grasp contemporary politics but, in fact, also actively promotes a political program complicit with the ideology of the state. Whereas cultural studies promotes populism, civil-society theory is complicit with neoliberalism, and populism and neoliberalism furthermore work symbiotically to advance late capitalism’s right-wing agenda and suppression of politics.
 
Beasley-Murray targets three thinkers who exemplify the theoretical heights of cultural studies (Ernesto Laclau) and civil-society theory (Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen). He argues that a defense of populism is not only legible from Laclau’s first book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), through his most recent, On Populist Reason (2005), but is also premised on the unsustainable distinction between a Right and a Left populism that Laclau drops in his later texts, thereby “validating populism as a whole.” “Hegemony, cultural studies, populism: these three slippery terms meet at the nexus that is Laclau’s theory of hegemony,” writes Bealsey-Murray, only to sound hegemony theory’s death-knell moments later: “any analysis that relies upon the concept of hegemony inevitably partakes of a populist politics” that remains silent about the role of the state and institutional power, inevitably becoming antipolitical (41). Whereas Laclau’s failure lies in his categorical evasion of questions relating to the state, thereby excluding it from the political picture, Arato and Cohen deal with the state openly by delineating its supposed autonomy. For Beasley-Murray, this attempt to clearly separate civil society from the state is telling. Their
 

insistence on the autonomy of the state and market, allegedly in the name of civil society’s own autonomy, demonstrates the paradoxes of civil society theory: a theory of democracy becomes a discourse of governmentality and control that sets the constituted power of state and market institutions against the democratizing force of social movements.

(88-89)

Arato and Cohen offer a civil-society theory with self-imposed limits to the utopian projects instigated by various social movements. But because they do not think these limit horizons from within the social movements, they cannot make the former work productively for the latter and at the expense of the interests of state or market forces. Instead, these theorists impose upon civil society (and, hence, the social movements that arise from it) various rational controls that police its boundaries, including the very market-friendly, instrumental logic to which they profess opposition.

 
While Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America critiques political theories that cannot account for pre-social, pre-ideological, or even pre-cognitive modes of social domination like habit and affect, Beverley’s Latinamericanism After 9/11 questions some of the political implications of such a critique. Beverley is less concerned with the civil-society theory of Arato and Cohen than with the avowedly rational concepts of hegemony and ideology that Beasley-Murray considers outdated for understanding contemporary politics. For Beverley, not only do hegemony and ideology still hold theoretical purchase, but, along with other concepts like identity, they also appear most apt for describing the rise of pink tide governments across Latin America. In a moment of self-critique, though, Beverley arrives at the same conclusions as McClennen about Latin American cultural studies today: the current state of politics in Latin America (which is to say, “after 9/11″—neoliberalism and new social movements included) compels us to do away with our old critical paradigms. McClennen thinks that this newly-oriented academic focus on the pink tide governments will result in updated critical work that will no longer recall “images of guerrillas rising up in arms” or resemble “the idealized ideas of indigenous resistance movements and guerrilla groups, and . . . no longer take place wholly within the nation-state” (138). For both McClennen and Beverley, the pink tide suggests a fundamental break from much of Latin America’s right-wing past, especially since the onset of neoliberalism after Chile’s own 9/11.⁴ But Beverley weighs more heavily the continuities between these supposed “indigenous resistance movements” of yesteryear and the current pink tide governments in countries like Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. “The paradigm implicit in subaltern studies (and postmodernist social theory in general) was that of the separation of the state and the subaltern,” he writes, explaining his own intellectual trajectory since the early ’90s: “the intention was to recognize and support both previously existing and newly emergent forms of resistance that did not pass through conventional historical narratives of state formation and statist forms of citizenship and political or social participation” (8-9). But now, these very subaltern movements have themselves propped up socialist governments: “in a situation where, as is the case of several governments of the marea rosada, social movements from the popular-subaltern sectors of society have ‘become the state,’ to borrow a phrase from Ernesto Laclau, or are bidding to do so, a new way of thinking the relationship between the state and society has become necessary” (9). This new paradigm, contrary to McClennen’s implication, entails a rethinking rather than an avoidance of the question of the state in light of its Left-subalternist alterations in Latin America.
 
Rethinking the relationship between the subaltern and the state is the aim of the last chapter of Beverley’s book, and one might even go so far as to say that the entire book is structured around this chapter. Beverley and Beasley-Murray share this concern with the state, and their books could be said to emerge out of a fundamental dissatisfaction with the way current leftist political and cultural theories deal with the question of the state. Beasley-Murray’s dissatisfaction with populism lies in its ability to generate an affectively charged support of the state in the guise of ignoring it altogether, and in its inability to distinguish between its leftist and rightist variations. His critique of civil-society theory similarly foregrounds its relation to the state and its positing of an autonomous civil society that, in turn, implies the autonomy of the state and of the market forces that end up governing it. While Beverley at certain points seems to agree with this assessment, Beasley-Murray presents the relationship between the state and the subaltern classes as always having been intimate: “it is not so much that the subaltern is excluded from power. In fact, the state is parasitic upon the power of the so-called ‘excluded’; it is they who provide it with legitimacy and life, as much as (or even more than) it is the state that denies welfare and recognition to them” (162-63). But the state still functions as an axis of control and subordination with respect to the subaltern. “The state is a reflex, constituted by and in affect, only to expel any affective surplus to the demonized margins of its territorial and symbolic control. The state excludes culture and affect, categorizing and disciplining it, but as a reaction-formation that depends upon an affective culture that is, in fact, primary” (163). This account implies a fleeting or immanent hope of a state that, as Marx says of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto, produces its own gravediggers, but in this case specifically through the emphasis on affect rather than by creating the proletariat. This hope, however, appears much more pronounced in Beverley’s suggestion that the pink tide governments, if not the gravediggers themselves, at least compel us to reconsider the state seriously as a locus of struggle that might expedite this process.
 
If there has always been an intimate (though not reciprocal) relationship between the subaltern and the state, Beverley suggests that it has qualitatively changed “after 9/11,” that is, after the sweeping victories of self-proclaimed socialist governments across Latin America since Chávez. Along with this qualitative shift, many leftist academics must give up their allergy toward the state, he urges, and this includes entertaining the idea that many of today’s leaders in the region came to power with the overwhelming support of groups that have been typically classified as subaltern. Evo Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government in Bolivia is a case in point. MAS vice-president Álvaro García Linera gives one of the most forceful arguments for bypassing the seeming opposition between the subaltern and the state upheld by critics like Beasley-Murray. Instead of maintaining a kind of ethical relation of unbridled solidarity with the subaltern classes, one which excludes politics altogether,
 

García Linera argues for a new form of politics directed at “becoming” the state that in some sense comes from the subaltern, but also involves the participation of intellectuals and “theory.” He moves away from the simple binary opposition between the state and the subaltern, to presuppose that hegemony not only can be but needs to be constructed from subaltern positions.

(Beverley 120).

While contradictions and tensions that, to a certain extent, dilute or slow the process of change will necessarily exist, the initial step of reaching state power is more important than maintaining a critique from within the left (a kind of “left opposition” in solidarity). And for Beverley, as for García Linera, this project of reaching state power must entail certain utopian ideals both to keep it honest and to keep it moving.⁵

 
In addition to rethinking the question of the state, which has been completely left off the table as an object of inquiry for Left critique since the fall of “really existing socialism” in 1989 (or even before then, dating back to Nicos Poulantzas and the experiment of Eurocommunism),⁶ Beverley asks us to rethink the question of armed struggle in Latin America. By this provocation he does not mean to rethink the viability of armed struggle today, but rather to consider how contemporary reflections on the armed struggles of the past indicate the political positions of Latin American intellectuals today vis-à-vis the pink tide governments. Beverley classifies most retrospectives of the armed struggle in Latin America, beginning roughly with the 1959 Cuban Revolution and ending with the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua due to the US-backed Contra War, as part of the “paradigm of disillusion” (see Ch. 5). He argues that most intellectuals who participated in or were ideologically close to these guerrilla movements in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s cast a revisionist light on them today in an attempt to distance themselves from them. These intellectuals thus produce a body of narratives that call into question the armed struggle, presenting a heavily one-sided account of the events. But much more important for Beverley is the fact that many of the pink tide’s leaders, including Álvaro García Linera and Dilma Rousseff (the current president of Brazil), themselves participated in the armed struggle.
 
For Beverley, this disavowal of yesterday’s armed struggle politically cashes out today in critiques of the pink tide governments, complacency with neoliberalism, and fodder for the Left’s right-wing challengers.
 

My underlying assumption is that, while there are many good reasons to be critical of or skeptical about the armed struggle, a vision of it as an ‘equivocación,’ or error, as in [Argentine critic Beatriz] Sarlo, even when it is produced from what is nominally a leftist position, sustains neoliberal hegemony in Latin America, in the same way that an antisixties narrative underlies the neo-conservative turn in the United States.

(98)

Many of the retrospective narratives of the armed struggle come from intellectuals who have since markedly veered to the right,⁷ and Beverley worries that this almost exclusive focus on the failures of the armed struggle, even when written from a leftist perspective like Sarlo’s, leaves future generations only one option: that of accepting the neoliberal status quo. He notes moreover that the paradigm of disillusion has not prepared us adequately for appraising the new pink tide governments. It has instead imposed upon us a “residual guilt that shades into an acceptance of, or identification with, the powers that be” (109). We must thoroughly work through our own disillusion, our own melancholia of defeat, without resorting to undifferentiated, one-sided, and developmentist narratives that uncritically identify “forward movement in time with progress” (100).⁸ We must remember, in short, that the armed struggles of the past were waged at a time when the future of Latin America was, like today, up for grabs.

 
Reflections on those armed struggles of the past, many now categorized as new social movements, make up the second part of Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony. This second part, theoretically structured around the concepts of affect, habit, and the multitude, builds a theory of posthegemony that not only breaks with Laclau’s populism and Arato and Cohen’s civil-society theory, but also challenges other prevailing analytical tools like ideology critique for understanding human interaction in merely rational terms. Theorists on the Left—Slavoj Žižek in particular—have attempted to revamp ideology critique in an attempt to move beyond the age-old Marxist impasse of understanding ideology as a mere question of false-consciousness. Žižek instead calls for an analysis of how ideology structures the very social reality in which we live, beyond our immediate symbolic register. But Beasley-Murray contends that “if ideology is no longer a matter of (mis)representation, then it should be reconceived as immanent and affective” (177). The social order and the state, in other words, exert their control through habitual customs and affective charges that make people inured to the struggles of everyday life and momentarily bracket the question of the state altogether. Habits, Beasley-Murray explains, are commonsensical and undertaken without ever having fully come to consciousness. They can reproduce themselves time and again. The social atmosphere in which they are formed furthermore sets the limits of this supposed common sense. Most importantly, habits and affects happen in the body below the symbolic registers of discourse and representation at which ideology remains trapped.
 
Beasley-Murray is not content, however, with simply offering up affect and habit as tools for critique. His project is much more ambitious: “Affect threatens social order. . . . Resistance is no longer a matter of contradiction, but rather of the dissonance between would-be hegemonic projects and the immanent processes that they always fail fully to represent” (136). As suggested earlier, perhaps it is because the state has tapped into affective energies in order to control its citizenry that affect also becomes the new site and weapon of Left struggle. The importance of affect for Beasley-Murray’s “posthegemonic analysis” cannot be overstated. Elsewhere he makes the primacy of affect clear: it structures habit (affect at a standstill) as well as the multitude (affect becoming subject). Beasley-Murray aligns himself here with the affect theory developed by political theorist Brian Massumi, though he seems aware of some of affect theory’s pitfalls: “the Deleuzian conception of affect is insufficient, indeed . . . it falls prey to traps similar to those that befall hegemony theory, in that on its own it cannot distinguish between insurgency and order, ultimately between revolution and fascism” (127).
 
Affect theory’s solution to this important political conundrum finds its fullest expression in its response to terrorism. Beasley-Murray argues for understanding El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a guerrilla group that waged a continuous war against the state from roughly 1980 to 1992, through Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic “war machine.” The “war machine” offers an alternative form of political organization to the state. It constitutes an outside to the state and is constituted by a radical exteriority that is absolutely open to plurality, multiplicity, and difference. Politically, it implies a democratic organization that must be constantly open to experimentation and renewal. And in the face of terror, it “obliterates individuality” and makes us “realize that we are part of a collective” (154). Habit, like affect, also has a positive means of presenting a political challenge. In the epilogue to his book, Beasley-Murray considers the case of the 1989 Caracazo in Venezuela:
 

The trigger for the Caracazo was no more (and no less) than habit. Commuters were accustomed to paying one price for public transport; they protested when they were suddenly forced to pay another. In response to the shock doctrine of neoliberal reform, sprung on the nation without warning after President [Carlos Andrés] Pérez had run for office on a broadly populist platform, the Venezuelan population took violent umbrage.

(288)

Beasley-Murray notes that this response from the Venezuelan multitude was conservative in many respects, thereby offering a dose of skepticism to his stress in the previous chapter on the multitude’s revolutionary power. The Venezuelan multitude made itself known again in 2002 when a short-lived coup d’état against Chávez was paralyzed by sweeping protests calling for the deposed president’s return. Beasley-Murray reads this moment in which Chávez was briefly deposed as a quintessential expression of the multitude’s power: chavismo or the Bolivarian revolution, largely understood as a populism centered around the ideology of one person, could not exist without a multitude that resisted calls for representation.

