Category: Volume 26 – Number 1 – September 2015

Ronald Bogue is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Deleuze and Guattari (1989), Deleuze on Literature (2003), Deleuze on Cinema (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (2003), Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (2004), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (2007), and Deleuzian Fabulation: The Scars of History (2010).

Jason Frydman is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where he has also served as Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Caribbean Studies. He is the author of Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature, and has published extensively on the literatures of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the African diaspora, on subjects ranging from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Muslim slave narratives to gender and migration in Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros. He is currently at work on a project about the legal fictions of Caribbeans on trial.

James Hodge is Assistant Professor of digital media studies at Northwestern University in the department of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. He studies digital media aesthetics. He has published essays in Critical Inquiry, Film Criticism, and elsewhere. His book project, Animate Opacity: Digital Media and the Aesthetics of History, argues for the significance of animation for the experience of historical temporality.

James Liner is Lecturer in Culture, Arts, and Communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. His research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of collectivity in contemporary U.S. literature, and his current book project examines the utopian possibilities of postmodernism in the novels of Thomas Pynchon.

Julia C. Obert is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of English at the University of Wyoming. Her first book, Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, was published by Syracuse UP in 2015. Her work has also appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Textual Practice, New Hibernia Review, Irish Studies Review, Éire-Ireland, Postcolonial Text, and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, and is forthcoming in Irish University Review and Emotion, Space and Society.

Christopher Schmidt is an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. He is the author of The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and two collections of poetry, Thermae (Eoagh, 2011) and The Next in Line (Slope, 2008). His essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in SubStance, Arizona Quarterly, Tin House, Bookforum, Boston Review, and other venues.

Stuart James Taylor is a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow. His dissertation examines the relationship between mathematics and contemporary American literature.

Stuart James Taylor (bio)
Glasgow University

A Review of Bolger, Robert K. & Scott Korb, eds. Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Cahn, Steven M. & Maureen Eckert, eds. Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace. New York: Columbia UP, 2015.

In 1985, long before he had been hailed as “the voice of an era” for a novel about the way consumer choice precludes free will (Kirsch), and before he impressed upon fresh graduates of Kenyon College the importance of choosing how to think, David Foster Wallace defined “what exactly fatalism is” (Wallace, “Fatalism” 143). In his undergraduate thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality,” Wallace describes fatalism as “a metaphysical thesis characterizing the world as working in a certain sort of way, in which everything that did happen had to happen, everything that does and will happen must happen, and in which persons as agents can do nothing but go with the flow over which they enjoy absolutely no influence” (143). The recent publication of this thesis has prompted two essay collections that re-engage Wallace’s works by emphasizing his status as a philosopher, a facet James Ryerson considers “an overlooked aspect of his intellectual life … that would play a lasting role in his work and thought, including his ideas about the purpose and possibilities of fiction” (“Introduction” 2).

Published eight months apart, Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy and Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace signal a drive in Wallace Studies to resituate the writer’s cultural value, acclaiming him as both a “rare philosophical talent” and exemplary storyteller (Ryerson, “Introduction” 3). In comparing these singular contributions to the expanding field of Wallace Studies we can assess the fecundity of such an approach and its impact on Wallace scholarship.

For Scott Korb, the essays in Gesturing Toward Reality aspire “to present Wallace’s work as one of the many places where philosophical ideas reside,” and the collection as a whole aims to “reveal Wallace’s work as a series of reminders of how life is and how it could be” (3). Readers hoping to engage in a rigorous appraisal of the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological influences and effects of Wallace’s “big, brainy novels” and essays may object to being misled: the “Philosophy” of the collection’s subtitle is in the noun’s colloquial sense, that of a particular (purportedly Wallace’s) Weltanschauung (Ryerson, “Consider”). Thus, reiterated and taken for granted throughout the collection are the virtues of choosing adequate “temples of worship” and the consequences of submitting to less-nourishing “addictions” (Ryerson, “Consider”). It is perhaps the provocative ambiguity of “philosophy” that results in Gesturing Toward Reality’s 300-odd pages containing a less satisfactory philosophical appraisal than Ryerson’s excellent introduction to Wallace’s thesis in Fate, Time, and Language.

Much of the success of Ryerson’s essay can be attributed to his respect for both Wallace’s precocious talent as an analytic philosopher and his family background (as the son of philosopher James Donald Wallace). By contrast, the aim of Gesturing Toward Reality to “reveal” Wallace’s philosophical significance as merely “a series of reminders” or notions of “how life is and how it could be” is a rather reductive treatment of a writer who made a significant contribution to the debate surrounding Taylor’s “Fatalism.” Consequently, Bolger and Korb’s examination of the “banal platitudes” of Wallace’s graduate commencement speech at Kenyon College fails to illuminate fully his philosophical import (Wallace, This is Water 9). By relying to a greater or lesser extent on the speech, better known as This Is Water and arguably the least fertile piece in Wallace’s oeuvre and the least representative of his literary philosophy, the essays of Gesturing Toward Reality often depict the writer superficially and even sentimentally: an act of neglect that has become so prevalent in Wallace Studies as to warrant Wallace the caricature nomination “Saint Dave.”¹

“Saint Dave” appears to be the patron of essays by Leland de la Durantaye, Robert K. Bolger, and Maria Bustillos. In “David Foster Wallace’s Free Will,” Durantaye hopes to show that the “most important idea” in Wallace’s works “is the question of how to be truly free” (21), which he does by considering “Wallace’s remark [in This Is Water] about being totally hosed … a signature stylistic trait and at the same time an absolutely serious, an almost technical, term in his philosophy” (21, 27). Durantaye’s argument is unconvincing, not least for the reductive treatment of ethics and logic resulting from his transplantation of the philosophically sophisticated term “free will” to a “stylistic” gadget in Wallace’s personal world-view tool belt (27). These distinct philosophical disciplines are thus amalgamated in what Durantaye calls a “philosophical spectrum,” in which the loosely ethical This Is Water is regarded as equivalent to Wallace’s work in modal logic (27). In almost the same breath Durantaye compares Wallace’s masterly honors thesis, which logically dismantles Richard Taylor’s notoriously tenacious “Fatalism,” with the Kenyon address which Durantaye calls “a masterpiece” (22-23). Similar misrepresentation also clouds Bolger’s “The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace,” in which Bolger gives “practical reasons for taking Wallace’s theology seriously” (33). While acknowledging that Dreyfus and Kelly misrepresent Wallace as “a sort of pop-culture self-help simpleton” (49), Bolger nevertheless reduces Wallace’s concerns to the “historic mystical tradition” excluding those nurtured by his literary and philosophical training (49). Bolger’s reliance on Wallace’s This Is Water, and his subsequent need to incorporate mystical theology as philosophy, impair his argument.

Maria Bustillos’s “Philosophy, Self-Help, and the Death of David Foster Wallace” is an interesting analysis of Wallace and philosophy. Her target is “the deficiency of modern academic disciplines in encouraging students, and particularly young people, to build a whole, healthy psyche” (124). This failing arises, for Bustillos, partly from “essentially esoteric” philosophical texts which “offer little in the way of immediate assistance to the suicidal drug addict or the victim of an anxiety disorder” (127). Exploring an alternative syllabus, Bustillos successfully presents “self-help literature” as a modern incarnation of the Christian lexical tradition from John Wycliffe through Samuel Smiles to modern popular self-help books that, though lacking the fine distinctions of philosophical literature, have practical value for their readers. However, Bustillos errs when she writes that “Wallace came to approach self-help literature with the same clear-eyed, absolutely undeceived seriousness with which he read everything else” and that “[b]ecause of his history with AA, Wallace had been conditioned to accept certain premises of self-help literature that ordinary readers might balk at,” without considering the apparent contradiction (132, emphasis added). While the role of Christianity in Wallace’s life merits further consideration, it seems fallacious to explicitly disregard the “essentially esoteric” distinctions of philosophy in the work of a writer who was partly raised on such esotericism, and whose philosophical thesis is a contribution to “formal philosophical works” (127). A consideration of Wallace’s Christianity would profit far more from an appropriate contextualization that balanced his belief in the values of literary theory and logic. It certainly appears that the collection’s parameters—David Foster Wallace and “philosophy”—force a false dichotomy on the mutually inclusive merits of philosophical fine-distinctions and self-help literature.

