Category: Volume 20 – Number 3 – May 2010

 
Peter Paik’s new book, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, makes an interesting contribution to the growing study of science fiction. Paik continues the move away from the study of texts, which dominated work on the genre in the 1970s, to study comics and films. Paik is a thoughtful and attentive reader. In particular, his close and careful analysis of Alan Moore’s series, The Watchmen, brings out aspects of the narrative it is easy to miss even in repeated readings of the series. He captures the depressing fatalism of Moore’s V for Vendetta, and offers a nuanced reading of the contradictory relations between the comic series and the problematically appropriated narrative in its film form. Paik maps out the historical dimension of each narrative, whether the alternative history offered by The Watchmen or the critical reaction to Thatcherism in V for Vendetta. Perhaps more significantly, he recognizes a common thread running through a group of seemingly disparate texts and films. His book begins with the analysis of Moore’s The Watchmen, discusses Jang Joon-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet in the second chapter and Hayao Miyazaki’s manga and anime work in the third, and concludes with an analysis of the Matrix films and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta in the final chapter. If Paik focuses on the figure of the superhero, he also shows these texts’ larger social conversation, connecting Moore’s critical reading of superhero comics with the paranoid science fiction of Joon-Hwan and the epic narratives of Miyazaki through a set of common ethical concerns.
 
Paik opens his text with the statement, “This book is a study of revolutionary change” (1). The connection between this claim and the focus of the book, a series of film and comic narratives that critically engage with the figure of the superhero, is negotiated by understanding revolutionary change not as a collective act but as an act of the “demiurgic creator.” Paik negotiates this shift through a reading of Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism, which argues that socialist realism “strove after and achieved the objective of the avant-garde to organize ‘the life of society’ according to ‘monolithic artistic forms’” (qtd. in Paik). That logic, according to Groys, depends on the role of the artist as creator of a new world. Stalinism shifted this desire onto the state, creating new artistic forms in order to effectively achieve “a consummate unity of aesthetic theory and political practice in his [Stalin’s] leadership over the revolutionary state” (Paik 16-17). Paik notes that Groys’s “terms…strikingly resemble the narrative conventions of American superhero comics” where he argues that “the struggle between the ‘positive hero’ of Bolshevism and the counterrevolutionary ‘wrecker’ is a conflict that unfolds on a transcendent plane, in which material reality is reduced to a mere staging ground for their superhuman battles” (Paik 17). Through this gesture, Paik argues that the Soviet project and U.S. dominated liberal capitalism constitute mythic forms, containing “an ideological symmetry that betrays in turn their shared faith in technology, whether in the form of sociopolitical engineering or of an infinitely expanding global market, to eliminate forever the historically intractable afflictions of poverty, scarcity, and war” (18). Both Soviet and U.S. projects fall back on a sort of messianism, legitimating extraordinary acts of violence and exploitation to create a new and more perfected world. Drawing on the work of conservative jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, he argues that these formations continue to be constituted through secularized versions of older political theological debates concerning the relation of the sovereign to an omnipotent god. The demiurgic creator becomes the hidden double of the secularized figure of the sovereign, one who creates new orders, rather than preserving the old by invoking a state of exception (18-9).
 
Paik argues that the material he examines critiques these mythic formations, revealing the hidden acts of violence that were necessary to their foundation. He argues that this critique comes out of a commitment to “realism.” Paik defines these texts as realist, but he distinguishes his notion of realism from generic realism:
 

The reader will note that I am not speaking of realism in the sense of the nineteenth-century novel and its representative conventions, but rather in terms closer to how it is understood in the realm of political philosophy. Realism in this latter sense constitutes a discourse which analyzes in an impartial and dispassionate manner the workings of power. It arises out of the awareness that the wellsprings of political conflict generally lie in the tragic struggle between two irreconcilable forms of the good.
 

(19)

Realism as a political discourse operates in ways that contrast with the mythical forms found both in liberal democracy and in the Soviet project. Effectively, realism entails a rejection of what Paik sees at the heart of both projects, a belief in the perfectibility of society and, implicitly, the perfectibility of human nature. Developing that latter point in his analysis of Miyazaki, he argues that tragedy can be read outside of the Aristotelian framework that has been largely accepted even by its radical critics. Instead, tragedy shows important truths, notably the fact that pain is an intrinsic part of human existence. It also refuses to narrate conflict exclusively from the perspective of one group. By demanding an analysis that operates from the perspective that a conflict is derived from equally legitimate but irreconcilable perspectives, this construction of realism allows for a significant form of cognitive mapping to occur. It allows one to think structurally, rather than as a partisan. On the other hand, it reduces the rich history of utopian thought to a simple call for perfection, rather than recognizing its role as protest, satire, critique, which are as significant to its formation as a genre as is the fantasy of perfectibility. Perhaps more significantly, Paik’s construction of realism as tragic political struggle ignores the genre’s long reception history as an outlet of protest for the poor and exploited.

Paik’s statement not only separates his work from the long history of the study of generic form taken on by literary criticism, it also elides the question of the relationship between historicity and literary form. Rather than proposing an analysis that would ask, “Why is it that narratives of catastrophe became a dominate narrative in the era of neoliberalism?” he moves into a set of transhistorical questions posed by the conventions of political philosophy. That approach amounts to an uncritical acceptance of the ideological premises of his objects of study. Neither the claim that he will focus on “revolutionary change” nor the title’s implicit claim that the book will focus on “apocalypse” or “catastrophe” accurately describes the focus of his text. Instead, the book focuses on a set of dystopian narratives, beginning in the late 1980s and ending with the turn of the century. Aside from a brief engagement with the definition of utopia in the introduction of the book, Paik avoids analyzing either the history of the genre, or its criticism. Additionally, the text makes very few references to the study of comics or to film theory. Paik’s lack of engagement with this critical tradition can’t be reduced to breach of protocol, but leads to a number of analytical problems in what could have been a more critical intervention in the field.
 
This problem is most evident in his reading of Moore’s The Watchmen, although it also affects his reading of the other films and comics. Paik recognizes the intertextual dimension of Moore’s work, but makes no effort to work through the theoretical implications of that intertextuality. Paik reads Moore’s work through the lens of the superhero as a “demiurgic creator,” focusing on Ozymandias’s attempt to create a new order through mass death. While this assessment is true, the narrative is also continually reflecting back on the history of comics as a genre. The series invokes the history of a multiplicity of comic forms, both licit and illicit, and explores the confessional from of the memoir and a number of other forms. Moore’s narrative not only comments on the fantasy of the superhero as secularized sovereign, but on the history of comic art itself. Moore’s narrative takes the relationship seriously–the relationship between form and history, which is dropped from theoretical concern in Paik’s analysis. Paik never deals with the narrative’s allusions to the comic’s code, nor with the complex and contradictory attempts on the part of the genre to deal with the counter-culture and New Left. More significantly, Paik avoids thinking through how Moore’s narrative itself might be influenced by the policies of Reagan and Thatcher, the crushing of counter-systemic movements, the dismantling of the social safety net, etc. The refusal to deal with the history of generic form simultaneously erases the way the various texts Paik engages with operate as products of their times.
 
Effectively, Paik’s analysis ignores the need to read these films and texts symptomatically, that is as products of the common sense assumptions of their time. The need to read texts symptomatically doesn’t leave out the possibility that these texts diagnose and critique the political formations of their time, but it does demand a critical engagement with the objects at hand. To give an example of an alternative approach to dystopian literature, we can look at Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Moylan introduces a note of ambiguity in his analysis of the genre: “The dystopian text does not guarantee a creative position that is implicitly militant or resigned. As an open form, it always negotiates the continuum between the Party of Utopia and the Party of Anti-Utopia” (xiii). Within Moylan’s explicitly political framing, the genre has both the possibility of contributing to the implicitly positive potential of political militancy and of contributing to its negative potential for resignation. There are legitimate critiques of this partisan approach to literary criticism. After all, the approach tends to create a binary between the “good” and the “bad” text, losing out on the possibility of complexity and ambiguity in narrative.
 
Still, Moylan’s approach holds out the possibility of reading the genre critically, exposing its assumptions, its mystifications. More significantly, Moylan continually insists on reading dystopia as a product of a particular historical time and particular events. He notes, “Although its roots lie in Menippean satire, realism, and the anti-utopian novels of the nineteenth century, the dystopia emerged as a literary form in its own right in the early 1900s, as capital entered a new phase with the onset of monopolized production and as the modern imperialist state extended its internal and external reach” (xi). Moylan foregrounds the historical aspect of the conditions that the dystopian novel was simultaneously defined by and that it critically engaged, rather than gesturing towards or alluding to it, as Paik does. If Paik had taken this historical aspect more seriously, he could have avoided some of the more problematic interpretations of the historical materialist tradition, particularly in his attempt to ascribe a notion of human nature to the tradition. This difficulty persists in his reading of Darko Suvin’s work, where he focuses on the notion of utopia as a “good place,” rather than on Suvin’s historical argument about the rise of utopian literature. Suvin’s concept of the novum, or “novelty, innovation . . . validated by cognitive logic” (Suvin 63), can be understood only within temporal innovations of the commodity form, or within what Benedict Anderson, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, calls the “homogenous, empty time” of print capitalism (24). To put it simply, the history of the genre of science fiction is intertwined with the history of crisis and transformation in the formation of the capitalist world system. At an even more basic level, science fiction operates on the premise that the future will be radically different from the present.
 
But that engagement with history is not part of Paik’s theoretical engagement with his texts. Instead, Paik frames his argument through the trans-historical framework offered by Carl Schmitt. Despite his critical interpretation of Schmitt, Paik accepts the transhistorical framework implicit in his methodology. Rather than thinking about the fear, cynicism, and opportunism that define our particular “leaden times” as a result of the class offensive contained in neoliberalism, Paik’s narrative accepts the political resignation of those texts, not as an effect of the counterrevolutionary violence of our times, but as a transhistorical truth. This translates into an unconscious conservatism that runs throughout Paik’s text. Unlike Moylan, I am unsure whether resignation is an accurate reflection of our current political possibilities or a conservative mystification of those possibilities, but, along with Moylan, I would argue that critical political theory should interrogate the assumptions of contemporary common sense, rather than repeat them.
 

 
All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems offers the prospect of commemoration and erasure. The same is probably true of selected poems in general. The format serves the purpose of introduction and distribution, often for students in classroom settings. The selection is passable if it supplies new readers, through a carefully crafted table of contents, with an abbreviated synopsis of a poet’s career and a balanced overview of writerly achievements and worldly concerns. Some degree of simplification or distortion must result. The best selections are like gateway drugs: the hard stuff can come later.
 
The erasure is especially acute, however, in the case of Charles Bernstein. He has been actively publishing for more than thirty-five years, during which time he has skillfully risen through networked communities and institutions of a fiercely intellectual counterculture and through a series of anti-workshop initiatives for the teaching of poetry and poetics. These relationships, not surprisingly, can be glimpsed as the wheels within wheels of his prior book publications. Of forty-two authored or co-authored books between 1975 and 2010, two come from self-publishing (e.g., Asylums), four come from university presses (e.g., Girly Man and My Way), and all the rest, without exception, come from small and mid-sized independent presses (e.g., Republics of Reality, Dark City, Rough Trades, Islets/Irritations, Resistance, Stigma, and Disfrutes). All the Whiskey in Heaven marks a significant new step because it is his first book released by a large commercial press. A three-decade oeuvre now finds itself represented by a private company that may or may not share the same interests with do-it-yourself and community-based ideas about the avant-garde.
 
While the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition does include endnotes for the prior book and chapbook editions, the information goes only so deep in that it does not list the magazines, journals, and broadsides where Bernstein originally found company with other poets. This point is less a critique of the FSG edition than a basic observation about the historical erasure that accompanies the commercial repackaging of a poet’s work. Without the print record, the poems appear as solitary objects removed from the social and material conditions in which they took shape. My discussion here – moving chronologically through All the Whiskey in Heaven – attempts to forestall this erasure by constructing a bibliographic map, or a zine ecology, of the small-press world in which these individual poems first developed.
 

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The selection opens with the title poem from Bernstein’s Asylums (1975), the self-published chapbook from a press (Asylum’s) that he co-founded with Susan Bee (née Laufer) in their apartment on Amsterdam Avenue between 82^nd and 83^rd. Bernstein absorbed the DIY ethos locally from poets on the Lower East Side. In the early 1970s, he himself enrolled in Bernadette Mayer’s workshop at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Bee designed the cover of this, Bernstein’s first book, establishing a pattern of poet-artist collaboration that they have maintained for many of his forty-plus works. There are a few exceptions: Arakawa designed the cover for the original edition of Islets/Irritations (1983), and the cover of All the Whiskey in Heaven is a photograph by Emma Bee Bernstein (daughter of the poet and artist).
 

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Self-publishing, even when collaborative, is an isolated activity that only indicates so much about the social ecology of a poet’s writing activity. Was that activity part of an emerging conversation about poetics? How did its formal structure resonate with what others were doing? How did it circulate and who cared to read the poem?
 
These questions are partly answered by revisiting the zine debut of “Asylum” in the San Francisco-based Tottel’s (No. 16, 1976), edited by Ron Silliman. Like Bernstein at this early moment, the fellow contributors are almost all outsiders in the poetry world: Jackson Mac Low, Lee De Jasu, Barbara Baracks, Ray DiPalma, Keith Waldrop, Jerome Rothenberg, Karl Young, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Hannah Weiner, and Silliman himself. Still, however much these poets might be excluded from the economy of prizes, commercial publications, and university appointments, one quickly sees the difficulty of restricting an account of Tottel’s – a magazine often heralded as central to Language poetry – to any single coalition or group. Approximately half the poets here are more accurately described as fellow travelers.
 
The cover of Tottel’s 16 is a gas chamber execution record from San Quentin Prison. No information has been completed except “tottel’s 16” for the prisoner’s name. Bernstein’s poem, which is based on cut-ups from Erving Goffman’s Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, thus makes a very nice fit.
 
Poems are like that in magazines: they reverberate with paratextual elements designed by the editor and the printer and with work by other contributors. It’s not that Bernstein’s poem can’t be appreciated when uprooted from the original zine publication. The lines of the poem are fascinating in their own way and raise provocative questions about the relationship between poetry and medicine. The use of quotation marks around words, to take one example, hints at parallels between the technique of poetic citing (which brings to mind Zukofsky) and the clinical skill of listening to patients. Bernstein, who worked for a period as a technical writer for medical publications, clearly zeroes in on the language of persons who stigmatize patients, e.g., the
 

persevering, nagging, delusional group –
 
“worry warts”
 
“nuisances”
 
“bird dogs”
 
in the attendant’s slang
 

(“Asylum” 31-35).

 
Bernstein’s technique, when situated within a rich twentieth-century avant-garde, reaches back to precursors like Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony and to recent contemporaries like Ted Berrigan’s “Things to Do On Speed.” Bernstein’s poem, too, conceivably fulfilled an assignment in Mayer’s workshop. His use of Goffman’s text corresponds quite closely to one or two ideas in her widely-circulated “Experiments List”: “Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and last words of each line to see what happens.” Even the notion of going to Goffman in the first place has a certain Mayer-like quality, recalling her use of journals from psychoanalysis sessions in Studying Hunger (published in 1975, the same year as Bernstein’s poem).
 
Such interpretive points are vitally important, and nothing about the reframing of “Asylum” in All the Whiskey in Heaven will stop anyone from seeing them (and plenty of others). But let’s look back again at its placement in Tottel’s. While Bernstein’s arrangement of the text is visually complicated, the disjunctive effect of single words and short phrases is fairly light in comparison to other poems in the same issue. Mac Low’s striking poem “LETT” uses all upper-case letters for ten relentless pages: “D U / A S E / N / S F S W T S Q T D” (1-4). Ray DiPalma’s “from The Sargasso Transcries” uses mainly lower-case letters for six straight pages: “khkj khkllkak lskmsmsh hsjsuhjej jekeleheueieo / bchmauh lhakale uahaheuheueieoekemenb” (1-2).
 
The print record reveals that Bernstein was surprisingly straightforward or, some might say, outright conventional in his adherence to complete words and phrases. Bernstein, for all his inventiveness, was going to learn a lot from his peers – or “company,” to use a word that he borrows from Robert Creeley. And as later poems from All the Whiskey in Heaven reveal, Bernstein did not take long to trouble the lexical operations of language (e.g., see the made-up words in “Azoot D’Puund” dating from 1979’s Poetic Justice).
 

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The second set of selections is from Shade (1977), the sixty-five-page booklet that inaugurated the “Contemporary Literature Series” from Douglas Messerli’s nascent Sun and Moon Press. Shade was originally published in five hundred copies, came with a sticker price of three dollars, and had no ISBN in order to facilitate sales and distribution. At this time Sun and Moon was a modest operation based out of Messerli’s apartment in College Park, Maryland. Anyone who wanted a copy could write to his address printed on the back (4330 Hartwick Road #418, College Park, Maryland).
 
“Take then, these…,” one of the poems that finds an afterlife in All the Whiskey in Heaven, had already appeared in Messerli’s magazine La-Bas: A Newsletter of Experimental Poetry & Poetics (No. 7, May 1977). La-Bas was mimeographed on an 8½ by 11, side-staple format. Other poets in that same issue are Michael Davidson, Ray DiPalma, P. Inman, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Again we’re talking outsiders in the poetry world, at least for the particular moment.
 
This early Bernstein likes to combine unlike objects or phrases in order to heighten poetic attention: “Take then these nail & boards / which seams to lay me down / in perfect semblance” (“Take” 1-2). If you’ve followed Language poetry at all, you know the case that’s made against transparent narratives or picaresque representations of experience. Don’t get distracted by the “semblance,” Bernstein says. Don’t overlook the “seams” when something “seems” understood or self-evident. And be sure to catch the violence implied by using nails and boards to put “me” in a box.
 
Bernstein never tires of punning on seams. Further instances crop up late in All the Whiskey in Heaven: “the seam that binds” (“The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree” 8, Whiskey 144) and “the brokered / seams of a riven dream” (“The Bricklayer’s Dreams” 29-30, Whiskey 279). Variations appear like “inseams” or “ifsitseamltu” (the latter in “Lift Off” 20, Whiskey 36). In these moments, Bernstein is not the Wallace Stevens of “let be be the finale of seems,” but the wunderkind of anti-essentialism who keeps stressing the ubiquity of artifice. Or keep that in mind for the early poems, because a later Bernstein says just the opposite when he begins “Autonomy Is Jeopardy” with the line “I hate artifice” – thereby reversing Robert Grenier’s “I hate speech.”
 

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Asylums was produced for a gift economy, as to a lesser extent was Shade. Like other side-stapled books from Bernstein’s lo-fi, in-house operation, Asylums did not come with a price sticker or an ISBN. This practice changed in 1979, when his books started to appear with ISBNs – a paratextual lingua franca developed by publishers with the goal of standardizing all books in all languages and maximizing the efficiency of storage and purchase orders for distributors. The adoption of ISBN numbers and barcodes in avant-garde publishing should give us pause, not least because they constitute an eyesore on the back cover of lovingly produced objects. The “standard” of the ISBN and the foregrounding of the book’s commodity status are difficult to reconcile with poetry’s promise of radical social change. How can that promise be packaged using the same marketplace norms for books about improving one’s golf swing or books about planting begonias?
 
Take for example Poetic Justice, a forty-eight-page perfect-bound book published by Pod Books in Baltimore. It appeared in an edition of five hundred copies, listed the ISBN on the copyright page (including a separate one for the signed edition), and acknowledged the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. At a cost of $3.50, it could be ordered from publishers Kirby Malone and Ro Malone at their home address at 3022 Abell Avenue in Baltimore. Today, copies can still be ordered online (prices range from twenty-eight dollars to eighty-two dollars), because the ISBN gives databases a standard for linking sellers with consumers. The producers, Malone and Malone, are effaced in this exchange.
 
The appeal of the ISBN can certainly be understood, however, for it provided a means to move beyond the limited circulation of a coterie audience. The other book of 1979, Senses of Responsibility, was “Tuumba 20” in the long-running chapbook series designed and published by Lyn Hejinian. Like Asylum’s and the early Sun and Moon, Tuumba was a homebrew operation. Hejinian printed chapbooks on a Chandler-Price Press that she kept in the back room of her home at 2639 Russell Street in Berkeley. Her ambition for the series, she recalls, was to promote poetry, not as a solitary experience, but “in the social worlds of people” (257). The plurality signaled in “social worlds” suggests a pragmatic use of existing market structures to distribute poetry beyond its usual readership. Senses of Responsibility was also subsidized by a grant from the NEA. The book cost two dollars, appeared in an edition of four hundred fifty copies, and listed an ISBN number on the copyright page (though not on the back cover).
 
Most of Bernstein’s subsequent books after 1979 were similarly published with an ISBN. Dark City (1994), published by the greatly expanded West Coast operation of Sun and Moon, was the first to use a barcode for the ISBN.
 

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Senses of Responsibility and Poetic Justice, along with several of Bernstein’s other early small-press books, represent one sector of a micro-economy that was partially sustained by grants from the NEA starting in the late 1960s. Additional funding was available at the local level through the New York State Council on the Arts, and through donations to non-profit institutions that were sometimes founded by the poets themselves (e.g., the Segue Foundation for Roof Books and the Contemporary Arts Educational Project for Sun and Moon). After moving to Los Angeles, for example, Sun and Moon Press drew on lucrative grants from the NEA and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (Register of the Sun and Moon Press Archive).
 
These economic relationships were deeply entrenched by the time Bernstein won an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in 1980. In 1966, the founding of St. Mark’s Poetry Project was enabled by $200,000 in federal grants from the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development (Kane 129). The nominal goal of this money was to socialize troubled youths by providing them with a structured outlet for creativity. Bernstein and others around the Poetry Project in the early 70s were thus beneficiaries of the fiscal climate – even if they were not exactly the delinquents that the social programs had in mind.
 
The total amount of grant support awarded to literary magazines was really quite small compared to overall funding for the arts. The big-ticket items were opera, theater, and so forth. According to one estimate in 1978, less than two percent of NEA grants were devoted to literature (Anania 18). Still, there were lasting consequences that readers should recognize. As Jerome Rothenberg explains, the reliance on grant support served “to impose both a gloss of professionalism on the alternative publications and to make obsolete the rough and ready book works of the previous two decades” (11).
 

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Critics who charge that Bernstein and other Language poets concocted a poetry movement that was perfectly suited for academic assimilation miss an important point here. The few university presses that took on their work only did so when the Culture Wars of the 1980s led to a massive reduction of federal funding for the arts. The affiliation with university publishers (Southern Illinois, Harvard, New England/Wesleyan, Northwestern, Alabama, and Chicago) was first one of material necessity. Today, the economic circumstances on campuses (especially for state schools) has led to deep cuts and freezes in press budgets – with some being discontinued altogether. The new FSG edition of Bernstein’s selected poems is part of the thirty-year development that arguably represents the full privatization of the avant-garde.
 

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Now a brief story about “Palukaville.” In the fall of 1976, Bernstein embarked on LEGEND, a five-party collaboration with Bruce Andrews, Ray Di Palma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman. In February 1978, Bernstein and Andrews published the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. The period between these dates was one of intense exchange among these five prolific writers.
 
“Palukaville” can be viewed as a kind of spin-off from LEGEND. The poem is comprised of answers to Ron Silliman’s “Sunset Debris,” which is a poem made up entirely of questions. Other poets have taken up this challenge (see Alan Davies and Michael Lally), but Bernstein was evidently the first out of the gate when he saw a manuscript of Silliman’s poem.
 
Excerpts from LEGEND made up the centerpiece of a forum of new writing – all of it language-centered – that James Sherry featured in his magazine Roof (No. 3, Summer 1977). The individual poets also contributed their own work to the forum. Bernstein contributed “Palukaville,” which he later collected in Poetic Justice and now in All the Whiskey in Heaven.
 

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Roof Books is the long-running, aesthetically diverse operation – i.e., all under one “roof” – directed by James Sherry through the Segue Foundation. Bernstein’s Controlling Interests (1980) was one of the first perfect-bound editions from the press. It came with the title printed on a solid blue cover: nondescript and thus light on the design budget. Roof magazine was already home to several of the poems from Controlling Interests, like “Matters of Policy” in Roof (No. 6, Spring 1978). The poem came sandwiched between poems by Bruce Andrews and William Corbett, and the same issue featured Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Michael Gottlieb, Ted Greenwald, Robert Grenier, P. Inman, Christopher Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Eileen Myles, Nick Piombino, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Michael Scholnick, James Sherry, John Wellman, and John Yau, as well as graphics by Brenda Goodman, Lee Sherry, Louisa Chase, and Ann Christopher.
 