 
In the few years since its publication, Beasley-Murray’s book has already attracted a significant amount of attention in the forms of both praise and criticism. Posthegemony was awarded Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for best book on Latin American or Spanish literature and culture.⁹ Beyond numerous positive reviews, it has been the subject of several essays and numerous conference papers.¹⁰ But the book and its overall project have also faced an increasing amount of criticism from Latin American literary, anthropology, and political science circles.¹¹ Beverley’s Latinamericanism has enjoyed some of the same results.¹² But apart from a handful of positive reviews, his arguments have largely been called into question by some of the same critics who support Beasley-Murray’s analysis of posthegemony. Indeed, his book is exclusively targeted by a dossier of the journal Política Común titled “On John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11” that is edited by Sam Steinberg and includes an article by Beasley-Murray himself.
 
These varied responses to each book in part have to do with their respective projects: while Beasley-Murray’s book attempts to develop its own positive theory of posthegemony, Beverley’s book interrogates already available theories. But they also have to do with the dialectic between their perceived positions with respect to Latin America’s pink tide governments and their theoretical commitments. Beverly, for example, is not bashful about his support for the governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela. And his theoretical commitments remain tied to the more traditional Marxist concepts of hegemony, ideology, and subalternity. Whereas against those who, like Beverley, praise the pink tide governments, Beasley-Murray contends that “these electoral victories are at best a symptom, at worst a reaction” (285). They are a symptom, he suggests, of the multitude’s need for constituted power at the same time that its constituent power exceeds the political representation they offer. They are a reaction to the displays of constituent power insofar as they can create a political vacuum that primes far-right alliances between the military and neoliberal capitalist forces to take control the moment they falter. This kind of response obligates Beasley-Murray to frame the political problem differently: given that the pink tide governments do not offer a new political opportunity insofar as they occupy the role of the state, we must develop new forms of critique that make us attentive to the contours of state power. The tools used by the state to quell resistance, like affect and habit, then also become sites of resistance, places where the pressure of the multitude can unravel the power of the state.
 
Beverley’s critique of these attempts to wither away the state without ever becoming part of it stage this dialectic between posthegemony theory’s support or opposition to the pink tide governments and its theoretical commitments. Following Lenin’s famous tract “Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1921), Beverley sees Beasley-Murray and other politically-informed “second wave” deconstructionist critics like Moreiras as “ultraleftists.”¹³ He characterizes this form of deconstruction as an attempt to intervene in Leftist politics (and critics like Moreiras would certainly agree): their goals are not merely to deconstruct texts, but also to renew the Left in order to lay the theoretical groundwork for a political transformation in Latin America. Beverley sees this last goal as the one this politicized form of deconstruction cannot live up to without supporting the pink-tide governments:
 

It seems, then, that both of these distinct (albeit related) outcomes to the unexpected impasse deconstruction encounters in its pretended relation with Latinamericanism—that is, Moreiras’s critique of the “onto-theological” character of politics and the apocalyptic ultraleftism of the “multitude” and “posthegemony” involve in fact a renunciation of actual politics, which means that despite their claim to be “transformative,” they remain complicit with the existing order of things.

(59)

Put another way, deconstruction’s ethical fraternity with the subaltern (he uses the example of Gayatri Spivak) keeps the latter politically in their place as the idealized subaltern. It takes away from them any power they might have had to change their subaltern status. “To make the claim that deconstruction is on the side of the subaltern, whereas ‘hegemony’ is on the side of domination,” writes Beverley, “is precisely not to deconstruct the binary that grounds that claim in the first place” (114). Instead of allowing for the possibility of the subaltern classes to change their status qualitatively and become part of, say, the proletariat or the ruling political class, deconstructionists reify the subaltern to the point of fixing people to their marginal political status.

 
While Beasley-Murray’s and Beverley’s respective projects seem at first glance to be antithetical to one another, at several moments this opposition dissolves and they appear much closer. For example, the most polemical chapter of Beverley’s book, titled “The Neoconservative Turn,” attacks a group of Latin Americanist critics that he claims have turned to the right from within the Left. He identifies this trend with three scholars in particular: the Guatemalan critic Mario Roberto Morales, the Uruguayan scholar Mabel Moraña, and Beatriz Sarlo. Beverley is afraid that something like what happened in France after the ’68 student protests will happen to these Latin American critics: in France, student members of a revolutionary Maoist group—among them André Glucksmann and Bernard Henry-Lévy—quickly turned to the Right after the protests, calling themselves the nouveaux philosophes, and made their careers through intellectual posturing on TV. Beverley’s argument is purposely polemical and overstated, and Morales has rightly taken him to task in an exchange published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (where Beverley’s chapter first appeared as an article) for a kind of multiculturalist essentialism that reifies Latin America’s indigenous identifications and unconditionally celebrates certain identities (“mestizo,” “the Mayas,” “the subaltern,” etc.) to understand a multi-ethnic reality.¹⁴ Beverley all too easily equates a cultural anti-essentialism with anti-leftism. As Morales explains, “Beverley, being a culturalist (that is, someone who privileges culture over the economy when theorizing about the rights of the subaltern) also adopts the moralism of a ‘people’s commissar,’ pointing out who is on the right and who on the left” (87). In other words, by leaving economics out of the picture entirely, Beverley cannot distinguish mestizo elites from, say, the subjugated mestizo peasants. The dictates of multiculturalism would only be able to identify both as mestizos, understood as an undifferentiated subaltern in whose name we must unconditionally submit. Beverley falls into the same inability to distinguish right from left that he spends his entire book attempting to address. In many ways, Latinamericanism is fraught with Beverley’s postmodernist past that comes into contradiction with a Marxist present.
 
Beverley comes closest to Beasley-Murray in his critique of Sarlo (whose book, Scenes from a Postmodern Life, the latter translated). Beverley takes Sarlo to task for defending literature in a modernist way against other forms of cultural articulation. In his Against Literature (1993), Beverley famously denounced literature as a bourgeois construct that cannot adequately represent an essentialized subaltern subject. He continues this line of criticism in Latinamericanism after 9/11. In the case of Sarlo, who criticizes “a testimonial Left that seeks refuge in the moral-formal reaffirmation of its values,” Beverley counters in a way that surprisingly allies himself with Beasley-Murray’s focus on affect as a political category. “To be on the Left today is to intervene in the public sphere and in politics by refuting the mimetic pacts that are pacts of complicity or resignation,” Sarlo writes (qtd. 87), to which Beverley responds:
 

The giro subjetivo [subjective turn] of testimonio with its emphasis on affect over critical theory, empathy over analysis, is in that sense the corollary of something like Kirchner’s neo-Peronism for her. A bad cultural practice—the giro subjetivo—leads to bad politics (because for Sarlo, Kirchner, and now his wife too are bad politics).

(87)

Beverley reads Sarlo here as equating the “giro subjetivo” with the Kirchners’ brand of Peronism, which he seems to support however reluctantly. After all, Beverley’s boundless support for the testimonio as a literary form that escapes the confines of modernist narrative places him firmly, contra Sarlo, on the side of the “giro subjetivo.” If for Sarlo the “giro subjetivo” means an emphasis on testimonio at the expense of the chronicle, the novel, or the poem, then for Beverley it seems that the benefit of this subjective turn is precisely “its emphasis on affect over critical theory”—its emphasis, in other words, on a post-ideological critique that escapes the confines of rational thought by becoming attentive to the naturalized, pre-cognitive response to an event. This move seems at least questionable if not highly contradictory: does Sarlo’s critique of the Kirchners not offer a way out of the affectively charged and politically ambiguous method behind Peronism’s “two hands” doctrine, in which populism has the dexterity of bringing together those on the Left with those on the Right? Critical theory, for Sarlo, does not lead to a political ambiguity that, under the pretense of Left governance, would allow the Right or right-wing policies into the government through the back door. Beverley takes this side against Sarlo because his hand seems forced from the beginning: his failure to differentiate the different governments of the pink tide (similar to Roberto Morales’s charge vis-à-vis mestizaje) forces him to defend all of them at all costs. Sarlo, conversely, clearly has her reasons for calling the Kirchner government to task from the Left: their neo-Peronist populism has occluded the fact that many government officials formerly served under Carlos Menem’s neoliberal, right-wing regime (1989-1999). How, then, can Kirchner’s government claim to be of the left when her government is filled with people who a decade ago were on the right and who have never spoken openly about their supposed “transformation,” let alone disavowed it or engaged in any kind of self-critique?

 
Like Beasley-Murray, Beverley envisions posthegemony as a desirable goal for the Latin American (and, arguably, the international) Left. “But to get to that point, a more conventional politics of some sort is necessary,” he reminds us before drawing a parallel to the South African apartheid regime: “after apartheid, ‘forgiveness,’ multilateralism, Derrida’s ‘politics of friendship’ are possible in South Africa, even necessary to ground a new form of national-popular hegemony; but to end apartheid required a struggle, both political and military” (59). For Beverley, Beasley-Murray’s theory of posthegemony leaves out the intermediary step of acquiring the state apparatus that would even allow for arranging constituent power along the lines of the multitude, habit, or affect. In fact, it’s unclear why Beverley thinks that posthegemony might be used to understand South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). Scholarship on the TRC has suggested quite the opposite and few believe that one can develop the kind of systemic change necessary in South Africa from a Derridean politics of forgiveness.¹⁵
 
While Beverley’s critique of Beasley-Murray’s project is certainly valid, it evades more fundamental questions that underpin the latter’s use of affect. These questions have political consequences that in Posthegemony go unanswered and largely unacknowledged. Affective theorists like Massumi (with whom Beasley-Murray explicitly aligns posthegemony) and the political theorist William Connolly have recently faced strong critiques that, among other things, highlight the theory’s political vacuity.¹⁶ The strongest critique so far, posed by Ruth Leys, questions the overwhelming importance affect theorists place on the primacy of affect. By primacy, Leys means the pre-social, pre-ideological, and ultimately pre-cognitive privilege affect is said to have over supposedly rational responses to stimuli like emotion. Beasley-Murray, in Posthegemony, doubles down on the primacy of affect:
 

It is only as affect is delimited and captured that bodies are fixed and so subjectivity (or at least, individual subjectivity) and transcendence emerge, but as this happens, affect itself changes: the order that establishes both subjectivity and transcendence also (and reciprocally) converts affect into emotion.

(128)

Beasley-Murray envisions affect as the primary, collective response to stimuli in contradistinction to emotion, which appears as the individual, subjective one. Leys has critiqued Massumi for his incorrect reading of neuroscientific experiments in his famous essay, “The Autonomy of Affect.”¹⁷ But I’d like to question the political results one can derive from affect theory.

 
Assuming that affect does occupy some sort of pre-cognitive domain, a positive political project like posthegemony that is built upon a theory of affect necessarily grounds itself on a form of determinism. We are affected by various stimuli every day, but only in the emotional (that is, cognitive) register can we make political decisions. This is because, in the affective (pre-cognitive) register, these political decisions are made for us. Massumi’s theory, derived as much from Deleuze and Guattari as from neurological experiments, casts affect as independent of signification and meaning. Massumi’s example of Ronald Reagan as the political example par excellence of affect is cited by
 

Beasley-Murray: Ronald Reagan, for instance, put affect to work in the service of state power, conjuring up sovereignty by projecting confidence, “the apotheosis of affective capture.” … Rather than seeking consent, Reagan achieved the semblance of control by transmitting “vitality, virtuality, tendency.”

(Posthegemony 129)

The presumed “autonomy of affect” (its pre-cognitive nature) works together with politics in a strictly deterministic fashion. Reagan enthralled so many people, even people who were presumably politically opposed to him (i.e., the so-called “Reagan democrats”), because he was able to tap into their affective predisposition. They were at the mercy of Reagan’s affective conceit, in other words, above and beyond their ability to think. This interpretation of events tells a tragic and politically impotent story about why so many people decided to vote for Reagan: presumably, there is nothing anyone on the left could have done to thwart the affective responses of so many people. They were predisposed to vote for Reagan’s grandfather-like because their affective disposition, over which they had no control given its autonomy, guided them in this way.

 
This narrative categorically ignores the actual political calculation and propaganda that right-wing activists and Republican strategists poured into Reagan’s marketing campaign. It also ignores the decades of ideological purging of left-wing activists and intellectuals as a result of McCarthyism and the Cold War that so significantly debilitated the Left in the US. How can one possibly construct a political program that is based upon categories over which we have no control? Others—elites, namely—may have affective control over us, but we seem to have no affective control over ourselves. With these assumptions, we might as well consider ascribing to a Heideggerian politics of Stimmung (mood) in which we give ourselves up to the moods that shape us.¹⁸ The pre-symbolic category of affect, for Beasley-Murray, ends up reaffirming everything posthegemony is against: in his chapter combining Deleuze, affect, and the FMLN, Beasley-Murray resorts to the symbolic language of testimonio and literary collage in order to challenge subjectivity. “The guerrilla both forms a war machine as ‘an alternative mode of social organization’ and reorders affect through visceral means, yet precisely effects this (exemplarily) and is shown to do so through a ‘combination of testimonio and literary collage,’” writes Philip Derbyshire about this chapter in Posthegemony, before concluding that “a signifying practice does the work of counter-subjectivation. So local hegemonic practices but no hegemonic work at a national level: this seems an arbitrary and self-amputating restriction” (53). Furthermore, it seems like a restriction that undoes the project of posthegemony altogether.
 
In the end, these two books elucidate two political-theoretical positions on the current state of affairs in Latin America and in Latin Americanism (cultural studies, literary criticism, etc.). A position not articulated by either side of this debate might better frame the difference between Beasley-Murray and Beverley. Recall Althusser’s position vis-à-vis Stalinism.¹⁹ Many orthodox Marxists and communist party lines around the world dogmatically aligned themselves with Stalinism through the 1960s. Conversely, communist party members fled the party to the right and used right-wing critiques of Stalinism to justify their decision. Althusser dialectically rejected the either/or dichotomy Stalinists and right-wing critics presented. He instead embarked on what he called the “first left-wing critique of Stalinism.” What Althusser meant by this left-wing critique was that he would, unlike other critics of Soviet orthodoxy, critique the theoretical premises of Stalinism from within, that is, from within the radius of Stalinism otherwise known as Marxism-Leninism, but without allying himself in any way with the Stalinist orthodoxy.
 