Notably stronger essays are offered by Thomas Tracey and Alexis Burgess. “The Formative Years: David Foster Wallace’s Philosophical Influences and The Broom of the System” benefits from Tracey’s close engagement with both the philosophical canon and Wallace’s more substantial works. This allows Tracey to claim that “Wallace’s extensive philosophical training equipped him with the tools to negotiate the concerns of Pragmatist ethics alongside Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language within the framework of [his debut] novel,” The Broom of the System, and that his “philosopher-father was a supplementary influence on the author’s personal and intellectual development beyond the halls of academe” (157). Tracey convincingly argues that James Wallace’s philosophical writings “evince how [his] own philosophy has drawn deeply on American Pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey, and serve as one avenue into looking at what intellectual influence the father’s writings may have exerted on his son” (158). Opening this collection, with “How We Ought To Do Things With Words,” Burgess also provides a convincing close reading. He challenges the authority of Wallace’s overpraised infallibility by attempting to prove that in “Authority and American Usage” Wallace “got the right answer for (largely) the wrong reasons” (6). His account of Wallace’s “pretty big rhetorical slip” of demolishing descriptivism instead of promoting prescriptivism persuades by engaging with the technical intricacies of a piece denser than This Is Water (7).

Allard den Dulk’s is arguably the only essay in the collection that successfully redeems the project of David Foster Wallace and Philosophy. In “Good Faith and Sincerity: Sartrean Virtues of Self-Becoming in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” den Dulk suggests that main characters Mario, Gately, and Hal all “embody…a contemporary version of the ‘virtue’ of sincerity” (199-200). Using Sartre as his “heuristic perspective,” den Dulk proceeds through an account of the existentialism of Kierkegaard, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka to argue that Infinite Jest promotes sincerity as “the ‘self-ideal’ or virtue that follows from this view of the self” in which one must “integrate his individual limitations and possibilities into a unified existence that he regards as his responsibility” (201-202). The success of den Dulk’s argument depends on a convincing reconstruction (indebted to the words of Ronal Santoni and Joseph Catalano) of Sartre’s notion of self-becoming as a framework for reading Wallace’s novel. Crucially, den Dulk’s approach to Infinite Jest allows a reading of the novel that reveals “Hal’s development to the attitude of sincerity is connected to a change in language-games, in communities of language and meaning” (219). Hal’s situation here contrasts to his context where “most people around him are not familiar with the language game of sincerity, and therefore do not understand him, and get the impression that he is uttering primitive drivel” (219). Unfortunately den Dulk’s philosophical approach to reading Wallace is the exemplary exception in Gesturing Toward Reality.

Freedom of the Self is a hundred pages slimmer than Bolger and Korb’s Gesturing, and consequently has a tighter critical focus. The collection is edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, the same editorial duo that brought us Fate, Time, and Language, the first contextualized publication of Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis. An answer to the plea in the preface of Fate, Time, and Language for Wallace’s philosophical arguments to “be taken seriously and subjected to careful scrutiny,” Freedom and the Self is a sincere “tribute to a philosopher of consequence” (Cahn and Eckert viii). The majority of the collection consists of a rigorous appraisal of Wallace’s “Semantics of Physical Modality” (the earliest fraction of his considerable creative output), which risks excluding casual readers of Wallace. However, while Gesturing Toward Reality treads water by frequent returns to his lightweight Kenyon address, Freedom and the Self illustrates the benefits of a serious engagement with Wallace’s thesis, allowing the development of his fundamental creative inspiration—“what it is to be a fucking human being” (Wallace qtd. in McCaffery)—to be seen from its genesis.

The collection’s first four essays elucidate significant attributes of Wallace’s response to Taylor’s “Fatalism.” William Hasker’s opening piece, “David Foster Wallace and the Fallacies of ‘Fatalism’,” illustrates the “splendid achievement” of Wallace’s “System J” (the logico-semantic framework created to articulate the flaw in Taylor’s argument for fatalism). First, conceding that this is not an original contribution to the debate about Taylor’s argument (merely a more effective update of Saunders’s initial criticism), Hasker believes that Wallace “has failed to grant Taylor’s premise P5 in the sense in which Taylor understood it” (22). In Hasker’s example of an agent knocking on a flimsy door, Taylor’s fifth premise states that we ordinarily, naturally, and universally accept that the shaking door is not a consequence of the door having been knocked, but a condition of the agent’s knocking it (16). Wallace is shown to reject this, refusing to grant Taylor’s rhetorical tenacity in upholding our understanding of “consequences of” as “conditions for” (Wallace, “Fatalism” 169). This is a flaw in Wallace’s argument because, Hasker argues, Wallace’s “admirably explicit” (18) outline of his philosophical project was “to grant [Taylor] everything he seems to want in the argument” (Wallace, “Fatalism” 151). The source of this flaw can be attributed, according to Hasker, to an uncharacteristic misreading by Wallace of Taylor’s Metaphysics, “in which the view [of the distinction between the act and the ability to act] is attributed by Taylor to his opponents” (27). Yet, Hasker notes with admiration, this error does little to diminish Wallace’s achievement of a meaningful contribution to philosophical scholarship.

In response to Hasker, Gila Sher defends Wallace’s reading of the subtle distinctions between logical and semantic arguments, the former commonly (and erroneously) attributed to Taylor’s “Fatalism.” Wallace was aware, Sher is convinced, that the latter designation better describes Taylor’s method. This is crucial, because only by considering Taylor’s modal operators (as he himself does) as nonlogical is Wallace able to advance the description of them as physical by “distinguish[ing] between two types of physical modalities” (41). Sher’s conclusion (that attention to detail and innovative technical distinctions at the semantic level allow Wallace to reclaim free choice from the clutches of fatalism) results from a comprehensive appreciation of Wallace’s semantic sensitivity that discussions of choice in This Is Water could never elicit.

Like Sher, M. Oreste Fiocco is appreciative of Wallace’s semantic distinctions. Where Sher focuses on the treatment of personal agency in Taylor and Wallace, Fiocco is concerned with what kind of philosophical structure permits such agency. For Fiocco, this is contingency, “the presence of nonactualized possibility in the world” (57). In “Fatalism and the Metaphysics of Contingency,” Fiocco considers Wallace’s critique of Taylor’s argument “significant” because it foregrounds “synchronic possibility, the idea that incompatible states of affairs are possible at a single moment” (58). After defining modal and temporal “metaphysics of contingency” Fiocco illustrates that, while Wallace foregrounds this notion of synchronic possibility, “Wallace and Taylor are actually making incompatible assumptions about the nature of contingency; each is presupposing a totally different view of the modal features of the world in time” (55, 77). Fiocco believes that Taylor in fact rejects synchronic possibility (i.e. subscribes to a temporal metaphysics) while Wallace assumes that Taylor accepts it (i.e. subscribes to a modal metaphysics). Of greater interest to Wallace scholars, however, is Fiocco’s claim that Wallace’s understanding of possibility rests on the synchronic. Although Wallace’s focus, in his thesis timeline, is on “the relations among worlds at moments,” Fiocco writes, “an essential feature of these moments is that there are many possibilities at any given one” (81).

Following examinations restricted to the dissertation, Maureen Eckert considers Wallace’s philosophical work alongside its narrative consequences. In “Fatalism, Time Travel, and System J,” Eckert considers Wallace’s “System J…useful for exploring [David] Lewis’s account [in “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”] of the shift of context driving the Grandfather Paradox while pushing further into matters of modality” (100). Such consideration leads Eckert to explore resonances of Wallace’s philosophy in his fiction. Eckert’s contribution is also useful as an explanation of “System J,” supplementary to Hasker’s earlier illustration, which allows us to appreciate “the most radical feature of System J”: that the model “allows for no alternative presents in the context of an actual given present” (103). This feature (not bug) of System J permits, in Eckert’s own Lewisian example, “no way [for] a time traveller [to] actually and physically return to a past moment in personal time” whilst defending the conceivability of this: “to conceive of this possibility, for Wallace, cannot be confused with what is physically and actually possible” (105). In this territory, with imaginative freedom distinguished from contingent reality, Ecker concludes with thoughts on the development of Wallace from philosopher to author. She suggests that Wallace’s formal system is, like his fiction, an elegant means to highlight where exactly true freedom of choice lies and to demystify rhetorical sleights such as Taylor’s that would defend a fatalistic universe or one where the past could be violated as depicted in David Lewis’s Grandfather Paradox. With these remarks, Eckert at last opens the discussion of the legacy of Wallace’s early work on Taylor’s “Fatalism” to the field of narrative semantics that characterizes his later career.

The observed shift from philosophy to creative writing provides an effective segue to Daniel R. Kelly’s essay. In “David Foster Wallace as American Hedgehog,” Kelly observes that “much of what Wallace talks about under the monikers of free will and choice will not interest certain analytic philosophers who understand and use the term ‘free will’ in particular, technical ways” due to the fact that Wallace’s focus shifts from logical Free Will to an ethical, existential, and everyday conception of the term (128). Kelly takes this latter conception to be the “one big thing” Wallace “knows” (109). This may provoke readers of Wallace’s complex novels, which have been noted for their encyclopaedic quality (Burn 28). Nevertheless, Kelly argues that free will is a subject that is informed, for Wallace, by the manifold difficulties of American culture. Contextualizing Wallace’s understanding of free will by referring to his essays on Dostoevsky, Kafka, television and contemporary American fiction, in addition to Infinite Jest, Kelly persuasively distills This Is Water into two words (“wake up”), a keyword-keynote that earmarks a career-long analysis of free will in contemporary America (124). Kelly encourages further study into what he considers a corollary of free will as Wallace’s “big subject”: the “secondary shadow” of fraudulence and the “fraudulence paradox” as explicated in his later work, specifically “Good Old Neon” (Wallace 179).