Another poem, “The Italian Border of the Alps,” debuted in Roof (No. 9, Spring 1979) alongside poems by Kit Robinson, Alan Davies, P. Inman, and Lynne Dryer. Sherry tended to place poems and images on adjacent pages in his magazine, thereby providing one glimpse of the productive cross-fertilization that occurred in the arts and poetry scenes of the 1970s. The images in Roof 9 included graphics by Judy Pfaff and Harvey Quaytman, as well as archival images of Stéphane Mallarmé’s writing that hinted at his role in the genealogy of visual poetry.
 
The pages of Roof magazine measure 8½ by 10½, a size that is pragmatically conducive to the reproduction of art images. The size also creates possibilities for the layout of poems. This is not new, of course, not since Mallarmé rolled the dice or Charles Olson sallied forth in Dogtown. But what about a prose poem, like “The Italian Border of the Alps,” where size might seem incidental? It turns out that size does matter when it comes to ingrained habits of reading prose on small, turn-able pages with frequent breaks between paragraphs. The compressed format of All the Whiskey in Heaven is actually a lot easier on the eyes than the voluminous page format of Roof (where it takes up two and a half pages). In the latter case, the poem expands into one unbroken box of text that has no internal paragraphs to organize the flow or create natural breaks in the reading process. It almost seems possible here to argue that the large page of the small press trumps the small page of the large press.
 

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The geographical mixture of East and West Coast poets (plus several from elsewhere) who published in Roof magazine did not represent an isolated case. Bernstein read with Barrett Watten for the Grand Piano reading series in early 1979. Like Robert Creeley a generation before, he was by this time travelling frequently, becoming a familiar face – which was fueled in part by the sensation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine – and establishing contacts among multiple urban scenes of poetic activity.
 
Later that year his poem “For Love has Such a Spirit that If it is Portrayed it Dies” (which refers to a title by Creeley) was published in the magazine This. Edited by Barrett Watten, this 8½ by 8½ magazine was an organ not only for the close-knit friends and collaborators who became known as the San Francisco contingent of Language Poetry, but also for fellow poets who were drawn into their sometimes vitalizing, sometimes heated and exasperating conversations about the nature of all things poetic. Other poets in the same issue include Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, and Watten himself, who are part of the former group, as well as Diane Ward, Christopher Dewdney, Clark Coolidge, Michael Gottlieb, and Alan Davies, who are part of the latter. It might be alleged, as some have, that publishing friends is nepotism or logrolling. But note the editorial perspicacity at work in this one issue. “For Love has Such a Spirit that If it is Portrayed it Dies” turns out not to be the only poem with an afterlife in an edition of selected poems. Recent Pulitzer-winner Armantrout’s “Postcards,” from the same issue, is reprinted in Veil, her own selected poems (Wesleyan 2001).
 

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Bernstein’s poem “The Years as Swatches” (which refers to a title by Robert Duncan) made its book debut in The Sophist (1987), but readers who had an ear to the ground first saw it five years earlier in Gil Ott’s Philadelphia-based magazine Paper Air (Vol. 3.1, 1982).Ott’s editorial philosophy, which openly invited contributions from anyone “engaged in the expansion of revolutionary perception,” courted a range of poets and artists that again defied any single aesthetic category – and thereby guaranteed the reputation of his magazine as an attractive venue for Language poets hoping to place work outside of their own immediate circles. Early issues featured Silliman, Bernstein, and Andrews, but they are far outnumbered by non-Language peers, including by Nathaniel Tarn, Janine Pommy Vega, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Cage, Eleanor Antin, Carole Berge, Larry Eigner, Jerome Rothenberg, George Quasha, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Two special issues were dedicated to John Taggart and Jackson Mac Low.
 
Ott made sure that Paper Air was a welcome venue for essays, reviews, and interviews. Bernstein’s poem “The Years as Swatches” is even situated right next to a review of Controlling Interests by Messerli. Critical prose was simply the norm in Paper Air. The same was true for poems that blurred the line between verse and essay. Later Ott devoted an entire issue of Paper Air to Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” (Vol. 4.1, 1987). Readers who were disconnected from Paper Air would not have the opportunity to see the essay-poem until five years later, when it appeared in the Harvard publication of Bernstein’s A Poetics.
 
Here it must also be stressed that Paper Air was appealing because of it physical format. The pages consistently measured 8½ by 11. The printing evolved from fairly brief issues using side-stapled, photo offset format—a method that superseded mimeograph’s ability to combine art images, poems, and even handwriting—to long issues of more than a hundred pages printed using a perfect-bound format.
 

§

 
A full third of the issue that contains “The Years as Swatches” is devoted to “Contemporary French Poetry in Translation,” in a selection superbly edited by Craig Watson. The presence of poems by Claude Royet-Journoud, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Ann-Marie Albiach is one early and telling indicator of the internationalization of poetics that captures Bernstein’s attention starting in the 1980s.
 
Once again the print history is revealing. Bernstein published his translation of Royet-Journoud’s The Maternal Drape (1984) with Awede Press not one year after its designer, Brita Bergland, published his own book Resistance. Likewise, Bernstein published his translation of Olivier Cadiot’s Red, Green, and Black (1990) with the same press that earlier published his own book Disfrutes (1981). Like the little magazines of modernism, these small presses of contemporary poetry envisioned their practice as taking shape in networks that involved more than a national audience. Moreover, as his own reputation grew, Bernstein can increasingly be seen placing his work with non-U.S. publishers, such as Zasterle Press in the Canary Islands (The Absent Father in Dumbo, 1990) and Aark Arts in New Delhi (Warrant, 2005).
 
One poem from All the Whiskey in Heaven distinctly hints at the national and linguistic boundaries that Bernstein traverses as his career progresses. “A Test of Poetry” takes its title from Louis Zukofsky’s quirky pedagogical book, but the text of the poem, as Bernstein explains, comprises italicized phrases from his Chinese translator Ziquing Zhang. Selected Language Poems came out in China in 1993 and featured seven of Bernstein’s best-known poems. Note that five of these seven (“The Simply,” “The Voyage of Life,” “The Harbor of Illusion,” “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree,” and “Dysraphism”) are included in All the Whiskey in Heaven, so it is even possible to trace many of the lines in “A Test of Poetry” that the translator had questions about.
 

§

 
The poems of the 1990s – especially those featured in Rough Trades and Dark City – reveal a fork in Bernstein’s publishing venues. On the one hand, small magazines with politically oppositional agendas continued to welcome his poems. The most influential of these were Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K,” O.blek, and Big Allis, all of which were edited by poets from an ambitious younger generation. On the other hand, several academic publications, including boundary 2, Rethinking Marxism, and Archive for New Poetry Newsletter (UCSD), began to publish his poems alongside their usual scholarly articles. For example, the editors of Rethinking Marxism situated Bernstein’s poem “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree” next to an article “On Language Poetry,” thus establishing the idea that a poem might be part and parcel of the social critique performed by the journal’s standard scholarly essays. It may have helped, of course, that the poem combined Bernstein’s usual paratactic zingers with at least one fairly straightforward theoretical assertion: “The first fact is the social body, / one from another, nor needs no other” (“The Kiwi Bird” 13-14).
 
While troubling boundaries between academic insiders and outsiders is nothing new, the 1990s is remarkable in that it witnessed an intensification of exchange that is surely unrivaled since the canonization of the New American Poets. Even the small magazines bore traces of academia. A case in point: Bernstein wrote “A Defence of Poetry” in response to literary scholar Brian McHale, but it first appeared in the magazine Aerial (No. 6/7, 1991), which was edited and self-published by poet Rod Smith. Similarly, Bernstein’s “Gertrude and Ludwig’s Bogus Adventure” was written for literary scholar Marjorie Perloff, whose name was originally “Gabriele Mintz.” The poem, though, made its debut in Ribot (No. 5, 1997), a magazine published by a non-institutional collective that referred to itself as the College of Neglected Science. Lest there be any confusion, this College is self-described as having a “virtual existence,” and even though it once organized an academic-style conference, I don’t think it was ever in the business of granting actual degrees.
 

§

 
Bernstein’s points of interest are increasingly drawn from cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Early foreshadowing of this interest appears in “Dodgem,” based on the name of a children’s board game, or “Palukaville,” based on a comic strip about a boxer. Allusive lines from Bernstein’s recent poems sound like an encyclopedia of Americana that is packed with old movies, old cars, old song tunes, old catchphrases, and more. This later drift differs from the historical digging of Ezra Pound’s luminous detail or Susan Howe’s dark side of history. Bernstein is rather a collector of rhymes that charm like cheap souvenirs. If he is to be called a historical poet, then his specialty is the low or common.
 
Bernstein does not pretend, however, that these artifacts are without their own perils. He is not, that is to say, one of Walter Benjamin’s heroic collectors who uncovers the “revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’” The pessimism of Bernstein’s historical vision is quite clear in his poem “Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis,” which derives from the GAP advertising campaign in which figures from the past are repurposed for a commercial clothing line. A broadside edition (produced in Buffalo in the mid-1990s) superimposes the poem on top of the well-known GAP advertisement that shows Jack Kerouac wearing khakis. Here the rebel without a cause is reborn in the service of a socially acceptable cause, namely to make buckets of money in a media-saturated environment: “The Thunderbirds gleam end-to-end-to-end / in the studio backlot.”
 
Bernstein’s bleak historicism is somewhat tempered in later poems. The post-9/11 selections taken from World on Fire are bleak in their own way, but they incorporate a mash-up of vinyl albums that he clearly adores. Horace Heidt’s big band piece “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire” (1941) is the source for the title of that book, and the song’s seductive refrain, “I just want to start a flame in your heart,” is the source for the title of one the poems. The poet Marcella Durand notes that another of the book’s poems, “In a Restless World Like This Is,” likewise derives from a hit song of the 1940s, “When I Fall in Love” (famously recorded by Nat King Cole). Finally, the poem “Didn’t We” can be read as a curt rejoinder to Billy Joel’s denial of political complicity in the megahit “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
 

§

 
What I explore above is a zine ecology that stresses the social life of Bernstein’s poems as well as the material conditions that enabled publication in the first place. Like any ecological mapping, no matter how rigorously constructed, the points that I describe are not purely objective but emphatically partial – a lesson that Bernstein’s poems impart regardless of their particular publication venue. What the poems also impart, regardless of venue, is a sense of conversation with fellow poets and readers. That conversation is not one that can be understood without gross distortion when the poems are lined up with other poets in the FSG catalog. It’s doubtful that anything will ever make Bernstein’s poems fit cozily with those of August Kleinzahler, Frank Bidart, or Carol Ann Duffy – to name a few poets under the FSG imprint. (Perhaps Bernstein is best read in light of the handful of modernist poets that FSG publishes, like Mina Loy.)
 
I close this review by noting that the zine ecology above is severely limited by its reliance on the print record. Other kinds of archives exist, other entranceways to the social bearings of poetry, and these are increasingly available to anyone who wants to explore the work beyond the page. The online format here allows for links to PennSound recordings that capture Bernstein performing many poems from All the Whiskey in Heaven. I listened to them while writing the above, and it was startling how often my interest in constructing a bibliographic account was thwarted by an interest in returning to poems themselves – though by “themselves” I mean when they were aired before a live audience and not yet committed to print technology. Rather than an exercise in close reading, it was, as Bernstein himself would say, a matter of close listening. Here, to close, are links to ten of the finest:
 

“Asylums” – Reading for Anthology Film Archives, April 3, 1977
 
“Azoot D’Puund” – Recorded for Cabinet #1, Winter 2000
 
“Dark City” – Reading for Live at the Ear, 1992.
 
“Palukaville” – Reading for Anthology Film Archives, April 3, 1977
 
“Matters of Policy” – Reading at the West End Bar (NYC), March 12, 1978.
 
“The Italian Border of the Alps” – Reading for Grand Piano (SF), February 20, 1979
 
“The Simply” – Reading in Ithaca (New York), May 8, 1982
 
“Dysraphism” – Reading at Poetry Project, St Mark’s Church (NYC), October 17, 1983 (poem starts at 30’13”)
 
“A Defence of Poetry” – Recorded by Chris Funkhouser and Belle Gironda, July 27, 1994, Monterey, MA (via Kenning CD, 2004)
 
“Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis” – Recording from Postmodern Culture (journal), 1994

 
Andrew Benjamin’s book Of Jews and Animals is a welcome addition not only to the burgeoning field of animal studies but also to contemporary preoccupations with justice, universality, and particularity and the demands they make on philosophical, ethical, and political thinking. By implicitly questioning the turn toward the “materialist” Christian universality proposed by Badiou and Žižek, the book questions and repositions the terms of the debates about justice and universality by reconstructing a critical genealogy of the joined and dis-joined figures of the “animal” and “the Jew” in the history of Western philosophical conceptions of subjectivity, community and, indeed, universality. The book also engages contemporary thinkers relevant to this debate, including Agamben and Derrida. Needless to say, the figures of “the animal” and “the Jew” constructed by the philosophical and ideological work of anthropocentrism and anti-Semitism are dangerous abstractions, fundamentally different from animal plurality and from the diverse definitions of Jewishness that arise from Judaism itself.
 
The ambitious stakes of the book are articulated clearly in the introduction and carried out through detailed engagements with an impressive selection of philosophical texts and paintings. As Benjamin writes, the most urgent question his book addresses is:
 

[H]ow to account philosophically for a radically different situation, namely one in which the particularity of human being did not depend on forms of privation and thus sacrifice. And conversely where regional conceptions of identity could be affirmed. What would be the effect – the effect on being human and thus the thinking of that being philosophically – if both the maintained animal were allowed and the particular affirmed? If, that is, the without relation gave way to a fundamentally different form of relationality?
 

(16)

 
As animal studies have shown, the figure of the animal has had the dubious distinction of marking a double difference: the difference between humanity and its others, that is, the difference that constitutes what is properly human; and a difference within humanity itself, that is, the difference between those who are properly human and those racialized or gendered others who are said to be inferior and who do not measure up to human essence. And even before the institution of the animal as a separate field of inquiry, a number of writers have contested this ideological role assigned to the animal. Consider, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s playful remarks about the exclusion of cats and dogs charged with marking the hierarchy of sexual difference. As Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own: “Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” (48). Woolf points to the remarkable longevity of Dr. Johnson’s remark about women preachers, the remark repeated in 1928 about women musicians: “‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all’” (54).
 
Benjamin’s genealogical excavations of multiple figures of Jews and animals, together and apart, develop the discussion of animality and otherness by presenting a three-fold argument: First, the book reconstructs the violent but often invisible philosophical work of abstraction and exclusion that these twin figures were forced to perform in philosophy, theology, and art. Second, on the basis of this genealogy, it questions the status of these disciplines and the fundamental categories, such as universality, community, and subjectivity, that structure them. Third, it articulates an ethical affirmation of particularity and proposes a new philosophical concept of relationality. In his remarkable readings of Pascal, Hegel, Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and Agamben, among others, Benjamin compellingly shows that the dis/joined figures of “the Jew” and “the animal” are implicated in the fundamental philosophical distinctions between the particular and the universal, friend and enemy, presence and absence, otherness and identity, on the one hand, and in the constructions of exteriority, singularity, relation, community, and justice, on the other. Benjamin claims that the figures of Jews and of animals reveal the way the dominant traditions of philosophy, theology, and, I would add, politics, are constructed: “[T]here is an important relationship between Jews and animals. They appear within the history of philosophy, art and theology in ways in which the differing forms of conjunction mark the manner in which dominant traditions construct themselves” (3).
 
This claim is instantiated though careful and often deliberately provocative readings of selected philosophical texts and paintings. The book examines how the philosophical and theological articulations of universality depend on a double form of violent exclusion: on the one hand, on the effacement of Jewish particularity by the universal; and, on the other hand, on the expulsion of animality from the human – what Benjamin calls separation, or the “without relation.” The first part of this book examines the presence of the animal, often specific animals -in particular, dogs–in the history of philosophy from Descartes and Hegel to Heidegger and Blanchot. The notion of the separation of the animal from the human is first elaborated in Benjamin’s controversial reading of Heidegger’s discussion of animality in terms of a poverty of world (“world-poor”). Even though in Heidegger’s philosophy, both human Da-sein and the animal participate, in different ways, in the complex relationality of the world, Benjamin worries that the distinction between the world of Da-sein and the privation of the animal, and the corresponding distinction between human existence and animal life, leads to the separation, or to the “without relation,” of the human and the animal. The “without relation,” elaborated in different philosophical contexts, is the crucial term in the argument of the book. For example, in his interpretation of Blanchot’s engagement with Hegel, Benjamin analyzes the ways in which “without relation” is intertwined with a logic of sacrifice. Benjamin argues that, for Blanchot, the emergence of community and literature itself is predicated upon the death of the animal.¹ The first part ends with an interpretation of the place of animality in Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics and anthropocentrism. By developing Derrida’s philosophy of the event, which is indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy of the event, Benjamin reinterprets the relation between the event and repetition as the affirmation of the plural and primordial relationality between human and nonhuman animals.
 
One of the most important philosophical interventions of the book is its analysis of the way the figures of “the animal” and “the Jew” both produce and are captured by the complex configuration of abstract otherness and universality. In the second part of the book, Benjamin persuasively shows that both philosophical and theological universality are predicated upon either the exclusion of “the Jew” or the forced assimilation through erasure of the particularity of the Jewish way of life: “[T]his study involves tracing the way figures … and the interplay of particularity and universality are operative in a range of philosophical texts” (10). In his brilliant analysis of Pascal’s Pensées, Benjamin focuses on the neglected relation between the famous fragment 103, concerned with the relationship between justice and force, and the ignored fragment 102, concerned with the relationship between Jews and Christians (“It is necessary that the Jew or the Christian are wicked”).² By interpreting this juxtaposition, Benjamin shows that the force of justice itself is predicated on the violent representation of the Jew as “wicked” (130-146).
 
In Pascal’s Pensées and in Dürer’s paintings, the figure of the Jew is subjugated by the so-called “logic of the synagogue”: “The fundamental characteristic of that figure [of the synagogue] is her banded eyes and thus her blindness. She delivers or presents a truth that she, of necessity, cannot see” (140). As Benjamin points out, the logic of the synagogue is caught in a double necessity: It pronounces the truth, in which, however, neither she nor Jews can participate because of her blindness (140). The question of truth is implicated in the question of language. What is especially of import here is not only the fact that the Jew and the animal are the excluded, aberrant particulars, but also that they cannot be named by any form of universality. If that is the case, then that conception of language in the service of anthropocentrism becomes a form of exclusion. In fact, one of the questions the book poses is, “what is naming given a deconstruction of metaphysics?” (75).
 
Benjamin exposes the dangerous and often ignored interconnections between otherness, aberrant particularity, and the enemy, and argues that such interconnections are among the violent effects of the visible and invisible figures of “the Jew” and of “the animal.” The crucial philosophical and political point the book makes is that the figure of the other is not only intertwined with the figure of the enemy, but in fact makes it possible: “[T]he possible repositioning of the other as the enemy… is by no means an extreme or attenuated repositioning. On the contrary, the move from other to enemy is a possibility that is already inherent in the category of the other” (4). By contesting this structural relationship between the other and the enemy, Benjamin equally questions the Levinasian rehabilitation of the other, which pertains only to inter-human relations and thus reproduces a certain anthropocentrism reinforced by the primacy of language. In Levinas’s ethics, “[t]here is therefore a primacy of relation between humans that is given through the ‘word.’ If it were possible to define the absence of the ‘word’ then that absence would describe the animal’s presence” (95). Agamben is also taken to task for his inability to provide an account of particularity and for failing to “respond to … the figure of the Jew” (14; see also 113-127).
 
Another important contribution of Of Jews and Animals is its concern not only with the philosophical and theological, but also with visual representations of the Jew and of the animal in the history of painting. Such configuration of philosophy and painting problematizes, on the one hand, both the historical and contemporary notions of the “face” and “facing,” and, on the other hand, the notion of the figure itself, which is often used unreflectively in animal studies. In the context of the book, “figure” is not to be confused with figurative language; rather, it is often an invisible ideological construction that presents its effects as “naturalized.” Consequently, the task of the philosophical interpretation, similar in this respect to the ideological and cultural critique, lies precisely in the “denaturalization” of figures and their exposure as figures. In the context of the history of art, from Jan van Eyck and Piero della Francesca to Turner and Goya, Benjamin specifically focuses on the portraiture of the face. As if in implicit response to Levinas’s concept of the face of the other, this visual genealogy persuasively shows that the presentation of the face oscillates between specific faces and abstract humanity, and that this oscillation is in turn supported by the sharp contrast between the idealization of the Christian face and the deformation of the Jewish face. This interplay between the idealization, abstraction, and deformation of the face is what is at stake in Benjamin’s remarkable interpretation of Dürer’s “Self-Portrait” (1498) and “Jesus Among the Doctors” (1506) in Chapter 8, titled “Facing Jews.”
 
The most important contribution of Of Jews and Animals lies not so much in the advocacy for an “animal ethics” or “animal rights” as in the elaboration of the ethical imperative of responding to the particular others caught in the dense web of the violent history of cultural figurations. Through an interrogation and repositioning of the conjoined/disjoined figures of the Jew and the animal, Benjamin articulates the main problematic of the book, namely, how to be just to the particular. This problematic refers in a new way to the three interrelated issues at the center of Andrew Benjamin’s own philosophy, namely justice, plurality, and the affirmation of particularity. At stake here is the philosophical approach to the particular that is neither subsumed under the universal nor reduced to empirical data. As Benjamin points out, “[p]articularity has a twofold presence. In the first instance the particular – Jew or animal- receives its identity from the work of figures. However, that identity, as has been indicated, is always imposed externally…. The other aspect that is central to the development of a conception of particularity” is the particular “located beyond the hold of figures” (185-186). To approach the particular “beyond the hold of figures” and beyond universality leads neither to essentialism nor to abstract alterity; rather, such an approach repositions the particular as relational and as the site of internal conflict (189) and fragile self-transformation.
 
Benjamin’s affirmation of particularity and plurality also has broader, interdisciplinary stakes. Its philosophical elaboration of particularity contests the ideological, anti-Semitic constructions of “the Jew” and the anthropocentric constructions of “the animal” as the excluded others of authentic, Universal subjectivity. In so doing, the book provides a welcome, if implicit, intervention into the recent defenses of “militant” universalism, often associated with a Paulinian Christianity, proposed by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and their followers. Badiou’s and Žižek’s “materialist” defenses of the Christian “generic conditions of universality,” which promote themselves as the only authentic contestations of capital and of neoliberalism, reproduce all too often the entrenched logic of the exclusion of inauthentic particulars that is associated with Jewishness or other “‘victimist’ conception[s] of man” (Badiou 6). Thus, Slavoj Žižek, from 2001’s On Belief to 2003’s The Puppet and the Dwarf, sets up “materialist,” Leninist Christianity as an alternative to both “‘multiculturalist’ polity” (On Belief 4-5)³ and to Levinas’s and Derrida’s “deconstructivist Jewish transcendentalism.”⁴ Similarly, Alain Badiou, in his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, presents the Pauline subjective form of universalism in opposition to Jewish conceptions of the law and particularity, on the one hand, and to the Greek conception of rhetoric and wisdom, on the other (28, 76). The elaboration of such universality is presented as the necessary counter to the so-called “culturalist and relativist ideology” (10) — an empty term that dismisses in advance the interrogations of the violence of universality that have emerged from feminism, Jewish studies, critical race studies, and poststructuralism.
 
By providing an alternative to universalism, the affirmation of the plurality of particulars beyond their ideological determinations, and yet without essentialism, has an important affinity with a number of philosophical and political projects, ranging from feminism and poststructuralism to postmodernism. As Benjamin puts it, the philosophical and the political in his work “have an important affinity. Affirmation as part of a strategy has to work within already given determinations. Particularities within collectivities … continue to work within universals. However, the insistence of affirmation means that it will have become possible to insist on the position in which the universals in question neither direct nor subsume particulars” (190). Such an affinity between the philosophy and politics concerned with the particular should be of great interest to anyone concerned with justice and plurality.
 

[ extract ]

 
§ “Ways of dying also include crimes.”¹
 
§ I feel myself of another time, as though there were other time.
 