Beasley-Murray and Beverley, on both the theoretical and political levels, seem to present an unbridgeable opposition. Beasley-Murray’s views on the marea rosada have become more complex and ambivalent since he penned a first draft of Posthegemony over a decade ago (the ambivalence of the Prologue when compared to the rest of the book displays this change along both theoretical and political lines). But it is clear that, on the whole, the book presents an anti-statist critique as well as a program for theoretical intervention. Beverley, by contrast, presents the opposite: a pro-statist position that unyieldingly, though at times hesitantly, commits itself to the vision and governments encompassed by the “pink tide.” This political position leads to theoretical mishaps, as with respect to Sarlo, that reveals its theoretical inability to distinguish the many valences of the Left that the pink-tide governments represent. Let us make no mistake: both Beasley-Murray and Beverley make these critiques from a position within the Left. (They are in no way succumbing to right-wing propaganda.) But they present accounts that all too quickly support or reject the present pink tide governments almost wholesale without being able to differentiate among them. The present moment calls for a much more nuanced differentiation of these governments than the ones offered by right-wing shills like Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former Secretary of Foreign Affairs under Vicente Fox, or Michael Reid, the Americas editor for The Economist.²⁰ Popularly labeled the doctrine of the “two Lefts,” this right-wing differentiation cuts the Left along lines of economic friendliness to the United States: depending on who you read, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador might appear on the bad side, while Brazil, Argentina, and Chile (under Bachelet) might appear on the good side.
 
For those left dissatisfied with the seeming dichotomy Beasley-Murray and Beverley represent, perhaps a “left-wing critique” of the many pink-tide governments in Latin America still remains an option. Can we critique these governments from within the realm of their theoretical enterprise precisely in order to make them more egalitarian, democratic, multicultural, multiethnic, and the like? How can we express solidarity, however futile it may seem from the ivory tower or North American armchair, with these self-described socialist governments in Latin America while at the same time critiquing them for not being socialist enough? How are we to moderate our utopian impulse of wanting to see the state practice a more egalitarian politics while remaining fully aware of capitalism’s universalization and the impossibility of seeing an ideal state develop over night? Marx gave one of his most famous definitions of communism in The German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence” (56-57). In short, how might we re-interpret this dictum for our present moment in the times of the pink tide?

. . . no more Stalins, no more Hitlers . . .

—William Burroughs

Covert activities place a great strain on the process of decision in a free society.

—The Tower Commission Report

 
Clark Kent may be what Superman thinks of us, but Christopher Reeve is what we think of Superman: disabled without that cape, less a costumed hero than a mortal pretending to be one. We like him and his fellow vigilantes so much because we don’t believe in them. We can’t. They conjure a world where it would be possible to right social wrongs with a satin mask, a stiff uppercut, and maybe the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, a world where people stronger and more confidently dressed than ourselves possess special powers and do amazing things—like protect us from bullies or make us breakfast. But it isn’t simply that Superman and his comic book ilk reincarnate memories of childhood. They perform a more speculative function too, staging a popular meditation on the legitimacy of vigilante violence. Caped crusaders are secret sovereigns, fighting crime with special powers. If one of the grievances of growing up is watching family heroes grow old, then it seems inevitable to wonder whether these will too. Does sovereignty outlive Superman?¹ If so, what forms does it take today?
 
A question, perhaps, for comics. Imposing cultural forces are at play here, which appear to divest such heroes of historical relevance. That at least is the thesis of the comic book that reflects most directly on the comic book as cultural artifact: Watchmen, the Hugo Award winning collaboration between Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen‘s 1995 cover, the familiar blood-spattered smiley face, proclaims it “One of Time Magazine‘s 100 Best Novels.” When it appeared serialized by DC Comics between September 1986 and October 1987, it hardly aspired to that august distinction. Writer Alan Moore never dignified Watchmen with the term “graphic novel”: “It’s a marketing term… that I never had any sympathy with. The term ‘comic’ does just as well for me” (Moore qtd. in “Graphic Novel”). As a serial comic, it took a year for Watchmen to unfold—a very interesting year in the annals of American foreign policy. Rekindling that ambient history throws the events it depicts into bold relief, highlighting its enduring urgency.
 
Watchmen is an alternative history written at a time when alternative history set the terms for real life, at least in Reagan’s America. It offers an extended meditation on the cultural fate of the costumed crusader. In typical comic book fashion, it approaches vigilante violence as an issue of extrajudicial exception and asks who wields it. One answer—the superhero—is oddly consonant with certain trends in contemporary political speculation. But that answer seems just as oddly incommensurable with the way things worked politically, or didn’t, during the year of Watchmen‘s publication. As a graphic examination of the politics of exception, Watchmen in some ways chimes nicely with Giorgio Agamben’s fretful interrogation of the use and abuse of civil violence in State of Exception. But as an alternative history of 1980s America, it sketches a geopolitics irreducible to that tidy if terrifying logic. Read in the flickering light of The Tower Commission Report, the official account of the Iran/Contra cover-up, Watchmen shows how exceptional circumstances can scatter the force of political decision and multiply its petty players.
 
“Who watches the Watchmen?” The graffito staining the background of so many of Watchman‘s frames asks an urgent political question. As Moore and Gibbons themselves note, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” (from Juvenal’s Satires), appears as an epigraph in The Tower Commission Report: specifically to “Appendix B,” which bears the title “The Iran/Contra Affair: A Narrative.” Appendix B provides the canonical account of the Regan administration’s great political debacle. It covers a historical period that closely parallels Watchmen‘s. And it too advances an alternative history to everyday life in the mid-eighties, the hidden history of the Iran/Contra affair. Appendix B and Watchmen thus frame that reality with competing versions of events. In one Earth hurtles toward nuclear holocaust. In the other America trades weapons for hostages. Neither version gibes with the reality most people thought they were living at the time. But both identify the true source of national security under such circumstances with a band of vigilantes. That one consists of erstwhile caped crusaders and the other of national security advisors might be little more than a matter of emphasis. Watchmen shares with The Tower Commission Report the revelation that American security rests with those willing and able, under exceptional circumstances, to deploy extrajudicial violence to achieve it. Looking back from the perspective of a world—our world—where drone aircraft target enemy belligerents for killing, it might be worth asking whether such practices are a thing of the past. Do masked vigilantes enforce justice today? Who—or what—orchestrates our interminable war on terror? Are drones our new vigilantes, masked by the global communications network that shrouds the true agents of retributive justice? If so, who watches these watchmen?
 

Superjustice

 
Hurled through a window high above the street, the body of Edward Blake lands with a viscid thunk on city pavement. Watchmen opens with a brutal murder, all the more curious for the blood-spattered smiley pin found at the scene. It marks the corpse as that of the Comedian, erstwhile masked vigilante, who retired his spandex on dubious terms. The Keene Act of 1977 put vigilantes out of business, with the exception, in the words of a detective on the scene, of a few “government-sponsored weirdos”—like Blake (I, 4). But a weirdo of another sort sees things differently, a masked sociopath known as Rorschach who once worked closely with the Comedian. He senses a conspiracy where the cops see only a corpse: the targeted killing of Blake and his aging band of costumed has-beens (including Rorschach himself). Not burglary but assassination caused this brutality. Somebody wants to kill masked crusaders. But why?
 
It takes a year and twelve installments of Watchmen to find out, but as the graphic narrative unfurls between 1986 and 1987, it advances an alternative history (or better, an alternative present) that illustrates both the logical outcome and the political obsolescence of Cold War strategies of total domination. In its world, Richard Nixon remains President of the United States, secure in his authority thanks to victory in Vietnam. The law-and-order executive maintains his sway over America, however, in both domestic and international terms, with the patriotic help of an unusual accomplice, a tall, blue and exceptionally gifted man (if that is the right word). Jon Osterman is a onetime nuclear scientist who, owing to a mishap at Gila Flats, site of government funded “intrinsic field experiments,” has acquired special powers along with his cerulean pigmentation (IV, 6). Dr. Manhattan, as he is popularly known, is a superhero—in fact the only superhero in Watchmen. His ability to transcend the limits of human agency sets him apart from other men, making him singularly useful to the task of governance. He asserts domestic stability by appearing regularly in the media. He maintains national security by projecting American military prowess abroad. He calms the nation and cows its enemies. After all he (and not Nixon) all but blue-handedly won the war in Vietnam (Fig. 1). Dr. Manhattan is the not-so-secret weapon in the US arsenal of civil defense. Only his origins remain unknown to the world: the secret of master science gone awry, whose opacity (in all its gendered splendor) his nakedness parodies.²

 
Click for larger view
 

Fig. 1.

Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam. From Watchmen IV, 20.

© DC Comics. Used by permission.

 
Watchmen presents a hypothetical test case for the doomsday scenario wired into the cultural software of the Cold War. Dreams of global domination structure its world, framed by the familiar antagonism of West versus East, the US versus the USSR. Dr. Manhattan stands between these global titans (sometimes literally) and the mutually assured destruction that promises to fulfill and obliterate their dreams of dominion. When an existential crisis (provoked by his apparently carcinogenic effect on those he loves) sends him sulking to the surface of Mars (he’s a superhero, remember), those pesky Ruskies take advantage of his absence to invade Afghanistan, threatening to answer any American reprisal with nuclear barrage. The ensuing standoff proves terminal—or will, if nothing can be done to interrupt the algorithm of annihilation that clicks into place with the retreat of Nixon and his staff into bunkers and his declaration of Defcon 2 (the next to highest Defense Readiness Condition, invoked historically only once—during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962).
 
The political problem here is as serious as its circumstances are fantastic: how to avoid total destruction in a Cold War world where ideological opposition escalates violence to the point of apocalypse. William Burroughs confronts this terminal logic in his early science fiction cut-up, Nova Express, and reduces its operation to a simple imperative: “Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts” (35). The outcome is inevitable and devastating: “Manipulated on a global scale,” this logic “feeds back nuclear war and nova” (54). Such is the grim operation of “the nova mechanism” (53). Amped by the global resonator of West versus East, destruction turns mutually assured. Watchmen‘s alternative Cold War history asks a simple question: how might a world driven by the nova mechanism avoid this doomsday scenario? It remains an urgent question today because doomsday has failed to arrive. For all Burroughs’ prophetic bile, nova never happened. Reading Nova Express now is a bit like listening to grandpa (clutching his .454 Casull) maunder on about imminent nuclear threat and alien invasion. While nuclear exchange may remain an abstract possibility, the agents and means of today’s global mayhem have changed: terrorists with dirty bombs, states with guided drones. Watchmen tracks the emergence of another scenario. If not mutually assured destruction, then what?
 
Its answer bears pondering, particularly in view of Agamben’s recent meditation on the function of violence during the “state of exception” in a book bearing that title. Agamben derives this phrase directly from the work of Carl Schmitt and indirectly from the Roman institution of the iustitium.³ Because “state of emergency” might better capture Agamben’s nuance for ears attuned to the tradition of common law, it seems important to acknowledge that State of Exception explores the long shadow of a specifically Roman legal heritage.⁴ Characteristically, Agamben shows less interest in a detailed history of the state of exception than in its constitutive and recurring structure: “The state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law” (39). Such a state suspends the rule of law (anomie) to dissociate force (violence) from its operation. In a sense it liberates violence from its practical legal applications of producing or preserving norms. In Agamben’s more specialized description, “In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference” (40).
 
Balefully, however, this anomie coincides (in Roman tradition) with the strange exceptionality of the sovereign, who stands both within and beyond the rule of law, able therefore both to enforce and to suspend it: “Being-outside, and yet belonging: this is the topological structure of the state of exception, and only because the sovereign, who decides on the state of exception, is, in truth, logically defined in his being by the state of exception, can he too logically be defined by the oxymoron ecstasy-belonging” (35). The sovereign emerges, in Agamben’s analysis, as the imperious ghost in “the juridical-political machine” for his capacity not merely to decide on the state of exception, but also to deploy the violence that ensues toward the practical end of installing new norms (86). The sovereign, then, wields a decision that suspends law and legitimates (extrajudicial) violence.
 
The state of exception augurs little happiness in democratic social circumstances. Agamben’s regular invocation of the dark trinity of totalitarian rule (Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin) provides historical endorsement for an analysis whose true target is contemporary politics. Agamben aims to illuminate less the fascist past than a menacing present. The state of exception, in his view, is fast becoming the “dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” (2). It’s easy to see how this paradigm installs crisis as a principle of economic governance: hard times require strict measures, including government intervention to secure fiscal stability. If governance occurs increasingly through protocols of security, the state of exception becomes less and less exceptional: “in conformity with a continuing tendency in all of the Western democracies, the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (14). Nor is this security-creep confined to historically liberal societies. In Agamben’s view “the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment” (87). Under such unexceptionally exceptional circumstances, in which to live is to live the state of exception (in its virulence and banality), the point of living politically acquires a simple if transnational aim: “ceaselessly to try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war” (87).⁵
 
If that’s the standard of political engagement, then Watchmen is a deeply political comic book. It shares Agamben’s diagnosis of a world in which the pursuit of security increasingly operates as a technique of government. American democracy seems little more than a means of regulating life in the name of safety. Domestically, the Keene Act reigns in any attempt to pursue justice outside established legal norms. It unmasks vigilantes in the name of state regulation, assimilating their violence to legislation that maintains a dreary status quo. Internationally, nuclear holocaust threatens the globe with incineration. It justifies using weapons of mass destruction to secure the safety of the masses. Both internally and externally, democracy gives way to security as the primary means of American governance, which is why Dr. Manhattan (not an elected so much as an electric official) looms so large in the pantheon of Western diplomacy. He alone secures the lives of those masses, American and Soviet alike, from mutually assured destruction. Not the nova mechanism but Dr. Manhattan assures the security of the world. In his exceptionality, he embodies the violence that both menaces and maintains the stability of the status quo. The superhero promulgates a superjustice that quantifies life en masse for the purpose of securing it. Although he ostensibly serves the cause of Western democracy, in fact he safeguards the global persistence of life itself, behaving less like Agamben’s sovereign than something even greater, perhaps a god.⁶ When he leaves for Mars, the state of exception he embodies and occludes erupts into the open, and “global civil war” turns all but inevitable.
 