An attempted synthesis of both free will as Wallace’s big subject and its obverse anxiety about fraudulence is offered in the collection’s final essay. In “David Foster Wallace on The Good Life,” Nathan Ballantyne and Justin Tosi aim to “contrast what Wallace says with some popular positions from moral philosophy and contemporary culture” on what philosophers call the good life (133). These popular positions are named “ironism,” “hedonism,” and “narrative theories,” and they serve as functional yet heavily compressed distillations of three nuanced philosophical stances on what makes life morally worthy. While noting that Wallace didn’t explicitly provide his own account of the good life in philosophy, Ballantyne and Tosi attempt to “triangulate his own view” of the good life from his written responses to irony, hedonism, and narrative theories (133). Perhaps the essay’s biggest problem, however, is its attempt to identify and define Wallace’s stance on narrative theories of life. While they convincingly illustrate how Wallace rejects the weak thesis of story-based ontologies, Ballantyne and Tosi are less successful in explaining his opinion of the strong thesis, “a subtle and complicated understanding of the self” with which they are “not ultimately sure how Wallace would engage” (157). This is a curious conclusion, because Wallace’s early works—namely The Broom of the System and “The Empty Plenum,” which stem from a deep interest in the theories of Wittgenstein and Derrida—show his artistic need for the strong thesis to be, if not all-encompassing, at least crucial to everyday conceptions of the self. What makes the essayists’ reluctance more striking is their subsequent comment that Wallace’s “humane recommendation about how to approach reflection on the good life” is “a sort of Wittgensteinian methodology”—the ambiguity of such a description being tantamount to an obfuscation of Wallace’s definitive consideration of Korsgaardian narrative theories (160). Nevertheless, this final essay does provide a productive engagement with Kelly’s proposal that fraudulence is antithetical to Wallace’s free will: Ballantyne and Tosi’s identification of fraudulence in theories of the good life indicates a fertile site for future scholarship.

A tightly structured, well-informed and at times provocative collection, Freedom and the Self benefits from deep philosophical penetration. In particular, Kelly’s amendment of This Is Water’s status is a timely corrective to the superficial paraphrasing of Wallace’s Kenyon address (that mantra of Gesturing Toward Reality). With its nuanced consideration of the full breadth and depth of his comments on writing, reading, and culture – from “Semantics of Physical Modality” to his most accomplished fiction – Freedom and the Self brings us closer to the core of David Foster Wallace.

Works Cited

• Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2003. Print.
• Cahn, Steven M. and Maureen Eckert, eds. Fate, Time, And Language: An Essay on Free Will. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print.
• Franzen, Jonathan. “Farther Away.” The New Yorker. 18 Apr. 2011. Web. 29 Aug. 2015.
• Hunter, J. F. M. “’Forms of Life’ in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.” American Philosophical Quarterly 5.4 (1968): 233-243. Print.
• Kirsch, Adam. “David Foster Wallace’s importance of being earnest: Irony, Generation X and the sheer joy of language.” Salon. 30 Nov. 2014. Web. 29 Aug. 2015.
• McCaffery, Larry. “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): n.p. Web. 29 Aug. 2015.
• Miller, Adam S. The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in the Age of Distraction. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Print.
• Ryerson, James. “Consider the Philosopher.” New York Times Magazine. 12 Dec. 2008: n.p. Web. 29 Aug. 2015.
• —. “Introduction: A Head That Throbbed Heartlike: The Philosophical Mind of David Foster Wallace.” Cahn and Eckert 1-33.
• Sanzgiri, Shona. “D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace: Everything and More.” Interview Magazine. 19 Oct. 2010. Web. 29 Aug. 2015.
• Taylor, Richard. “Fatalism.” Cahn and Eckert 41-52.
• —. Metaphysics. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974. Print.
• Wallace, David Foster. The Broom of the System. London: Abacus, 1997. Print. —. Infinite Jest. London: Abacus, 1997. Print.
• —. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. London: Abacus, 1998. 21-82. Print.
• —. “Good Old Neon.” Oblivion. London: Abacus, 2004. 141-181. Print.
• —. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” Consider The Lobster And Other Essays. London: Abacus, 2007. 255-74. Print.
• —. “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” Cahn and Eckert 141-216.
• —. “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has been Removed.” Consider The Lobster 60-65.
• —. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print.
• —., ed. The Best American Essays 2007. New York: Mariner Books, 2007. Print.
• Wallace, James D. Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. Print.

James Liner (bio)
University of Washington Tacoma

A review of Potts, Jason and Daniel Stout, eds., Theory Aside. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.

We all know better than to believe that the complex history of theory (to say nothing of its present) can be reduced to a sequence of compartmentalized, oversimplified schools and movements or a roster of celebrated proper names—and yet our pedagogy and even, at times, our scholarship continue to perpetuate a caricatured account of the life and times of Theory. In Jason Potts and Daniel Stout’s view in Theory Aside, the reification of the history of theory and of the theory canon results to a significant degree from the political and philosophical aspirations shared broadly among theorists and critics since the 1960s: “the desire for unprecedented intellectual transformation itself built a tendency toward canonicity into theory from the very beginning” (2). Potts and Stout’s new collection of essays pursues the worthy goal of calling theoretical and critical attention to the marginalia of theory—those historiographies, methodologies, and individual figures that have for various reasons been left to the side of the theory canon: “What … would our intellectual landscape look like if we were less beholden to the idea of wholesale change? … What intellectual options has [the] demand for radical alteration left by the wayside?” (3). In an age when it has become commonplace to pronounce the death of Theory as a discrete discipline, the essays in Theory Aside narrate a new history (and present) of theory that draws on unexpected sources, revises our understanding of the usual suspects, and introduces new questions that mainstream, canonical theory has forgotten or failed to ask. This search for theoretical alternatives is salutary.

Moreover, Theory Aside pursues these goals without simply rejecting theoretical inquiry and retreating into the traditionally conceived disciplines. Although some critics have recently turned away from theory and toward the comforting, familiar disciplinary terrain of literary form and belletristic literature, the contributors reject this move. Moreover, they tend to do so partly on the grounds that it fails to provide workable, livable alternatives to the neoliberal corporate university. For example, in “Late Exercises in Minimal Affirmatives,” Anne-Lise François critiques a relaxation of critical rigor that she finds in the late work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, William Empson, and Roland Barthes. Historicizing her critique of these three theorists, François sees an “uneasy proximity of a certain qualified emphasis on ease of access and concomitant futility of effort … to the seemingly similar emphases on ease, effortlessness, instantaneity, precarity, and unskilled labor defining late capitalism in the electronic age” (49). The relaxation she identifies in Sedgwick, Empson, and Barthes thus finds a more recent echo in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s 2009 call for critics to turn from ideological depths to textual surfaces (see Best and Marcus, esp. 9–19). This agenda proposes that critics abandon models of criticism predicated on laborious ideology critique in order to focus on what’s already there on the surface of the text (Marcus calls it “just reading” [75]). However, a return to the text itself may look like an alternative to high theory, but it hardly counts as a workable alternative or a means of defending a discipline on the grounds of its distinctiveness: on the contrary, François suggests that such retreat will merely exacerbate the casualization of academic labor in the corporate university.

François is not alone in linking labor conditions to the project of proposing theoretical alternatives. In “What Cinema Wasn’t: Animating Film Theory’s Double Blind Spot,” an interrogation of North American film theory’s relative silence concerning the role of animation in the historiography and interpretation of cinema, Karen Beckman likewise acknowledges the need for alternative theoretical approaches that remain cognizant of the constraints faced by academic labor. Translating André Bazin’s work on animation, for example, would be one clear remedy for the “blind spot” Beckman identifies, yet as she points out, the economic realities of academic labor confound such an easy solution, precisely because of the pressure on scholars to publish original monographs and articles rather than translations (189). Beckman’s innovative solution is to propose a different kind of translational work, in which film theorists dialogue not just about but also with animation “practitioners” in a broadly collaborative, interdisciplinary theoretical approach that contrasts starkly with calls for narrowly disciplinary, antitheoretical formalism (192; see 190–92).