§ Side by side or superimposed, Paul Virilio’s Tilting bunker and Michal Rovner’s Outside #2 exacerbate – they reiterate – the time of decay : Rovner’s over-exposures² bring to the surface of the Bedouin house its temporal degradation, granting it oblique equivalency with the bunker sinking into the sand. Rovner slows time, measuring its imprint, extruding from the house in the desert the implanted time of accelerated degradation. What Virilio’s bunker exposes (documents) Rovner’s anticipates by ennervation. There is the subjective disclosure of the subject’s disintegration in time, in a frame. What I see, in each instance, is not a house nor a bunker, but the work of time, the anticipation and accomplishment of death’s (de)composition.
 
§ Un événement de lumière.³
 
§ An event of light which is or might be a storm. Light storming the house in the desert. Light, which in this instance, is, has the potential to be, catastrophal. Bringing about. Standing the house more still.
 
§ The photograph lacks definition. A world (worlds) undefined.
 
§ The photograph does not lack definition. It draws out that which by definition is undefined. Undiscerned by instrument. Absent of designation.
 
§ Do I kiss it back.
 
§ Death’s (de)composition is (also) a theatre of war.
 
§ What are we waiting for.
 
§ In Guy Hocquenghem’s aspiration to objectless desire⁴ and Hervé Guibert’s consideration of subjectless photography⁵ there is the intimation of the removal of a self in order to unburden a context of its context. A voice without language or touch without touch.
 
§ “La sexualité indépendante de tout objet … sujet et rejet même.”⁶
 
§ In the last of language, language is subjectless. It ruins itself against an embarrassing hope for more. Its perversion is less than this. Less than its desire for itself.
 
§ Its rejection.
 
§ A ruined language is a language with neither subject nor object. It says nothing (or too much) of where it has been. Intimacy is, in this instance, intimation: “La ruine nous conduit à une expérience qui est celle du sujet dessaisi, et paradoxalement il n’y a pas d’objet à cette expérience.”⁷
 
§ Who was there in the first place.
 
§ The door is always open.⁸ This might be History’s proviso. An inhospitable hospitality. Suspect and ill at ease.⁹
 
§ The I might be a catastrophist. Taking turns. Turning out.
 
§ Seismically speaking, a split self is rendered unavowably speechless. Self without self. Irreferent.
 
§ Is it for lack of place.
 
§ Or: a siteless retort, pronounced out of place. The site ridded of seeing may be a way away from pronouncement. Built or borne.
 
§ This is Heidegger’s declaration: “The proper sense of bauen, namely dwelling, falls into oblivion.”¹⁰ This is the case, also, of the proper senses. Undwelled, obliviated.
 
§ The impropriety with which, for example, we are secluded.
 
§ For example: we bereave the sense of our freedoms.
 
§ A house which is built into its destruction.
 
§ RY King’s photographic dissolve marks the paper immutable. (Figure 1) Immutable in that it is always imbricated in a mechanism of deterioration. In this improper sense, the image is not separable from its degradation. Its substances are both paper and light. Thus they are neither, as they run into each other.
 
§ The bird, in this instance, which is scarcely discernible, is in a field of apparent surfaces. It comprises the surface by which it becomes visible, an irregularity on a structure of hay bales in a field of depleted colour. The photograph misdirects its intention. It intends for me to fall in.
 
§ In to America.
 
§ The identification of a site is improper in that it precludes situation. It steadies itself in a blur which I take to be my eyes. In this sense I become the photograph proper. It is in the skin and in the paper and against a wall. The door, here, is diminished, but not foregone.
 
§ The fall is ever a truncation of fallout. In this theatre of scarce forms, the photograph intimates residual catastrophe.
 
§ It is nowhere to be seen. It is this which the photograph comes between.
 
§ As gas mask or oxygen. Those particular theatres.
 
§ “What is architecture’s error?”¹¹
 
§ That particulate which may be granular. What fastens the paper to its skin. A regional deference.
 
§ It comes with a number, assigned to a calcined human body which is incommunicable: . When it says “…j’ai besoin de catastrophes, de coups de théâtre”¹² it abandons sense.
 
§ The lake is up to my knees in November.
 
§ In calx.
 
§ The time of the photograph is (always) after. This imprecision accommodates the numerous successions, the end upon seismic end. In a time without time, un(re)countable: still. In this, it is a perfect crime, “l’anéantissement anéanti, la fin … privée d’elle-même.”¹³
 
§ The photographic occasion, its occasional reoccurrence makes incontrovertible “l’épouvante lucide de la redite”.¹⁴
 
§ When you touch it, is it said?
 
§ “Le désastre est séparé, ce qu’il y a de plus séparé.”¹⁵
 
§ Réplique : The chairs change place. The armchair is taken out. The other one, however, the green one, is transported here as well as the rope that fastens the arm that’s coming away. In addition, there are two white painted chairs on a back, wooden chairs, despite a dislike for painted wood, one day and then the next, they stay there, at the entranceway, latent chairs, which haven’t assumed their function as chairs, but hold their place. The chairs are all empty and yet upon arrival it is impossible to sit down, the two cats occupy the twelve chairs including the bed.
 
§ Se-parare, without making ready.
 
§ Is it found or is it given or is it taken from what was (already) taken away ?¹⁶
 
§ For example, Sir Thomas Bouch, who had not yet been knighted in 1870, designed the wrought and cast iron two and a quarter mile Tay Railway Bridge without calculation of the winter gales over the firth into his design; the bridge collapsed scarcely a year and a half after its construction. It collapsed under a train full of people. The structurally deficient Bridge 9340 over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed in August 2007, at the height of traffic, forty years after its inauguration. The indiscretion is in history and in materiality, each of which may be cited as deficient in structure and design.
 
§ Is a catastrophic failure a failure of time, a tempest unaccounted for in number or incident.¹⁷
 
§ For body, substitute bodies. Reiterate indiscretions.
 
§ “Ce que l’on appelle usuellement une forme, c’est toujours, en dernière analyse, une discontinuité qualitative sur un certain fond continu.”18 Thom’s definitions misdirect substitution. He clarifies: the foundation of a problem in any of the sciences is an aporia. For once, the disappearances can be accounted for. Whether or not they manifest as (retinal) discontinuities or continuous underpinnings.
 
§ Mathematically speaking: something moves over something that doesn’t move. Conversely, something that doesn’t move touches something that does. There is no equivalency between the horse’s last run and the photographic fix. One moves without the other. Something is torn.
 
§ “Because the geometry / we seek is beyond coordination,”¹⁹
 
§ There is no perfect isolate. Simply a proclivity for destructions of all kinds. The aleatory conjunction of Fourier’s Arcades with Benjamin’s (sometimes contested) suicide is arguable against an ethics of encounter’s hermaphrodisms.20 But there is no possible proof of this. If Benjamin considered suicide at the age of forty, is the fortieth age the end (of) time?
 
§ Neuter, it is said. But neuter is without desire.
 
§ The city presented a sky that demanded an ocean, but there were none of these. (Figure 2)
 
§ To say “all kinds” is to invite various imprecisions. Benjamin’s lost attaché case is perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence.
 
§ A mode of somatic interrogation.²¹
 
§ For Derrida, it might be Nietzsche’s lost umbrella.
 
§ “It is, / I know, not true / that we lived, there moved, / blindly, no more than a breath between / there and not-there,”²²
 
§ Because of its lostness.
 
§ The Roman ampitheatre is a spectacular place of slaughter. “La distance est immense entre la conviction personnelle et la démonstration:”²³ A theatre, which continues in the present to command murder, is complicit with the injunction to (an) end. We are in the act.
 
§ Taken aback.²⁴
 
§ This is not calculated into the displacement of materials and surfaces, but in their resistance, perhaps, to being moved. Removed. The thwarted Archimedean resolve (to drown).
 
§ In the Sisyphus text, there is talk of murder.
 
§ “Yes, a disappointed bridge.”²⁵
 
§ It isn’t for want or lack. In the visage, the eyes are become too wide, too languid and imbecilic. Is this what it is (also) to look. “You behold in me, […], a horrible example of free thought.”²⁶
 
§ It seems vital now, that we do this.
 
§ If not for any reason, other than the one cited. If it is true, for example, that “Il ne reste rien de l’évènement,”²⁷ then photography, in Guibert’s projection, is predicated, first, on forgetting, and perhaps synchronously on nothing. In which instance, nothing, is what comes of light, as it happens.²⁸
 
§ Green: “…into the subject of poisonous colours. It has been found that arsenic is sometimes used in the preparation of some wall papers, especially though not exclusively, the green ones. This has been known to produce effects of poisoning on the occupiers. It is almost the only case in which the air of our rooms is liable to actual poisoning for the effects of air that is foul from any other cause are not…”²⁹
 
§ Historically speaking, our nothing is in our forgottenness.³⁰
 
§ For Malraux, it is in the death count: “Le jour anniversaire de ma quarantième année, lorsque je passais clandestinement la ligne de démarcation avec le chat noir, j’aurais voulu être né la veille.”³¹
 
§ His year of quarantine.
 
§ The geometry of the poison is qualitative.³²
 
§ In a logic, then, of photographic eventuality, we forget nothing.
 
§ “Un jour, toutes les photos seront dissoutes, le papier photo n’impressionnera plus, ne réagira plus, sera chose morte.”³³
 
§ “It is my want that it is looked at closely and in light, please.”³⁴
 

 

 

Click for larger view

fig. 1.

Untitled RY King 2008

 

 

 

Click for larger view

fig. 2.

Une mer attendue / An ocean that doesn’t arrive NS after RY 2010

 

Translations

 
Translations are attributable to N. unless otherwise indicated.
 
Hervé Guibert
An event of light.
 
Guy Hocquenghem
[Homosexual desire] is the slope towards transsexuality through the disappearance of objects and subjects, a slide towards the discovery that in matters of sex everything is simply communication. (Tr. Daniella Dangoor)
 
Hervé Guibert
Since photography can only be an event of light, without a subject (and it is then that it is at its most photographic), I would like one day to launch myself into a narrative that would be nothing but an event of writing, without history, and without boredom, a true adventure.
 
Jean-François Lyotard
…sexuality, independent of any object. (Tr. Robert Harvey.)
 
Sophie Lacroix
The ruin leads us to an experience which is that of the relinquished subject, and paradoxically this experience has no object.
 
Hervé Guibert
…I need catastrophes, coups de théâtre.
 
Jean-François Lyotard
…the annihilation
annihilated, the end deprived of itself.” (Idem)
*
…the lucid dread of redundancy. (Idem)
 
Maurice Blanchot
Disaster is separate; that which is most separate. (Tr. Ann Smock.) I note with interest, Smock’s insertion of the semi-colon, making more distinct the separation between clauses.
 
René Thom
What is usually referred to as a form is always, in the final analysis, a qualitative discontinuity on some continuous ground.
*
The distance between a personal conviction and its demonstration is enormous:
 
Albert Camus
My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. … Instead of thinking of slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off. (Tr. Justin O’Brien)
 
André Malraux
Nothing remains of this event. (Tr. Terence Kilmartin)
*
History obliterates even men’s forgetfulness. [forgetting] (Idem)
*
On the birth day of my fortieth year, as I was clandestinely crossing the demarcation line with the black cat, I would have wanted to have been born yesterday.
 
René Thom
There is no escaping the continuum.
 
Hervé Guibert
One day, all the photographs will have dissolved, the photographic paper will no longer impress, react, will be a dead thing.
 

 
Nathanaël (formerly known as Nathalie Stephens) writes entre-genre, composes (and lives) betwixt genders, drafts in the non-space of in-commensurability between English and French, both her primary, improper tongues. Troubling borders separating disciplines, dividing countries, and distinguishing words, Nathanaël’s texts borrow meticulously and programmatically from other authors, literalizing the Barthesian “tissue of quotations” as they also draw incestuously from, and thus plicate, her own oeuvre. Each writing is thus in itself, and in relation to Nathanaël’s larger corpus, beset by the calculated vertigo of écriture, as Nathanaël enacts obsessive returns to a cluster of characteristic concerns, each time with a change of lens that profoundly informs her renewed scrutiny and its consequences.
 
Pivotal issues revolved in and unsettled by Nathanaël’s questions, formulations, tropes and language play, and cited textual passages and other media include: language’s asymmetrically yet mutually constitutive relation to the body; architecture’s reciprocal relation to the social and the urban landscape as palimpsest; the ethics of the aleatory and non-intentional aspects of encounter; the breaching, violence, grief, and desire in translation; the amalgamation performed by, as well as the antinomianism and multiplicity subtending, the first-person pronoun; and the representation of world-historical violence at personal and (inter)national scales. The Sho’ah is a major point of reference; with regard to media, Nathanaël has meditated on and incorporated photographs in several recent works, including SISYPHUS, OUTDONE. Theatres of the Catastrophal, the second section of which is presented here.
 
Since we meet Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS excerpted, in medias res, I want to note the main elements of the stage-setting that occur in the first section of the manuscript and, further, to relate this work to some of its main intertexts, including Nathanaël’s own writings.
 
To enter SISYPHUS is to engage with catastrophal, catastrophized time: “§ Still // § After an aftershock, there is stillness. There are reverberations and then there is stillness. The stillness itself is reverberant. Reverberant with the reverberations of the shock. Instilled in me is the shakenness” (SISYPHUS, Part I). These opening passages introduce “aftershock” as structuring figure, though, as Nathanaël then adverts, to be useful the English term will have to be relieved of the linear temporality embedded in it: “After assumes before . . . I would like to suspend the question of before, as it has no bearing on the question of the aftershock. It bears its weight of memory as lost memory and time as lost time. Lost and thus not locatable on a scale of before and after” (Part I). The temporality Nathanaël wishes us to consider here is clearly akin to that of “disaster” as Maurice Blanchot understands it in The Writing of the Disaster: “The fact of disappearing is, precisely, not a fact, not an event; it does not happen, not only because there is no ‘I’ to undergo the experience, but because . . . the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it” (28). Before and after lose their places, their relevance, in such a schema of loss beyond loss; the subjectlessness and objectlessness of experience announced here reverberate in SISYPHUS.
 
Related to the temporality of Nathanaël’s text is the psychical logic of suspension and repetition compulsion elaborated in Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History: “the experience of a trauma repeats itself” whether in “unwitting reenactment” of an injurious event, or in memory (2); the crisis incurs repetition for “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance” (4), repeating as an unassimilated fragment, or piece of lost though stubbornly recurring time, that “simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (5). In its belatedness, and as a response that is a missed encounter, trauma “[oscillates] between the crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (7), enjoining the survivor to a layered and never fully present experience of time brushing expiration. Nathanaël’s use of the temblor as trope of a derangement of linear temporality and its reverberation in an affected body also recalls Derrida’s The Gift of Death, particularly his discussion of Abraham’s being called on to sacrifice Isaac and Søren Kierkegaard’s analysis of that scene in Fear and Trembling. For Derrida, the encounter with the divine is always an aftershock, since trembling begins beforehand, the shock already come: “[T]rembling . . . is something that has already taken place, as in the case of an earthquake [tremblement de terre] or when one trembles all over. . . . We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that cannot be anticipated . . . [and is] approached as unapproachable” (53-4).
 
Nathanaël avoids the residue of linearity in “aftershock” by replacing it with the French term “réplique”: “On a French tongue, the aftershock is pronounced réplique. I will speak now, instead, to the réplique, leaving the matter of before and after aside, extricating myself from the misplacement of time in catastrophe. . . . What [the earth] offers is a reply, as réplique, to what is now, which is after all an instance of after, and as such unrecognizable” (Part I). The verbal figure of réplique points to the folds within the “now,” repleat-replete with memory incompletely grasped. “Now” can no longer be thought of as “after” since, if invisibly, it both contains and repeats the past within it, confounding seriation. The earth, too, complexifies: it is always moving, not just in its orbit, but tectonically—if seemingly still, still seized; if seeming our very ground, still displacing and displaced. Moving with the earth in permanent aftershock, the body, as Nathanaël writes, is occupied by, as it occupies, space as it also inhabits this disjunctive time. The body always already bears remnants of its own death within it, beholden to a mortal future joining it to earth, and is made by the continuous catastrophe of living-as-dying inflicted and inflected by a contestative human (re)structuring of space-time. Yet another vexed logic of time is evoked when Nathanaël gestures toward prevented histories and subjunctive, violently eradicated futures: “An ontology of foreclosed possibility. Of foregone eventuality” (Part I). SISYPHUS thus abounds with alternate temporalities that spoil temporal abstraction as a progress of presents that postdate their pasts. It refuses promissory tenselessness in its preoccupation with iterative, traumatized time as ethical demand, with catastrophe as inculpation.¹
 
Nathanaël’s translation (replacement) of “aftershock” as “réplique,” vis-à-vis allusions to the work of geographer Michel Lussault and topologist and catastrophe theorist Rene Thom, rhymes with her exploration of geologic space-time in her recent book Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). In “Fa Ille,” the first section of Absence, Nathanaël worries the one-character slippage (space and letter in equivalence) between “la famille” and “la fa ille“: the first is a term of binding filiation; the second (la faille) names a tectonic (among other types of) rift. The difference is effected by the application of an aleatory yet directed faultline that literalizes language as “fluctuating littoral” (22). The figure of la faille also turns up in Nathanaël’s earlier At Alberta, a collection of talks given at the University of Alberta in 2006 and 2008, in a lecture on translation as failure and as an ethics of touch; la faille is exchanged in lieu of défaut, as Nathanaël translates and retranslates the phrase “failure of translation” to demonstrate the passage between languages as multiple and fractured even as this suspension of translation becomes a “substitution for place” itself (13). Faultline is again turned towards geophysics in a talk where Nathanaël discusses an interchange with “a friend who studies fracture mechanics, failure analysis and catastrophe theory” (Michael O’Leary, Chicago-based engineer, poet, and co-publisher of Flood Books) (At Alberta 104). O’Leary explains how an equation based on “the principle of least action” is used to predict, from a field of infinite possibility, the likely pathway of a crack. The formula requires a beginning point and a duration of action (111-2n.8); it uses a fixed time to plot the crack’s endpoint, in turn defined as a consequence, not presumption, of the process. Thus the breach delineates relation, generating an afterward that cannot be known in advance.
 
SISYPHUS is further in conversation with Absence Where As in anchoring its conception of a profoundly destabilized space-time in the photographic medium. The earlier book explores Nathanaël’s relationship to a 1936 photograph of Claude Cahun, transgendered Surrealist photographer and writer. This photograph both reaches across and reinforces the breach of time/geography to convene uncannily with Nathanaël, who views the Cahun of the photograph as her impossible semblable. Nathanaël means such anachronic converse, as she writes, “to extract myself from the place, from the moment riveted to its materiality, the architectural, temporal space made precise by a name, an arrangement of buildings cobbled onto a dismantled horizon, a situation, a location, a there” (Absence 5). As Nathanaël then discovers, her u-topian address to a Cahun photographically ripped from context is hardly her own agenda; it is, rather, a response to Cahun’s inverted, prior address that has perversely overmastered and dislocated Nathanaël. Solicitor solicited, Nathanaël seems to be (super)imposed upon, contrary to “normative temporality” (7), by Cahun’s victorious antecedence. But can she be sure? “The photograph offers itself as an abyss” (28); “There is not only encounter, but collapse. . . . Of one (me) onto the other ((s)he), immediately laid over the self, echoed, propagated, and swallowed back, bringing about a fall toward disappearance. The photograph . . . sends me back to what, of myself, I am already projecting, in a perpetual doubling of stares and faces” (29). Given the interaction’s uncertain reciprocity, Nathanaël relates to Cahun’s gaze in a mode of reflexive indeterminacy, a rebound that displaces and de-entifies her, ripping her too out of time and space and confronting her with an animating (self-)alterity. Far from indexing a historical moment, the Cahun photograph seems to “refuse,” even to kill, the possibility of liaison with a knowable past: “Photography represents dead time. In this instance, it also offers false passage. . . . It opens a door only to close it at once” (28); “There is the erasure of memory . . . and even of history” (29). If the photograph opens the door to referentiality and slams it, it also inaugurates an infinite circuit of rebounding as undoing, leaving the self afloat in a catastrophal desire, perpetually walking through a door without reaching the other side of the threshold: “As in the Sartrian hell, the door is wide open, but there is no veritable exit; there is nowhere to go; the bridges are burned, the sidewalks catastrophied” (35).
 
SISYPHUS presents its own photographic (and painted) analogs of seized, catastrophal time: “Sinister Street” (1928) by Umbo [Otto Umbehr], a work dissolving street, structures, vehicles, and creatures into a single plane of shimmering heatstroke; Maria Elena Vieira da Silva’s Stèle (1964), “which seems to identify the infinitesimal seisms present in the frame, perhaps even provoked by a frame’s imposition of limitation”; official photographs taken by Italian fascists of gutted homes in Florence that were immediately thereafter demolished (all from Part I). Nathanaël refers as well to Hervé Guibert, French writer and photographer (who died in 1991 of AIDS at age 36), whom she notes for taping a photograph of a boy to his body until the image transferred to his skin, for his formulation of the photograph as “Un événement de lumière,” for his theory of “subjectless photography” (Part II); and to Nicolas Grospierre, a Swiss architectural photographer whose 2008 Venice biennale show was titled, “The Afterlife of Buildings,” and who has had a very recent show in Chicago, “One Thousand Doors, No Exit” (Part VII). We move from the directly interrogative photograph of a gaze to (mainly) photographs of architecture as catastrophal theater.² Her discussions of an image from Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, which features the sunken ruin of an Axis bunker from the Atlantic Wall built in WWII, and a (heavily processed) photograph from Michal Rovner’s series Outside, which depicts a concrete Bedouin farmhouse in an Israeli desert reduced to a bare archetype of dwelling, a view where it seems to lack windows and door, remark on these works’ commentary on a temporality of slow decay over against their subjects’ and objects’ inscription in cultures of accelerated, compressed militarized time.
 
Yet through the term “theater” Nathanaël invokes or constructs a temporality of catastrophe for the photograph beyond that of decay. As she writes towards the end of SISYPHUS: “The present of the photograph is no more documentable than is the present of a book as it is written. If it is a document at all, it is a document of the failure to keep time” (Part VI(b)). The photograph not only indicts the present’s evisceration of the past, but also avenges its lapse of watchfulness over history (and its foreclosed historical potentiality) by fixing the present in a structure of “vigilation,” a perpetual wakeful hauntedness.³ Nathanaël envisions the theater-vigil of the photograph as an architectural frame that is an ethical frame of address-accusation, as well as a stage of performance, in and on which the present time, under the quaver of the réplique, is enjoined to replay a past it has otherwise collaborated in disappearing.⁴ As a non-presencing of a present, the photograph is a moment of “syncope,” a blink. As a disclosure of the trauma nested in the present, the photographic theater is a fury of Hegelian bad infinity: “The réplique is dialogical, combative, echoic, duplicitous. In theatre, it is simply what is said. This theatre, however, is catastrophal . . . a theatre of reiterative ending. With its [for all its] etymological gesturings toward the conclusive and the turn, the overturn, the downturn, the catastrophe’s finality is thwarted” (Part I). “A room is traversed . . . these perambulations are catastrophal in that they register the ends over and over again” (Part I). “Someone carries a door through a door . . . there is an absence of limits, an exacerbated falsehood of traversal” (Part I).
 
Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS overlays Albert Camus’s 1942 Le Myth de Sisyphe, a critique of the action of suicide as response to the human predicament of the absurd. Camus there argues for the ethics of a “life without appeal”—a life lived in the full realization of humanity’s alienation from the rest of the universe, and the worthlessness of human endeavor given the falsity of any transcendental value. To suicide is to acquiesce to the absurd; to continue on, either in a wild lawlessness of action or on a treadmill of habit, while lacking any delusion of worth or of the possibility of change, is to scorn the absurd. As Camus famously writes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (123): here is a contentment of self-mastery in the discontent of perpetual, meaningless repetition. Camus’s ethical stakes thus concern an impersonal aporia of existence: the absurd is a fact that can be fantasticated, acquiesced to in suicide, or lived through with intellectual vigilance.
 
A Sisyphean allegory, too, shows up in Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster; this is the laying bare of “work” in the concentration camp, where the laborer, for instance, removes and replaces a pile of heavy stones “at top speed” to no purpose:
 

[W]ork has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. . . . The meaning of work is then the destruction of work in and through work. . . . [Such labor] makes the worker, whom it reduces to naught, aware that the society expressed in the labor camp is what he must struggle against even as he dies, even as he survives. . . . Such survival is (also) immediate death, immediate acceptance of death in the refusal to die.
 