But there’s something surprising about Watchmen‘s version of these events: the ostensible sovereign in this scenario, Richard Nixon—the man with his finger on the nuclear button—neither invokes the state of exception nor deploys its constitutive violence. After declaring Defcon 2 (a state penultimate to exception), Nixon retreats with his staff to the case-hardened subterranean bunker where American sovereignty might ride out nuclear exchange. He faces the decision, which senior advisor G. Gordon Liddy puts in plain language, to declare Defcon 1 and launch nuclear weapons against the Soviets: “Mr. President, our analysis shows good percentages on a first strike” (X, 3). But Nixon refuses. He resists the logic of exception, choosing to play Godot rather than God: “We do what we came down here for: we stay at Defcon two … and we sit … and we wait” (X, 3). In the absence of superjustice, Dr. Manhattan’s sovereignty over life itself, state sovereignty turns optative, a local refuge against global apocalypse. Decision and politics dissociate under Watchmen‘s circumstances of impending “global civil war,” exactly the circumstances Agamben attributes to “the generalization of the paradigm of security.”
 
Under such circumstances, according to Watchmen, sovereignty mutates. “There will be no more Hitlers, no more Stalins” (Burroughs “No More”).⁷ Another kind of decider emerges to administrate security in a world of nuclear doom. If not Richard Nixon, if not Dr. Manhattan, then who—or what? Watchmen gropes toward an answer whose very lunacy is instructive. Each new issue (or chapter) opens with a doomsday clock ticking relentlessly toward nuclear midnight. The nova mechanism works implacably. Neither Nixon nor his Soviet counterpart can commandeer its inevitable violence. The Cold War lumbers toward an incendiary peace that will render sovereignty obsolete—unless a way can be found to create unity out of terminal conflict. At the last minute before midnight, an event occurs that does just that, turning sworn enemies into allies, obviating the necessity for mutually assured destruction. An alien invasion all but destroys New York, leaving countless dead and the city in ruins.
 
We readers (such are the comforts of irony) know this attack to be a sham. The deaths are real, but the invasion is not.⁸ Brainchild of another retired vigilante, the transnational übertycoon Ozymandias (also known as Adrian Veidt), it nevertheless provides the appearance of a common enemy so powerful as to render nuclear weapons and their exterminating violence pointless. At his polar hideaway, Ozymandias monitors news reports that broadcast the sudden prospect of a calculated peace (Fig. 2): “. . . eth toll in the millions”; “and in New York millions of”; “and news just in of a response from Russia”; “immediate end to hostilities until we’ve evaluated this new threat to”; “end the war”; “York tonight, three million” (XII, 19).

 
Click for larger view
 

Fig. 2.

Ozymandias triumphs. From Watchmen XII, 19.

© DC Comics. Used by permission.

Ozymandias cries in triumph “I did it!” (XII, 19). He interrupts the operation of the global war machine. As CEO of a corporate empire coextensive with global capitalism, he’s perfectly positioned to do so. It takes little subtlety to notice that Watchmen redirects the operation of sovereignty away from politics and toward economics.

 
But rather than view Ozymandias as just another decider, the new sovereign as CEO, it’s worth emphasizing the ultimate source of his authority. It’s not the exceptionality of the sovereign per se that legitimates his deployment of violence but the brute statistical force of the broadcast body count. His bloody stunt, beamed around the world, produces a “peace millions died for” (XII, 20). The result is to secure the lives of many, many more. “Killing millions to save billions”—that’s how the movie version puts it (Watchmen). The forbidding wisdom of statistics, and not the sovereign’s exceptionality, legitimates deploying extralegal violence in the name of peace. The paradigm of security, generalized to embrace the world, operates no longer in accordance with the decision of the political sovereign but with the banal force of arithmetic: superjustice as computational imperative.
 
Ozymandias may be an ersatz superhero, and his fake invasion may be an exceptional event, but his decision to deploy violence originates in the anonymous sovereignty of numbers. Hence his anonymity as efficient cause. He’s no Hitler bawling across the airwaves to loving minions. Television decides the fate of humanity as it beams statistics around the globe, quantifying death—and life. “What’s that in your hand, Veidt,” asks Dr. Manhattan. “Another ultimate weapon?” Veidt replies, holding a remote, “Yes, you could say that” (XII, 18).⁹ Televised images of staged catastrophe consolidate the sovereignty of numbers. It’s simple addition with visual aids. Do the bloody math. Besides, old-time apocalypse is bad for business. Ozymandias ends conflict, but to his lasting advantage less as sovereign than global capitalist. His authority must remain a secret, as Dr. Manhattan grudgingly acknowledges in costumed company including his old girlfriend, Laurie Juspeczyk: “Logically, I’m afraid he’s right. Exposing this plot, we destroy any chance of peace, dooming earth to worse destruction. On Mars, [Laurie] demonstrated life’s value. If we would preserve life here, we must remain silent” (XII, 20). Security works through statistics to consolidate a secret, distributed sovereignty, the province perhaps of a few agents in the know, but hardly a means to dictatorial political power. With security comes biopower: the administration of “the production and reproduction of life” itself without ultimate regard to political sovereignty.¹⁰
 

Contra/dictions

 
Mercifully, Watchmen presents what in retrospect seems an obsolete alternative history of Cold War apocalypse. Perhaps to the surprise of its late-1980’s audience, the wall dividing West from East would come tumbling down only two years later, transforming the structure of international relations. That this development was well under way during the months of Watchmen‘s serial publication is one of the many lessons of the comic’s great political companion-piece, an alternative history written in an openly juridical mode, the Report of the President’s Special Review Board, more popularly known as the Tower Commission Report. It appeared February 26, 1987, about midway through the original serial run of Watchmen. The trade paperback compilation of Watchmen‘s twelve issues, also published in 1987, acknowledges this affinity by quoting the Latin epigraph mentioned above.
 
To sustain its analysis of mutating sovereignty, Watchmen creates a web of cultural and political references, among which the Tower Commission Report is only the most obvious. Popular music blares in the background throughout, sounding notes of urban menace (Iggy Pop’s “Neighborhood Threat”) and existential camp (Devo’s Are We Not Men?). Bob Dylan, as usual, proves the conscience of apocalypse. “All Along the Watchtower” frames Chapter X (“Outside in the distance a wild cat did growl, two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl”), but it’s “Desolation Row” that sets the mood for the whole series, ominously punctuating Chapter 1: “At midnight, all the agents and superhuman crew, go out and round up everyone who knows more than they do.” ¹¹ The lines conjure Cold War paranoia (Highway 61 Revisited, which included the tune, was released in 1965) and recall the blunt force of old-style sovereignty.
 
Their political correlative appears, perhaps surprisingly, in John F. Kennedy’s last speech—the one he intended to deliver on November 22, 1963, to the annual meeting of the Dallas Citizen’s Council, but for obvious reasons never did. The speech plies textbook Cold War rhetoric in the service of American military, scientific, and economic might. The word “security” appears nine times, always in the context of imminent Soviet threat. A peculiarly resonant peroration follows, given the coming work of Moore and Gibbons:
 

We, in this country, in this generation are—by destiny rather than by choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as it was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain.”

A more direct—and perhaps innocent—description of the aims of sovereignty could hardly be written to order, complete with a quotation of Psalm 127 that aligns its agents with ultimate authority. Kennedy’s watchmen serve freedom—and the Lord. Moore and Gibbons’ inhabit a world bereft of such a liege, where not wisdom but statistics condone the righteousness of a cause. Watchmen gathers the Lord’s watchmen into a web of intertextual reference that secures its sense of Cold War’s passing by historical contrast. With Kennedy’s assassination would come the ultimate textual antecedent to Watchmen‘s critique: The Warren Commission Report, whose devotion to the causes of truth and a lone gunman (“in recognition of the right of people everywhere to full and truthful knowledge concerning these events”) would consolidate the sovereignty, if only in retrospect, of “a young and vigorous leader” (1).

 
One more intertextual connection bears noting, this one contemporary with the comic’s original publication. Ronald Reagan looms large in The Tower Commission Report, a paper sovereign whose ostensible agency diffuses over a host of covert operatives. His address to the Forty-Second Session of the United Nations General Assembly ends with an idea—a fantasy really—that he believes could unify a divided world. Reagan delivered the speech on the 21^st of September, 1987: the penultimate month of Watchmen‘s serialization. Perhaps he was an avid fan. Befitting his UN venue, he proffers a world tour of prospering economies and promising democracies. Laggard nations, like Afghanistan and Nicaragua, come in for generous attention from an America ready and willing to advance the cause of freedom. Then comes the weird fantasy that seems lifted from the (yet unpublished) final chapter of Watchmen—or more likely an Outer Limits episode buried in Reagan’s brain:
 

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we sometimes forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?

This from a President approving covert war in Nicaragua. Not a state of exception, but exceptionalism pure and simple guides Reagan’s vision of united humanity. His fantasy provides a nostalgic backdrop to Watchmen‘s account of a simulated alien invasion whose lethal effect is to secure life—in part to preserve a market for Veidt’s hottest commodity, a perfume called “Nostalgia.”¹²

 
Watchmen constellates such intertextual references to consolidate its assessment of mutating sovereignty, and nowhere more explicitly than in its relationship to the Tower Commission Report. Edward Blake, the masked vigilante whose broken corpse opens Watchmen‘s narrative, worked both ends of the Iran/Contra affair as a goon in government employ, as the text testifies at least twice: “after his handling of the Iran hostage situation, even his harshest critics fall silent” (IV, 23); “returning from Nicaragua by air, [and] suspecting Sandinista bases, he resolved to investigate” (IX, 24). From handling hostages in Iran to combating Sandinistas in Nicaragua: Blake’s clandestine operations in Watchmen parallel those described in The Tower Commission Report. Between them these alternative histories sketch new conditions for governance emerging to replace the oppositional logic of the nova mechanism, with its ICBMs and its doomsday countdown.
 
There are plenty of reasons to read them together as complementary documents of the Cold War’s closing days. The Tower Commission Report advances a version of recent events no less fantastic than Watchmen‘s for being, according to the President’s Special Review Board, true. As alternative histories, they partake of the same speculative genre. Their truth arises as a function less of metaphysics than consensus. If all histories today are in that sense alternative histories, then ratings and sales become one index of their truth—a circumstance confirmed not only by the comic’s immediate success but also by the huge popularity of the live broadcast of the Iran/Contra hearings between May and August 1987, a real time TV drama anticipating today’s reality shows except with better actors. The Tower Commission Report shares with Watchmen and other artifacts of postmodern culture a characteristic multiplication of narratives and tendency toward pastiche, qualities that in comparison turn The Warren Commission Report into a document of high modernism.¹³ Watchmen contains several mutually disrupting story lines (the death of Edwards, the disillusionment of Dr. Manhattan, the immanence of nuclear apocalypse, and the comic within the comic Tales of the Black Freighter—not to mention miscellanies of textual matter appended to the end of each episode). The Tower Commission Report does, too: its central story, entitled “The Iran/Contra Affair: A Narrative,” appears as the second of eight appendices following a five-part narrative analysis. Formally, it offers an exploded diagram of the new conditions for governance emerging as the Cold War grinds to a close. Thematically, it offers an extended tutorial in the way a generalized “paradigm of security” works—or doesn’t. Its central lesson, if it can be said to have one, is continuous with its form: American governance, or what it is becoming in the late 1980s, also eschews traditional notions of authority.
 
Just where you would expect, if you were a reader of either political history or Agamben, to find a sovereign wielding the extrajudicial force of decision to promote security (as the “dominant paradigm for government in contemporary politics”), you get, for lack of a better term, Ronald Reagan, a leader better known for not knowing about Iran/Contra than for any decision to assert sovereignty through violence. His primary concern through the whole duplicitous ordeal was to secure the safety of the American hostages held by Iranian terrorists in Tehran. Security in this instance (and the situation of the hostages in Iran clearly stands in for that of all Americans under a threat of mutually assured destruction) mandates not sovereign decision but ignorance, as Reagan’s later note to Chairman Tower attests: “In trying to recall events that happened eighteenth months ago I’m afraid that I let myself be influenced by others’ recollections, not my own” (Tower B-19). This sovereign can’t decide what he remembers or whether his memories are even his own.
 
If they aren’t his, whose are they? Who, in other words, inherits sovereignty in a world where the complex task of securing safety discourages the sovereign from deploying exceptional violence (in order to avoid either nuclear apocalypse or capitulation to terrorists)? The Tower Commission Report provides a long, rambling answer that is really as simple as the letters N-S-C. Sovereignty, no longer the sovereign’s exclusive privilege, diffuses among a surrogate collective, the National Security Council. One purpose of The Tower Commission Report is to provide a detailed account of how the National Security Council works, not merely in the instance of the Iran/Contra scandal, but more generally as means of American (or better, global) governance. Apparently “the paradigm of security” distributes sovereignty in such a way that the sovereign remains ignorant of the means of his ostensible agency. No wonder Reagan can’t remember what he said. Security requires secret heroics, and who better to provide them than of a band of masked vigilantes?
 