Interdisciplinary collaboration and methodological pluralism reappear elsewhere in the collection as remedies to blind spots produced by a retreat to the traditionally conceived disciplines. For example, in “Archive Favor: African American Literature before and after Theory,” Jordan Alexander Stein rereads the role of bibliographic and archival work in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and calls for an expansion of what counts as literary scholarship. When Gates’s The Signifying Monkey appeared in 1988, it faced a double bind determined by its historical moment: on the one hand, Gates’s study was a monumental effort in recovering lost African American texts, but on the other hand, it continually elevated its theoretical aspirations at the expense of its traditional bibliographic scholarship, the latter almost becoming a source of embarrassment for Gates-the-high-theorist (165). Rather than perpetuate this inherited value system that views critical bibliography as a debased or outdated avocation and regards questions of history or materiality as inferior to those of aesthetics, Stein calls for theorists to take up “the challenges that come with accounting for and narrating the work of literary studies in plural terms” (173). Methodological pluralism, he contends, encourages recognition “that no scholar is or could become an interdisciplinary research project unto herself” and that interdisciplinary collaboration is not just desirable but necessary in a time when institutional pressures are driving scholars into disciplinary foxholes (173–74).

The same methodological pluralism appears in several of the other essays in the collection. For example, Heather Love’s “Reading the Social: Erving Goffman and Sexuality Studies” calls on scholars in sexuality studies and queer theory to revisit the work of the sociologist Goffman. Arguing that Goffman has had a hitherto unacknowledged influence on queer theory, Love shows how Goffman’s methodology “ignores the distinction between text and world, enlisting literature as well as other narrative and fictional forms in the service of describing social dynamics and their reinscription of hierarchy” (241). For Love, this blurring of traditional disciplinary boundaries allows Goffman to approach familiar theoretical terrain—the thesis that identities are socially constructed—but this time from the position of “a socially grounded account of performativity” rather than the more familiar “linguistically oriented” one (245). Thus, Goffman not only exhibits the methodological pluralism celebrated by contributors to Theory Aside but also provides an empirical view on the phenomenology of sexually marginalized subjectivities.

Love and Stein are thus exemplary of one of the chief virtues of Theory Aside: Love’s addition of Goffman to the historiography of theory, and Stein’s reevaluation of discounted critical methods in Gates, speak to the importance of maintaining theory’s interdisciplinarity when the very enterprise of theory, as traditionally understood, is increasingly devalued (along with the humanities in general) by a university system that prioritizes careerist education and commodified research. One viable response to the attack on theory is to demonstrate its unexpected vitality in places we wouldn’t think to find it and to show the surprising benefits of interdisciplinary research programs that fruitfully combine theory with other fields and methods.

In addition to modeling interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, Love and Stein also contribute to the collection’s second crucial project: revising the theory canon and rethinking processes of canonization. Love does this by making a compelling case for broadening our notion of the theory canon, while Stein reveals often unseen methodological tactics in a canonical theorist. However, the collection’s most dramatic and surprising challenge to the inherited canon comes from Frances Ferguson, who reads I. A. Richards against the grain of New Criticism, with which Richards is most closely associated. New Criticism regards the literary text as sufficient unto itself, the archetypal illustration being Keats’s well-wrought Grecian urn. In “Our I. A. Richards Moment: The Machine and Its Adjustments,” Ferguson claims thatliterary criticism for Richards is comprised of “statements of consciousness or subjective statements” that “relate to [literary or aesthetic] objects themselves only in an oblique and variable fashion” (264). This is anathema to the doctrinaire New Critic, for whom the text transcends such contingencies as the proclivities of individual flesh-and-blood readers, the circumstances of an act of reading, or even history itself. For Richards, as described by Ferguson, literary meaning is neither transcendent nor eternal; to the extent that it arises from concrete, subjective experiences of reading a text, it is just as historical and “susceptible to change” as any other human experience (266). Ferguson’s concluding comments on Richards’s Practical Criticism—which collects, analyzes, and compares interpretations offered by his undergraduate students—underscore the distance between Richards’s theoretical assumptions and the canonical tenets of New Criticism: “Richards’s informants treat the poets behind the poems as if they had motives that can only be described as social motives, and they respond as social beings…. [T]hey demonstrate how little the reading of poetry actually participates in a distinct and autonomous world” (276). As Ferguson reads him, Richards could hardly be further from the self-effacing reverence for the work (not text) associated with the New Criticism—and the understanding of theory canonicity that emerges from Ferguson’s essay and others could hardly be further from the conventional narrative. Such rereadings call radically into question any pretense to theoretical or methodological purity, highlighting as they do the inevitable entanglement of formal with sociohistorical analysis, the humanities with its disciplinary others, and the conceptual and intelligible with the material and the contingent.

For all its merits, however, Theory Aside has crucial limitations as well. Significantly, many of these stem from the modest ambitions staked out in Potts and Stout’s abnegation of theory’s claims on revolution. One consequence of their rejection of theory’s “strongly interventionist ambitions” and “compulsion toward radical transformation” (2, 3) is that it is not always clear what changes as a result of a given reading or why a reading matters outside its immediate context. For example, “What Is Historical Poetics?”, Simon Jarvis’s impressive reading of poetic virtuosity in Alexander Pope, is grounded in a reading of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and begins from the premise (recognizable in a different form to readers of Fredric Jameson) that literary form itself is always already historical: “what if ‘formalism’ were already ‘historical poetics’?” (98). Yet it remains somewhat unclear how the essay is intended to contribute beyond its specific focus on Pope and Adorno, and this despite both the virtuosity of Jarvis’s own technical analysis of Pope’s poetics and his provocative statement that form is the “most intimately historical aspect” of a “work of art,” the “most vulnerable to becoming obsolete or to missing its moment” (101). The likeliest larger context for Jarvis’s argument is aesthetic experience itself, but Jarvis regrettably leaves untheorized his key aesthetic term, “delight.” The essay thus misses an opportunity to theorize its concepts in a way that enables further critical intervention or theoretical elaboration. Potts and Stout’s deliberately limited claims on behalf of theory seem here to rein in theoretical and critical energies that might otherwise multiply beyond Pope and Adorno.

William Flesch’s “Hyperbolic Discounting and Intertemporal Bargaining” is a similar case. Derived from his analysis of the behavioral economist George Ainslie, Flesch’s readings of the phenomenology of narrative time and the relation between reader and text are interesting and insightful, but the essay leaves important implications underdeveloped. His conclusion teases the reader—reading “is real life: someone else is presenting us the fiction”; it is “intersubjective to the core…, even when we are most solitary” (213)—without delivering on the promises for a social or political account of the experience of reading that such claims seem to suggest. In these instances, the essays appear to butt up against limits posed by the collection’s programmatic modesty.

More troubling, however, is Theory Aside’s occasional neutralization of the political. There are moments when the volume’s modesty translates into an outright disavowal of the perennially political vocation of most theory. Potts and Stout present Michael Hardt’s call for “militancy” rather than “critique” as one instance of the “exclusively revolutionary” trajectory of theory that they hold partly responsible for pushing aside the conversations represented by these essays (4). For Hardt, mere critique is “the art of not being governed so much,” whereas his more radical model of “militancy seeks … to govern differently, creating a new life and a new world” (qtd. 7). For an illustration of why a radical theorist might be dissatisfied with theorizing that remains content with ameliorative reform, one need only look to “The Biopolitics of Recognition: Making Female Subjects of Globalization,” Pheng Cheah’s essay on women sex workers’ subjectivity under neoliberal globalization. Dismissing rather quickly the Marxian tradition of ideology critique (without, however, attending to the various transformations of the concept of ideology under Marx’s inheritors [127–28]), Cheah’s essay essentially acquiesces to neoliberal globalization, notwithstanding his productive use of Foucault’s classic analysis of biopower and biopolitics. In the concluding pages, Cheah writes: “With the decline of socialism as a genuine alternative, the only way forward is for countries to play the competitive game of developing human capital and the recognition of human rights within the framework of global capitalist accumulation…. [W]e cannot not want to be part of this system of creating useful human beings even if this makes us susceptible to being used” (137, 139). Being governed is a foregone conclusion here; capitulation is “the only way forward.” Cheah’s argument precludes the possibility even of utopian hope, let alone revolutionary praxis. One might reasonably excuse Hardt and other Marxists if this strikes them as rather beside the point of theory.

While in many ways Cheah’s exclusion of revolutionary praxis is the exception in Theory Aside, it is precisely this exceptionalism that reveals the collection’s most significant programmatic flaw: the essays tend to be at their most insightful at those moments when they are furthest from the modest aims articulated in the introduction. Beckman’s exhortations concerning the place of animation in film studies also carry with them the ambitious goal of “catalyz[ing] full-scale conceptual reorganizations” of the discipline as a whole (183). Even further from Potts and Stout’s rejection of high theory’s lofty claims is the politics of noncontemporaneity developed by Natalie Melas in “Comparative Noncontemporaneities: C. L. R. James and Ernst Bloch.” Melas finds in James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) “a noncontemporaneity of the future” which “flips the noncontemporaneity of racial backwardness over to the vanguardist noncontemporaneity of a future revolution” (69). This noncontemporaneity anachronistically links the historical Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) with the coming postcolonial revolutions in Africa that constituted James’s future: “the past intrudes into the present as a trace of the future” (69). As Melas reads him, James clearly aims at something fundamentally other and more than being governed differently. Similarly, Elizabeth Povinelli, in her study of the relation between liberal biopower and critical theory titled “On Suicide and Other Forms of Social Extinguishment,” calls on theorists to “act even though the world in which our actions would have made maximal sense will be extinguished at the moment of our success, its cardinal measure subsumed by a new world” (91). This, of course, is precisely what revolutionary praxis itself does: it acts in this world to create a new one.