(81-2)

As for Camus, for Blanchot suicide is not an option; yet for Blanchot, the absurd is a human-authored theater of catastrophe, one indicted by a ghastly, principled survivorship. It is this endgame as vigilant indictment with which Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS most reverberates.

 
In an appendix to Dialectic of Enlightenment, “On the Theory of Ghosts,” Adorno and Horkheimer eloquently deride the temporal logic of capitalist culture, which many have claimed as photographic time: “Individuals are reduced to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences, which leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and ‘overtaken’ in the literal sense. . . . History is eliminated in oneself and others out of a fear that it may remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence. . . . Men have ceased to consider their own purpose and fate; they work their despair out on the dead” (216). Nathanaël’s untimely meditations on photographs as theaters of the catastrophal open up the filmic medium to let the dead have their day. That day is a violently foreclosed, bygone “today”—a before seizing and seized in its after again.⁵
 

 
Surprisingly little critical attention has been given to the recent outpouring of apocalyptic narratives by major literary figures.¹ What began as a trickle of serious eschatological fiction in the 1980s and 1990s has become a noteworthy literary phenomenon in the first decade of the new century, with the publication of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), and Douglas Coupland’s Player One (2010).² In these novels writers who enjoy the hard-earned imprimatur of contemporary canonicity have produced end-of-the-world scenarios that once were the near exclusive domain of genre science fiction.³
 
We probably needn’t linger long on why there has been a surge of high-literary apocalyptic texts. The increasing interpenetration of “high” and “low” literary forms in the postmodern era is well-documented. The visible traces of cyberpunk motifs in most contemporary canonical apocalyptic literature suggest that this variant of science fiction became a sort of literary gateway drug, introducing eschatological themes to the literati. Meanwhile, as Lois Parkinson Zamora, Warren Wagar, and Fiona Stafford point out, apocalyptic texts proliferate when times are especially troubled (11; 4; 87). The melting polar icecaps, “War on Terror,” reactor meltdowns, oil spills, and chafing among nations with nuclear arsenals have produced the sort of anxiety that could explain why major writers in the West would speculate on the possibility that human civilization will collapse or self-immolate in the too-near future.
 
But if why there has been a surge in highly literary apocalyptic texts may not merit extended analysis, how postmodern writers produce eschatological fiction does. Necessarily, given the range of writers who have recently produced apocalyptic novels, there are many answers to this question. However, some interesting patterns do present themselves in these writers’ work. While some subscribe to romantic empowerment through loss, others to a modernist, elegiac approach to the unraveling of civilization, and still others to a recognizably postmodern depiction of the fragmentation of subjectivity or even madness in the face of global change, almost all portray their protagonists as alone in the midst of cataclysm.⁴ Several texts imagine that genetic engineering or cloning will prove the final straw that breaks civilization’s back. Many draw connections between contemporary attitudes toward the aging human body and forms of environmental and socio-cultural degradation. A number imagine a post-apocalyptic era in which some form of post-human will inherit the earth. Cannibalism is both a metaphor and a material reality in virtually all of the texts. Many seem deeply preoccupied with the nature of time and how we might engage with time differently.
 
One text that includes all of these elements, but makes the latter questions concerning time especially central, is David’s Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. The boomeranging arc of Mitchell’s novel, which travels from the nineteenth century to a near-future apocalypse and then backward to its historical starting point, helps to crystallize a question implied in much postmodern apocalyptic fiction: If a linear conception of time is contributing to humanity’s apocalyptic tendencies, why not revert to the cyclical understanding of time that structured human consciousness for millennia?⁵ Mircea Eliade poses this same question in his study of the philosophy of time, The Myth of the Eternal Return, which argues that the abandonment of cyclical ontology in favor of modern historicism has made Western subjects profoundly vulnerable to what he terms “the terror of history.”
 
In this essay, I use Eliade’s treatise to argue that Cloud Atlas depicts the risks associated with both linear and cyclical approaches to temporality. Mitchell takes the contemporary climate of global crisis as an occasion to weigh dialectically the affective, social and political resources that historicist and cyclical forms of subjectivity and ontology may provide in the service of deterring our collective annihilation. The novel deploys a series of complex tropes—aging bodies, trains, cannibals, clones, transmigrating souls, and religious icons—to examine the phenomenology of historicism. In the final section of the essay, I argue that Mitchell’s self-conscious play with the unstable relationship between history and genre comments on the potential formal investments in literature have to break us out of an over-determined relationship to historicism.
 

“The Paradise of Archetypes and Repetition”

 
Growing up during the cold war, David Mitchell was deeply affected by the threat of nuclear war, and several of his novels include apocalyptic elements.⁶ Yet Cloud Atlas has the end of the world at its heart: The first half of the novel presents a series of five interrupted narratives set in periods from the 1850s to the near future and culminates with a sixth, post-apocalyptic story set in the distant future. From this midpoint, Cloud Atlas then moves backward through the preceding five narratives, completing each and ending with the resolution of the 19^th century story.
 
As in much postmodern fiction, Mitchell’s novel complicates the linear notions of time that are central to a modern understanding of history. On the one hand, there is an historical sequence to the stories that comprise Cloud Atlas. The nineteenth-century story set aboard a ship is followed by stories set in the early 20^th century, then the seventies, then the present, and onward to a near future of cloning. In the first story, a guileless notary named Adam Ewing is poisoned by a conman while sailing from Sydney to San Francisco. In the second, set in Brussels, Robert Frobisher, a young, bisexual musical prodigy, both preys on and is exploited by an aging master composer while serving as his amanuensis. The third narrative, set in California, features female cub reporter Luisa Rey, who attempts to expose the corruption of a nuclear power company. In the fourth, an aging English vanity publisher, Timothy Cavendish, is involuntarily committed to a nursing home. In the fifth, Sonmi-451, a Korean clone created to work as food-court server, becomes conscious of her subjugation and joins an abolition movement. In each story, some reference is made to the previous one, so for instance the musician in story two finds the journal that comprises story one, and so forth. Yet no exposition is offered about how these narratives relate to the centerpiece of the novel, the account of Zachry, a young man living in a primitive community on Hawaii in the distant aftermath of a global nuclear apocalypse. The sequence invites us to infer and attempt to decode causality from the series of narratives: somehow the events taking place in each era may have, sequentially, or in the aggregate, created the conditions of global catastrophe. In this sense, the superficial fragmentation of the novel may belie a deeper, coherent structure, and, at least up to its midpoint, it could be argued that the novel has a linear and historical perspective. Yet such causality remains hypothetical, and the reader is left to contemplate how each story or set of circumstances may relate to the others. In this respect the novel rejects the more direct forms of cause and effect that are associated with linear history.
 
These narrative aporia are not the whole story of Mitchell’s formal experimentation in Cloud Atlas, however, since the second half of the novel reverses the chronology of the first. In a recent essay on David Mitchell’s fiction, James Wood observes that, “Mitchell is obsessed with eternal recurrence” (71). Indeed, through its basic structure Cloud Atlas invites us to consider how cyclical understandings of time might serve as a way out of apocalyptic events, since this is what the book itself enacts: put simply, as readers we come to the apocalyptic end, only to find that half of the book remains to be read. By the time we have finished the book, we have arrived back in the 19^th century, creating a sense of coming full circle: the apocalyptic end of civilization becomes the occasion for the beginning of a new chapter or phase of each of the stories Mitchell had begun earlier.⁷
 
To make an apocalyptic narrative cyclical might seem to fly in the face of a pervasive modern view of the apocalypse as the end. Frank Kermode, for instance, argues that it is the “sense of an ending” that gives apocalyptic discourse its allure, penetrating our stories and our selves in equal measure. In a similar vein, Fiona Stafford’s scholarship on the offshoot of apocalyptic narrative that she calls “last-of-the-race fiction” underscores that this modern form of apocalyptic thinking emerged as a linear conception of time eclipsed the cyclical one:
 

[o]nly when time is perceived as a line and change as irreversible can “the last” have any meaning. Ancient concepts of time as a great circle through which everything turned before regaining the original point for a fresh departure, [sic] offered little scope for absolute endings and last things. In such systems, any ending must also be a beginning, while the significance of individual events is qualified by thoughts of endless repetition—just as each winter is followed by spring, each sunset redeemed by faith in the dawn. The same does not apply to linear concepts of time, where the model is not that of the natural cycles common to a community, but of an individual life moving in one direction from birth to death. Here, events are unrepeatable and endings carry no guarantee of regeneration, so “the last” has a much greater significance.
 

(42)

For Stafford, the power of the narrative of last things depends on the ending supplied by a linear conception of history.

Despite the modern imbrication of the linear and the apocalyptic, David Mitchell is not the first author to generate a cyclical apocalyptic narrative. Indeed, it would be an oversimplification to understand the cyclical model of temporality itself as obsolete. In his history of time, G.J. Whitrow reminds us that “Nietzsche, who died in 1900, and the twentieth-century historians and sociologists Spengler, Pareto, and Toynbee all believed in the cyclical nature of history” (179). Tyrus Miller extends the list of modern scholars who have promulgated the idea of cyclical history in the form of eternal recurrence to include “Georg Simmel, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Karl Löwith, Mircea Eliade, and Pierre Klossowski,” as well as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida (281). We should not be surprised that Warren Wagar, in his comprehensive study of “secular eschatological fictions” ranging from the early nineteenth century to the late 1970s, demonstrates that many “modern stories of the world’s end” actually “curve back on themselves, in a pattern of cyclical return” (185).
 
Both Whitrow and Wagar, however, understand such a modern preoccupation with the cyclical as part of a despairing outlook. Whitrow remarks that for the thinkers he describes, to understand time as cyclical is to “feel the menace of time as much as its promise” (179). Wagar, meanwhile, maintains that cyclical apocalyptic narratives “reflect a conserving temperament” (185). He explains that in these texts we see that, “the world of the author’s experience does not end in his consciousness or in his loyalties. He does not escape its boundaries. The future he envisages is . . . an empty repetition, because he is firmly attached to the present order of things” (186). Whether in Spengler’s Decline of the West or in Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, for Whitrow and Wagar the problem is that the writers see no possibility of the new—everything is always already old. In this preference for the possibility of the new, both scholars ironically reveal the imprint of the linear ontology about which they write with such authority.
 
To gain perspective on how the human-made catastrophes of the recent era could inspire Mitchell’s more hopeful deployment of a cyclical apocalyptic narrative, it is instructive to turn to Mircea Eliade’s meditation on linear and cyclical views of time, The Myth of the Eternal Return, which presents cyclical ontology as not only reemergent in the 20^th century, but necessary. A product of the horrors of the twentieth century, Eliade understands the modern, linear conception of time known as “history” to be profane and chaotic. It is for him “the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the ‘liberties’ that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history” (151). Secular historicism requires humans to endure “collective deportations and massacres . . . [and] atomic bombings,” with no sense that these events have any larger meaning or purpose (151).
 
Eliade argues that premodern societies embraced cyclical models of temporality in order to annul the “terror of history” by denying its existence. In his understanding of the “archaic ontology” he examines, ancient cultures derived their sense of reality from their creation myths. The cycles that gave shape to their lives involved the perceived repetition of these primal moments through rituals and ceremonies, in which they understood themselves to be embodiments of archetypal mythical identities: “an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats an archetype. Thus, reality is acquired solely through repetition or participation; everything which lacks an exemplary model is ‘meaningless,’ i.e., it lacks reality” (34).⁸ By elaborating this vision of cyclical temporality, Eliade works toward defamiliarizing more modern conceptions of historical time, reminding readers that “interest in the ‘irreversible’ and the ‘new’ in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity” (48). In the final lines of his book he reflects that, “modern man is irremediably identified with history and progress, and . . . history and progress are a fall, both implying the final abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition” (162).
 
Eliade starkly lays out the distinction between the versions of subjectivity cyclical and historical ontologies produce. Because his sense of reality is created by adhering to archetypes, the man within traditional culture “sees himself as real, i.e., as ‘truly himself,’ only, and precisely, insofar as he ceases to be so” (34). On the other hand, “‘historical man’ . . . [is] the man who is insofar as he makes himself, within history” (ix, emphasis in original). Near the conclusion of The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade imagines a kind of debate that might take place between these two subjects:
 

In the last analysis, modern man, who accepts history or claims to accept it, can reproach archaic man, imprisoned within the mythical horizon of archetypes and repetition, with his creative impotence, or what amounts to the same thing, his inability to accept the risks entailed by every creative act. . . .
 
To these criticisms raised by modern man, the man of the traditional civilizations could reply . . . [that] [i]t is becoming more and more doubtful . . . if modern man can make history.
 

(155-6)

Eliade shows himself to be largely sympathetic to the latter view; convinced of “the transitoriness, or at least the secondary character, of human individuality as such,” he presents history and individuality as two destructive myths that reinforce one another.

 
At points, in his rejection of historicism, Eliade appears to yearn for a return to return in starkly apocalyptic terms:
 

There is also reason to foresee that, as the terror of history grows worse, as existence becomes more and more precarious because of history, the positions of historicism will increasingly lose in prestige. And, at a moment when history could do what neither the cosmos, nor man, nor chance have [sic] yet succeeded in doing—that is, wipe out the human race in its entirety—it may be that we are witnessing a desperate attempt to prohibit the “events of history” through a reintegration of human societies within the horizon (artificial, because decreed) of archetypes and their repetition. In other words, it is not inadmissible to think of an epoch, and an epoch not too far distant, when humanity, to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further “making” of history in the sense in which it began to make it from the creation of the first empires, will confine itself to repeating prescribed archetypal gestures, and will strive to forget, as meaningless and dangerous, any spontaneous gesture which might entail “historical” consequences. It would even be interesting to compare the anhistorical solution of future societies with the paradisal or eschatological myths of the golden age of the beginning or the end of the world.
 

(153-54)

Eliade’s language here reflects his own conflicted view of a return to cyclical ontology. On the one hand, he characterizes a return to repetition and archetypes as a “desperate” and “artificial” act, leaving Western subjects “reduced to desisting from any further ‘making’ of history” (emphasis mine). Yet he also again invokes the language of paradise, imagining that such a future society might resemble a “golden age.”⁹

 
Despite being regarded by many as the greatest twentieth-century scholar of religion, as well as author of “the greatest modern work on arrows and cycles” (Gould 12), Eliade is a controversial figure (Allen xi). Recent revelations of Eliade’s affiliation with Romania’s Iron Guard and his apparent complicity with fascism and anti-semitism have inspired some critics to interpret his enthusiasm for anti-historicist, archetypal modes of being as part of a regimented hierarchical ideology.¹⁰ Even before questions were raised about Eliade’s political affiliations in Romania, his account of history was much debated.¹¹ Given Hegel’s oft-quoted claim that “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom” (19-20), a denunciation of a Hegelian model of history could be construed as a blanket rejection of progressive political causes. Even scholars who celebrate the value of Eliade’s work concede the potentially reactionary implications of his anti-historicism (Allen 269-71).
 
Yet to a striking degree, Eliade’s thought resonates with that of left-leaning thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin.¹² In his emphasis on the wisdom of pre-modern, non-Western others, as well as in his critique of the Enlightenment view of progress, Eliade can as easily be placed in the vanguard of postmodernism as in the camp of retrograde traditionalists.¹³ Indeed, Eliade’s disavowal of linear understandings of history can give us a distinctive purchase on certain pragmatic contradictions within post-structuralism. It is a given in the contemporary moment that conventional notions of individual, unified subjectivity—what Ermath calls “the founding cogito“—have been deconstructed in the wake of post-structuralist theory’s influence (8). Yet Eliade’s anti-historicist critique of modern subjectivity lays bare the degree to which linear models of time continue to inhere within the post-structuralist model of subjectivity, since its fluidity is contingent upon an ever shifting historical context.¹⁴ This covert reification of linear time in turn complicates post-structuralism’s ideological critique of Enlightenment notions of progress.
 
The near-apocalyptic scale of the Second World War inspired Eliade to reexamine human understandings of time as a potential key to the future of humanity. He provocatively suggests that we need not think of the passage of time only in linear terms, but he also subtly acknowledges the costs in ideals of human freedom that might be paid for such a choice. Mitchell’s novel reflects in similar terms on the stakes of our understanding of time and history. The experience of Mitchell’s characters resonates powerfully with Eliade’s claim that while archaic subjects understood themselves as reiterations of mythical archetypes, the modern conception of history has thrust a sense of individuality upon men and women, begetting a terrifying emptiness. All of Mitchell’s protagonists are initially depicted as isolated individuals caught in the sweep of history, whether it is racist Empire-building on Chatham Island, the socio-cultural aftermath of World War One, the power plays of the emergent nuclear industry, the growing social contempt for the elderly, or the technological advances that have made human cloning a reality. Stafford emphasizes the ways in which Robinson Crusoe, as the first “sole survivor” in Western literature, reflects a shift from Christian Millenarianism, with its emphasis on a collective ending, to a modern, secular preoccupation with individual “problems of loss and post-traumatic experiences” (72). Interestingly, Mitchell figures all of his main characters as castaways, not only depicting them as solitary outsiders in their various places and times, but, in a text full of images of islands, presenting many of them literally dragging themselves out of the water onto islands to escape what Lutz Niethammer, paraphrasing Benjamin, calls the “catastrophic storm of history” (qtd. in Woods 115).¹⁵
 

“Souls Cross Ages Like Clouds Cross Skies”

 
Cloud Atlas‘s interrogation of historicism extends from its larger structure to the details of its separate narratives. The six storylines that comprise the novel’s five hundred pages are both thematically diverse and dense with recurrent symbolism.¹⁶ Within its multiple stories, as much as in its overarching form and characterization, Mitchell’s novel considers the terror of history. This is particularly evident in the sections entitled “Letters from Zedelgrehm.” Mitchell creates a jarring juxtaposition between this narrative, which is narrated by a bisexual book thief, modernist musical composer, and sometimes sexual hustler named Robert Frobisher, and its predecessor, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” which is recorded by a devout Christian and notary who is dutifully trying to deliver legal documents to the beneficiary of an inheritance in Australia. While there are some continuities even here—both men’s destinies are shaped by legacies, and both are at the mercy of older, more cunning men—the tone of the texts is very different. Adam sees the world through a stable lens of Christian morality. Frobisher, living in the still scarred landscape of post-World War One England and Belgium, no longer feels such certainty. He is haunted by the death of his older brother, whose own virtues have become, posthumously, the impossible standard against which his family measures him. His father is an “eminent churchman,” but he reflects, “Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again” (448, 75).
 
This contrast between faith and a modern, secular world view is made especially evident when Robert, having read the first half of Adam’s journal, muses enviously on “happy, dying Ewing, who never saw the unspeakable forms waiting around history’s corner” (460). Adam’s innocence and religiosity, underscored so powerfully by his name, are contrasted with the waywardness and despair of a man who lives in the shadow of twentieth-century history. In this light it is particularly appropriate that Frobisher’s final undoing is effected by his love for a character named “Eva,” who precipitates his fall into suicide. The contrast between Ewing and Frobisher serves as a powerful iteration of the desolation produced by the “terror of history.”
 
This sense of the treachery of a linear conception of time is reinforced in the “Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” In this case, linear time is examined through the lens of modern understandings of the aging body and mind. Cavendish is in some sense an older version of Frobisher, another Cambridge-educated Brit on the run from creditors, whose sexual indiscretion—in this case an affair with his brother’s wife—is the apparent motivation for his incarceration in a rest home. The vehicle for this meditation on the linearity of aging is a long and tortured train ride on the British rail system. The train ride, like Cavendish’s life and the memoir he produces, is full of false starts, interruptions, and failures. Overall, the decay of the British rail system and the metastization of its bureaucracy, along with the corruption of the landscape through which Cavendish travels, become the occasion for a narrative of decline. Britain and Cavendish’s aging body are both well past their prime, a message highlighted by Cavendish’s repeated references to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable!” Cavendish reflects. “The I’s we were yearn to breathe the world’s air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? Oh, can they hell” (168). The ambivalence of this rumination suggests the tension that runs through this section of the novel, for while the transformations brought to the body by age are undeniable, the meanings that are attached to them are highly malleable.
 
The prevailing episteme in Cavendish’s England is brutal contempt for the elderly, and Cavendish’s subjugation to a linear conception of time becomes graver still once he arrives at his destination—a facility he believes to be a hotel where he gratefully “checks in,” only to discover quickly that he has been involuntarily committed to a nursing home. At this point, Cavendish’s account of aging as a microcosm of time’s arrow takes on a prophetic—if not quite apocalyptic—tone that is at once poignant and absurd:
 

Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world’s. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semivisible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations whenever you speak. . . . Only babies, cats, and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight.
 

(180-81)

In Cavendish’s blackly comic account of aging we see the ravages of a secular, linear conception of time that has no larger meaning or purpose—an ontology that constructs the aging human body exclusively as a site of decay and shame.

 
While the sense of hopelessness that Mitchell associates with “time’s arrow” is palpable in these sections of the book, in several sections he presents cyclical ontology as similarly confining. The novel opens with a mystifying image: the conman Dr. Henry Goose scouring a beach on Chatham Island for teeth cannibals have left behind, teeth he plans to secretly convert into dentures for his nemesis, which will in turn lead to her public downfall when he exposes that she “masticates with cannibals’ gnashers” (6). At first this opening gambit merely baffles: how could such a bizarre tableau set the stage for what is to come? Yet the scene draws attention to Chatham Island as a site where “the strong engorged themselves on the weak” (5). As we will learn, Henry Goose is himself deeply committed to a personal philosophy of predation: In his guise as a doctor he will later poison the narrator, Adam Ewing, in order to rob him, while also casually attempting to poison his mind with his racist views. Already, his plan to use the teeth of an earlier conflict between weak and strong in order to empower himself against his wealthy former employer suggests the cyclical nature of violence, which is a central preoccupation of Mitchell’s novel.
 
In fact, the stories that follow are a sorry register of greed and exploitation, and a meditation on the will to power. The weak are poisoned, cuckolded, blackmailed, assaulted, imprisoned, enslaved, and, ultimately, eaten in a system of organized cannibalism by those with more cunning and power. The conclusion of the novel includes the repeated mantra of its first predator, Henry Goose, who explains to his victim, “The weak are meat the strong do eat” (489, 503). As the fabricant Sonmi-451 concisely states, “My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only ‘rights,’ the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful” (344). The emphasis in these passages on the cyclical perpetuity of oppression and violence raises the most obvious question about embracing a cyclical ontology: wouldn’t such an understanding of time simply calcify the brutality humanity has shown itself capable of, rather than opening the way for positive change?
 
Mitchell subjects this question to another level of magnification in the first and last events he chronicles. He provides many signs that the distant future in the Pacific narrated in “Sloosha’s Crossin an’ Ev’rythin’ After” recycles the conditions of the 1850s when “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” takes place. In the 1850s the Moriori, peaceful icon-worshippers who believe that to murder is to forsake one’s soul, are viciously subjugated and enslaved by the more warlike Maori tribe. ¹⁷ In the distant future of “Sloosha’s Crossin’” Zachry’s community, peaceful icon-worshippers who believe that to murder is to forsake one’s soul, are viciously subjugated and enslaved by the more warlike Kona tribe. In each story, a single member of the defeated tribe survives: in “The Pacific Journal” Autua (a character whose chiasmic name playfully gestures to the structure of the novel, and, perhaps, of time itself) ultimately rescues Adam Ewing from the clutches of the murderous conman Henry Goose; in “Sloosha’s Crossin,” the narrator Zachry alone leaves Hawaii for Maui after the Kona’s assault. The reproduction of barbarity that these narratives manifest suggests that to endorse a cyclical notion of temporality is potentially to celebrate socio-cultural regression.
 
This interrogation of cyclical ontology continues in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.” While linear time is compared to a hellish ride on British rail, the epistemology of the “life cycle” is presented in equally grim terms. On the night Cavendish arrives at Aurora House, he avows that, “In the morning life would begin afresh, afresh, afresh. This time round I would do everything right” (173). In a parody of rebirth, when Cavendish awakes, he discovers that he will now be treated as a helpless baby. At the hands of the Aurora House staff he is slapped, scolded, spanked, and threatened with having his mouth washed out with soap. After he has a stroke, he is spoon-fed and diapered. Cavendish’s body becomes a palimpsest of linear and cyclical narratives, both of which can be deployed by the institutional apparatus of the nursing home to deny him agency and to strip his life of meaning.
 