History ties the National Security Council, as The Tower Commission Report indicates, directly to the Cold War (II-1, II-3). With the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower after World War II, the Truman administration felt the need for an agency that could coordinate foreign policy with strategic defense. The National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council to serve the President in an advisory capacity, integrating those concerns under the rubric of national security. Originally comprising seven permanent members (the Secretaries of State and Defense; Chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force; and the Chair of the National Security Resources Board), its charge remained restricted to advising the Chief Executive (“United States”). He alone retained the capacity to make policy decisions. The Tower Commission Report makes much of this subordination, as if to forestall any question regarding the sovereignty of the decider: “the President is responsible for the national security policy of the Unites States. In development and execution of that policy, the President is the decision-maker” (I-2). The National Security Council only assists in the decision-making process. It remains “properly the President’s creature” and serves “the creative impulses of the President” (I-3). The President, like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s famous novel, breathes life into this creature, and he bears full responsibility for its behavior: “The NSC system will not work unless the President makes it work. After all, this system was created to serve the President of the United States in ways of his choosing” (IV-10).
 
But in politics as in fiction, such creatures can acquire a life of their own. “This,” in the Tower Commission’s dry judgment, “presents any President with a series of dilemmas” (II-3). The particular creature in question here is the National Security Advisor, an entity whose existence is neither formally established by law nor subject to Congressional hearing and approval. What guarantees the subordination of such advisors or the system that empowers them to the President? Only the President, the sovereign, the superior being responsible for his creatures’ deeds. And this President, in the Commission’s view, in the end proved a flaccid master: “Had the President chosen to drive the NSC system, the outcome could well have been different” (IV-10). On this account the sovereign retains his sovereignty. He just fails to use it. His creatures run amok, more as neglected children than secret agents of a distributed agency.
 
The Tower Commission Report nevertheless supports the possibility that, as the end of the Cold War approaches, sovereignty diffuses beyond the sovereign. The Commission’s reconstruction of the clunky international plot to trade arms for American hostages in Iran while funneling profits to the Contras fighting in Nicaragua is familiar enough not to require repeating. Details matter less anyway than the conditions for governance that made them possible. Granted, Cold War antagonism still frames the entire drama, as Colonel Oliver North, its lead player, acknowledges at one point to an unnamed Iranian official in a Tehran hotel: “This is not a deal of weapons for release of the hostages. It has to do with what we see regarding Soviet intentions in the region” (B-107). But the structure of global politics is getting rickety. As in Watchmen, it configures an apocalyptic show-down that would defeat the explicit purpose of governance to secure the safety of those hostages—or the larger populations they represent. Under such circumstances, the state of exception doesn’t empower so much as incapacitate the sovereign. Terrorism trumps apocalypse. Like Watchmen‘s Nixon, The Tower Commission Report‘s Reagan can only wait, watch, and hope for a solution to a security problem that exposes the impotence of sovereignty.
 
So that agency diffuses, drifting to the NSC—but not solely because the President fails to oversee its operation. On the contrary, The Tower Commission Report indicates quite clearly and in spite of its presidential critique that the peculiar status of the NSC as an executive agency positions it to assimilate the agency of the executive, a situation summed up in the report’s portentous section heading, “The NSC Staff Steps into the Void.” In 1981 Reagan himself consolidated this status with Executive Order 12333 (quoted by the Tower Commission on page C-12), which states that “the NSC shall act as the highest Executive Branch entity that provides review of, guidance for and direction to the conduct of all national foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and special activities, and attendant policies and programs” (C-12). The words “direction to” in this summation of agency open a rhetorical door to significant NSC initiative in “the conduct of all national foreign intelligence.” And indeed, the whole question of the legitimacy of its agency in the Iran/Contra affair boils down to whether an Executive Office agency so charged remains subject to Congressional legislation, specifically the Boland Amendment of 1982 barring the CIA and Department of Defense from funding insurgence in Nicaragua.¹⁴ The legal void Reagan’s NSC stepped into arose as much from its para-executive status as any lapse of presidential leadership, as if exception were structured into its very existence as a security council: a portable sovereignty by proxy.
 
That under Reagan the NSC was eager to take this step is the lesson of a weird little fantasy contained in a memo from its Chair, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, to Deputy National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter. Describing a recent secret meeting in Tehran with Iranian officials, McFarlane suggests the following scenario as a context for operations: “It may be best for us to try to picture what it would be like if after a nuclear attack, a surviving Tatar became Vice President; a recent grad student became Secretary of state; and a bookie became the interlocutor for all discourse with foreign countries” (B-101). McFarlane is denigrating the Iranian delegation, of course, but what’s revealing (if a little frightful) is that the context he imagines for NSC operations is post-apocalyptic. In his head the MIRVs have flown and found their targets, damaging the structure of global governance almost beyond recognition. Sovereignty here is a thing of the past, political agency a matter of improvisation. The new agents of governance will move nimbly, bargaining with rank amateurs who nevertheless threaten the security of America, or what’s left of it after the nuclear rain. Better the NSC than a lumbering Congress or the sweet old executive wielding an obsolete sovereignty.
 
After the Cold War—or nuclear apocalypse, they’re the same for McFarlane—global politics will work differently, at least in regard to national security. The Tower Commission Report prognosticates the ways simply by describing the activity of the NSC. As an agency of the Executive Branch, it is perfectly positioned to undertake operations beyond the reach of judicial or legislative regulation. Doing so openly, of course, would exceed the Council’s charge merely to advise the President on matters of national security. But as a means of advancing covert operations, the NSC combines juridical-political autonomy with para-executive authority. Masked by their proximity to the President, its members comprise a band of vigilantes reminiscent of the extrajudicial crusaders in Watchmen. Exceptional circumstances require covert operations—and agents.
 
That’s how the NSC justified the arms for hostages overture to Iran, as Attorney General Edwin Meese recollected during his interview with the Tower Commission. To the suggestion that the deal would involve a breach of the President’s policy against negotiating with terrorists, he recalls the position of a senior NSC official: “The rejoinder, I think by Poindexter, was that this was a special situation and that this was not at odds with our overall policy; it was an exception to the general situation” (B-62). Exceptionality here exonerates the extra-judicial agency of the NSC, granting it the diffused force of a distributed sovereignty in order to advance Presidential policy by breaching it—under cover. Covert operations become the means necessary for an NSC empowered by exception to advance inadmissible policy, as becomes the case on the Contra end of the arms for hostages initiative as well: “The activities of the NSC staff in support of the Contras sought to achieve an important objective of the Administration’s foreign policy. The President had publicly and emphatically declared his support for the Nicaragua resistance. That brought his policy in direct conflict with that of the Congress” (IV-3). Enter the NSC. It covertly advances prohibited Presidential policy, as if in accordance with executive sovereignty but absent any clear decision to invoke it. Plausible deniability or flexible exceptionality? Either way, sovereignty gets redistributed to include a band of masked vigilantes.
 
They share with Watchmen‘s Ozymandias the tendency to view global politics as an extension of global capitalism. Reagan’s NSC combined the double Presidential aims of securing the safety of American hostages and supporting anti-Sandinista insurgence in a singular set of business transactions: sales of TOW antitank missiles and HAWK missile replacement parts to Iranian government officials and diversion of the ensuing profits to Nicaraguan Contras. In its reach and financial complexity the deal resembles the operations of corporate capitalism (as the several flow-charts published with The Tower Commission Report illustrate), with the difference that governments and not just corporations were jockeying for transnational advantage. The Cold War may have provided a general background to negotiations, but their means were pure business, a haggling among profiteers. Not the business of politics, then, but business as politics.¹⁵ Colonel Oliver North nicely crystallizes the perils of such dealings: “I have no problem w/ someone making an honest profit on honest business. I do have a problem if it means the compromise of sensitive political or operational details” (B-70). But in the Iran/Contra affair, sensitive political details and honest profit fuse beyond reckoning. HAWK missile replacement parts valued at 6.5 million dollars, for instance, cost Iran 15 million to acquire from the U.S., leaving a tidy profit for diversion to those Nicaraguan freedom fighters. Oliver North indeed has a problem. As the conditions for governance shift from diplomacy to business, from ideological antagonism to transnational exchange as the condition of engagement, it falls to the NSC to conduct the business of politics on behalf of an executive whose erstwhile sovereignty is better suited to the nova mechanism than covert operations.
 
That this business was not a workable solution in the long run is the lesson of bad outcomes. Iran may eventually have released the hostages, but when the NSC’s secret deal went public, the United States suffered a crisis in governance that triggered Congressional hearings and the indictment of several key National Security Council members, among them Colonel Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, and National Security Advisor Robert C. McFarlane. The first two were convicted (among other things) of obstruction of justice and the third of withholding evidence, but North and Poindexter saw their convictions overturned on appeal and McFarlane received a presidential pardon from George H. W. Bush (“Iran Contra”). The NSC as an Executive Office agency and its personnel were to that extent vindicated. Their dubious initiative in pursuing presidential policy aims prohibited by other branches of government was less to blame, apparently, than a sovereign asleep at the wheel. Reagan did his best to accept responsibility for the behavior of his rogue council, as he confessed during a press conference on November, 14, 1986: “I considered the risks of failure and the rewards of success, and I decided to proceed, and the responsibility for the decision and the operation is mine and mine alone” (D13).
 
Such are the responsibilities of sovereignty. But the whole affair indicates to the contrary that, when American lives are immediately at stake, security legitimates a redistribution of sovereignty among secret executive agents. The National Security Council may not be able to act with the impunity of an Ozymandias, but it shares with him and the other costumed crusaders of Watchmen a vigilante agenda whose extra-judicial status justifies covert operations. Reagan’s National Security Council also shares Ozymandias’ business instincts, if not acumen. Whether of human lives directly or missile profits, accounting becomes the means of political decision, identifying sovereign agency less with the state than with statistics.¹⁶ The Tower Commission Report renders Watchmen‘s alternative history in real-politic terms, advancing an alternative alternative history that shows how sovereignty works under the auspices of security. To return one last time to Agamben, if “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (State 14), then not sovereignty per se but its masked agents conduct the real business of global politics—securing the safety of hostages—which includes pretty much everybody.
 

Drone-state

 
What’s the point of reading Watchmen and The Tower Commission Report as companion inquiries into the place of sovereignty in contemporary governance? Precious little if their conclusions pertain only to an aberrant moment in the history of executive agency. But they continue to shed light on the workings of security as a technique of governance today. Since the Iran/Contra affair, the NSC has only expanded its number of members and scope of operations, thanks in no small part to the terrorist attack of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s ensuing scramble to improve national security. If one of the lessons of Iran/Contra was that a distributed executive agency courts investigation and recrimination (since only sovereign decision fully suspends the force of law), then the goal of security would be better served by a legal means of sanctioning such agency. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Congress provided that means in its joint resolution of September 14, 2001, known as The Authorization for the Use of Military Force. In compliance with the War Powers Resolution, it authorizes the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those who committed or abetted the terrorist attacks “in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States” (“Authorization”).
 
That language gives a big legal boost to the NSC as the executive agency charged with advising the President on matters of security. The Authorization declares war against terrorists, specifically those associated with al-Qa’ida, and in doing so legitimates violence that would otherwise require sovereign decision to deploy. Assassination or “targeted killing,” which Regan’s own Executive Order 12333 prohibits as state policy, becomes the use of “necessary and appropriate force” against an enemy belligerent. Under Reagan the NSC covertly sold TOWs to terrorists. It never openly targeted terrorists for killing. But The Authorization for the Use of Military Force sanctions that possibility, authorizing a subtle but decisive shift in the operation of the NSC, whose agency now involves advising the President on how to conduct a war against terror. Little wonder, then, that NSC membership has steadily grown over the last decade, a trend President Barack Obama only exaggerated with his Presidential Policy Statement of February 13, 2009, which consolidated the staffs of the NSC and the Office of Homeland Security while vastly expanding the variety of government officials authorized to attend regular meetings. The NSC now includes as statutory advisors the Director of National Intelligence as well as the Director of the CIA. Under Obama it has developed into archipelago of intelligence agencies. The war against terror, or at least the terrorists responsible for 9/11, provides a legal basis for the distribution of sovereignty to include the NSC in its capacity to advise the President. Exactly how appears quite clearly in current efforts to justify targeted killing not only of foreign terrorists, but also of American civilians linked to terrorist activities abroad. Under normal circumstances such killing would constitute assassination, but war is a state, if not quite of exception as Agamben understands it, then at least of exceptional legality regarding homicidal violence. That’s the position advanced in a Department of Justice White Paper obtained by NBC News. Its full title is long but instructive: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” The document takes pains to restrict legitimate targeted killing to the belligerents named by Congress in The Authorization for the Use of Military Force, thereby sidestepping any breach of Executive Order 12333. Only those formally at war with the U.S. can lawfully be targeted, and everyone knows it’s legal to kill enemy soldiers. After acknowledging that this particular war differs from others in that “The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and its associated forces” (3) (raising the problem of enemy soldiers-without-borders), the Department of Justice advances three criteria for targeting dispersed belligerents: first, that an “informed high-level official” determines that such an individual “poses an imminent threat of violent attack” against the United States; second, that capture is not feasible; and third, that targeting occurs in conformity with “applicable law of war principals” (6).
 
The first of these criteria most clearly redistributes executive agency to the NSC. It isn’t simply that defining “imminent threat” turns out to be impossible, which the white paper demonstrates in self-deconstructing language when it admits “that the U.S. government may not be aware of all al-Qa’ida plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur” (7). The double negative here turns imminence into ubiquity. The real issue, however, involves not the definition of “imminent threat” but the process of identifying it. “A high-level senior official” determines that a “violent attack” will soon take place. Who is that high-level senior official? Surely not the President. How can he, ensconced in the Oval Office, know anything decisive about terrorist activities dispersed internationally across the globe? Through his advisors is how, specifically those serving the executive directly, the masked crusaders of the NSC. The Justice Department attributes to them an agency tantamount to sovereignty to the extent that they provide the advisory information that deems a threat imminent and determines targeting—of American citizens if necessary. They play Ozymandias in a nutshell, targeting a few to secure the safety of many.
 