Nowhere is the contradiction clearer between the collection’s modest program and its ambitious achievements, however, than in “Needing to Know (:) Theory / Afterwords,” the closing statement by Ian Balfour. Balfour begins with what is probably the volume’s grandest sweeping gesture: “To be antitheory is to be anti-intellectual” (280). The boldness of this opening move corresponds to the magnitude of Balfour’s claims for the necessity of theory: “theory is always at work…. It is thus not a question of whether to do theory, whether to take sides for or against it, but only a question of how one does it” (280). Although this sentiment is clearly shared among the essay’s contributors in various ways, what is unique in Balfour’s treatment is the powerful conviction—which elsewhere occasionally seems more like lip service—that theory’s new directions necessarily require that we enlarge the canon of theory without abandoning canonical proper names, that we continue rather than curtail critical traditions associated with revolution and political critique, and that we widen the scope of theory, not narrow its focus:

We find ourselves in a precarious moment when it comes to what might be considered a brand new totality. No sooner had we finished learning the hard lesson of poststructuralism that absolutely everything was under the sway of difference (still true), when the need to know the totality … impressed itself in the world and on the scene of world theory and any number of seemingly local analyses. Jameson has been the most eloquent proponent of ‘back to totality’…. But the imperative now presents itself categorically. To everyone. (282–83)

Balfour’s defense of theory stands less as a bookend than as a rejoinder to the introduction’s bracketing of revolutionary ambition. Whereas Potts and Stout make their focus the margins and minutiae of theory and decry high theory’s reliance on “the proper name” (1), Balfour’s afterword has theory squarely confronting the social totality itself—the same global capitalism against which Cheah proposes we are powerless—by means of two (essentially) proper names, poststructuralism and Jameson. Here and elsewhere, essays in Theory Aside have the most to offer theory and theorists when they are least faithful to the collection’s intentions.

Nonetheless, Theory Aside usefully contributes to important theoretical questions, local and global, in a variety of ways. Although turning aside sometimes means turning away, the volume’s true strength lies in theorizing otherwise, approaching established figures or questions in new ways, complicating them rather than foreclosing them. As Povinelli puts it, “The question critical theory asks is what releases one or another of these potential otherwises into the actual” (89). The best essays here aim to release the potential otherwises of theory into a newly expansive and transformed canon of theory.

Works Cited

• Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” The Way We Read Now. Ed. Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best with Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood. Representations 108 (2009): 1–21. Web. 22 April 2011.
• Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.

Ronald Bogue (Bio)
University of Georgia

A review of Baross, Zsuzsa. Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Print.

Baross, Zsuzsa. Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Print.

The epigraph of Zsuzsa Baross’s outstanding study comes from Gilles Deleuze: “To encounter is to find, to capture, to steal, but there is no method for finding other than a long preparation.” What Baross puts on display is the art of the encounter—in the painting and 159 drawings of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald (1994-1996), in several films by Claire Denis, in texts on the cinema of Denis and on the body by Jean-Luc Nancy, and in Baross’s study itself. The art of the encounter, Baross shows, is a discipline of the contingent, a long preparation for the advent of the impersonal event, “an interruption, an irruption, opening (to) another future” (7). The artist or philosopher cannot will the event into existence. It is “[a]leatory, contingent, it arrives” (11). It impinges on art and thought as the force of an unforeseeable encounter. But the artist and philosopher can stage encounters, if not control them, by assembling images and concepts in experimental combinations, awaiting the arrival of an event, and then, should it arrive, composing paintings, films or texts that capture and amplify the force of that event.

Encounters has three chapters: “In Place of a Preface … ,”an introductory section on the concept of the encounter; “159 + 1 Variations or Painting Becoming Music,” a lengthy analysis of Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald; and “Il y a du Rapport Sexuel: The Body in the Cinema of Claire Denis and the Writing of Jean-Luc Nancy,” an essay exploring the network of relations Denis and Nancy have forged in the creation of their respective works.

Baross opens with a reference to Jacques Derrida’s statement in Dissemination that “this (therefore) will not have been a book,” adding that not only will Encounters likewise not have been a book, but its preface will not have been a preface. This gesture toward Derrida is less a recognition of the problems of origins and closure in philosophical writing than an articulation of the necessities entailed in thinking the encounter. As Baross says of her non-book, “the movements the writing both tracks and sets into motion, pursues and itself generates in the texts abide by a different logic. Aleatory, contingent, fortuitous, its operations necessarily defy any pro- or pre-vision and announce its presence only after the fact” (2). The encounter’s effects may be shown but not predicted, and Baross’s aim is to make her non-book itself a “showing (a ‘monstration,’ to borrow the term of Jean-Luc Nancy, rather than a demonstration)” of the consequences of encounters: “resonances and echoes, montage and variation effects that from a distance join distant texts, texts and images, a writing and a painting, painting and drawing, thought and cinema, the cinema and the body” (2-3).

Baross initially approaches the artistic and philosophical encounter as “a relation by contact,” reviewing various “mediators, transporters, carriers that deliver the new by way of contact, without, however, the power of determining what passes in that contact” (4). She first considers the basic relation of touch and then moves to the relations of intrusion, adoption, appropriation, abduction, and theft. Nancy’s L’Intrus, a meditation on his heart-transplant surgery, provides a graphic figure of intrusion. Denis’s film L’Intrus, inspired by Nancy’s text, exemplifies adoption, in that the film is not a faithful adaptation of Nancy’s essay but a treatment that invents a relation: “The film adopts the book as one adopts a child, gives it a wholly other future, a future unthinkable/unimaginable from the place where it was found” (5-6). Denis’s adoption of Nancy is like the appropriation painters make of earlier artists’ work, such as Picasso’s repaintings of canvasses of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, and Manet. And what Jean-Luc Godard calls abduction is the wholesale appropriation of visual and sonic materials he conducts in Histoire(s) du cinéma, a collage/montage of quotations, music, paintings, photographs and film clips that constitutes theft without plagiarism. If Denis’s adoption “takes charge of its ‘object’,” Godard, in his abduction, “takes (what he finds) rather than takes charge of” (5, 6).

All of these relations by contact—touch, intrusion, adoption, appropriation, abduction, and theft—offer Baross means of conceiving of the art of the encounter, but her goal is to discern as well relations of resonance and variation, which are relations of “contact, without con-tact. Between bodies, between bodies (corps) and corpus of writings, between traits and colors, concepts and musical notes, at a distance” (11). Relations of contact entail violence, the violence of forces that intrude and collide, and the violence of counter-forces that adopt, appropriate, and abduct those forces. Relations of resonance and variation, by contrast, function otherwise, Baross argues. They do so as Deleuzian “becomings,” encounters in which, says Deleuze, “‘what’ each (term or body) becomes changes no less than ‘that which becomes’” (10). A figure of this becoming offered by Deleuze is the “unnatural nuptial” (noce contre nature) of the orchid and the wasp, in which the orchid’s wasp-like coloration and scent induce male wasps to engage the flower as a female wasp and so collect pollen and carry it from one orchid to another. In this nuptial, the becoming-wasp of the orchid makes it a sexual partner of the wasp, and the becoming-orchid of the wasp makes it a reproductive organ of the orchid. “This erotic sensuous image of a nuptial,” says Baross, affords the conception of an encounter “whose force is without violence, without the violence of a forcing” (10). Resonance, like the sympathetic vibration of an open cello string when a piano note sounds, is one such nonviolent encounter at a distance. In resonance, interacting vibrations, waves, or currents are activated among bodies, but what passes among them is resonance itself. “The wave, the agitation, the tension do not come to bodies from the outside. It is in their resonance—something they have differently in common—that they encounter one another, consummate as it were their nuptial in resonance” (11). Variation is a second form of nonviolent encounter, complementary to that of vibration. In variations on a theme—a harmonic progression, a line, a color, an image, a figure, a concept—each new variation aspires to contract a relation with its predecessors across the intervals that separate it from them. Variation is “a quest for nuptials,” a search with the hope that each “new element will contract with the rest, with the past, that it will compose with other elements, enter into a relation of variation with variations already in place in a new block of becoming that the Variation itself will have become” (11).