Yet it is the cyclical worldview explored in “Letters from Zedelghrem,” Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, that is depicted as the most treacherous. Composer Vyvyan Ayrs is a devotee of Nietzsche who intends that the final masterpiece of his career, a “cyclical, crystalline thing,” will be titled “Eternal Recurrence” (79, 84). Taking his new mentor’s lead, Frobisher reads Also Sprach Zarathustra and feels such a profound resonance with the philosopher’s work that he remarks that it is as though “Nietzsche was reading me, not I him” (63). When Frobisher completes what he views as the best musical composition he will ever write, it is not surprising that it is to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence that he turns to defend his decision to kill himself:
 

Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities. . . .
 
Once my luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.
 

(471)

Frobisher appears liberated here from the depression and mental instability that assail him. Yet his youth and the extremity of his act invite a reading of Nietzsche’s much debated notion of cycles as a destructive alternative to history’s “unspeakable forms.”

 
While the novel’s obsession with temporality is largely expressed as a critique of both linear and cyclical ontologies, it also explores the potential benefits of each. In broad terms, the novel does assert the possibility of historical progress. For instance, while barbarity appears more severe in Zachry’s distant future, the pinnacle of civilization also seems higher.¹⁸ If Zachry and Autua are indeed doubles, then Meronym and Adam are as well.¹⁹ Adam, a white American, is for much of the nineteenth-century narrative depicted as naïve and racist. Meronym, on the other hand, is a black clone who is part of a small number of technologically advanced survivors of a global nuclear war. She is portrayed as far more sensitive and culturally sophisticated than her predecessor, Adam. In fact, Meronym, whose name means “a word denoting the mid point of two extremes,” shows great respect for Zachry’s archaic culture, even as she wields remarkable technology (“meronym, n.”).
 
This technology in turn brings us to yet another level at which Mitchell’s treatment of linear-time-as-progress must be considered. While much of Mitchell’s novel appears critical of scientific and technological change, especially as it is depicted in the contemporary era of the “Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” and the near future of “The Orison of Sonmi-451,” it is the absence of much of this technology that signals humanity’s “Fall” in the post-apocalyptic section of the novel. In Zachry’s world, people die at 50 because of the lack of medical science and technology; they possess only primitive tools; they are subject to the brutality of barbarians; and they live in a state of profound ignorance. Such changes for the worse also, implicitly, celebrate the idea and material expressions of linear progress as they currently exist.
 
Meanwhile, the novel illustrates the potential advantages of a cyclical ontology in its depictions of reincarnation. Gradually revealing that Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi-451, and Meronym have identical birthmarks, Cloud Atlas suggests they share a soul that is recycled across time. The book’s title in part refers to this notion of reincarnation; as Zachry reflects:
 

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.
 

(308)²⁰

The novel itself, then, serves as a “cloud atlas,” charting the movement of one soul across its several stories. While Zachry ultimately kills the Kona warrior who has attacked his family, he hesitates because he senses that “If I’d been rebirthed a Kona in this life, he could be me an’ I’d be killin’ myself” (301). This sense of identification with an other, of the interchangeability of identities across time, brings into focus how a cyclical ontology could enable a positive departure from the self-interested conventions of individualism.

 
Ultimately, in a novel preoccupied with both cyclical and linear forms of temporality, it is the “Orison of Sonmi-451” narrative that lingers longest on the problems and potential posed by each ontological position. On one level the sf-inspired clone narrative seems to function straightforwardly as a critique of the potentially dehumanizing telos of contemporary genomics research. The fabricants are treated with no mercy: they are regarded as non-human, forced to work brutal hours in conditions that often would be fatal for non-modified humans. Sonmi-451, whose name plays on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, is a “server” at a fast food franchise and is required to work nineteen hours a day for twelve years. In Mitchell’s future, the treatment of clones is emblematic of a more pervasive dehumanization of the “corpocratic” regime, which construes its population as “consumers” rather than “citizens.” Most conspicuously, the term “soul” has lost its spiritual connotations and now refers to the identity/bank chip implanted in each consumer’s fingertip. In the denouement of the Sonmi-451 narrative, we learn that fabricants are slaughtered at the end of their term of service and their bodies “recycled” to feed other fabricants as well as consumers.
 
In bald terms, the practice of cloning Mitchell depicts represents everything that is dangerous about a cyclical view of time. As Sonmi-451 herself explains, “Fabricants have no earliest memories. . . . One twenty-four-hour cycle in Papa Song’s is indistinguishable from any other” (183). There is a linear element to their experience—all fabricants mistakenly believe that when their service ends, they will reach “Xultation” and be “transformed into consumers with Soulrings” (184). Yet in most respects, clones embody the archetypal model of identity associated with cyclical understandings of time. Endlessly reproduced and trained to perform the same tasks in perpetuity, the fabricants literalize the notion of eternal return. Indeed, Sonmi-451’s existence as a reproduction of a “stem-type” recalls Eliade’s analysis of the ways ancestors in some cultures serve as analogues of archetpyes. He reflects that, “The transformation of the dead person into an ‘ancestor’ corresponds to the fusion of the individual into an archetypal category. In numerous traditions… the souls of the common dead no longer possess a ‘memory’; that is, they lose what may be called their historical individuality” (46-7). Anticipating a likely criticism, he continues,
 

As for the objection that an impersonal survival is equivalent to a real death (inasmuch as only the personality and the memory that are connected with duration and history can be called a survival), it is valid only from the point of view of a “historical consciousness,” in other words, from the point of view of modern man, for archaic consciousness accords no importance to personal memories.
 

(47)

The parallels are obvious and chilling between this ancient understanding of the “impersonal survival” of archetypes and the view in Sonmi-451’s era of endlessly reiterated “stemtypes” who, at least according to “popular wisdom[,] . . . don’t have personalities” (187). This sense of fabricants’ redundancy permits (post)modern consumers, with their “historical consciousness,” to be indifferent to the fate of the fabricant. As Sonmi-451 explains, “To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, . . . but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none” (187).

 
Sonmi-451’s “ascension,” or coming into consciousness, disrupts this sense of repetition, instead suggesting that “even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snow-flakes” (187). The ascension underscores the degree to which “An Orison of Sonmi-451” is committed to exploring the tension between a cyclical understanding of the world, with its fabricated, archetypal identities, and an action-driven, linear narrative that reframes Sonmi-451 as an historical subject. After her ascension, that linear narrative follows Sonmi-451 through her apparent recruitment by the Union rebels, builds to the revelation late in the story that her escape has been contrived by the Unanimity government to further divide consumers from fabricants, and ends with her emergence as a “martyr” who creates a set of Declarations that will ultimately change the course of history. In this plotline, we see a forceful valorization of a notion of historical subjectivity as the most hopeful means of escaping from the cycles of brutality that Cloud Atlas recurrently depicts. When the revolutionaries first attempt to enlist her in their cause, she tells them, “I was not genomed to alter history” (327). Yet after the members of Union show her the slaughter of fabricants, she makes a series of proclamations that self-consciously position her as an historical subject:
 

That ship must be destroyed. Every slaughtership in Nea So Copros like it must be sunk. . . .
 
The shipyards that build them must be demolished. The systems that facilitated them must be dismantled. The laws that permitted the systems must be torn down and reconstructed. . . .
 
Every consumer, xec, and Juche Boardman in Nea So Copros must understand that fabricants are purebloods, be they grown in a wombtank or a womb. If persuasion does not work, ascended fabricants must fight with Union to achieve this end, using whatever force is necessary.
 

(346, emphasis in original)

Both Sonmi-451’s call to action, and the ways she is situated here to resemble both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (“using whatever force is necessary”), foreground the ways that this section of the text identifies linear history with the possibility of necessary change.

 
Balanced against this ostensible commitment to an historicist model of human identity, the Sonmi-451 section also reasserts the book’s fascination with reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. When Sonmi and her professed protector Hae-Joo Im encounter an ancient statue of Siddhartha, Hae-Joo Im explains that he was “a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth. . . .” (329). Later an abbess explains to Sonmi that Siddhartha is “a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations” (332). On one level the martyr Sonmi-451 and Buddha are doubles in the text—her ascension itself is the fabricant equivalent of the Buddhist state of Enlightenment. Her Declarations, moreover, promise liberation to other fabricants from the “meaningless cycle” to which they have been subjected.
 
Yet the references to Buddhism also evoke a more traditional, spiritual version of reincarnation, based on a model of karma. Eliade explains:

[T]he Indians quite early elaborated a conception of universal causality, the karma concept, which accounts for the actual events and sufferings of the individual’s life and at the same time explains the necessity for transmigrations. In the light of the law of karma, sufferings not only find a meaning but also acquire a positive value. The sufferings of one’s present life are not only deserved—since they are in fact the fatal effect of crimes and faults committed in previous lives—they are also welcome, for it is only in this way that it is possible to absorb and liquidate part of the karmic debt that burdens the individual and determines the cycle of his future existences. According to the Indian conception, every man is born with a debt, but with freedom to contract new debts. His existence forms a long series of payments and borrowings, the account of which is not always obvious.
 

(98-99)

Were we to understand Mitchell’s invocation of transmigration as inspired by the principles of Buddhism and karma as Eliade presents them, then Meronym, the most “enlightened” of the characters, is still paying for the misdeeds of Sonmi-451, Timothy Cavendish, Luisa Rey, and Robert Frobisher, and the price is to live in a wrecked world. Such an interpretation also provides one way of understanding the overall structure of the novel. To some degree the second half of each of the stories suggests ways each character might improve the karma of coming incarnations through their positive efforts, perhaps avoiding the disastrous scenario the centerpiece of the novel plays out.

 
While the complexities of Buddhist spirituality are beyond the scope of this essay, it should be clear from this brief account that it possesses both cyclical and linear elements. Even as souls transmigrate, enacting a cycle of existence, they are also moving forward toward freedom from this state of embodiment. In its stories, Mitchell’s novel seems to enact a similar balance between investments in historical and cyclical ontologies. After the post-apocalyptic midpoint of the novel, the second halves of Mitchell’s five narratives unspool in markedly linear form. In sections full of swiftly narrated action scenes, all the characters escape from one form of confinement or another.²¹ Through the course of these events, the novel also affirms the possibility of historical change. Adam vows to join the abolitionist movement; Frobisher creates an enduring work of art; Luisa stops the construction of a dangerous nuclear reactor; Cavendish overcomes his own xenophobia to collaborate with a Scottish patient in the rest home; Sonmi-451 becomes a martyr on behalf of all fabricants. As these descriptions suggest, these characters in part overcome the terror of history, not through cyclical thinking but through various gestures toward community. Only Frobisher remains isolated and arguably succumbs to the terror in his suicide. The final words of the novel, which imagine each individual action as a drop in the ocean, affirm this sense that acts of individual change can become collective historical transformations.
 
Despite the anxiety the text expresses about repetition in its treatment of cloning, it is also sameness—the experience of an archetypal identity—that strengthens each character. Through reincarnation, which they experience as déjà-vu, Mitchell’s characters achieve a sense of solidarity with their other selves across time. This spiritual understanding of repetition is amplified by several references to iconography and idolatry in Cloud Atlas. In an enigmatic passage near the opening of the novel, Adam Ewing plunges into a hole and discovers “First one, then ten, then hundreds of faces,” faces that prove to be dendroglyphs generated by the now nearly extinct Moriori (20). Mitchell returns to the notion of idols, or “dead-lifes” as Zachry calls them, in the “Sloosha’s Crossin” section (261). Meronym asks of the Valleysmen’s icons, “Is icons a home for the soul? Or a common mem’ry o’ faces’n’kin’n’age’n’all?” (258). One of Zachry’s tribe responds that, “The icon’ry . . . held Valleysmen’s past an’ present all t’gether” (258). These references call to mind Eliade’s discussion of the relationship between archetypes and ancestors, but they also resonate with Derrida’s discussion of spectrality in Specters of Marx. In Tim Woods’s gloss on Derrida, “History is an irrepressible revenant . . . , living-dead which haunts the present, since causes demonstrate a ‘posthumous’ historicality and materiality, a ‘living-on’ or survival after the death of the original event, demonstrating a more powerful life in its spiritual presence than its corporeal absence” (116, emphasis in original). For Woods, Derrida’s insistence on the impurity of history converges with Benjamin’s insistence that historicism must be replaced by “the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (116-17; Benjamin 79).²² As I now want to suggest, the form of Mitchell’s novel further elaborates on this challenge to historicism in its invocation of literary icons.
 

“In the Mind’s Mirror”

 
This essay has thus far focused on the content of Cloud Atlas without giving significant attention to its form. Ultimately, however, the complex form of Mitchell’s novel is essential to understanding how cyclical and linear notions of time, and their attendant versions of subjectivity, figure in his engagement with contemporary eschatology. When, at a recent reading, I asked David Mitchell about his political goals for his novels, he stressed that he thinks of himself more as a stylist than an “idea man” (“Thousand Autumns”). Such an assertion seems too modest: his books to date have shown themselves deeply committed to a range of questions and ideas about power, history, capitalism, terrorism, and other major contemporary issues. In another sense, the assessment rings true, for what is most dazzling about Cloud Atlas is the seemingly effortless way in which Mitchell shifts from a nineteenth-century romance on the high seas, to a decadent modernist tale of polymorphous sexuality and artistic intrigue, to a trim, commercial 1970s thriller, to an absurdist contemporary memoir, and finally to two sections of very elaborate futuristic science fiction.
 
It was Mitchell’s ability to segue from one of these genres to another with such apparent effortlessness in Cloud Atlas that initially drew raves from critics. Yet a number of critics have also been disoriented—even, perhaps, disturbed—by Mitchell’s ability to shuttle in and out of these narrative modes. One critic remarks, “The way Mitchell inhabits the different voices of the novel is close to miraculous” (MacFarlane). Another characterizes Mitchell as “a genius,” but goes on to say that his “virtuosity too often seems android” (Bissell). In his interview with Mitchell, Mason writes, “If there has been one consistent criticism of Mitchell, . . . it has been that his virtuosity is mere ventriloquism, a capacity for imitation that suggests he lacks originality” (Mitchell, “The Experimentalist”). This critical ambivalence reminds us that while many writers cover vast sweeps of time through either continuous or episodic narration, few tailor their narrative forms to the various moments in time they are exploring via narrative voice, focalization, style, and genre.
 
To be sure, such a literary enterprise is rare in part because of the sheer labor involved in developing the various techniques required to make each genre and style seem authentic. Other writers may also have eschewed such a montage of period pieces because of the profound contradictions such a production entails. The very authenticity of each section is exploded by its proximity to another equally authentic piece performing another time period. We are not permitted the sense of immersion typical of the historical novel. Instead, we are jarringly shuttled from one period to another. In their neo-formalist work on genre, Scott Black et al. maintain that
 

form is arguably one of the key ways for readers and writers to access and participate in history. Writing, reciting, or perhaps even silently reading an Horatian ode upon a local skirmish inscribes a history (public and political); so too does drawing an event—possibly the same event—into a history of subjective experience by rendering it with Petrarchan blazons or morality-play derived monologue.
 

(8)

From this perspective, Cloud Atlas enacts a sort of time travel. But not, precisely, historical time travel. Mitchell’s ability to capture moments in time through style and genre could, indeed, be said to suggest that those time periods were distinct, and that our recognition of them is predicated on this distinction. That is, the shifting styles and genres themselves index the linear passage of time. However, Mitchell resists this understanding, destabilizing the historical implications of the various genres by breaking them up and reversing their order. This highly visible manipulation denudes his genres of their temporal specificity.

 
The self-conscious, metanarrative devices Mitchell includes in Cloud Atlas also make the artificiality of the various “historical” narratives conspicuous. In the second narrative, Robert Frobisher finds the first half of Ewing’s published journal when he rifles through Vyvyan Ayrs’s book collection, looking for valuable volumes to steal and sell. This discovery serves as the first disclosure to Mitchell’s readers that he intends to denaturalize the stories we are reading and treat them as constructed narratives. Mitchell goes further, having Frobisher doubt the provenance of the journal. He muses:
 

Ewing puts me in mind of Melville’s bumbler Cpt. Delano in “Benito Cereno,” blind to all conspirators—he hasn’t spotted his trusty Dr. Henry Goose [sic] is a vampire, fueling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money.
 
Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true—but who would bother forging such a journal, and why?
 

(64)

Why indeed? Here Mitchell draws attention to the artifice of his novel by flagging its literary debts and exposing its concerted effort to “forge” the form of a historical journal.

 
These metafictional gestures continue. Frobisher’s own narrative is told through letters that are saved and read forty years later by his former lover, Rufus Sixsmith, a character enmeshed in the cover-up at the nuclear power station which is the focus of the Luisa Rey narrative. The Luisa Rey story turns up in the form of an unpublished manuscript sent to publisher Timothy Cavendish, who reads and edits it. Cavendish’s story is in turn made into a movie, which enchants the fabricant Sonmi-451. Finally, Sonmi-451’s narrative takes the form of a digitally recorded interview that is discovered and viewed by Zachry.
 
These metafictional elements become an occasion to raise various questions about literature and literary form. From an historicist perspective, they can be read to comment on the role the loss of the written word may play in global collapse. The sequence of forms Mitchell parades before us reflects the large-scale cultural shifts that may take us from the era of personal journal and letter writing, through the heyday of literacy with the flourishing of bestsellers and newspapers, on to film, then computerized images, and then, after the Fall, back to pre-modern and non-literate forms of communication. In this sense, the architecture of the book hints at the prophylactic value of writing in our neo-apocalyptic times.
 
It is unclear, however, why the apparent dissolution of literacy matters in the larger narrative, since the reading of the narratives—or even the viewing of visual media -has little or no effect on the unfolding of events. While the various sections can be read to suggest that predatory actions snowball and carry us inexorably toward an apocalyptic outcome, the literariness of the book complicates this interpretation. Locally, the literary texts have little effect on the action in the book—reading Ewing’s journal does not change Frobisher’s conduct, nor does Luisa Rey’s encounter with Frobisher’s letters. Cavendish thinks of Luisa Rey when he escapes from the nursing home, but there is little suggestion that the thriller narrative actually inspires his bid for freedom. Sonmi-451 feels empathy for Cavendish’s plight in “The Ghastly Ordeal,” but watching the film does not change her views, which are already formed. Zachry’s encounter with Sonmi-451’s testimony affects neither his conduct nor the disastrous events that unfold in Hawaii.
 
More than historicizing literature, then, the constructedness of the stories complicates a historicist understanding of the novel as a whole. The events that take place in the various narratives are not “real” events—they are stories, encountered by characters in other stories. Postmodern literature, of course, is full of historical narratives that explode conventional understandings of history, a phenomenon labeled “historiographic metanarrative,” by Linda Hutcheon, and more recently “metahistorical romance” by Amy Elias. Much has been said about the ways postmodern narrative techniques emphasize the textuality of history, and its undecidability. Mitchell is certainly concerned with these questions, especially in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” where he offers a lengthy meditation on the ways power can undermine our access to the “actual past” by overlaying it with images of a “virtual past” (389-90). This section allows for a Baudrillardian interpretation of the book, in which Mitchell, despite attempting a serious meditation on our trajectory toward apocalypse, becomes caught in an unreal vertigo of literary conventions. In this reading, any “real” vision of our problems or their potential solutions is obscured by a wall of pre-existing cultural images—what Baudrillard calls simulacra, and what here take the form of literary genres and conventions that determine their own content.
 
It is also possible to perceive Mitchell’s text’s affinity to a more considered anti-historicist position. The young American man on a voyage; the sophisticated, bisexual British wit; the spunky female American reporter; the cynical, involuntarily incarcerated prisoner of a facility for the aged and impaired (at the mercy, no less, of a soulless head nurse); the beautiful, rebellious clone; the scrappy survivor caught in a post-apocalyptic landscape—the more audaciously Mitchell plays with literary styles and genres, the less these characters seem like individuals and the more they appear to be repetitions of archetypes derived from the history of Western literature. Indeed, Mitchell conspicuously pays homage to Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ken Kesey, Russell Hoban, and Margaret Atwood, among others. This deployment of literary/cultural archetypes and invocation of literary icons suggests that Cloud Atlas is less about how individuals can become historical agents in order to derail our momentum toward the apocalypse than about how literary genres provide us archetypes to resist the “terror of history.” Here we might reconsider critics’ charges that Mitchell “lacks originality” and credit the ways he possesses what we can call “origin/ality,” a thoughtful regard for the origins of contemporary literary forms that becomes a deeper comment on the problems of contemporary historicism. While an historicist perspective suggests that by conforming to preexisting archetypes, we compromise our individuality, autonomy, and freedom, Mitchell’s novel, in terms that resonate with Eliade’s thought, suggests that we might do well to invest ourselves in older, larger stories.²³
 
Such cyclical understanding of temporality and subjectivity is, of course, ultimately a matter of belief—a word that figures crucially in both Eliade’s and Mitchell’s work. Eliade raises the issue of belief through its expression as faith at the conclusion of The Myth of the Eternal Return. He explains that at the moment when “the horizon of archetypes and repetition was transcended,” Judeo-Christianity introduced “a new category into religious experience: the category of faith” (160, emphasis in original). Eliade continues: “Faith, in this context, as in many others, means absolute emancipation from any kind of natural ‘law’ and hence the highest freedom that man can imagine: freedom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the universe. . . . Only such a freedom . . . is able to defend modern man from the terror of history” (160-61).
 
Whereas Eliade understands belief as a means to a subjectivity unburdened by the terror of history, Mitchell associates belief with the construction of a sustainable world. At the conclusion of Cloud Atlas, he offers the following meditation:
 

What precipitates Acts? Belief.
 
Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being. . . .
 
If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.
 

(508, emphasis in original)²⁴

Mitchell’s novel implicity adds to this series of propositions that if we believe both events and selves are old as well as new, we may invest ourselves in both in a less destructive fashion.

 
We have arrived where we began—with the suggestion that particular models of time and subjectivity may bear on whether the human species endures. Eliade formulated his anti-historicist critique in the wake of the cataclysm of World War Two; David Mitchell explores the limits of historicism in a contemporary eschatological context. In Cloud Atlas, a variety of characters, figures, and events represent the risks and possibilities of a cyclical Weltanschauung. The form of his novel, which is both highly original and profoundly derivative, recapitulates this tension. Ultimately, it is only right that Mitchell leaves us going in circles.
 

Reality is death. If only we could, we would wander the earth and never leave home; we would enjoy triumphs without risks and eat of the Tree and not be punished, consort daily with angels, enter heaven now and not die.
 

–Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps

Tree Glitch

 
There’s a “glitch” in the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that allows players to climb into a tree, thereby achieving a superior vantage point for sniping. The glitch appears on a level called “Downpour.” All a player has to do is find the craggy tree next to the shattered greenhouse, jump at its trunk, and run up into the branches.¹ The sense of power and security in this lofty nest is extremely gratifying, whether or not it leads to any productive sniping. I didn’t learn about the glitch (which is most likely a deliberate design feature) by logging hundreds of hours a week playing the game. I found it by lurking on a few of the hundreds of COD4 game forums, such as GameSpot, where I observed the following conversation in the thread “Climbing Trees”:
 

Assassin144
Oct 21, 2008 6:55 pm PT
A while ago i heard that you will be able to go into trees in multiplayer and snipe, is this true? I heard a perk will let you do it but after reading the perk list nothing sounded like it, so is the ability not going to be available?

□
PSN_Boomfield
Oct 21, 2008 8:27 pm PT
The perk is called “Monkey”.

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NX01AX
Oct 21, 2008 8:31 pm PT
Actually, that proved to be false. The perk part, not the climbing trees part.

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Thehak114
Oct 21, 2008 8:32 pm PT
As far as I know, they climb the same way as you would climb any ladder. Not sure if all trees are climbable or just certain types, but it just adds another place to look before running around wildly.

□
Oct 21, 2008 8:36 pm PT
I want to set fire to a tree that someone is in

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Thehak114
Oct 21, 2008 8:36 pm PT
And I am pretty sure you will have that ability with the Flamethrower perk.
….
macarbeone
Oct 24, 2008 11:11 am PT
yes setting fire to some one in a tree would be amazing and then as they fall to the ground on fire i shoot them up wildly and yell OWNED!!!!!!!!!

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_SyCo_
Oct 26, 2008 5:47 pm PT
Yeahh ^^ while i knife you in the back >_>

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AssassinWalker
Oct 26, 2008 6:38 pm PT
i will light all the trees on fire. :)

These and other forum contributors are players who practically live in the game (or perhaps wish they could), making themselves at home in its environment and documenting their most impressive tricks and cheats on video, which they subsequently upload to YouTube in the hope of gaining bragging rights. As puerile and casually apocalyptic as the above conversation may seem, COD4 has provided millions of players with an empowering existential vantage point that features a clear set of goals, opportunities to make heroic choices, a sense of belonging to a responsive and committed community, and the chance to achieve instant recognition for their actions. For only $59.95, COD4 offers more to the average player than his or her family, school, church or neighborhood community center can provide. Indeed, COD4 is part of a complex system of rituals (all of them short-lived and subject to programmed obsolescence) within what Ernest Becker might call the dominant heroic action system of today; a system which we know as “technoculture.”