But doesn’t the decision to target an enemy belligerent in a non-international armed conflict rest ultimately with the President, Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces? Not really. If the NSC (or its high-ranking officials) participate in a distributed sovereignty, so do their decisions, which is to say such decisions no longer originate with a decider in any conventional sense. Ozymandias had his arithmetic, the Reagan NSC its accounting: decisions made on the basis of computation. This tendency reaches its apogee in the problem of targeted killings. The war against terror proceeds in part in a future mood: The Authorization of the Use of Military Force undertakes to “prevent future attacks.” The dangerous terrorist plots today but acts tomorrow. Targeting him or her requires factoring tomorrow into a calculation of culpability. Hellfire missiles scream into a future made peaceable by their terminal violence. Short of the telepaths of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” the decision to target terrorists dispersed across national boundaries and camouflaged in inscrutable cultures must rely on the best available means of prediction.
 
Today those means have a name as benign as it is fateful: the “Disposition Matrix.” The Washington Post describes the way it works in some detail in a three-part article from late October, 2012. Obama administration officials view it, in the words of that report, as “an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit” (Miller). Less enthusiastic commentators call the Disposition Matrix, more simply, a kill list. In actual fact, it is a “gigantic data-mining operation” (“Disposition”), a complex database used to identify and target suspected al-Qa’ida related terrorists in a game of weaponized profiling. According to the Post, “The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations…. [It] is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the ‘disposition’ of suspects beyond the reach of American drones” (Miller). Any fan of science fiction movies will sense the morbid implications of the phrase “Disposition Matrix,” a euphemism of a piece with others made familiar by the war on terror, “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation.” This Matrix aims to kill—in a war against terror without end (the Post headline labels it “The Permanent War”) on a battlefield as potentially wide as the world.¹⁷
 
And who is the Ozymandias who wields the force of its calculations? Any “informed, high-level official” who determines which terrorists pose an “imminent threat.” The Disposition Matrix operates under the auspices of the National Counterintelligence Center, which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Post reports that it “was conceived as a clearinghouse for threat data and has no operational capacity” (Miller). It nevertheless generates the profiles and contingencies that send al-Qa’ida affiliated terrorists to paradise or prison in an undisclosed location. Computational analysis generates the data and high-ranking officials deploy it: the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA, other NSA officials, and, ultimately, the President of the United States. But one man stands apart as principal keeper of the deadly keys of disposition: John O. Brennan, founding director of the National Counterintelligence Center under George W. Bush, then Homeland Security Advisor under Barak Obama, and now Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Brennan, who told the Post, “I tend to do what I think is right,” is the architect and prime proponent of the superjustice of computational profiling and targeted killing (DeYoung). Ozymandias, like Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian before him, now works for Washington.
 
Perhaps the biggest problem with the Disposition Matrix, aside from its moral transparency, is that it works.¹⁸ As targeted killings have increased, violent attacks against American interests have decreased—or so administration officials claim in justifying the institutionalization of its wartime policy. Brennan plays a large role in administrating doom: “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it. Now the system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan’s desk, and subsequently presented to the president” (Miller). The decision to use deadly force against terrorists has clearly been distributed. The agency of the decider diffuses among information compilers and deployers: the Disposition Matrix, Brennan, and other “high-level” NCS officials (including the Director of the CIA, who has authority to approve targeted killings outside of Pakistan).¹⁹ The Matrix proposes and the administration disposes. All in the name of national security.
 
Drones do the dirty work. If circumstances appear statistically auspicious and appropriate officials concur, a remote controlled aircraft called a Predator lifts off from an American airbase in Djibouti, piloted by skilled technicians located a world away at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada or Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico (Whitlock). It steers a blind but guided course toward its target of opportunity on a battlefield without borders, maybe in Pakistan, maybe in Yemen, maybe in Afghanistan: wherever a “Senior Operational Leader of as-Qa’ida or an Associated Force” poses an imminent threat. Perhaps it finds the particular belligerent targeted for killing. Perhaps it lets fly a Hellfire missile, killing the cleric Anwar al-Awlake, an American Citizen, or perhaps his 16-year-old son.²⁰ Perhaps its kills innocent civilians too, inevitable if regrettable collateral damage—somewhere between 475 and 885 total in Pakistan 21 between 2004 and 2012.²¹ Perhaps Pakistanis, Somalis, Yeminis, Afghans come to view the United States as a demon spitting death. Perhaps not sovereignty but its computational equivalent now directs deadly force against enemy belligerents. Perhaps Ozymandias—or the Disposition Matrix—kills thousands to save billions. If the state of exception is indeed giving way to a paradigm of security as the prevailing technique of government, it’s neither the sovereign nor his exceptional decision that the world should be worrying about. It’s the program of lethal profiling that directs sovereign agency and statistically legitimates targeted killing. In the state of exception turned security, sovereignty belongs to the drone—in both senses of the word: the lethal buzz of pilotless aircraft and the reproductive function of the male bee. American drones breed global violence. As the drone state profiles its way to victory in an interminable war against terror, it produces the belligerence that legitimates security. Who watches its watchmen?
 

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise has elicited an unusual critical consensus. Most critical readers tend to agree that because this novel represents an American culture given over to consumerism and its various mediations (primarily by television), in the America of the novel one can no longer experience an authentic relationship to oneself or to the social world. Seduced by the image, inhabiting a world dominated by Baudrillardrian simulacra, the novel’s characters passively embody the crisis of postmodernity, futilely seeking meaning in supermarkets and malls. As Mark Conroy puts it in an early article on the novel,
 

Gladney’s life has been in severe drift for many years, but his malaise may best be seen as a crisis of authority. His life is falling apart because it needs several registers of traditional authority in order to stay together. And all of them are coming under attack in the America of DeLillo’s text: not from revolution, of course, but simply from those acids of modernity.

(98)

Conroy argues that the novel shows us what happens when traditional modes of authority and “cultural transmission” (religion, humanism, the nuclear family, and community) have been replaced by “phony” institutions (99), “fake” religion (101), “compromised and meretricious” humanism (102), an “errant” family narrative in which parents have abdicated their authority (98), and an “expression of civicism in its most perverse form” (100). The novel ends, for Conroy, with Jack “doubly victimized by modernity. . . . Only as that quintessentially passive figure, the consumer, does Gladney have the faint glimpse of immortality now allowed him” (108). Like most critics of the novel, Conroy reads the last scene in the supermarket as the final nail in the coffin of an American culture and citizenship destroyed by the depredations of consumer culture and, as John Duvall says, its “proto-fascist” purveyor, television (128).¹ This reading of the novel allows no blurring of the authenticity/inauthenticity divide and related binaries.

 
Descriptions of the “consumer” as the “quintessentially passive figure,” and of consumerism as a replacement of authentic experiences with “phony” ones suggest, however, that consumerism is more nuanced in DeLillo than the criticism allows, and that the crisis of postmodern culture that consumerism subtends in the novel is a crisis of traditional masculinity. Critics who read White Noise as exposing the problems of postmodern consumer culture carry on a tradition of cultural critique which has dominated both left-liberal and conservative discourses invested in diagnosing what’s wrong with American culture and the American citizen. At least since the middle of the nineteenth century, what has come to be known as the “American jeremiad” has insisted that what’s wrong with American culture is that it “feminizes” American citizens.² As Philip Gould points out in a retrospective discussion of Ann Douglas’s influential The Feminization of American Culture, the feminization thesis “depended on the dual associations of mass culture with cultural totalitarianism and sentimentality with naïve ideology. Liberal politics, in other words, naturalized a masculine vision of ‘American’ culture that was perpetually endangered by feminization” (iv). The postwar critic, continues Gould, uses the logic of feminization “to the point of creating a cultural metaphor—indeed, a cultural history—of declension, where an originally masculine American political culture has lost its way. Put another way, this is a secular and exclusively masculine jeremiad of postwar American culture” (iv). In this narrative of crisis, “American” means masculine and, thus, this line of cultural critique naturalizes an equation between nation and gender, claiming as self-evident that which must constantly be constructed and naturalized. A masculinist version of liberalism, as Gould suggests, focuses attention less on the material effects of social and cultural systems, and more on the symbolic and individualist effects of those systems on “feminized” men. In doing so, narratives about feminization offer little insight into the exploitative relations of consumer culture, pursuing instead a fantasy about national disempowerment played out through the individual performance of “feminization.”
 
Although there has been surprisingly little work on gender in DeLillo (see Nel, Helyer, and Longmuir), the critical response to White Noise can be used to explore the gendered construction of consumerism and authenticity in postmodernism. In this essay I focus on the ways in which a certain mode of anti-consumerist critique carries with it a set of unacknowledged assumptions about gender. My goal is not to argue that DeLillo celebrates consumer culture, nor is it to contest critiques of commodity culture that have been articulated since Marx.³ Instead, I unpack the rhetoric of anti-consumerism within White Noise criticism in order to argue that a certain construction of “postmodernism” reproduces a version of a mass-culture critique that sees “feminization” as the primary ill of consumer culture and that figures consumerism as loss.⁴ At the same time, the narrative of crisis or decline that governs so many readings of this novel tends to be at odds with postmodern theory’s delegitimation of traditional familial, religious, civic, and humanist narratives. As feminist theorists and critics writing around the time of White Noise‘s 1985 publication suggest so forcefully, postmodernism offers an alternative to the master narratives of Western history that cloak the particularity of a masculine perspective with a sham universality.⁵ It is not necessary to rehearse these debates here; suffice it to say that the mode of postmodernism cited by the critics of White Noise has become its own master narrative of crisis that reproduces some of the same oppositions that were supposed to have gone the way of delegitimated master narratives: active/passive, intellectual/bodily, high culture/mass culture, abstract/material.⁶ The mark of this postmodernism is a nostalgic anti-consumerism that values a modernist and masculinist notion of individual autonomy, authenticity, and meaning, while (at least implicitly) degrading as feminizing anything that compromises these values.
 
Narratives of postmodernism which focus on the loss of the (modern) values of originality, authenticity, and individual autonomy—and the secure separation of high from low or mass culture that grounds these value—position the white middle class male individual as the victim of what Conroy calls the “acids of modernity.” Andrew Hoberek has recently argued that the postmodernism theorized by Fredric Jameson mistakes the “experience of the postwar American middle class in transition” for a more global cultural and political crisis and, thus, “requires us to understand postmodernism not as an external, reified phenomenon but rather as the universalized worldview of the new white-collar middle class” (Twilight 117, 120). Although Hoberek does not identify it as such, this theoretical account of postmodernism carries on a tradition of social critique, begun in the 1950s, which reads the alienation of the white, middle-class American man as the tragedy of postwar culture. It is this postmodernism that elevates consumerism to the status of a malevolent force intent on depriving a formerly autonomous male agent of the power not only to produce authentic culture, but also to distinguish between the authentic and inauthentic. In construing the postmodernized subject as that “quintessentially passive figure, the consumer,” to recall Conroy, and despite their explicit disavowal of both androcentrism and naturalization, such versions of postmodernism insinuate that one of the most damaging effects of postmodern consumer culture is to dilute the power of gender difference, making men more like the women who are “naturally” aligned with consumerism.⁷ As my emphasis on autonomy and individualism suggests, the crisis of postmodernism as imagined in the criticism of White Noise is an existential crisis, rather than a social, economic, or political crisis. This construction of the novel’s project in the criticism focuses not on the economic realities of consumer culture, but on the ways in which social forces affect the individual. In DeLillo criticism, postmodernism becomes a crisis of individualism, and of the death of the patriarchal subject and its patriarchal moorings. For example, in his reading of White Noise as exemplifying the end of modernist “heroic narrative” (361), Leonard Wilcox stresses what he takes to be the novel’s representation of “modernist subjectivity . . . in a state of siege” (348). While acknowledging that this state of siege is a “crisis in the deeply patriarchal structures of late capitalism, a world in which there is a troubling of the phallus, in which masculinity slips from its sure position” (358), Wilcox quickly generalizes from this crisis of masculinity to a cultural crisis tout court and, in doing so, aligns himself with critics who read White Noise as representing an unambiguous nightmare of postmodern loss and decline. Wilcox’s analysis raises the question of whether the crisis of postmodernism is only or primarily a crisis of heteronormative masculinity, going so far as to suggest that Jack’s confrontation with Willie Mink enacts a “confrontation with postmodern culture itself” (359), complete with an oedipalized struggle over the possession of Babette. He stops short of considering the gender implications of his own analysis, concluding that the novel offers a “grimly satiric allegory of the crisis of the sign in the order of simulacrum, the dissolution of phallic power, and the exhaustion of heroic narratives of late modernity” (361). The leap from a crisis of masculinity to a crisis in the “heroic narratives of late modernity” returns the subject and his narratives (even if in crisis) to the normatively masculine. Not interested in the question of whether the novel might do something other than mourn the loss of patriarchal structures, Wilcox misses the opportunity to ask whether we might read the novel as a parody of the idea of a masculine, phallic, autonomous self that is decentered by postmodernity. The thrust of Wilcox’s argument is that White Noise bears witness to a condition of general cultural decline coupled with, if not caused by, the crisis of an “autonomous and authentic subjectivity” (349). Wilcox concludes: “a failure at heroism, Gladney shops at the supermarket” (364). The interpretive framework here explicitly couples the “exhaustion of heroic narratives of late modernity” with “the dissolution of phallic power.” Because that failure is figured by shopping, we can only conclude that stories about consumerism replace those heroic narratives and, thus, render the erstwhile phallic subject emasculated or feminized.
 