Crucial for Baross is that vibration and variation, unlike violent forms of encounter, are “machines,” by which she means that they are “generative of impersonal a-subjective effects that are spontaneous and involuntary,” and equally important, that the effects of these machines occur in “the realm of the senses or sensation” (11). Her object in the chapters following the introduction is to detail the operations of these machines in Titus-Carmel, Denis, and Nancy and isolate the effects of sensation that escape signification or rational conceptualization.

In her lengthy chapter on Titus-Carmel, Baross provides clear, concrete examples of the workings of vibration and variation in the realm of sensation. (For those with an allergy to abstraction, a useful strategy might be to read this chapter first and then take on the introduction.) The object of her analysis is Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald, a work consisting of one painting and 159 drawings created in response to the central panel of Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece (1512-1516). The acrylic painting is of the same size as the Grünewald altarpiece (256.6 cm x 332.6 cm), and its elements correspond, with varying degrees of abstraction, to those of the altarpiece—Christ on the cross at the center of the composition; Mary swooning in the arms of St. John the Evangelist on the far left of the painting; Mary Magdalene kneeling to the left of the cross; John the Baptist, pointing at Christ, to the right of the cross; and a small lamb on the right between the feet of Christ and those of John the Baptist. The 159 drawings, identical in size, but smaller than the painting (70 cm x 60.5 cm), are in mixed media: “chalk, crayon, acrylic wash, charcoal, lead pencil, and—cut or torn, then pasted on the subjectile—thin often transparent ‘Asia’ paper, itself in smooth pastel color” (20). In the 2007 exhibition of the Suite Grünewald at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris (the installation on which Baross comments), the acrylic painting is mounted on a panel at what would be the altar of the Collège’s Gothic nave, with the 159 drawings displayed on the room’s left and right walls flanking the altar. Baross’ book includes a photograph of the exhibition space, as well as color reproductions of the Grünewald altarpiece, Titus-Carmel’s corresponding acrylic painting, and 67 of the 159 drawings. The ample illustrations convey a clear sense of the Suite Grünewald, and their inclusion in the book allows the reader to follow Baross’s complex analysis readily.

The encounter that occasioned Baross’s study of Titus-Carmel was a synesthetic sensation when first visiting the Suite Grünewald exhibition: “I believe I hear music—a trill on a single instrument, a short piano trah-la-la—faintly emanating from the picture-space of the drawings” (19). Her response to this contingent, disorienting event is to consider the Suite as a musical composition—not in some vague, impressionistic sense, but in a rigorous, philosophical sense that questions the limits of painting and music and seeks to uncover a becoming-music proper to Titus-Carmel’s artwork. She finds the musicality of the Suite in various formal relations of color and line, extracted from Grünewald and then reconfigured, and in their variation within and across drawings. The variations of these extractions and reconfigurations ultimately generate a temporality specific to the Suite, one that discloses a zone of indiscernibility between the forms of painterly and musical composition, a time-space of a becoming-music immanent to the artwork itself.

Baross identifies in the disposition of the drawings a basic schema of “n + 1.” The drawings are displayed in two rows along each of the nave’s facing side walls, in groups of three above three, four above four, and so on, the groups punctuated by an additional drawing on the bottom row with no drawing above it. (In other words, the bottom row is a continuous row of evenly spaced drawings, whereas the top row parallels the bottom with an empty space appearing at irregular intervals above a drawing on the bottom row.) The groups form blocks of variation, the first three above three group, for example, consisting of six treatments of Grünewald’s kneeling Mary Magdalena, the same figure in each drawing but submitted to diverse modifications across the series. Each block of variation (three above three, four above four …) has its own dynamic, its elements varying in their degree of apparent self-coherence (some blocks contain anomalous drawings that echo drawings in other blocks) and in the extent to which their elements bear a resemblance to Grünewald’s. The “+ 1” drawings punctuate the blocks but also serve as joints or pivots that link each block to the next, as if each + 1 drawing were engendering a successive block of variation. In this sense, the n + 1 schema is both generative and open-ended.

Each drawing is like a cinematic frame, Baross argues, a rectangle of unchanging dimensions that crops various elements of Grünewald’s canvas, now in extreme close-up (Mary Magdalena’s hands), now in close-up (Mary Magdalena’s torso), now in mid-shot (Mary Magdalena, Mary and St. John the Evangelist), and so on. Each framing is in service of what Baross labels a method, “namely, the progressive fragmentation, abstraction, denouement of the original” (26). The object of this method is to extract color and line from Grünewald’s representations and render palpable the strictly painterly forces immanent within them—forces Titus-Carmel identifies in his notes accompanying the exhibition as torsions, convulsions, suffocations, the slowness of the movements that disturb the figures, the whirlwind of reds, and “the agitations of a secret wind,” among others (27).

But schema (n +1) and method (extraction through cinematic framing) are not enough to make the artwork a creative event. It is variation that does so. The schema provides a dynamic structure for variation, and method supplies extracted elements for its operation, but variation is the machine that generates productive encounters. Each extracted element is turned into a motif, or “prototype,” which Baross defines as “an a-signifiant, non-signifying element,” which has been “cut off from its origin” (30). The prototype is then subjected to experimental variation and set in resonance with other prototypes within an emergent composition of forces, rhythms and movements. That which converts heterogeneous prototypes, individual drawings, blocks of drawings, and the central painting into a composition is “the variation machine that the Suite invents and assembles and whose invention and assembly are coterminous with it” (33). Titus-Carmel’s “long preparation” for encounters is in the schema and method, but the creative formation and functioning of the variation machine is one he merely oversees as its operator, not its author, for the machine “coincides with its autogenesis” (33).

The Suite is like a musical composition in that it is an active deployment of forces, rhythms and movements, but the becoming-music of the work is to be found above all in its temporality. Following Pierre Boulez, Baross identifies the “musical object” as “the aftermath of a retroactive, posthumous re-appropriation—paradoxically, not of an object, but of a passage…. … So that what gives itself is not a complete and accomplished whole but something that passes, is in passage … a passage that makes itself pass, breaches its own paths” (44). A melody, for example, passes in time, one tone after another, but only becomes a coherent melody through constant retrospective assimilation of the preceding tones into their successors as part of a complete yet open-ended passage. Baross’s claim is that the apparently spatial object of the Suite is really a temporal object, and that the variation machine generates passages among the diverse elements of the composition. She identifies three different temporal dimensions of the Suite. The first is chronological, marked by the dates of composition of the drawings, which are posted as titles of the various drawings (#1 June 20, 1994, for example). This succession has its own rhythms—sequences of one drawing per day, sets of drawings over two or three days, a hiatus of over a year, followed by drawings dated only by month and year and then a resumption of drawings including the day or days of composition. The second dimension is anachronic, passing forward and backward across the intervals between drawings. As Baross shows in great detail, #16 appears as an anomaly until #44 offers a variation of the earlier drawing’s elements, at which point a back-and-forth movement sets the two in resonance, and in the process activates # 28 as a belated member of the ensemble. And the third dimension is vertical, manifest in the cut and torn pieces of Asia paper pasted on the drawings. The translucent sheets covering portions of the drawing (and often covering other sheets as well) are layers of time, Baross argues, the mark of the drawing underneath the Asia sheet representing “a present that is past but not absent … a present that is both past and present, presenting itself” (56). The interval between the drawing and the sheet of paper “is between two presents simultaneously present, while, impossibly, also standing in a relation of present/past” (57).

The culmination of the Suite as temporal object arrives in the final painting, dated 1994-1996, which is the time span that encompasses the creation of the work as a whole. Baross likens the painting to an electronic music machine called the “harmonizer.” Every musical note includes the overtones of its scale, though the ear does not perceive the overtones as discrete entities. The note is a contraction of multiple notes occurring at such speed that only one note is perceptible. The harmonizer retards the vibration speeds and thereby “liberates a whole series of virtual sounds, a selection of which will be articulated (prototypes) in a new composition” (59-60). The final painting is in one sense a culminating contraction of the 159 variations and their temporalities, but also a generative center whose virtual elements manifest themselves in the 159 variations. The painting thus is both before and after the variations. And further, the painting is also a “harmonizer” of Grünewald’s altarpiece, a machine that sets free the virtual forces of that canvas. Hence, “rather than singing praises of the master’s work, the Suite makes the painting itself ‘sing.’ In 159 variations, it liberates something like a song from the Crucifixion, a song of lines and colors which has been silently (virtually) present…. Or more precisely (or creatively) … the Suite gives its time to the tableau” (19).

In the chapter on Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy, Baross continues her meditation on time and resonance as these concepts relate to the body. If music is a temporal object, as is the Suite Grünewald, so too is the body itself, according to Baross. Bodies are formed of multiple, coexisting times that are like the passages of melodies. They “are constituted in the birth and passage (enchainement) of presents.” They are durations, “the always singular durations (or becomings) of an aging, a dying, a growing tired … passing through or being actualized in this or that body” (67). Neither a dimension nor a milieu, the body’s time is “constitutive,” and it is inseparable from the forces, themselves temporal, “that pass through it and traverse it, and to which it submits” (67). The time proper to a given body is singular but not personal, “not the attribute of a body but the expression of a life, of rhythmic variations in the ‘melody of an existence’ at ‘this’ or ‘that’ time” (68). In this regard, a given body is less a discrete entity than a “locality of durations—a dying, a suffering, a jouissance, a falling asleep—taking place, accomplishing itself, in time, in the place (lieu) and ‘locality’ of the body” (68).