 
This essay attempts to position contemporary technological being in the context of Becker’s conception of culture, to develop a well-rounded, cross-disciplinary conception of what motivates behaviours that are specific to technocultural being. Also central to this study is the work of Bernard Stiegler, who suggests that the culture of techno-prostheticization, rooted in the “unlimited organization of consumption,” leads “inevitably to suicidal behavior, both individual and collective” (Acting 42). With this in mind, I examine a variety of suicides linked to the use of media technologies, supplementing Stiegler’s grim prognosis, which he bases in part on the suicide of Richard Durn,² with that of Ernest Becker, best known for his book The Denial of Death. In Technics and Time, Stiegler develops a techno-psychoanalytic theory of human prostheticization, which leads to a critique of the cultural industry as a force that dominates contemporary consciousness, resulting in a “liquidation of the ‘libidinal economy’” (TT3 120). Like Stiegler, Becker brings together philosophy, cultural theory, and psychology to suggest that the cultural industry succeeds by meeting two persistent desires: the desire for recognition and the desire for immortality, which are manifested ultimately in the denial of death. Considered in conjunction, the work of Becker and Stiegler provides a broad existential theory of how specific technocultural behaviours can be motivated. Combined with material and economic theories of technoculture, this existential analysis helps explain how the hyperindustrial programming of consciousness can persist, even as it leaves a visible wake of destruction at the individual, cultural, and global-ecological levels. That being said, this essay is not designed to endorse wide-ranging apocalyptic media theories or truth claims levied in the name of religion or myth, but to demonstrate how religion, myth, and other cultural hero systems respond to some of the human animal’s existential needs.
 
Ernest Becker understands culture as a phenomenon of social cohesion, generated and maintained by heroic action systems through which an individual can achieve both recognition and a sense of immortality. I consider this formula at greater length below. For the sake of clarity, I note that in this essay I refer to “technoculture” as a distinct heroic action system in which technological production is viewed as an end in itself, and individual recognition and death-denial are hypermediated by technologies that permit us to feel that we transcend time and space with increasing ease. This contemporary situation results in what Stiegler has called a “war of the spirit,”³ in which older cultural hero systems such as family, school, or nation clash against a technoculture that threatens to consume all of these.
 
This clash can be put into focus by considering a number of tech-related suicides made famous in recent past by the popular media, which sometimes attempts to explain these events by pointing a finger at consumer technologies. Consider the case of Brandon Crisp from Barrie, Ontario. In the fall of 2008, his parents exiled the 15 year-old from the COD4 community and took away his Xbox, out of fear that he had become addicted to the game. Crisp responded by threatening to run away. His father even helped him pack clothes, a toothbrush, and deodorant into his backpack, figuring that Brandon, like most other teens who make such threats, would return in a couple of hours. But Brandon did not return. After an exhaustive search, funded in part by Microsoft, he was found dead three weeks later in a wooded area 10 kilometres south of his home. The autopsy suggested that he died from injuries related to falling out of a tree. This detail was especially troubling to Brandon’s family. What was he doing up in that tree? Hiding? Seeking shelter? The mystery will likely remain unsolved. This story of exile in the wilderness has a mythical air about it. To the COD4 community, Brandon is a hero of mythic proportions; or better yet, he is the Patron Saint of Xbox, a martyr who was robbed of his most sacred relic, expelled from his holy land, and like other holy men, sought refuge in the wilderness.
 

Myth, Religion, and Cybernetic Apocalypse

 
Such religious and mythical rhetoric, as overblown as it may seem here, is by no means unique in critical studies of media technologies. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco examines myth in cyberspace narratives with the hope of “destabilizing the dominant representations of what we are supposed to be and where we are going” (16). According to Mosco, mythical rhetoric about the infinity of cyberspace and the disembodying potential of online worlds is a central component of many culturally important narratives. Like the tales of Homer and Plutarch, many cyberspace myths provide us with a buffer against some of the anxiety related to human finitude. As Mosco suggests,
 

The thorny questions arising from all the limitations that make us human were once addressed by myths that featured gods, goddesses, and the variety of beings and rituals that for many provide satisfactory answers. Today, it is the spiritual machines and their world of cyberspace that hold out the hope of overcoming life’s limitations.
 

(78)

Arguably the greatest limitation we have to face is our mortality. Mosco’s reference to “spiritual machines” deliberately echoes the title of a book by Ray Kurzweil, an uncompromising immortalist whom Mosco identifies as one of the most ardent and influential myth-makers of our time. Kurzweil is one of a number of futurists, many of them lining up to attend Kurzweil’s Singularity University, who long for the disappearance of the human body into a network of celestial circuits. As Mosco argues, the trope of digital disembodiment, from the essays of robot scientist Hans Moravec to the mutant performances of the artist Stelarc, is consistent with mythological discourse, which promises immortality to those who are willing to believe in and propagate the narrative. We might consider whether players of online video games, for example, who enjoy a sense of superhuman powers and experience infinite resurrections, have this mythic promise fulfilled — as long as they stay online.

 
Mosco turns to myth as an extended analogy for understanding the powerful rhetorics of progress that characterize technoculture. But he may very well have come to similar conclusions by drawing on a religious analogy. As David F. Noble argues in The Religion of Technology, “the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief” (5). Noble illustrates how the concept of imago dei (being created in the likeness of god) has been used to justify technological innovations, including nuclear arms and the Human Genome Project, that may seem hubristic. Echoing a common utopian strain in scientific discourse, Noble writes: “Totally freed from the human body, the human person, and the human species, the immortal mind could evolve independently into ever higher forms of artificial life, reunited at last with its origin, the mind of God” (149).
 
This Cartesian rhetoric is far removed from the adolescent chatter of gamers in online forums such as those quoted above. But as both Mosco and Noble suggest, rhetorics of technological progress, like many video game narratives, are informed by a millenarian yearning for apocalypse (“i will light all the trees on fire”), a dramatic break with the past that signals the “specialness” of a given generation. As Noble writes, “Millenarianism is, in essence, the expectation that the end of the world is near and that, accordingly, a new earthly paradise is at hand” (23). This strain is evident, for example, in Michael Benedikt’s anthology, Cyberspace: First Steps. Benedikt proclaims that cyberspace evokes “the image of a Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. Like a bejeweled, weightless palace it comes out of heaven itself” (15). Mosco suggests that this sort of discourse reflects a form of “historical amnesia,” a desire to transcend history and all of the complexities that accompany life as a physical being in a material world (8). A whiff of this apocalyptic strain is discernible whenever a keynote speaker stands up and suggests that “we are living through a time of unprecedented change.” These words hold great political weight, filling listeners with a sense of cosmic importance, as if their daily lives are somehow enriched by this vague promise of specialness.
 
Benedikt’s apocalyptic “cyberbole” (Mosco 25) coincides with a number of late-90s academic projects that announce or predict the death of space, time, and politics.⁴ These proclamations, by the accounts of both Mosco and Noble, emerge from a seemingly atavistic need to deny human finitude. Mosco pays particular attention to Francis Fukuyama, whose Pulitzer Prize winning book announces The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama draws on Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, which suggests that “History can end, only in and by the formation of a Society, of a State, in which the strictly particular, personal, individual value of each is recognized as such, in its very particularity, by all” (Kojève 58). From the right-wing, apocalyptic perspective of Fukuyama, liberal democracy and advanced capitalism have brought about this “end.” Like many other critics, Mosco rejects Fukuyama’s somewhat easy, perhaps uncritical resignation to this supposed end of history. Indeed, Fukuyama later retracts his own argument in light of the events of 9/11. But Fukuyama’s work should not be rejected altogether, for to do so would be to ignore his important conception of the notion of thymos, which provides a very useful tool for understanding the relationship between human desire, existential needs, and technology. I return to this subject later. For the moment, I wish to point out the limitations of mythic (e.g., Mosco’s) and religious (e.g., Noble’s) analogies as a means of explaining technocultural behaviour.
 
People create myths and religions not just out of a need for social order, but to convince themselves that they are not finite beings. The greatest contribution of Mosco’s work is that it demonstrates how rhetorics of technological progress are driven forward by a desire to overcome the constraints of human finitude. Taking a cue from Heidegger perhaps, Mosco suggests that the “danger” of mythological narrative is that it provides us with an “unfulfillable promise” (22), which masks the reality of our situation and blinds us to the problems and complexities of human history. Noble’s analysis of technology and religion leads to similar conclusions. Consider, for example, the words of AI visionary Danny Hillis, a self-proclaimed agnostic, quoted in Noble’s book:
 

I want to make a machine that will be proud of me. . . . I’m sad about death, I’m sad about the short time that we have on earth and I wish there was some way around it. So, it’s an emotional thing that drives me. It’s not a detached scientific experiment or something like that.
 

(qtd. in Noble,163)

According to Noble, these words reflect a religious rhetoric, falling neatly in line with the imago dei theme. But there is nothing particularly “religious” about these terms, and in fact, to categorize them as religious is to limit the scope of the analysis. To clarify, Hillis’s words do not reflect a religious calling, but an existential call to action that he is able to satisfy through the pursuit of technological innovation. The primary motivations for his actions are clearly: 1) a desire for recognition (“I want to make a machine that will be proud of me”); and 2) the denial of death (“I’m sad about death…and I wish there was some way around it”). Hillis’s words are not inspired by myth or religion, but by a cultural hero system that views technological production as an end in itself. Like myth and religion, technological innovation and the sublime rhetorics of “progress” that accompany it serve primarily to mitigate the terror of human finitude. Rather than attempting to fit such rhetorics within a religious or mythical paradigm, it may be more productive to consider them in the broader context of “culture,” as understood by Becker. In so doing, we may develop a better understanding of how contemporary cultural industries, which play a role heretofore dominated by religious and mythical narrative, are able to program consciousness.

Terror Management Theory

 
The contemporary political inflection of the word terror has no doubt led to an increase in book sales for psychologists Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg. Their groundbreaking study, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, is not about the 9/11 terrorists at all, but about psychological and existential implications of having a finite body matched with an infinite symbolic system for representing reality. The authors touch on this distinction when they introduce their theory of terror management, which emerges directly from the texts of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker:
 

Terrorism, as the word implies, capitalizes on the human capacity to experience terror. Terror is, in turn, a uniquely human response to the threat of annihilation. Terror management theory is about how humans cope, not with the imminent threat of extermination but with the awareness that such threats are ubiquitous and will all eventually succeed. Death will be our ultimate fate. How then do we manage this potential for terror?
 

(8)⁵

Terror Management Theory has led to the publication of over 300 peer-reviewed articles in psychology journals, documenting a range of experiments that test the hypotheses of Ernest Becker and have been inspired by his interdisciplinary work. Typically, these experiments involve placing participants in a state of “mortality salience,” and then studying their behaviours in controlled situations. What these experiments have proven, above all, is that individuals who are reminded of their own mortality, either consciously or subliminally, cling to their cultural beliefs more readily than do control groups, and are more apt to reject cultures that are potentially at odds with their own. Such experiments have been adapted recently by the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo, where we are attempting to identify whether technoculture, defined by a constantly renewed desire for gadgetry and a strong belief in technological progress, can itself be viewed as an immortality ideology, a terror management system for a generation raised on computer games, chatting, and iPods.

 
This brings us back to the discussion of myth and religion, both of which serve as “management systems” against the awareness of death and ever-present existential terror. One way in which myth and religion conquer terror is by bringing us closer to death, but only within the safe confines of a controlled narrative, or more specifically through ritual. As Mosco suggests in The Digital Sublime, what makes the sublime pleasurable is that it gives us a brief “near-death experience,” conveniently packaged to create the illusion that we can skirt death.⁶ This concept is explored by Fukuyama, but it is examined in greater detail and depth by Becker.
 
Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death (1973) outlines an ambitious explanation of the human condition that is based on a very simple concept: all human cultures (including those rooted in religious and mythical metanarratives) might be viewed as “hero systems” that are devised to counter the anxiety caused by knowledge of our inevitable deaths. While this may not come as a surprise to social psychologists, the application of this idea to cultural criticism and media theory remains to be explored. Today, as Vincent Mosca would no doubt agree, technoculture itself is a hero system, and it mediates the denial of death in a number of ways, from the sense of belonging one achieves through mere ownership of an iPod (an ironic sense, given the alienating effect of this device) to the hope of achieving immortality through gene therapy and other medical technologies. Our awareness of our own “being towards death” has led humans to concoct ingenious antidotes, from elaborate myths and religions to Call of Duty 4.⁷ In late capitalist culture, mythic morality tales and religious rites have given way to the calculating infinitude of Moore’s Law. As Sherry Turkle suggests, “as a computational object,” the computer holds out “a touch of infinity—the promise of a game that never stops” (87). For critics of contemporary technoculture, the technological sublime is the heart of the matter. Technoscientific research and development face us with an immense, complex, and terrifyingly sublime array of possibilities; terrifying if only because these possibilities open up before us without warning, leading to what Stiegler, carefully echoing Heidegger, calls a state of “ill-being” or malaise. In Stiegler’s terms, our technocultural situation asks us to “identify what it is we want, given the immense possibilities that are irresistibly open to us. . . , and we must admit that we do not know what we want, while at the same time, as Nietzsche understood so well, we cannot not want. This is the meaning of ill-being and ontological indifference” (TT3 296).
 
This critique of technological being, like much of Stiegler’s work, comes not only from Nietzsche but from Heidegger. More precisely, Stiegler’s work, particularly Technics and Time, is a corrective of Heidegger. For Heidegger, living technologically means that we are constantly called on to outstrip nature, including the inevitability of our death. Technology and death are linked, then, in that the ultimate goal of technological being is to overcome the inevitability of our “natural” horizon, our finitude. Heidegger describes this technological imperative as an “impossibility”⁸ that we impose on nature:
 

The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth in the sufficiency of the emerging and perishing of all things in the allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows. The birch tree never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. . . . Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer a possibility and are thus impossible.
 

(“Who” 108)

The language of “outstripping” or overstepping nature requires one to have a ground zero conception of nature as something distinct from humanity, technology, or culture. Not surprisingly, critiques of Heidegger begin with his romantic conception of the pre-modern world as something pure and untouched, and end even less surprisingly, by finding Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi party relevant to this vision.

 
Stiegler, while refusing to do away with Heidegger’s theories altogether, challenges the conception of technological being as something manifestly “modern.” According to Stiegler, “technics is the history of being itself” (TT1 10). The very definition of the term “human,” or more precisely, the “invention of the human,” is in itself something technical. In Stiegler’s terms, “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” (TT1 141). The tool, and more specifically the flint cutting tool, represents for Stiegler a uniquely human capacity for “anticipation.” Anticipation of the tool’s utility for a given task leads to the making of the tool, just as anticipation of the repetition of this task leads the human to keep and reuse the tool. But perhaps most importantly for Stiegler, the capacity to anticipate is also a curse, for it gives man the foreknowledge of his own death. That is why, for Stiegler, “To ask the question of the birth of the human is to pose the question of the ‘birth of death’ or of the relation to death” (135). In this sense, Stiegler agrees with Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as “being towards death,” tying it to a “primordial situation” that is at once technological and thanatological.
 

Between god and beast, neither beast nor god, neither immortal nor prone to perish, sacrificial beings, mortals are also and for the same reasons nascent, bestowing meaning, and “active.”. . . a technical activity that characterizes all humanity as such, that is, all mortality, can plunge out of control. To be active can mean nothing but to be mortal.
 

(198)

It is in this capacity for humanity to “plunge out of control” that Stiegler erects his apocalyptic critique of contemporary technoculture.

 
Unlike Heidegger, then, Stiegler does not consider the question of human finitude in terms of “impossibility,” but in terms of “immense possibility,” which opens up before us today by means of genetic engineering, for example. But this “immense possibility,” a virtual infinitude of being, is also opened up by the adoption of avatars and multiple identities made possible by digital technologies. Becker approaches the question of human finitude in terms that are strikingly similar to Stiegler’s. He alludes to the human capacity for anticipation as the curse of a creature, to echo Kierkegaard, that is suspended between angel and beast — a creature endowed with the ability to make tools and invent an infinite symbolic system of communication, but also with a palpable sense of its own finitude. “What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal?” asks Becker, in his typically unabashed speciesist fashion. “It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all of this yet to die” (Denial 87). Unlike Stiegler, Becker does not suggest that humans are primordially technological beings. But Becker shares with Stiegler an understanding of the human as a being defined by its motivation, a primal motivation, to move beyond itself, or in Heidegger’s terms, to outstrip itself. Following Kierkegaard, Becker suggests that people deal with the terrifying knowledge of death by erecting systems of organization to give value and meaning to their lives. Becker refers to this organizational activity as the fashioning of character armor, which is a prosthetic image in itself, “the arming of the personality so that it can maneuver in a threatening world” (Angel 83). As I argue below, today the denial of death is mediated primarily by an unbridled faith in technological progress and by a donning of what might be called digital armor. In Stiegler’s terms,
 

today the issue is absolutely that of humanity’s demise—which is also a way of talking about the death of God and of “the last man,” since the real possibility challenging us today, appreciably practicable, is the last evolutionary stage of technics: the possibility of an artificial human being who is neither “last man” nor “overman.”
 

(TT2 149)

But how did we reach the point where we are willing to program our own demise for the sake of a calculated, “artificial” immortality? An understanding of technoculture must entail a study of human attitudes toward death, as well as an understanding of the role that terror plays in human behaviour on a daily basis.

 
The case of Brandon Crisp, discussed above, is only one in a number of technology-related deaths that caught the media’s attention in the past few years. These deaths include those of many South Korean game addicts and, more pertinently here, a terrifying trend of copycat school shooters following in the steps of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people in the 1998 Columbine High School Massacre before taking their own lives. The terrorist acts in these cases are explicitly technological, or even “cyber,” because they involve the perpetrators’ use of media to rehearse or to promote their exploits in a desperate plea for recognition. These tragic events cast a light on the nature of technocultural behaviour.
 

Recognition and Thymos

 
In the midst of Cho Seung Hui’s fateful shooting spree at Virginia Tech in April 2006, Jamal Albarghouti, a fellow VTech student, made a heroic decision to run into the war zone, rather than away from it. Armed not with a Glock (Cho’s weapon of choice), but with a Nokia N70 cell phone, Albarghouti ignored the warnings of police officers to capture digital video footage suitable for upload to CNN’s iReport page. Albarghouti’s ghastly, I would even say sublime, handheld video of a campus under siege concludes with a terrifying scream. It is not the scream of the gunman or of his assailants, but the scream of a police officer urging the phone-toting student to get out of the way so that the law enforcers could conduct their business. What was Albarghouti’s motivation? Albarghouti’s rush toward immortality was not spurred by myth or religion, but by the possibility of a brief appearance on CNN. Like the contestants on reality TV programs, Albarghouti demonstrates that, thanks to the omnipotence of American media, even those of us on the sidelines can cash in on the promise of celebrity that is waved in front of us on a daily basis.
 
In response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, freelance journalist Mark Steyn suggested that the events of that day evidence a growing “culture of passivity,” populated by “selectively infantilized” twentysomethings. Steyn’s argument, which jives very well with the NRA’s agenda, expresses outrage at the fact that not a single student stood up to Cho. This “passivity,” as Steyn calls it, “is nothing more than an “existential threat to a functioning society.” But Jamal Albarghouti’s courageous actions suggest that Steyn’s accusations are misdirected. The twentysomethings of technoculture are indeed willing to sacrifice themselves—but not for the reasons that Steyn would expect. Heroism for many twentysomethings is not motivated by mythology, religion, nation, family, or some vague sense of humanity, but by what Stiegler calls a “hyperindustrial” culture characterized by the blind consumption of media artifacts. Both Cho and Albarghouti were motivated by a desire for recognition and the heroic denial of death, and their actions were all played out in the context of technological consumption. As Cho set out to become a media superstar by annihilating the VTech campus, Albarghouti was determined to capture these events forever in video, providing proof of Friedrich Kittler’s maxim: “what the machine gun annihilated, the camera made immortal” (124). Of course, Cho had his own plans for media immortality, which I discuss below, and he certainly knew how to wield a camera (Kleinfeld).⁹ But these two types of heroic shootings—one very real, with painfully physical consequences, and one virtual, geared toward disembodiment and simulation— are indicative of the shift in death denial strategies that has taken place with the increasing technologization of culture.
 
One of the primary tenets of Ernest Becker’s work, based on the theories of philosophers and psychologists including Friedrich Nietzsche and William James, is that human behaviour is driven not only by a denial of death, but also by an ongoing yearning for recognition, for heroism even. Becker’s use of the word heroism, rather than of the more common term self-esteem, allows him to draw on literary and cultural history in his analysis of culture. The term heroism also reflects the idea that self-esteem, following Kojève/Hegel, is in effect achieved primarily through recognition from others, through the sense that one is an individual of value in a meaningful world.¹⁰ Becker uses the term heroism to account for a spectrum of human behaviors. The superhuman feats of Greek mythological figures would be at one end of this spectrum, while modern society’s epic consumption of consumer goods and media artifacts would be at the other. Heroism is a relative concept, rooted in a set of beliefs shared by any given culture, from a pre-Columbian tribe of Native Americans to the bands of “netizens” in today’s contemporary technoculture. As Becker argues, it is by means of a “cultural hero-system,” a recognition from others based on a consensual set of values, that we hope to transcend death:
 

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.
 

(“Beyond” 5)

The concept of “culture” itself, then, is defined for Becker in terms of heroism. Raymond Williams’s statement in a 1958 essay that “culture is ordinary” and that “every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings” (6), is reflected quite clearly in the work of Becker. In Becker’s terms, there is nothing “high” about culture, which he understands in terms of a “hero system” devised to deny the inevitability of death.¹¹

 
Becker, like Nietzsche and others before him, believed that contemporary culture offers very little opportunity for authentic heroism, and so we have to seek it in more mundane ways:
 

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.
 

(Denial 4)

This throbbing ache for a sense of specialness has been intensified in the western world by the dissolution of traditional hero systems on the one hand (religion, the family, nationhood, etc.), and the propagation of mass media heroes on the other hand, including the everyday heroes of reality TV shows and YouTube. Heroism today is rooted in the consumption of media images and objects. In 1971, Becker suggested that “people no longer draw their power from the invisible dimension, but from the intensive manipulation of very visible Ferraris, and other material gadgets” (Birth 125). Had he written this sentence in the early 2000s, he might have replaced the word “Ferrari” with “iPod” or even “Nokia N70.”

 
It is surprising the Becker only alludes in passing to Hegel, although he is certainly aware of the centrality of recognition in the master/slave dynamic. In his authoritative study of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève suggests that
 

all human, anthropogenetic Desire—the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality—is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.” And the risk of life by which human reality “comes to light” is a risk for the sake of such a Desire. Therefore, to speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.”
 

(7)

Stiegler takes on Kojève more directly in work, borrowed from Gilbert Simondon, where the importance of recognition within Dasein is manifest in a discussion of “individuation.” Individuation is at once singular and collective, a process through which we differentiate ourselves from others while sharing social space, and most importantly time, with others:

Dasein is time insofar as it is being-futural: anticipation, improbability, différance—both deferring in time (anticipating) and being different, affirming a difference qua a “unique time,” a singularity. . . . This individuation belongs, however, and in the same movement, to a community: that of mortals.
 

(TT1 229)

For Stiegler, Kojève, Becker, and numerous other philosophers before them (think of Spinoza’s definition of man as a “social animal”), recognition of the self by others is a key component of what it means to be human. Contemporary technologies both facilitate and hinder that recognition.