Several critics of White Noise, like Wilcox, rely on unspecified notions of “authenticity,” using this relative term as if it were an absolute quality; “authenticity” stands in for a vaguely articulated set of values lost through the dominance of consumer culture in the novel’s world.⁸ These readings assume that consumer culture is always false, fake, and lesser than other, more “real” forms of culture. But “authenticity,” of course, is neither a self-evident nor an ahistorical term, and in contemporary culture it is constantly being negotiated. In a recent book on contemporary meanings of the “authentic,” Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that contemporary critiques of consumer culture can be linked to a philosophical tradition that “has contemplated the space of the authentic as a space that is not material” and perpetuates “the same distinct boundary between a consumer capitalist space and an authentic one.”⁹ Like the critics of White Noise, the cultural commentators identified by Banet-Weiser hold onto the bedrock (and modernist) assumption that “authenticity is still possible” in a “space [that] exists outside of consumer culture” (11-12). For example, critics have emphasized that Jack’s search for transcendence or existential value in shopping simply demonstrates the distance White Noise tracks between an authentic, modern sense of self and an inauthentic, postmodern illusion of self. Commenting on the scene in the Mid-Village Mall, John Duvall mocks the sense of “power and control” Jack derives from shopping: “Jack replaces his inauthentic Hitler aura with the equally inauthentic aura of shopping, which he experiences, however, as authentic” (137). Christoph Linder too notes that “the ‘fullness of being’ derived from the experience of shopping is nothing more than an illusory effect, a transparent state of delusion, a false and fleeting sense of well-being” (160). If Jack is “deluded” into misreading shopping as “authentic,” it is not clear where this “real” authenticity might reside. Such claims rely on the “common sense” that consumer culture, and the meanings found within it, are inauthentic because mass-produced and packaged; consumer culture, in this reading, is an affront to the creative (masculine) individual who no longer has the power to discern the difference between original and copy, the true meaning of art and the false meanings of mass culture. This discourse of authenticity betrays a retrogressive desire for some unspecified golden past before the age of simulations distanced us from the “real.” As Linda Hutcheon notes in her comments on Jameson’s Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “it is precisely nostalgia for this kind of ‘lost authenticity’ . . . that has proved time and time again to be paralysing in terms of historical thinking” (“Irony” 203).
 
At stake in negative assessments of shopping is the cherished notion of an authentic self threatened by the forces of consumerism, a consumerism that has historically been gendered feminine. Mark Osteen, for example, concludes about this scene that “shopping produces a simulated self who is not an individual agent but an element of a system of capitalism. . . . [C]onsumption turns persons into packages radiating and receiving psychic data. We become spectacular commodities who consume everything we see, but most of all, ourselves” (171). The distinction between an “authentic inner self and the performative outer self” (Banet-Weiser 10) has been a fixture throughout the tradition of anti-consumerist critique to which I am tying White Noise criticism. Although Osteen does not identify this problem of the simulated self with gender, the very notion of the “authentic self” threatened by large social systems is a fiction of masculinity particularly pervasive in a postmodern culture characterized by “agency panic.”¹⁰ Critiques of contemporary consumer culture tend to reproduce the early Cold War rhetoric fueled by a suspicion that all systems, including consumerism, aim to rob the individual of his autonomy. As Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter point out, the “anticonsumerism [that] has become one of the most important cultural forces in millenial North American life” is less a “critique of consumerism” than it is a “restatement of the critique of mass society” that has dominated American social criticism since the middle of the twentieth century (98). Heath and Potter point to popular films such as Fight Club and American Beauty as rehashing this critique which is long past its “sell-by date” (102); but they also identify it in both the “high” theory of Baudrillard and Jameson and in the more popular critiques of consumer culture like No Logo and Culture Jam. What these critiques have in common, according to Heath and Potter, is an ultimately elitist (and Puritan) hostility toward shopping and shoppers; they all work to naturalize a construction of contemporary consumer culture as false and inauthentic, but also as feminizing.¹¹
 
In a particularly blatant example of this mode of critique, Benjamin Barber diagnoses consumer capitalism as producing a crisis in masculinity. Barber’s case for the emasculations of consumer capitalism relies on its difference from an earlier stage of capitalism, one peopled by the “swashbuckling” men (“they are rarely women”) who, “exuding virile recklessness,” were driven by “invention and discovery” (55). Against these pioneers, Barber imagines an emasculated heir, more “puerile” than “virile” :
 

The ethos animating postmodern consumer capitalism is one of joyless compulsiveness. The modern consumer is no free-willed sybarite, but a compulsory shopper driven to consumption because the future of capitalism depends on it. He is less the happy sensualist than the compulsive masturbator, a reluctant addict working at himself with little pleasure, encouraged in his labor by an ethic of infantilization that releases him to a self-indulgence he cannot altogether welcome.

(51)

The shopper envisioned here is a man who is “infantilized” by American consumer culture. While Barber wants to assign agency to capitalism and to argue that the compulsory shopper cannot help but fulfill the terms “demanded” by consumer capitalism, at the same time he chides this shopper for his laziness, his self-indulgence, and his lack of will. Barber needs to imagine his shopper as male in order to create a sense of crisis here; Barber does not worry that female shoppers might be “feminized” by consumer culture because the sense of gender reproduced in his text imagines women as always already feminized and men as always in danger of being feminized. Indeed, the female shopper who inhabits the pages of many postwar critiques of American culture functions primarily to reinforce a binary construction of gender based on the opposition between masculine production and feminine consumption. She is perhaps most famously enshrined in Vance Packard’s “Babes in Consumerland,” where she is made to embody the dangers of a consumer culture that “scientifically” engineers consent. Describing the techniques through which market researchers study how women get sucked into making “impulse purchases,” Packard wryly observes that the optimum goal is to put the “ladies” into a “hypnoidal trance” so strong that “they passed neighbors and old friends without noticing or greeting them,” had a “glassy stare,” and “were so entranced as they wandered the store plucking things off shelves at random that they would bump into boxes without seeing them” (92). Like zombies not even cognizant of their own will or identity, they passively embody the desires of the marketers and other professionals intent on ensnaring them in the consumer net. As Cecile Whiting comments, mid-century discourses about the female shopper represent her as “deceived by representation, los[ing] her grip on the real” (38).

 
The figure of the entranced female shopper lurks within readings of DeLillo’s supermarket, although critics have seemed mostly uninterested in tracing a history of this figure’s representation, or in DeLillo’s possible engagement in a cultural history of shopping.¹² For many critics, Jack’s delusion that he can find “a fullness of being” through purchasing goods in the supermarket (20) simply demonstrates the novel’s construction of postmodern culture as inauthentic and its subjects as zombies in Packard’s supermarket. It is worth noting, however, that it is the male characters who most compel the critics’ (and DeLillo’s) attention; it is the male characters who shop so enthusiastically; and, it is an entirely male faculty in the Department of American Environments who devote their lives to studying cereal boxes and other forms of mass or commodity culture. Might the masculinity of DeLillo’s shoppers and consumer-culture students contribute to the negative response to the novel’s representation of that culture? As histories of gender and consumerism have pointed out, women and men have experienced sometimes radically different material and symbolic relations to shopping and other activities of consumer culture. Because women have been relegated to the private sphere, historians have suggested that shopping has provided the main route toward women’s participation in the sphere.¹³ For women, consumption thus becomes a means toward the construction of public identity. For men, consumerism has been understood as threatening public identity, individual autonomy, and agency.
 
What these divergent histories suggest is that a particular mode of anti-consumerist critique—one that emphasizes consumer culture’s threat to autonomy, authenticity, and individualism—announces a crisis of masculinity rather than a broader cultural crisis. The focus in White Noise criticism on male shoppers and on the loss of the “heroic narratives of modernity” (Wilcox 361) is fueled by an unacknowledged but nevertheless pervasive assumption that the crisis of masculinity (and of the patriarchal subject) is the crisis of postmodern culture. As many feminists writing about the relationship between feminism and postmodernism in the 1980s made clear, men and women have historically had different relationships to the myth of the autonomous subject: women are unlikely to mourn the death of a privilege they have never had (theoretical) access to in the first place.¹⁴ Although this feminist critique of theories of loss in postmodernity did not directly tie the crisis of postmodernity to consumer culture, the rhetoric of loss and decline that marks the key texts of postmodern theory is virtually the same rhetoric of loss and decline I find in anti-consumerist discourse and in criticism of White Noise. The crisis of postmodernity as diagnosed in White Noise criticism is exacerbated by, if it does not originate in, DeLillo’s representation of men as pursuing what are more commonly understood as “feminine” pleasures and, in the process, as abandoning traditionally masculine pursuits. To cite Wilcox again, “A failure at heroism, Gladney shops at the supermarket” (364).
 
A closer look at the critical response to the scene in which Jack shops at the Mid-Village Mall supports my claim that shopping causes gender trouble for the novel’s critics. For Chistoph Lindner, shopping functions only as evidence of cultural decline, and Jack’s enthusiastic participation in it merely emphasizes his failure to detect the difference between the real and the simulated. Lindner couches this argument in a gendered logic when he notes that Jack’s “mall crawl” is provoked by the “emasculating” comments of his colleague, Eric Massingale, who shows Jack that “[e]ven when surrounded by the aura of machismo emanating from the hardware store, he still looks harmless and insignificant (read unmanly) to his male colleague” (162). Given the prevalence of a discourse about shopping as a feminine experience, however, Lindner’s suggestion that Jack seeks to “escape his feelings of inadequacy” by “los[ing] himself in the experience of shopping” seems counterintuitive (162). Lindner’s language, in fact, echoes accounts of women’s shopping “habits:” Jack engages in “retail therapy,” “reckless spending and impulse buying” (162), leaving the “masculine and masculinizing space” of the hardware store (161) to enter the mall, and is “alive with the delirium of shopping” (163). But Jack’s feelings of inadequacy may be addressed rather than exacerbated by his becoming-feminine. Lindner fails to consider that Jack might be pursuing a healthy therapy through a normatively feminine activity, a line of analysis that indicates DeLillo’s challenge to conventional ideas about gender and consumerism.
 
DeLillo’s representation of Jack’s enthusiastic shopping at the Mid-Village Mall suggests that shopping means pursuing communion with the female members of his family and entering into their world. It is Babette and “the two girls” who become his “guides to endless well-being,” “puzzled but excited by [his] desire to buy” (White Noise 83). Jack reports that “My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping at last” (83) and, even if Wilder and Heinrich are included in the unit “my family,” Jack does not mention either one of them. The “retail therapy” in which Jack indulges at the Mid-Village Mall aligns him with women, and suggests his embrace of the feminine pleasures of shopping. The language he uses to communicate his experience certainly resonates with descriptions of female shoppers pursuing a “shop ’til you drop” strategy of retail therapy: he “shopped with reckless abandon,” being led by Babette and the girls and carried along on the wave of their desires (84). Because Lindner poses the feminine shopping that Jack pursues against the masculine realm of the hardware store, his gendered reading of the scene ties DeLillo’s negative assessment of the “depthless postmodern space” to the demise of the authentic, masculine self (Lindner 164).
 
Thomas Ferraro also connects the scene in the Mid-Village Mall to a series of losses bemoaned in the 1980s, particularly by conservative critics such as Christopher Lasch and Allan Bloom, and linked to the rise of feminism, “Me Generation” materialism, and the demise of the traditional nuclear family. For Ferraro, White Noise represents a dysfunctional family (made so by the “quicksand” of “no-fault-no-shame divorce” [20]) with patriarch Jack able to restore his authority and power only through the illusions of family solidarity found in the shopping mall. Although Ferraro demurs from assessing the politics of this representation and its relationship to the critiques penned by Bloom and Lasch, his analysis leaves the impression that White Noise is a part of that anti-consumerist tradition. Rather than read Jack’s shopping spree as feminizing him, Ferraro reads this scene as pointing to a false because consumer-mediated version of masculinity; the “structure of the family is regrounded in the actual business of consumption,” and Jack’s status as patriarch is guaranteed only within the realm of consumption, where each family member “knows his or her responsibility, his or her privileges,” rather than within some more real, less “illusory” realm not defined by the marketplace (22-23). Ferraro thus aligns White Noise with the (conservative) nostalgia that marks Lasch and Bloom.¹⁵
 
While Lindner, Ferraro, and other critics use this scene to further develop their reading of the novel’s representation of consumer culture as inauthentic, thus reproducing “the great divide” between a modernist hostility to mass culture and postmodern capitulation to it, such readings miss the opportunity to comment more critically on the gendering of consumerism. We might, instead, read the mall scene as DeLillo’s representation of Jack struggling to negotiate his own gender in relation to consumer practices. DeLillo’s challenge to conventional genderings of consumerism is further developed through his representation of Jack and Murray in the supermarket, which contests oppositions between passive consumption and active intellectual production, between shopping and reading, and between feminine and masculine. It would be hard to argue that what goes on in the supermarket in White Noise is only shopping, and harder still to argue that DeLillo presents shopping as passive. What Murray and Jack engage in is more like reading than shopping: they take pleasure in the act of interpretation in addition to the act of buying.¹⁶ Reading is everywhere foregrounded in these scenes of shopping, from the analysis of packaging to the “paperback books scattered across the entrance” of the store (20). This is not to say that “reading” is, somehow, better than “shopping,” or vice versa; it is to say that reading and shopping need not be understood as antithetical activities, the one “higher” and the other “lower.” As Meaghan Morris has suggested, consumer venues can and should be understood as “spaces of cultural production” (193). For Morris, this means displacing the assumptions about cultural value enshrined by modernism; she suggests “studying the everyday, the so-called banal, the supposedly un- or non-experimental, asking not, ‘why does it fall short of modernism?’ but ‘how do classical theories of modernism fall short of women’s modernity?’” (202).¹⁷ Morris gestures toward a complex set of oppositions here that poses women, stagnation, passivity, and everyday consumption against men, innovation, activity, and intellectual production. This version of modernism has spawned the particular version of postmodernism that dominates criticism of White Noise; the problem with this postmodernism for DeLillo’s critics is not that it “falls short of women’s postmodernity,” but that it threatens to make men themselves appear as modernism’s “other”: passive, consuming, stagnant, and stuck in the materialities of everyday life. Morris’s work suggests that an emphasis on the material relations of consumer culture produces a very different reading of the relationships between individuals, shopping, and cultural value than does a more abstract emphasis.¹⁸ Unlike the cultural critic who seeks a position above the practices of consumer culture, DeLillo’s shoppers simultaneously analyze and enjoy. The novel suggests that there is no disinterested position from which to launch a critique. As Linda Hutcheon argues in her elaboration of a feminist version of The Politics of Postmodernism, the fact of complicitous critique need not be cause for (modernist) despair. For Jack, “[t]here is no difference . . . between identification and resistance, or between enjoyment and critique. Like the supermarket’s own multiplication of lines, he seems to be energized by, to survive on, the proliferation of theories about what the supermarket is” (Bowlby 209-10).
 