The body’s temporality, however, is not Baross’s primary topic in this chapter, merely “a preliminary and provisional” digression “in order to give time to the body, to give bodies their proper time” (67). Rather, her focus is on the pairs “sense/sensation” and “touch/resonance.” In Corpus, Nancy aims not to write about the body, argues Baross, but to let the writing be the body itself. Nancy works within language, but in this text “he writes toward the limit of language, toward its very edge and on the border of its sense” (70). He writes toward what he calls “the sense without sense” (sens sans sens) at the limit of language, and toward the body’s own sensuous sensations. He explores this zone between sense without sense and sensations through the figure of touch. In his text, it is as if the limits of language and the body, their respective skins, were entering a relation of touch, the writing being “a movement toward,” and the body “that which withdraws from it” (71). The text’s touch never makes contact, but resonates in “a rapport without touching, or rather, a rapport that self-touches while it also touches the other at a distance” (70). In the text, a “rapport or intercourse—something untouchable, inappropriable—takes place between the sense that is without signification, which arrives to writing at its limit” and “the sense of sensuous sensations (neither senseless nor without sense): micro vibrations, imperceptible tremors that traverse the surface of the skin” (71).

Baross finds a similar investigation of the touch of bodies and the limits of sense and sensation in the films of Claire Denis. Denis works with the significations of the bodies, treating themes of racism, colonialism, and sexism, but in Baross’s analysis Denis also presents bodies of sensation, without signification, through a cinematic touch without touch. Through various techniques, she deploys a tactile vision, what Alois Riegl called a “haptic” near-seeing as if the eye were seeing with the hand. But in so doing, Denis also discloses the visible body as an image. “In the visible, image and body are linked by an exceptional complicity…. The body is image …, always already cinematic: in the visible, it screens—that is, extends—the visible” (74).

Baross offers numerous examples of the body’s disclosure as sensuous asignifying image in Denis’s cinema. Notable is the section in which Baross analyzes three scenes from White Material, a film set on an African coffee plantation during a time of social upheaval. Baross shows how the complex images of contact between the white plantation owner’s son and black child soldiers and a black maid force awareness of relations only possible between bodies of sensation: the son’s bare neck and the point of a lance, a black hand running across the son’s shoulder tattoo, a bundle of cut hair thrust into a black maid’s mouth and then vomited to the ground. Equally impressive is the succeeding section, in which Baross surveys images across Denis’s oeuvre that participate in events of sensation: hair/fur/feather; the scar; a wound; the heart; the hand; the skin of the night.

Baross closes the third chapter with a commentary on Nancy’s short review of Denis’s Trouble Every Day, speculating that the review offers an approach to the body that is absent in Nancy’s Corpus and that marks the most intense zone of resonance between Denis’s cinema and Nancy’s thought.

Baross writes in the parenthetic mode, thought within thought, allusion within allusion, but also in the modes of projective anticipation and recursive reconfiguration, of adoption, appropriation, and abduction. I have numbered only a few of the concepts that Baross deploys in the invention of her own conceptual composition, ignoring Nancy’s “expeausition” and “excription,” Deleuze’s “spiritual automaton,” Barthes’s “punctum,” Foucault’s “dispositif,” among many others. The success of Encounters, however, is not in its use of sources, but in its operation as an autogenic variation machine, a machine that in its coherent incompletion, its rigorous openness, and its activation, through scrupulous selection and long preparation, of dynamic relations among texts, paintings and films, creates and perpetuates genuine encounters.

Jason Frydman (bio)
Brooklyn College

Abstract

This essay argues that narco-narratives–in film, television, literature, and music–depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other media; these hauntings refract the asymmetries of geo-political and socio-cultural power undergirding both the transnational drug trade and its artistic representation. The circum-Caribbean cartography offers both a corrective to nation- or language-based approaches to narco-culture, as well as a vantage point on the recursive practices of citation that are constitutive of transnational narco-narrative production.

A transnational field of narrative production responding to the violence of the transnational drug trade has emerged that encompasses music and film, television and journalism, pulp and literary fiction. Cutting across nations, languages, genres, and media, a dizzying narrative traffic in plotlines, character-types, images, rhythms, soundtracks, expressions, and gestures travels global media channels through appropriations, repetitions, allusions, shoutouts, ripoffs, and homages. While narco-cultural production extends around the world, this essay focuses on the transnational frame of the circum-Caribbean as a zone of particularly dense, if not foundational, narrative traffic. The circum-Caribbean cartography offers both a corrective to nation- or language-based approaches to narco-culture, as well as a vantage point on incredibly recursive practices of citation that are constitutive of the whole array of narco-narrative production: textual, visual, and sonic.

Erich Auerbach, confronting the similarly expansive flows and exchanges of “world literature,” called for an Ansatzpunkt, “a point of departure, a handle, as it were, by which a subject can be seized. The point of departure must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy” (14-15). The “set of phenomena” this essay “elects” are patterns of narrative doubles in a series of citational texts set within the context of circum-Caribbean drug violence “whose interpretation is a radiation out from them.” These works—a US detective show, a Colombian telenovela, a Jamaican dancehall track, a US coming-of-age novel, and a Jamaican film—depend on mutually articulating intratextual and intertextual structures that map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and the distribution of death in the late twentieth-century circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Dialectically negotiating the truth-claims of official discourse and the genre conventions of fiction, narrative doublings mediate the tension–and stage the aporia–between hegemonic scripts of drug violence and the efforts of individual narratives to localize and complicate those scripts even as they inescapably participate in them.

As an Ansatzpunkt, narrative doubling “radiates out” to a variety of ways in which narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, and other media. These hauntings refract the asymmetries of geopolitical and sociocultural power undergirding both the transnational drug trade and its artistic representation. The particular history of the circum-Caribbean, with its unique “proximity and vulnerability to imperial and neoimperial forces” (Stites Mor 279), makes these asymmetries not only legible to scholars and critics, but also part of the formal apparatus of narco-narratives themselves, which constantly reference their own emanation out of a historically specific circum-Caribbean “socio-economic formation” (Lemelle 58). Much scholarly attention has been paid to narco-narratives as regionally specific, northern Mexican border narratives (Cf. Matousek 119-120); however, while the US-Mexico border looms large in the hemispheric narco-economy, this essay makes plain that narco-narratives rarely limit themselves to one border. The circum-Caribbean designation encourages us to pursue less linear, more plural and rhizomatic vectors of traffic, in a nod to the work of Édouard Glissant, who perhaps more than anyone brought the circum-Caribbean cartographic frame, reaching from Brazil to New Orleans, out of the disciplines of botany and Meso-American anthropology (Glissant 120-143). These vectors of traffic cut across disciplines and media, inspiring landmark works including Kamau Brathwaite’s “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” (1967-1969), where T. S. Eliot and Duke Ellington help clarify “the West Indian contribution to the general movement of New World creative protest” (337); Ned Sublette’s The World that Made New Orleans (2008), where you can track the maritime routes by which Cuba’s cha-cha-chá and three-chord loops shaped Fats Domino’s R & B and Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll; and, more recently, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), a novelistic versioning of Laurie Gunst’s Born fi’ Dead, with a proliferation of Cuban political operatives, CIA agents, Colombian dealers, Bahamian crackheads, American journalists, reggae singers, and gunmen in Cold War Downtown Kingston, Miami, and New York. In light of such circum-Caribbean cultural production, it would seem impossible to produce a singular, border-bound narco-narrative. Whether from the hegemonic media position of US network television, or from the studio yards of Downtown Kingston, every narco-narrative integrates its doubles, its shadows. This is the formal expression of the transnationalism of the drug trade, and the transnationalism of the field of its narrative production. In the case of productions emanating out of the US media, these shadows express the bad conscience of narco-narrative production, politically ambivalent not only about the racialized, spatialized victims of the war on drugs, but also about its own dependence on the saleability of those victims and their art forms. In the case of productions emanating out of Colombia and Jamaica, these shadows set forth a critical understanding of local violence as essentially structured by US demand for narcotics and its government’s militarized, exported war on drugs. On the other hand, formally and generically these narco-narratives betray their own sort of ambivalence, an ambivalence about their own aesthetic and commercial accommodation to the violent social relations produced by these transnational structures.