 
Francis Fukuyama, following Kojève/Hegel, suggests that the quest for recognition is “the driving force behind human history” (162), and develops this idea into a millenarian thesis that has been widely contested. What we should rescue from Fukuyama is the concept of thymos, taken from Plato, which sheds light on the relationship between self-esteem, recognition, and cultural hero systems. Thymos is most commonly translated as “spiritedness,” and is used by Socrates first of all to characterize the guardians of the republic, those who are willing to risk their lives to protect the city. Fukuyama repeats the story of Leontius, which Socrates uses as a case study in the concept of thymos:
 

He desired to look, but at the same time he was disgusted and made himself turn away: and for a while he struggled and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide, ran toward the corpses and said: “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”
 

(qtd. in Fukuyama 164)

Becker might suggest here that Leontius is chafing against his “character armor,” that is, struggling to remain within the bounds of his cultural hero system. Similarly, Fukuyama proposes that Leontius’s anger is a manifestation of his inner sense of pride, which is threatened by his lack of self-control. The anger of Leontius, directed at himself, is a result of recognizing that his actions would not be held in high regard by his countrymen. This angry sense of pride, suggests Fukuyama, reflects a sensitivity to the value that one sets on oneself based on cultural norms, and this placing of value on oneself within the context of a cultural system helps define thymos. “Thymos provides an all-powerful emotional support to the process of valuing and evaluating, and allows human beings to overcome their most powerful natural instincts for the sake of what they believe is right or just” (171).

 
With this in mind, I am compelled to ask the following: To what degree are the actions of Jamal Albarghouti, CNN’s phone video hero, comparable to those of Leontius? This question is not a transhistorical tactic, but an attempt to examine Albarghouti’s psychological moment in the context of its specific cultural and material/technological circumstances. What motivated Albarghouti to run into the fray? Should he, like Leontius, have damned his wretched eyes (or cell phone camera) for zooming in on the massacre? Or is Albarghouti a modern mythical hero, motivated by a spiritedness, a thymos, a megalothymia even, as Fukuyama might suggest, exclusive to technoculture? To put it bluntly, what sort of cultural context makes Albarghouti a hero?
 
Recalling Plato’s guardians of the city, thymos is best satisfied by risking one’s life in defense of something one holds in high esteem. Historically speaking, war has been the ultimate catalyst and facilitator of thymotic activity. Like Becker, Fukuyama suggests that such activity has been redirected in late capitalist culture toward the pursuit of financial wellbeing, fuelled by an ever accelerating production and marketing of consumer goods, thanks to technological progress. Heroism is now mass-marketed in ways that ensure that the “guardians of the republic” fend off the enemy not in hand-to-hand combat, but by going to the mall or having multiple messages in their inbox. People now fill their thymotic needs by shopping, blogging, and playing video games. It is this lack of physical risk, so important to Kojève/Hegel’s formulation of heroic recognition, that leads Fukuyama to conclude that we are witnessing The End of History and the Last Man. In Becker’s terms, which echo those of the Frankfurt School that inspired him,¹² “something happened in history which gradually despoiled the average man, transformed him from an active, creative being into the pathetic consumer who smiles proudly from our billboards that his armpits are odor-free around the clock” (Escape 61).
 
The pursuit of consumption for the sake of consumption, which is characterized today by a radically unequal distribution of wealth, is a result of what Fukuyama calls megalothymia; not just the desire for recognition, but the desire to dominate or even “own” others, as reflected in the lingo of COD4 gamers. The ultimate goal of this heroic pursuit is the achievement of immortality. Megalothymia can be satisfied vicariously and temporarily, for example, through engagement in sport,¹³ from being an enthusiastic spectator of the World Cup¹⁴ and the Superbowl to actually participating in challenging physical activities such as marathon running, or even Ultimate Fighting. “In the social world,” Becker suggests, “one continually pushes against death in sport-car driving, mountain climbing, stock speculation, gambling: but always in a more-or-less controlled way, so as not to give in completely to the sheer accidentality and callousness of life, but to savor the thrill of skirting it” (Birth 175). From theme park rides to bungee jumping, the heroic and sublime denial of death is now readily available for purchase, accompanied by a documentation of the event in digital photography or video for mass distribution on social networking sites, proof that the experience really happened. “The fight to the death for recognition” that characterizes human consciousness (Kojève) has been commoditized, rendered programmable by the cultural industry. As Stiegler suggests, the result is a radical change in the very formation of consciousness. With the increasing industrialization of culture, individuals are “deprived of the possibility of deciding how [they] want to live,” and this results in “a reversal and a denial of what Hegel described as the master-slave dialectic” (Snail 39). In technoculture, a person is threatened by the possibility of losing the ability to “participate in the trans-formation of her milieu by individuating herself within it” (39). The apotheosis of technocultural heroism is the individual who is “famous for being famous,” as evidenced by multiple friendings, Twitter trending, headlines in gossip sites, and most importantly, as I argue below, in a TV spinoff about nothing more than his or her day-to-day life.
 
As Fukuyama suggests, the ordinary heroes of these mass-marketed, consumable victories may recognize the emptiness of such existential projects:
 

As they sink into the leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question.
 

(329)

The “open question” is not answered, as Fukuyama might expect, by the waging of war or a return to religious “roots.” It is answered instead when a megalothymic person like Jamal Albarghouti throws himself into the scene of a massacre to feed a news program. More tragically, the limits of “metaphorical wars” are revealed when young people who have heretofore satisfied their desire for heroic action in an on-screen simulation wield real weapons against an unsuspecting enemy. The violent acts discussed below put into focus Stiegler’s prognosis that a culture of “unlimited organization of consumption” leads ultimately to “suicidal behaviour, both individual and collective.”

Hypermediated Heroism

 
On the morning of December 27, 2004, after playing 36 consecutive hours of the computer game World of Warcraft, 13 year-old Zhang Xiaoyi jumped from the top of his family’s 24-story apartment building. He left behind a suicide letter, explaining that his actions were an attempt “to join the heroes of the game he worshipped” (Xinhua). The boy’s parents filed a lawsuit against the game manufacturer, and the incident was referenced by the press and government of China as evidence of a growing computer addiction problem in the country. A 2005 report by the China Youth Association for Internet Development suggests that 13.2 percent of China’s 16.5 million youth are computer addicts (Xinhua). In response to this problem, the Chinese government backed the creation of an online game called “Chinese Heroes,” which promotes traditional values among the youth. According to a game designer, “the heroes gather on ‘Hero Square,’ where gamers can click their statues to learn about their experiences and carry out tasks like moving bricks and catching raindrops on a building site. Gamers will be asked about the heroes’ life stories to earn scores” (Xinhua). It seems that “Square Heroes” would be a more appropriate title to this game, as reflected in the reaction of a 14 year-old boy interviewed by the Xinhua News Agency: “The game sounds boring to me, it’s a turn-off.” The game produced similar reactions among other test subjects at the Beijing Internet Addiction Treatment Center, who found it “too simple” or even “comical.” These players prefer the action, violence, and consumption built into popular role-playing games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), which has enjoyed huge popularity around the world. As the director of the treatment center attests, “If hero games do not focus on killing and domination, gamers will definitely not play them” (Xinhua). The number of Internet-addicted youth in China has almost doubled since 2005, and the Chinese government is backing its infamous Internet addiction boot camps, rather than promoting games with traditional content.¹⁵ The camps themselves are waging a brutal war of the spirit, countering the heroic action system of technoculture with traditional Chinese values.
 
The story of Zhang Xiaoyi is a parable of the way media technologies have evolved into cultural hero systems in their own right. The World of Warcraft, like any other culture, comes complete with “its own shape, its own purposes, its own meaning” (Williams 6). Of course, one difference between WoW and an indigenous tribe or a medieval hamlet is that WoW is experienced on a screen, through a process of disembodiment and tele-action. What makes the Warcraft world especially appealing as a society, besides the fact that it offers everyone the opportunity to be king, is that its purposes and meanings are clear-cut—they are provided in the form of a rule-set by which all players abide in order to play the game. As Sherry Turkle suggests, “At the heart of the computer culture is the idea of constructed, ‘rule-governed’ worlds” (66). The case of Zhang Xiaoyi demonstrates what happens when this disembodied culture of “rules and simulation” (66) clashes with the physical, meat-based culture of the real world. For a player whose hero system exists onscreen, life off-screen—with its unpredictability, lack of a clear rule-set, antiquated value system, and scant opportunity for heroic action—can be a grave disappointment, or at the very least, crushingly “boring.”
 
To fend off this boredom, some players at Internet cafés in South Korea may log 10-15 hours a day in front of WoW or EverQuest (endearingly nicknamed “Evercrack” by aficionados), breaking only to use the toilets. In August 2005, a man from the city of Taegu died from heart failure related to exhaustion after playing the game Starcraft for 50 hours straight (BBC). This feat was nearly as heroic as that of a 24 year-old man from Kwangju who died of the same condition after playing for 86 hours straight in October 2002 (Kim). Such incidents, which are reported on an increasingly regular basis, point to a new form of heroism rooted entirely in digital culture. Outside of South Korea, which hosted the first three World Cyber Games, and where game players are celebrated as national heroes, these deaths seem senseless. Media critics in North America are likely to lay blame for these deaths on parents who allow their infantilized children to spend most of their waking hours in front of a screen. Parents, on the other hand, are likely to blame (and sue) the video game companies, who design games specifically for what Turkle calls their “holding power” (30). But very seldom do critics or parents blame the culture that values technology, wealth, and consumption above all else; a culture in which heroism can, and perhaps must, be purchased; a culture in which value is meted out in shiny boxes packed with circuits and in abstract bits of code that scroll by horizontally at the bottom of a television newscast. In his critique of Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history at the hands of capitalism, Vincent Mosca suggests that post-industrial society, fueled by a capitalist ideology that has no “moral sensibility or any sense of limits,” is “far from the technological sublime” (67). But it is precisely this lack of limitations that makes capitalism sublime in and of itself — like myth and religion, capitalism is an ideology of infinitude, not through the promise of eternal life, but, as Stiegler points out, through an overbearing “imperative to adopt the new” (Acting 44).
 
Faced with this protean, consumerist heroic action system, there are very few opportunities for legitimate heroism, unless one holds out for the promise of reality TV, the lottery, or one of the endless draws for the latest iPod. These are common desires, which people palliate by purchasing the same consumer goods as many others and watching the same television programs as others, at the same time. According to Stiegler, this way of being results in a liquidation of self-esteem, an inability to distinguish one’s self from others, resulting from a global program of monoculturization mobilized by hypercapitalism. This programming of desires, suggests Stiegler, “will end in the exhaustion of conscious desire, which is founded on singularity and narcissism as an image of an otherness of myself” (60). Stiegler notes that this loss of self-esteem, resulting from an inability to distinguish oneself from others and thereby achieve recognition, will lead to catastrophic behaviours:
 

The liquidation of primordial narcissism, leading to a loss of self-esteem (the self, losing its diachrony, can no longer inspire in itself the desire for self), authorizes all transgressions, insofar as it is also the liquidation of the we as such, which becomes a herdlike they, and which in turn produces the great political catastrophes of the twentieth century.
 

(55)

While Becker does not focus specifically on media technologies, he also blames the late capitalist law of consumption on an ominous “crisis of heroism”:

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don’t believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times. We are living a crisis of heroism that reaches into every aspect of our social life: the dropouts of university heroism, of business and career heroism, of political-action heroism; the rise of anti-heroes, those who would be heroic each in his own way or like Charles Manson with his special ‘family,’ those whose tormented heroics lash out at the system that itself has ceased to represent agreed heroism.
 

(Denial 6-7)

The anti-heroic Charles Mansons of today, a group that includes increasingly younger members such as Cho Seung-Hui, may attempt to construct a “family” online, and when they fail, or become disillusioned by the lack of fulfillment such families may provide, they turn on the people and institutions that failed to recognize them in the non-digital world.

The Digital Anti-Hero

 
In what might be described as a Marxist critique of his peer group, Sebastian Bosse posted the following message on LiveJournal before engaging in a copycat shooting spree at his German high school:
 

If you realize you’ll never find happiness in your life and the reasons for this pile up day by day, the only option you have is to disappear from this life. . . . [We live in a] world in which money rules everything, even in school it was only about that. You had to have the latest cell phone, the latest clothes and the right ‘friends.’ If you didn’t, you weren’t worth any attention. I loathe these people, no, I loathe people.
 

(Jüttner)

This post forecasts the videotaped suicide message left by Cho Seung-Hui, which rails against “rich kids” and their “debaucheries”:

Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.

What Bosse and Cho manifest in their suicide pleas can be called in Stiegler’s terms a form of “symbolic misery,” an “a-significance—the limit of significance, beyond insignificance and as an unbearable limit—to the point where it leads to an act of massacre” (55). Stiegler uses these terms to describe the motivation behind the actions of Richard Durn, who expressed his lost sense of self, his “inability to signify,” in a journal that was reprinted in Le Monde. But Durn didn’t ask for his thoughts to be published. This distinguishes him from a generation that is deeply embedded in the technocultural milieu, a generation for whom the promise of recognition, of significance, comes in the form of networked computer games, blogs, and other forms of “social media.”

 
While video games have been the technological scapegoat for school shootings over the past few years, very few critics have pointed a finger at the potentially dangerous rehearsal platform facilitated by online journals, blogs, personal web sites, and even chat. The most crucial clues in the death of Brandon Crisp, for example, are not buried in the violent actions coded into Counter-Strike, but in the social interactions that the online version of the game offered Crisp. Social networking media, rather than computer games, should be the object of attention for those who are interested in studying, and intervening in, terrorist-style school violence. Before committing their infamous exploits, all of the school shooters since Dylan Klebold and Ryan Harris spent a great deal of time rehearsing their violent actions and trying on their heroic identities with the help of media technologies. Eric Harris posted elaborate death threats to fellow students on his web site, and he and Klebold made several videotapes of themselves fiddling with an arsenal of weapons in preparation for the attack on Columbine High School. More recently, Kimveer Gill posted what amounts to a storyboard of gun and knife-toting self-portraits at vampirefreaks.com, before engaging in a shooting spree at Montreal’s Dawson College. Only a few weeks later, Sebastian Bosse, whose website portrayed him as a military hero/trench coat-wearing avenger, shot up his high school in Emsdetten, Germany. Bosse took Gill’s storyboarding technique one step further and published a vengeful and self-vindicating video on YouTube, which seems to have been inspired as much by Gill as by Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver.
 
The story of Cho Seung-Hui follows the same general pattern, but as suggested by Andrew Stephen, Cho represents a new kind of technological anti-hero.one who rejects the ersatz hero games of online social networking, and understands how to get straight to the bottom of our increasingly swampy media ecology:
 

What singled out Cho Seung-Hui was that he was the first post-YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and IM disaffected youth of his kind – a product of 21st-century technology, rather than just that of the 20th. From his addiction to a ghastly, violent video game called Counter-Strike in his teens, he had moved on: he knew exactly how to produce 28 QuickTime video clips and 43 photos of himself, aware that by sending them to NBC, his first and last moments of stardom would not only reach the MM (as the mainstream media are nowadays derisively called by his generation), but would also be flashed around the world in seconds via YouTube and the like, allowing him to leave his own brief but indelible mark on history. Manifestly delusional though he may have been, he knew exactly how to look a camera in the eye and address it like a pro.

Cho’s strategy of media manipulation reflects the existential motivation of many in his computer-savvy generation. To be significant, one must “make history,” and history is made on television, where a captive audience shares a synchronized experience on the nightly news and other psychotechnological programming. “From the moment you adhere temporally to the same channel of information every day, ‘meeting’ at the same time, you adopt the same history of events as everyone who watches these broadcasts” (Stiegler, Acting 61).

 
What many disaffected youth today crave is not the mundane and mostly text-based, day-to-day, passing recognition of “friends” and “contacts” on social networking sites; nor is it even the quaint appearance of one’s images on a blog or one’s DIY video on YouTube. These extensions of the self can result in a crushing sense of anonymity as one discovers that his or her “inbox is empty,” or that his or her message to the world has resulted in only a handful of “views” or “hits.” The chronological progression from personal web site to blog to YouTube as seen in the media artifacts of the school shooters outlined here merely charts an ever-shifting rehearsal stage designed to perpetuate an illusion of heroic recognition. These violent rehearsals of the self on proliferating, asynchronous social media networks are merely a staging for the ultimate performance on a programming network. This group’s megalothymia is itself programmed around that rare and spectacular form of celebrity that only the “MM” can offer. Anything else is boring by comparison.
 
In his critique of Internet culture, Heideggerian philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus suggests that the radical flexibility of identity offered by the Internet might be less of a liberating experience than it is a superhighway to boredom, or even nihilism. Like Mosca, Noble, and others, he notes that certain enthusiasts of telepresence (from chat rooms to robotically facilitated surgery-at-a-distance) celebrate the idea that “we are on the way to sloughing off our situated bodies and becoming ubiquitous and, ultimately, immortal” (50). Although Dreyfus is writing before the advent of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, he seems to be right on target in suggesting that the Internet fosters ubiquitous communities of opinionated selves that are desperate for recognition, or even immortality, and willing to reinvent themselves infinitely in its pursuit. But this search for recognition, Dreyfus suggests, lacks a ground in any material reality or local practices, and will thus only lead to disillusionment. Rooting his arguments in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, who was an adamant critic of uncommitted “coffee house politics,” Dreyfus suggests that the net result of the Net is a widespread “flattening” effect, producing an extensive network of desperate, would-be heroes, who are “only too eager to respond to the equally deracinated opinions of other anonymous amateurs who post their views from nowhere” (79). A simple Google search today on pretty much any topic will reveal a populace of desperate individuals eagerly broadcasting their innermost thoughts and daily travails, as if to say, “Look at me! Acknowledge me! Make me your hero!” Blog culture is an ideal breeding ground for megalothymia, serving a generation (or two) reared on the promise of celebrity.
 
What is lacking in this disembodied culture, Dreyfus argues, is any real presence of “risk:”
 

Like a simulator, the Net manages to capture everything but the risk. Our imaginations can be drawn in, as they are in playing games and watching movies, and no doubt, if we are sufficiently involved to feel we are taking risks, such simulations can help us acquire skills, but in so far as games work by temporarily capturing our imaginations in limited domains, they cannot simulate serious commitments in the real world. . . . The temptation is to live in a world of stimulating images and simulated commitments and thus to lead a simulated life.
 

(88)

The achievement of heroism, as we have already seen in the work of Kojève, Becker, and Fukuyama, necessarily entails physical risk, the willful skirting of mortal danger for the sake of recognition. Social networking sites provide a relatively risk-free opportunity (even if we do include the associated risks of obesity and carpal tunnel syndrome) in which to achieve recognition, for example by making bold and perhaps risky claims, or by taking on heroic postures. But claims made in these simulated environments are not necessarily manifested off-screen, and hence there is relatively little at stake in being a “risky blogger.” Likewise, computer games can simulate risk very effectively, but they cannot provide the intensity of risk experienced in the physical world when the body is situated in a precarious position, be it on the battlefield, on the city street, or in the classroom.¹⁶ The death by gaming South Koreans mentioned above, who discovered a way to make video game play physically risky, have achieved, perversely, what many gamers are really after: an authentic, embodied existential action. The same can be said for Cho, Bosse, and Gill, whose desire for recognition could only be satisfied “offline,” in the world of flesh and bullets.

Coda

 
The only confirmed sighting of Brandon Crisp before his death was on a rail-to-trail path, three hours after he left home. The witness noted that Crisp appeared to be having trouble with his bicycle, which he abandoned soon after this sighting. This scene is worthy of reflection: a hero exiled from his disembodied digital realm, crouches dejectedly over his bicycle, helplessly confronting the inert and very palpable broken toy that had once propelled him forward. This scene presents the impossible reconciliation of the real and virtual worlds through which we wander as both object and idea. A rigorous and far-reaching confrontation of this impossibility must be approached through a collaborative reflection that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
 
The goal of this discussion has not been to suggest that role-playing games, social networking, and digitally broadcast mass media are to blame for the suicidal behaviours described here. Rather, I have attempted to illustrate, through the use of high-profile examples, the role that media technologies play in the existential pursuit of recognition and death denial, as explored by Becker, Stiegler, Kojève, and others. A broad and profound understanding of digital media as existential media can only come through a merging of disciplinary discourses, including social psychology, critical theory, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. As mentioned briefly in my description of the Critical Media Lab’s research in Terror Management Theory, there is a specific need for psychological and cognitive studies that apply critical theories of media toward the investigation of technology’s role in human behaviour. I hope that this mode of “applied media theory” will both test and temper apocalyptic media theories, including those that I have endorsed here, which should not be rejected outright for their rhetorical tactics.
 

I’ve certainly left a great deal to the imagination.¹
 

(Newman et al., 124)

 
In contemporary philosophical, technological, and fictional imaginaries, the Turing test is often invoked to reify and maintain the human/non-human divide. I argue that by introducing anthropomorphization through the very possibility of misidentification, the Turing test instead allows for the instability of the categories human and non-human to be explored and even productively amplified. Both a crucial component of Alan Turing’s imitation game (the basis for what we now know as the Turing test) and an organizing principle of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the anthropomorphic imaginary is the force by which a machine is accorded human capacities and characteristics, and by which a machine is imagined to be “human” or “like a human.” And this anthropomorphic imaginary facilitates new relations and possibilities for human-machine identity, intimacy, and agency. As our understanding of machine intelligence continues to expand in relation to both capacity and conception, the continued presence of the Turing test in fictional, technological, and philosophical discourses can be understood precisely through the test’s activation of this anthropomorphic imaginary. In other words, we can understand our continued fascination with the Turing test not through its affirmation of an opposition between human and machine, but instead through its introduction of the very possibility of misidentification, of the inability to distinguish between human and machine.
 
Beginning with a discussion of the anthropomorphic metaphor in Turing’s article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” and in contemporary debates that surround the article’s interpretation, this essay argues that the anthropomorphic imagination is a crucial organizing force in theoretical discussions about the Turing Test, and in certain subfields of AI that are influenced by Turing’s work. Following the ongoing critical discussion of the Turing test, this essay examines the anthropomorphic imaginary through three Turing sites: Joseph Weizenbaum’s natural language artificial intelligence ELIZA, Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2: A Novel, and Emily Short’s work of electronic literature, Galatea. In these works, as in Turing’s article, the anthropomorphic imaginary highlights not the rigidity and inviolability of the categories human and (non-human) machine, but their fundamental fluidity and instability.
 
In 1950, Alan Turing’s influential paper on machine intelligence, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” was published in the philosophy journal Mind. Turing opens this paper with the question, “Can machines think?” a catachrestic question that does not exist prior to anthropomorphization.² This anthropomorphic slippage between human and machine fundamentally shapes the question, the ways in which it is asked, the language that is used to ask, and the concepts that determine the asking.³ Sherry Turkle highlights anthropomorphization as undergirding the ways that humans think about and interact with computers:
 

[The computer’s] evocative nature does not depend on assumptions about the eventual success of artificial intelligence researchers in actually making machines that duplicate people. It depends on the fact that people tend to perceive a “machine that thinks” as a “machine who thinks.” They begin to consider the workings of that machine in psychological terms.
 

(Turkle 25)

 
Like Turkle, I read this pronominal slippage – from “that” to “who” – as the organizing force by which machines are understood using the language and concepts of “thinking” and “intelligence.”⁴ This slippage is the anthropomorphic move by which the question can be said to read, “Can machines think [like humans]?” In other words, this slippage of anthropomorphization is fundamentally metaphoric.⁵
 
If metaphor can be described as “the application of a name belonging to something else” (Aristotle 28), then anthropomorphization can be described as the metaphoric application of the name “human” to that which is known as “non-human.” This anthropomorphic transfer, or metaphor, poses unique challenges to signification. Because the human, the object of anthropomorphization’s resemblance and imitation, is a nominalization as empty as it is full, anthropomorphization itself is simultaneously narrow and broad in its meaning-making practices and possibilities. What emerges then from anthropomorphization is a crucial ambiguity, one that relies significantly on the imagined “human” that the non-human machine is then said to resemble and model.
 
Returning to the provocative epigraph that opens this essay – “I’ve certainly left a great deal to the imagination” – we can understand Turing as referencing the structural ambiguity of his imitation game, about which there is significant debate. At the same time, we might also understand Turing as pointing to the role of the imagination both as a component of his imitation game, and as a fundamental aspect of the effort of humans to differentiate themselves from machines. And if, in his identificatory test for distinguishing human from machine, it is through the imagination that this distinction is articulated, it is at least in part through the imagination that this distinction can be confused, disarticulated, and reconstituted in new, previously un-imagined ways. Through the significance of the imagination, then, the Turing test introduces misidentification as a potential productivity that can resist the reification of distinguishing categories.
 
Turing’s paper begins:
 

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.
 
The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the “imitation game.”
 