DeLillo’s interest in shopping and domesticity is part of his larger interest in the “radiance of dailiness” that he describes in a much-cited 1988 interview. Asked about his “fondness” “for the trappings of suburban life” and the meaning of the “supermarket as a sacred place,” DeLillo clearly differentiates his point of view from those of critics who find that shopping distances us from meaning and, even, transcendence:
 

In White Noise, in particular, I tried to find a kind of radiance in dailiness. Sometimes this radiance can be almost frightening. Other times it can be almost holy or sacred. Is it really there? Well, yes. You know I don’t believe as Murray Jay Siskind does in White Noise that the supermarket is a form of Tibetan lamasery. But there is something there that we tend to miss. . . . I think that’s something that has been in the background of my work: a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision.

(DeCurtis 70-71)

The language here—”radiance,” “holiness,” the “sacred,” “something extraordinary,” something “really there”—points not to the falsenesses of consumer culture, but to something not reducible to a nightmare image of the consuming self. To see the novel as “an extended gloss on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of consumer society” (Duvall 136) requires that we declare allegiance to a brand of anti-consumerism that appears, at best, at odds with DeLillo’s statements here, and, at worst, willfully uninterested in the possibility that the novel might challenge a simple opposition between the active critic and the passive consumer helplessly seduced by the supermarket. Without actually making an argument for what’s wrong with the supermarket, DeLillo’s critics tend to assume that the pleasures and reassurances sought and found there are necessarily inauthentic, and so destructive of any “real” meaning.¹⁹ Authenticity, wedded to masculinity, is endangered in the supermarket and mall, where the real (and the self) is always already commodified.

 
The “real” in this line of argument is not the “real” of material objects, but the “real” of some more abstract value having to do with independence from mediation, commodification and exploitation, and with “being” not determined by commercial interests. This approach is exemplified by Joseph S. Walker’s attempt to pinpoint the unmediated real in DeLillo’s fiction. Walker isolates moments of “criminality,” or more accurately moments produced as the effect or in the wake of criminality, as the places where DeLillo attempts to represent the real. But even to put it in these terms suggests the problem, because, according to Walker, any representation of a phenomenon—a sight, an experience, a sound, or what have you—is always already mediated. Walker suggests that the much-discussed “postmodern sunsets” that appear with the receding airborne toxic event might just be the “book’s most convincing instance of the real—indeed, [they] may be the clearest instance of the real in all of DeLillo’s work” (440). While it is unclear why it matters that this phenomenon appears in the wake of criminality, Walker emphasizes DeLillo’s narration of the crowd’s participation in the event of the sunsets. Contrasting this viewing experience with the earlier visit to the “most photographed barn in America,” Walker suggests that the instability, changeability, and unpredictability of the sunsets—in short, their mystery—elevates them above all other narrated events in the novel. Because they change from day to day, and because Jack and the others do not know how to react to them, the sunsets cannot “be contained by a single image endlessly repeated, assimilated, and commercialized. The crowds that gather to watch the sunsets are unmarked by the brand names that run through much of the novel; instead of the gaudily packaged products of the supermarket,” the watchers bring, as DeLillo tells us, “fruit and nuts,” a “thermos of iced tea,” and “cool drinks” (Walker 441; White Noise 324).
 
The idea that “fruit and nuts” are, somehow, outside commercialism or necessarily posed against the “gaudily packaged products in the supermarket” seems unconvincing to me, offering evidence only of this critic’s desire to imagine something “natural” that escapes the logic of consumer culture. The desire to find a “pure” experience uncorrupted by “intervening mediations” is fueled by an implicit assumption that “authenticity” must be sought in some pre-commercial paradise (Walker 434). As Daniel Miller points out,
 

most critics of mass culture tend to assume that the relation of persons to objects is in some way vicarious, fetishistic or wrong; that primary concern should lie with direct social relations and “real” people. The belief underlying this attitude is often that members of pre-industrial societies, free of the burden of artefacts, lived in more immediate natural relationship with each other.

(Material Culture 11)

Walker’s desire to find an unmediated real in DeLillo’s work is marked by a nostalgia for a (fantasized) pure past that DeLillo actually mocks in this scene by presenting the sunsets as completely mediated, even personified: “The sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life” (324). Like the evacuees’ response to the airborne toxic event, described by Jack as having an “epic quality” (122), “part of the grandness of a sweeping event” (127), the response to the sunsets can be understood only through the mediation of other narratives, other representations. To identify the sunsets as both “postmodern” and “rich in romantic imagery” (227) is to abandon the distinction between the false, the simulated, and the mediated, on the one hand, and the genuine, the authentic, and the natural, on the other hand. It is also to tie the postmodern to the romantic desire to find an “authentic” self and a pre-cultural, “‘authentic’ social relation” (Miller, Material Culture 41). ²⁰

 
As Kim Humphery argues, much anti-consumerist discourse depends on a set of oppositions that are never fully examined. “A life that is ‘really real,’” he writes, “is seen as residing principally in the world of the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual,” and is posed against “the falsity of most commodity satisfaction, particularly the ersatz and temporary fulfillment of mass-produced things and media experiences, and of mainstream commercial space such as the shopping mall” (134). Critics of White Noise maintain that its engagement in consumer culture is meant to expose precisely the “ersatz and temporary fulfillment of mass-produced things and media experiences,” as evidenced by the nearly unanimous consensus that Jack experiences a “false sense of transcendence” when he hears a sleeping Steffie utter the words “Toyota Celica” (Duvall 135). But Jack concludes that Steffie’s words constitute a “moment of splendid transcendence” only after submitting those words to a series of questions—that is, after he critically considers the question of consumerism and transcendence from a variety of angles:
 

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe.

(155)

Critics who read this scene find that Jack mistakes a “false transcendence” for genuine transcendence by failing to see that Steffie’s words represent “a key moment in the production of consumers” (Duvall 135). But Jack has already considered this position, and nevertheless concludes that the transcendence is real and is “splendid”—what DeLillo describes, elsewhere, as “something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives” (Begley 97). That Steffie is simply “repeating some TV voice” does not disqualify her utterance as insignificant; instead, Jack reaches here for a way to interpret a transcendence that contradicts the philosophical certainty that it shouldn’t count as transcendence.²¹ Ferraro, similarly, makes a distinction between real and fake community when he argues that DeLillo “examines not so much the individuating force of consumer culture as its communalizing power. What he sees is the way consumerism produces what we can call an aura of connectedness among individuals: an illusion of kinship, transiently functional but without either sustaining or restraining power” (20).²²

 
This insistence on the difference between “real” transcendence and kinship and “false” or “illusory” transcendence and kinship evidences a fantasy of unmediated reality that DeLillo does not share. Rather than lament a state of crisis in which we can no longer distinguish between “real” and “false” emotions, commitments, and experiences, DeLillo represents the shifting epistemological ground of postmodern culture and the blurring of the boundaries between the real and the simulated. We can see this in his representation of the Gladney children responding to each newly announced symptom of Nyodene D exposure: “What did it all mean? Did Steffie truly imagine she’d seen the wreck before or did she only imagine she’d imagined it? Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion? Is there a true déjà vu and a false déjà vu?” (125-26). Even though he plays this scene for laughs, DeLillo nevertheless suggests here that, even if we could confidently tell the difference between the “real” and the “false,” it would not matter because Steffie feels herself experiencing déjà vu, even if it is an illusion of an illusion. In insisting that consumer-mediated experiences are false or inauthentic because they are consumer-mediated experiences, we can only conclude that those experiencing them are suffering from a form of false consciousness.
 
The absolute self-evidence of the claim that consumer culture substitutes the false for the real and, thus, distances us from both an authentic selfhood and an authentic engagement in the social betrays, to conclude, an investment in what Miller calls the “discourse of shopping,” which is to say, the dominant narrative that intellectuals tell about consumer culture: according to this narrative, consumer culture is necessarily trivial and the “giant malls” are “symbols of sheer emptiness, crammed full of pure ephemera that have the power to dissipate the seriousness of labour into an objectifying of nothing” (Theory 96). This narrative serves the purpose of perpetuating the “exclusively masculine jeremiad of postwar American culture” (Gould iv), here couched in the vocabulary of critique. Miller argues that “the academic theory of postmodernism provides admirable service to our need for a vision of destructive consumption as pointless waste” (96), suggesting that this theory is less interested in describing a contemporary reality than it is in constructing that reality as a fall from an earlier, better, pre-consumerist reality. This “need for a vision of destructive consumption as pointless waste” both stems from and further entrenches a set of hierarchical distinctions that “we” need only if we are intent on safeguarding high culture from low, real value from sham value, consumption from production, masculinity from femininity.
 
When asked by an interviewer to comment on the “relationship between consumerism, the indifference of the masses and the loss of personal identity,” DeLillo zeroes in, not on the figure of the zombie shopper compulsively consuming or on the alienated individual subject to commodification, but on the homeless represented in Mao II, who “live in refrigerator boxes and television boxes. If you could write slogans for nations similar to those invented by advertisers for their products the slogan for the US would be ‘Consume or die’” (Naidotti 115). What DeLillo is getting at here is more than an abstract dissatisfaction with the postmodern condition of simulation, consumerism, and inauthenticity; he is foregrounding the ways in which such an abstract stance—as indicated in the interviewer’s question—fails to get at the lived realities of consumer. Clearly, DeLillo sees the problems engendered by rampant consumerism, but he does not see these problems as producing the existential crisis most often invoked by critics of White Noise. The implicit anti-consumerism characterizing this criticism furthermore continues to insist on an increasingly unstable distinction between the social and the commercial, the authentic and the inauthentic, and between intellectual production and passive consumption. Offering a more negative assessment of White Noise’s critical intervention than do most of the novel’s critics, Andrew Hoberek suggests that the focus in White Noise on processes of commodification obscures the larger economic forces affecting the middle class and, thus, repeats Jameson’s “symptomatically postmodernist turn away from production and toward consumption” (Twilight 118). For Hoberek, DeLillo’s failure to “allude to the possibility of some social horizon beyond [his] protagonists’ alienation” means that White Noise “eschews even the possibility of a social solution to [Jack’s] alienated, commodified existence” (Twilight 125, emphasis added).²³ While it is certainly true that DeLillo does not, in this novel, offer the kind of analysis that Hoberek traces in his argument about the “proletarianization of the middle class,” I wonder why it is necessary to uphold a clear distinction between the social and the (merely) personal, between a focus on labor and modes of production and a focus on consumption; the practices of consumption that DeLillo (and others) represent are political, but they are not always political in a clear or one-dimensional way.²⁴ Furthermore, I am not sure it’s completely useful, or even accurate, to speak of Jack or any DeLillo protagonist as “alienated,” because notions of alienation rely on assumptions about what would constitute the “unalienated”—a concept that is as problematic in DeLillo’s work as is the concept of an “unmediated” representation. DeLillo has, in all of his work, displayed an abiding interest in thinking through the mutual entanglement of subject and system, the complex ways in which individual agency is both constrained by and made productive through the networks of power and social organization that can only work through the individual’s participation in them. The narrative of decline that marks White Noise criticism fails, in my view, to acknowledge fully this aspect of DeLillo’s work. Instead, it gets hijacked by a modernist narrative of decline that also relies on the assumption that there is a social, political, or even literary realm that is, somehow, more real or authentic than the realm of consumption. In postwar social critique, white middle-class alienation is figured as a fall, not only in class terms, but in gender terms as well. The tendency to code the crisis of late capitalist, postmodern consumer culture as a crisis of masculinity—in readings of DeLillo’s novels and elsewhere—severely limits our understanding of both that culture and the possible modes for critiquing it. DeLillo’s representations of shoppers and shopping have been used to bolster claims for White Noise as an exemplary text of a postmodernism understood as a series of losses. Such a framework, I have argued, constructs the crisis of postmodern consumer culture as a crisis of masculinity. But, as recent work in material culture studies and in histories of shopping suggests, consumerism is not only an economic, political, or even symbolic system; it is also a series of material practices engaged in by human subjects whose needs and desires may not be fully accounted for within the theoretical accounts of postmodern consumer culture I have critiqued here. Attention to DeLillo’s representation of the material practices of consumer culture—the pleasures and pressures he so painstakingly represents in White Noise—might yield a different narrative, and one that might place Steffie or Denise or even Babette at its center; such a narrative, focusing perhaps on the intriguing life of things in the Gladney home and other of the novel’s environments might offer an alternative to readings of the novel as a “grim satiric allegory of the crisis of the sign in the order of simulacrum, the dissolution of phallic power, and the exhaustion of heroic narratives of late modernity” (Wilcox 361) that has dominated the critical conversation.