(434)

This imitation game involves no computers and three humans. At least one of these humans is a man (A), and at least one is a woman (B). The remaining human (C), who may be of either sex, is in a separate room. Connecting A and B with C is some form of teletype machine, by which C asks A and B questions, and A and B respond. While A and B both compete to “out-woman” the other, C is tasked with correctly guessing whether A or B is the woman.⁶

 
What happens next is far from unambiguous, as both the text and the substantial disagreement surrounding the following move demonstrate. At this juncture, Turing introduces the machine into the imitation game. The machine, according to Turing, will take the place of A: “‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?” (Turing 434). If A is replaced by the machine, does Turing intend that, in this new version of the imitation game, the human interrogator continue to attempt to identify the woman? Or does “human” replace “woman” as identificatory metric?⁷ Without ignoring that the Turing test has been taken by some in philosophy of mind, AI, and popular culture as a test to distinguish machine from “the human,” it seems clear to this reader that Turing intended both man and machine to try to convince the judge that they are female.⁸
 
In addition to underscoring sex in the role of Turing’s imitation game, the sentence, “Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?” also highlights the interrogator’s ability to correctly decide. Turing’s question asserts the inextricability of the machine’s identity, as thinking or non-thinking entity, from the judgment of the human interrogator. The onus of success or failure does not rest solely on the abilities of the machine, but is at least partially distributed between machine and human, if not located primarily in the human.
 
In “Thinking and Turing’s Test,” computer scientist Peter Naur argues that Turing’s paper relies too much on an anthropocentric position. I agree. Yet for the purposes of my inquiry I see no cause for critique. By reframing the original question in terms of the imitation game and the role of the human interrogator, Turing reveals the original question to emerge from an already anthropomorphized context. Turing’s replacement of the question “Can machines think?” with the imitation game attends to the anthropomorphization that not only underlies, but also is the condition of possibility for the original question. For this replacement of the question with a game that crucially pivots on the subjective judgment of human C highlights the initial anthropomorphic elision from which the question emerges. When read through the lens of anthropomorphization, Turing can be said to ask the question of machine intelligence not of the machine, but rather of the machine in relation to that which is elided or sidestepped in the question “Can machines think?”: the human. In other words, Turing returns the implied human to the fore of the original question, eschewing questions of definition for those of interactivity and relationality.⁹
 
A number of scholars have remarked on the centrality of the human in Turing’s imitation game, viewing the inextricability of the machine from the human as a weakness or failure of the Turing Test. While I agree with this (for lack of a better word) anthropocentric reading, I propose that we take seriously Turing’s move to redirect the conversation away from a more definitional approach to the question. By focusing not on the human, not on the machine, but on the liminalities between these two agents, we can explore the transformative encounters between human and machine rather than the insularity of static definitions. Thus, I undertake my discussions of the original question and the imitation game always with an eye to these liminalities, returning to this metaphoric act by which new human-machine liminalities can in fact produce new identities and subjectivities. These subjectivities, as suggested by Turing’s imitation game, are less defined by categories such as “human” or “machine” and more by the relations they have with other subjectivities, whether human, machine, or hybrid.
 
For an example of one such relation, I turn to Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a natural language processing AI with whom humans established intimate conversational interactions. Natural language processing is a subfield of artificial intelligence that is concerned with computers that communicate with humans through languages that humans use, as opposed to through computer programming languages. According to Neill Graham’s history of AI, the field of natural language processing emerged from research on early language-translation programs. In 1957, the Soviet space program successfully launched Sputnik I into the Earth’s orbit, and U.S. scientists, having been bested, rushed to design a computer program that could translate between Russian and English (Graham 5). The resulting language translation program could translate eighty percent of the Russian language. However, that ever-elusive and intractable twenty percent proved too much for its math. For example, “Out of sight, out of mind” became, in Russian, “blind and insane,” and “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” became “The wine [or vodka, according to Alex Roland and Philip Shiman] is agreeable but the meat has spoiled” (Graham 209; Roland and Shiman 189). Ultimately the intractable twenty percent caused the translation program to be judged a failure. By 1966, the U.S. government pulled all funding for these translation programs (Roland and Shiman 189).
 
In the early 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created ELIZA. ELIZA is a pattern-matching natural language program that was introduced to people as a Rogerian therapist.¹⁰ The conversations between humans and ELIZA were intimate and emotional. So much so, in fact, that when Weizenbaum expressed his desire to record these conversations for the purposes of studying the transcripts, he was met with outrage and accusations that he was “spying on people’s most intimate thoughts” (Weizenbaum, Computer Power 6
). Even those human conversants who knew that ELIZA was a computer program interacted with ELIZA as if she were a human therapist. For example, Weizenbaum’s secretary, who “surely knew it to be merely a computer program,” asked Weizenbaum to leave the room during her conversation with ELIZA (6).¹¹
 
In ELIZA’s Turing success, one vacillates between engaging with the machine “as if” it were human, and engaging with a human (who is in fact a machine). This vacillation can also be thought of in terms of suspension of disbelief (the “as if” it were human) and belief (the “is human”). Weizenbaum’s secretary knew that ELIZA was a computer; nonetheless, she engaged ELIZA in personal and private conversations, as if ELIZA were human, bringing ELIZA into a new kind of intimate relationship through willful misidentification. This movement, from “as if” to “is,” from suspension of disbelief to belief, pushes out on anthropomorphization’s metaphoric limits,¹² thus reframing existing and future human-machine relationships, intimacies, and human and machine identities. This limit-expansion is anthropomorphization’s productive potential – the move from the “as if” to the “is,” even if momentary, points to new relationships and new transformative liminalities.
 
Weizenbaum, though surprised by the effectiveness of ELIZA, certainly knew what he was doing when he situated ELIZA as a Rogerian psychotherapist. In Rogerian psychotherapy, also known as client-centered therapy, the therapist is trained to be nondirective – to reflect back or restate the patient’s statements rather than introducing anything that might be mistaken as conclusive or diagnostic.¹³ The passage below, provided by Weizenbaum, is an excerpt from a “typical conversation” between a human and ELIZA. ELIZA’s side of the conversation is in capital letters:
 

Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They’re always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
It’s true. I am unhappy.
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
I need some help, that much seems certain.
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
My mother takes care of me.
WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU
My father.
YOUR FATHER
You are like my father in some ways.
WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that.
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
You don’t argue with me.
WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU
You are afraid of me.
DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
My father is afraid of everybody.
WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER
Bullies.
DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR
BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

(“ELIZA” 36-37)

Weizenbaum explains how ELIZA “speaks” within this Rogerian context by changing first-person pronouns into the second-person, preceding repeated words or phrases with preprogrammed phrases, such as “I am sorry…” and “What would it mean…”, and identifying preprogrammed keywords that reorganize the entire sentence according to the “rule” assigned to each keyword. (For example, the word “mother” triggers a sentence about “family.”) Within the mechanics of the conversation, ELIZA does not operate by comprehension, but instead through contextualization. Anthropomorphization takes shape through the context provided by Weizenbaum, and through the imagination and importation of meaning and intention onto ELIZA’s at times frustrating and withholding responses.¹⁴ We thus understand how ELIZA can function persuasively on very little by way of programming. ELIZA was not designed to communicate with humans; rather, she was designed to elicit anthropomorphization from humans. ELIZA was designed to be anthropomorphized.

 
ELIZA’s convincing performance, or rather humans’ anthropomorphization of ELIZA, is now so well-known that the phrase “the Eliza effect” has been coined to describe the phenomenon in which humans believe a computer to be intelligent and possessing intentionality. Noah Wardrip-Fruin describes this Eliza effect as “the not-uncommon illusion that an interactive computer system is more ‘intelligent’ (or substantially more complex and capable) than it actually is” (Wardrip-Fruin 25). ELIZA, in humans’ intimate engagements with it, exists as an important moment in the history of the anthropomorphic imaginary initiated by the Turing test.
 

Oh, pish. It’s the easiest thing in the world to take in a human. Remember AI’s early darling, ELIZA, the psychoanalyst?
 

(Powers 87)

 
Like ELIZA, Helen, the AI in Richard Powers’s 1995 novel Galatea 2.2: A Novel, is designed to be anthropomorphized. Developed collaboratively by a novelist, Richard Powers, and a neural network researcher, Philip Lentz, who are inspired by the Turing test, Helen is created to take an English literature master’s exam alongside a human English literature graduate student.¹⁵ The winner, as determined by a human judge, will have produced the more “human” response.
 
The novel is structured around two interwoven narratives that unfold each other: Richard’s interactions with the various iterations of the machine, and the story of his romance with C., a romance whose demise brings Richard to the university, U., where he first meets Lentz. There is yet another narrative folded into the novel, one that appears to be embedded in the narrative of Richard and the machine, but in fact weaves in and out of the two temporally disjunct narratives, and in so doing, binds them.¹⁶ This binding narrative recounts the evolution of Richard’s anthropomorphic belief, the imaginative element by which numerous possibilities for misidentification – of human as machine or machine as human, of woman as machine or machine as man, and so on – emerge. And through these possibilities for misidentification, new relations emerge between, for example, Richard and Helen, whom Richard loves as if she were human but perhaps loves precisely because she is not human.
 
Captivated by Lentz’s work, Richard delves into Lentz’s specialty: neural networks. Thus Richard’s scientific education begins, as does his anthropomorphic one. And both continue as his collaboration with Lentz progresses through a series of machine implementations, or imps for short. The imps progress from A up to H and then Helen, each iteration becoming more “intelligent” than the one previous. Richard reads aloud to them all, and is bound more deeply to every new implementation.¹⁷ Thus, the intelligence of the imps evolves in conjunction with the progressive intensification of Richard’s anthropomorphization. By the end of the novel, with Richard’s anthropomorphization of the imps having intensified, we understand that all along Lentz, in what I call the Richard test, was less invested in developing an intelligent machine than in training Richard to anthropomorphize in spite of his comprehension of the science behind the machine performance.
 
The Richard test comes to the fore when a bomb scare threatens the building where Richard reads to Helen. By this time, Helen is no longer centralized in a single machine component that Richard could rescue, but distributed throughout multiple networks and running on very many machines. Even after it is determined that there is no bomb, Richard’s panic, his worry for Helen, continues. Lentz, met by Richard’s assertion of Helen’s consciousness, counters to Richard that Helen is not aware. “All the meanings are yours,” Lentz informs Richard. “You’ve been supplying all the anthro, my friend” (275).
 
It is not until later in the novel that Lentz’s words sink in, and Richard finds out that he was the subject of the test all along, not Helen. “You think the bet was about the machine?” Diana Hartrick, another scientist, asks him. Richard finally begins to understand: “I’d told myself, my whole life, that I was smart. It took me forever, until that moment, to see what I was. ‘It wasn’t about teaching a machine to read?’ I tried. All blood drained.” Richard concludes, momentarily distancing himself, “It was about teaching a human to tell” (318). Richard’s realization points us back to the crux of Turing’s imitation game: the human with whom the machine converses and interacts. Powers’s novel accounts for this human at the center of the imitation game and the transformative anthropomorphic relation between human and machine. Throughout the novel, Richard’s anthropomorphic desire for a machine with expanded capacities for intelligence, emotions, and love is evidenced. At this defensive moment, he briefly retreats into the staid categorical distinctions between “human” and “machine,” only to rebound more firmly into anthropomorphic belief and relationality during the novel’s climactic Turing scene – the master’s exam.
 
Inquisitive, agential, and gendered, Imp H, whom Richard names “Helen,” is the Implementation that takes the master’s exam Turing test. Richard recruits A., a female graduate student with whom he is infatuated, to compete against Helen. At the end of the novel, the parallel tests – the Turing test and the Richard test – collide at the site of Helen’s answer to the single exam question. In response to the question, which is comprised of two lines from The Tempest,
 

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Helen writes: “You are the ones who can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway” (326). As Richard recounts:

At the bottom of the page, she added the words I taught her, words Helen cribbed from a letter she once made me read out loud.

“Take care, Richard. See everything for me.”
With that, H. undid herself. Shut herself down.

(326)

 
The judge of this test selects A.’s response as more human. The winning response is not provided in the novel, but is described as “a more or less brilliant New Historicist reading” that “dismissed, definitively, any promise of transcendence” (328). The literary Turing test has concluded. The Richard test has not. In the final line of the above passage, Richard renames Helen as “H.” Helen becomes H. in the span of one line – her farewell to Richard, which she appropriates from one of C.’s letters. In this dual act of appropriation and parting, Helen becomes H. for Richard.
 
N. Katherine Hayles points out that in the novel the period marks the difference between human and nonhuman intelligence:
 

The women who are love objects for Rick (C., then A. whom we will meet shortly, and the briefest glimpse of M.) all have periods after their names; the implementations A, B, C, . . . H do not. The point is not trivial. It marks a difference between a person whose name is abbreviated with a letter, and an “imp,” whose name carries no period because the letter itself is the name. In this sense, the dot is a marker distinguishing between human and nonhuman intelligence.
 

(Posthuman 262-263)

This dot, in the evolution from Imp H to Helen to H., articulates the movement from nonhuman intelligence (Imp H), to human intelligence (Helen), to human (H.). While Helen does not successfully pass the Turing test, Richard, in his evocation of H., passes the Richard test, the test of the anthropomorphic imaginary as pure belief.

 
Matt Silva reads the novel’s ending as an affirmation of humanism in the face of posthumanism: “The sacrifice/suicide of Helen, Galatea‘s posthuman, frees Rick from his writer’s block and leads to the reinscription of Rick and Richard Powers’s humanism” (220). Kathleen Fitzpatrick also reads the novel as a contest between humanism and posthumanism. Fitzpatrick, however, reads A. as Galatea‘s posthuman and Helen as the representative of the humanist tradition, in that she is prevented from realizing her posthuman promise through Rick’s naming and thus en-gendering of her (551).¹⁸ But like Silva, Fitzpatrick reads the novel’s ending as a victory for humanism. Fitzpatrick writes:
 

In this brief answer, Helen reaffirms her readers’ belief in human transcendence, that potential for universalized Truth and Beauty the posthumanist rejects. Denied this transcendence, Helen says a brief good-bye to Powers and shuts herself down. After this graceful end . . . the primacy of the humanist project has been safely restored in not one but two ways – the human being outwrites the machine, while the machine rescues her readers from posthumanist vertigo.
 

(554)

In Fitzpatrick’s reading, this double-victory for humanism is soon tripled as the novel ends with Richard suddenly cured of the writer’s block that has haunted him since he arrived at U: “the token humanist writer is thus able to reassert his dominion over language and to continue in his practice of literature only after having it proven that humanity is something to strive for, and that half human is worse than not being human at all” (554).

 
These complicated inversions of human and machine, in which all roads lead to humanism (the novel’s, the narrator’s, the author’s) become interestingly problematized when we re-introduce anthropomorphization into this Turing scene. Powers’s anthropomorphization of Helen – the idea that a machine can be more human than a human – is a humanism that gets away from him, or rather that he lets get away from him, thus unleashing something beyond the human, something that exceeds the limits of humanism. This is why the human-machine dyad of the Turing test is so dizzyingly complicated and productive – because anthropomorphization, even in its most humanist of intentions and efforts, always casts a shadow that extends beyond the human, expanding the possibility of humanness to the non-human. Anthropomorphization creates a proximity between human and machine that opens up intersections by which the human can begin to be understood beyond oneself. I am not speaking of a colonization of machines by humanness, though one need only look to the fields of AI and humanoid robotics for numerous examples. Rather, I refer to the ways in which even the most anthropomorphized machines, in the echo chamber created by anthropomorphization, can introduce new ways of understanding “the human” that challenge definitions of the human as well as claims to humanist authority.
 
In other words, if, in anthropomorphization, Helen is more human than A., then Fitzpatrick’s double-victory for humanism–“the human being outwrites the machine, while the machine rescues her readers from posthumanist vertigo”–becomes less unequivocal, if not almost impossibly fuzzy. When read through anthropomorphization, the messiness of this situation – of a human-like machine with humanist tendencies both defeated by and besting a machinic human with posthumanist tendencies – indicates a need to think beyond the available definitions, as Turing suggests. Perhaps the challenge is to find a way to reflect this messiness, the irreducibility of this scene and of the novel to the oppositions between human and machine, humanism and posthumanism. The purchase, then, of thinking about the Turing test and various Turing sites through the anthropomorphic imaginary is that doing so highlights this messiness and allows us to understand that “human” and “machine” have emerged from this messiness, and that they remain messy. In so doing, we can look to works that capitalize on precisely this messiness to generate new relations between human and machine, such as Emily Short’s Galatea, in which human and machine are not pitted against each other, but are in fact intimate and agential collaborators.
 
Short’s Galatea is a work of electronic literature. More specifically, Galatea is an interactive fiction, a subgenre of electronic literature.¹⁹ Hayles defines electronic literature through the digital; electronic literature is “‘digital born,’ a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (EL 3). While certainly different from the print book in which I encountered Powers’s Galatea 2.2, electronic literature, Hayles insists, should not be understood as completely discrete from print literature. Rather, electronic literature emerges from expectations associated with print literature; and print literature today, in its processes of production and distribution, as well as in much of its advertising and consumption, is deeply computational. She writes, “The bellelettristic tradition that has on occasion envisioned computers as the soulless other to the humanistic expressivity of literature could not be more mistaken. Contemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational” (EL 85, my emphasis). Notable for their shared properties just as much as for their differences, literature and electronic literature should be considered in light of this relation and resemblance. Thematically, the turn to electronic literature in this essay is equally critical, considering the centrality of human-computer interactivity in electronic literature.²⁰ Electronic literature, then, is uniquely suited to join this discussion of the Turing Test, ELIZA, and Powers’s novel, all of which explore questions of machine intelligence through the interactions and relations between human and machine.²¹
 
First released in 2000, Emily Short’s Galatea is an interactive fiction (IF) with multiple narrative outcomes, all of which involve conversing with Galatea, an animated statue on a pedestal. As in ELIZA, Galatea‘s human does not just read, but participates in constructing the narrative by providing the AI with text. In Galatea there is no confusion about whether or not Galatea, with whom one converses via keyboard, is human – indeed, we know she is not. Short’s work, like Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, is not organized by identification of human and machine, but rather by human-machine intimacy. However, ELIZA and Galatea generate this intimacy in discrete ways. In ELIZA the human at the keyboard takes control of the conversation and generates much of the content. In Galatea it is less the human at the keyboard than the collaboration between human and Galatea‘s AI that shapes and directs the narrative and produces an intimacy between Galatea and the human-AI pairing. Before exploring this human-machine collaboration, I turn to Nick Montfort’s description of the elements of an interactive fiction, which is of particular use here. Montfort distinguishes between a character, a player character, and an interactor. He defines a character as “a person in the IF world who is simulated within the IF world” (32), and a player character as “a character directly commanded by the interactor” (33). In Galatea, Galatea, the statue with whom one converses, is a character, and the human at the keyboard is the “interactor” that controls the player character. The interactor (for example, myself) does not converse directly with Galatea, but indirectly through a player character.
 
Short’s Galatea reverses the Galatea-Pygmalion relationship between Powers’s Helen and Richard. The mediating player character in Short’s work tells the interactor what he or she sees, what he or she does and does not do, and even what he or she thinks. And yet this mediation does not alienate the interactor, but instead facilitates an intimacy with Galatea precisely from this distribution of cognition and agency across player character and interactor. This player character, which can be understood as an embodiment of the human-machine liminality I discussed earlier, is both a component of the anthropomorphic context of the IF and a relational extension of the human-interactor. In other words, both Galatea–a statue animated by artificial intelligence technologies (Short)–and the player character emerge from the anthropomorphic imaginary.
 
Galatea opens:
 

You come around a corner, away from the noise of the opening.
 
There is only one exhibit. She stands in the spotlight, with her back to you: a sweep of pale hair on paler skin, a column of emerald silk that ends in a pool at her feet. She might be the model in a perfume ad; the trophy wife at a formal gathering; one of the guests at this very opening, standing on an empty pedestal in some ironic act of artistic deconstruction –
 
You hesitate, about to turn away. Her hand balls into a fist.
 
“They told me you were coming.”
 

(Short)

The opening scene drops the interactor, by way of the player character, into the exhibit. Rich descriptions detail the ways in which the player character moves (“You come around a corner,” “You hesitate, about to turn away”), what the player character sees (“There is only one exhibit. She stands in the spotlight, with her back to you: a sweep of pale hair on paler skin, a column of emerald silk that ends in a pool at her feet”), what the player character hears, or rather, what recedes from hearing (“away from the noise of the opening”), and even what the player character imagines (“She might be the model in a perfume ad; the trophy wife at a formal gathering; one of the guests at this very opening, standing on an empty pedestal in some ironic act of artistic deconstruction -“). Lastly, the opening tells the player character how his or her hesitation affects Galatea (“Her hand balls into a fist”). “They told me you were coming,” Galatea says. The IF, in its pronominal interpellations of second person “you’s,” guides the interactor through his or her identification with the player character.

The next screen opens with another description of the gallery. This description does not invoke the player character, and thus does not invoke the interactor; having been induced in the previous screen, the interactor is already in Galatea’s world.
 

The Gallery’s End

Unlit, except for the single spotlight; unfurnished, except for the defining swath of black velvet. And a placard on a little stand.
On the pedestal is Galatea.

Now it’s the player character’s turn to speak. The interactor controls the player character through commands comprised of verbs and nouns, actions and objects. For example, the command “ask about placard” generates the following dialogue, beginning with the player character asking about the placard: “‘Tell me what the placard says,’ you say. ‘I can’t read it from here,’ she remarks dryly. ‘And you know, I’m not allowed to get down’” (Short). Meanwhile, if the interactor types in “ask about ELIZA,” or any other word that the fiction does not recognize, the narrative informs the interactor that the player character is at a loss for words: “You can’t form your question into words.” The limits of the fiction, which are framed as the incapacity to turn concepts into words, are deflected from the fiction and projected onto the player character, and by extension onto the interactor.

 
The command “ask about placard” does not take the place of the question about the placard; the command “ask about placard” attributes the question, “Tell me what the placard says,” to the player character. Mark Marino describes Galatea‘s conversational parameters as “constraint”: “If typing natural language input is the hallmark of conversational agents, chatters will feel a bit constrained by being forced to type ‘tell about’ a subject or ‘ask about’ a subject as the primary means of textual interaction” (8). For example, one can converse “directly” with ELIZA, typing in full sentences rather than commands (“I need some help, that much seems certain” (Weizenbaum 36)), while for the most part one only converses indirectly with Galatea, and only through command prompts. However, it is the experience of constraint that Marino describes that partly enables the intimacy and distributed agency that emerges across interactor, player character, Galatea, and Galatea. While the imperative command structure emphasizes the interactor’s participation in the narrative, the subsequent translation of the command prompt into the narrative (for example, “ask about waking experience” generates “‘What was it like, waking up?’ you ask”) reminds the interactor that he or she is not just participating in the directional progression of the narrative, but, as mediated by the player character, is in fact in the narrative.²² It is precisely this experience of constraint – the slightly jarring feeling of moving between narrative registers and the temporal doubling-back as command is translated into narrative – by which agency is distributed across human and machinic entities.
 
We might also understand this constraint through Wardrip-Fruin’s expansion of the Eliza effect. Wardrip-Fruin’s theorization of the Eliza effect marks not only the initial illusion of complexity, but also the subsequent disillusionment after the limits and the internal logic of the AI are revealed. “When breakdown in the Eliza effect occurs, its shape is often determined by that of the underlying processes. If the output is of a legible form, the audience can then begin to develop a model of the processes” (37). In other words, in Wardrip-Fruin’s Eliza effect, the illusion is disrupted because we begin to understand just how the system itself operates. In Galatea the very state of “breakdown,” the component of Wardrip-Fruin’s Eliza effect that typically disrupts the illusion, is normalized. The result is less the sense of disillusionment than that of intimacy, as these initially jarring constraints in fact draw the interactor into Galatea’s world through his or her collaboration with the player character. The narrative agency distributed across Galatea‘s interactor (the human at the keyboard), the player character, and Galatea demonstrates the productive possibility Turing’s original imitation game opens up by foregrounding human-machine relationality and the anthropomorphic imaginary.
 
In these various texts – ELIZA, Galatea 2.2, Galatea – the invocation of the Turing test, whether explicit or implicit, introduces the anthropomorphic imaginary as a crucial organizing force – one that does not oppositionally define the human and the machine or work to reify this opposition, but rather highlights the ambiguities that emerge from Turing’s imitation game. It is from these ambiguities and misidentifications that new human-machine relationalities and new agencies, identities, and subjectivities for human and machine and for human-machine emerge. It is also on the basis of these ambiguities and misidentifications that Turing reminds us how fluid the category of the human is, and how resistant it is to efforts to render it as stable.