In two episodes about gangster rap and the narcocorrido, respectively, the US television procedural Law & Order leverages the repetitive capacities of its own formulaic structure in order to make available a critique of the racial substitutions encouraged by the hegemonic imagination of drug violence. These two Law & Order episodes that appeared less than five years apart essentially follow the same plot, featuring drug murders, racialized minorities, and the violent popular music associated with them. However, the doubled, conflated representation of African Americans and hip-hop with that of transnational Mexican migrants and narcocorridos points to a disturbing fungibility of racial signifiers in the transnational field of narco-narrative production, making available a critique of this fungibility even as the show relies upon it. Episode 7 of Season 20, “Boy Gone Astray,” aired on November 6, 2009, three years into Mexico’s military-led war against the drug cartels. The show opens with the discovery of the corpse of a young blonde woman, ostensibly an interior designer. The investigation locates a second apartment of the victim, filled with valuable modern art, cash, and high-grade marijuana; detectives conclude that she fronted for a Mexican drug cartel, dealing and laundering money through the art market. Clues to her murder emerge through a narcocorrido mp3 that Assistant District Attorney Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), despite being a native speaker of Spanish, takes to her DJ ex-boyfriend to help decode. He identifies the performers as Los Guerreros, a norteño band commissioned to glorify the exploits of the Vela family drug cartel.

Through the dual figure of the native informant, Law & Order complicates its portrayal of Mexican narco-culture. ADA Rubirosa offers some historical context for District Attorney Jack McCoy’s (Sam Waterston) dismissal of narcocorridos as merely glamorizing violence and drug trafficking. She explains how narcotraficantes inhabit a symbolic space partly shaped by traditional corridos, or border ballads:

CONNIE RUBIROSA

These guys are folk heroes. JACK MCCOY

Not to mention pushers and murderers. CONNIE RUBIROSA

Well, you’d have to know Mexico’s colonial history. Banditos fought the power. Banditos like my ancestor, Juan Cortina. People revered them. JACK MCCOY

Your ancestor, maybe I should keep a closer eye on you. So the Vela cartel targeted Nina Wilshire because she was in a song that extolled the virtues of a rival cartel. KEVIN BERNARD

Yeah, well, it’s called talking smack with a semi-automatic.

Rubirosa invokes her own ethnic filiation with a tradition of norteño resistance to both gringos and the Mexican central government. Revealing the constitutive doubleness of the native informant indexed as well by McCoy’s crack about keeping a closer eye on her, Rubirosa historicizes the narcocorrido genre only then to deploy her ethnicity manipulatively to compel the boy-assassin Raphael, trained by the Vela family, to testify against them. She uses memories of comforting bowls of her mother’s birria to entice his testimony, which the death of another witness-suspect indicates is a near-certain death wish. When during the trial a narcocorrido circulates on the Internet threatening ADA Rubirosa, Law & Order doubles its own generic form, appropriating a staple Mexican narco-drama plotline about the erosion of state institutions in the face of powerful drug cartels. McCoy’s concern over Rubirosa’s dangerous Mexicanness has manifested in an unexpected way, for in acting on behalf of the state, her duplicitous manipulation of her Mexican ethnicity to compel Raphael’s testimony sets the stage for the murder of state agents and government witnesses. “Mexican” emerges here as a volatile, destabilizing signifier as Law & Order establishes its transnational form through citation of narco-narratives from south of the border.

Regular viewers of “Boy Gone Astray,” now turned on to narcocorrido mp3s and their generic conventions, might have felt a jolt of Law & Order déjà vu. On January 12, 2005, “Ain’t No Love” (Season 15, Episode 13) introduced viewers to the underground market in hip-hop mixtape CDs and the discursive production of “street cred” in gangster rap. Moreover, just as “Boy Gone Astray”’s Raphael would find himself poised between the violent world of his Mexican past and the opportunities his parents sought in the US, four years earlier Shawn Foreman seemed to be fulfilling the dreams of his middle-class Queens parents until old ties to the “street,” embodied by his friend “Psycho,” threaten to derail his upwardly mobile trajectory. Shawn had just recorded a hip-hop album with the legendary rap producer RC Flex, who was found murdered in his studio at the beginning of the episode, a plotline “ripped from the headlines” concerning the 2002 murder of Run DMC’s Jam Master Jay. Police investigation reveals that RC Flex and Shawn had argued shortly before the shooting, apparently about the mixtape version of the album Shawn and Psycho planned to leak to the street, the proceeds of which would fund Psycho’s big buy-in to the drug trade. Just as 2009’s narcocorrido mp3s would encode messages of gangland murder, so too do these 2005 underground, bootleg raps. Listening to the mixtape, Detectives Green and Fontana (Jesse L. Martin and Dennis Farina) hear Shawn boasting about the murder of a rival drug dealer that involved the same signature “ghetto silencer” (a plastic Orange Delecta bottle) as that used in RC Flex’s murder. While it becomes clear that Psycho committed both murders, the police and the DA’s office knowingly ignore the genre conventions of gangster rap and collapse the narration of crime with the confession of crime in order to prosecute Shawn.

This willy-nilly substitution of one African American defendant for another agitates ADA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm), who insists that the two individuals should not be substitutable. In the final scene of the episode, District Attorney Arthur Branch (Fred Thompson) lectures ADA Southerlyn on the law before firing her:

ARTHUR BRANCH
You know, Serena, if you were right, you were right for the wrong reasons.

SERENA SOUTHERLYN
Meaning?

ARTHUR BRANCH
Emotions, not facts. What was it you said, everyone you talked to said he couldn’t have killed that man?

SERENA SOUTHERLYN
My emotional responses make me . . .

ARTHUR BRANCH
. . . an advocate. You’re a superb attorney; you ought to be involved in cases that feed your passion.

SERENA SOUTHERLYN
Well, that would be wonderful.

ARTHUR BRANCH
Serena, you must know, that will not happen in this office. It can’t. Now, a prosecutor can be zealous, but not passionate. Advocacy is warm-blooded, enforcement’s got to be cold-blooded, and blind, and even angry.

Delivered with sangfroid, this defense of the district attorney’s office touts prosecutorial “blindness” in the face of its double, the emotional responses of advocacy. With the near-conviction of yet another innocent African American, Law & Order offers access to the racialized costs of such blindness.

The Latin remix of this episode less than five years later provocatively disabuses regular Law & Order viewers of their would-be blindness: The way in which African American and gangster rap could be so easily “updated” to Mexican migrant and narcocorrido points to something beyond the show’s constitutive pop-ethnographic mode and its formulaic procedural structure. These substitutions, which so bothered ADA Southerlyn, highlight the fungibility of racial signifiers in hegemonic discourses of narcotics and popular music, easily conflating unique racial formations and their geopolitical and sociocultural contexts. In negotiating its relationship to these transnational discourses and genres, Law & Order presents, at arm’s length, the double criminalization of gangster rap and narcocorridos: not only do they narrate, motivate, and confess drug crimes, but their modes of dissemination (mp3s and bootleg CDs) bypass legitimate, copyrighted channels. Commodified scripts of popular music exploit this air of illegality to enhance their appeal. Shawn says of the lyrics that were taken as evidence: “I just put [them] in my song to juice up my rep.” And critic Miguel Cabañas notes in a comment relevant to gangster rap as well: “One could not explain the popularity of the narcocorrido without the censure of the genre that goes hand in hand with the criminalization of drugs” (520, my translation). Appropriating this double-bind, these Law & Order episodes stage the blindness of law-enforcement scripts while borrowing the illicit allure of the narcocorrido and gangster rap genres for its own commercial success.

Through the duality of gangster rap and narcocorridos, native informants and prosecutorial blindness, Law & Order cites its way into the collapsible space between the truth-claims of official discourse and the conventions of fiction, the aporia that, this essay argues, is at the center of narco-narratives’ transnational form. The show’s “ripped from the headlines” format intensifies the traffic between official discourses and their fictional doppelgängers. An epigraph precedes Law & Order episodes that hew particularly close to the headlines: “Although inspired in part by a true incident, the following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.” Not only a legal disclaimer against lawsuits, this disclaimer announces the creative license that enables fiction to probe the discursive construction of reality. In a discussion of Mexican literary production “amidst the din of gunfire,” Gabriela Polit-Dueñas notes the crucial importance of fiction in a context where “corrupt official discourses which try to reduce [narcotrafficking] to a legal problem are part of the complexity of the phenomenon” (560). Through techniques of narrative doubling, Law & Order draws attention to the way that the abstractions of legal discourse produce and maintain a blindness toward processes of racialization. By self-reflexively participating in the same substitutions as those legal scripts that criminalize racialized subjectivities and cultural production, Law & Order delicately positions itself between these scripts and their blind spots.

Negotiating its own delicate position between official discourses of drug violence in the circum-Caribbean, and the melodramatic conventions of the Latin American telenovela, the Colombian serial El cartel intertextually cites Law & Order at the beginning of every one of its fifty-plus episodes. Like Law & Order, episodes of El cartel open with white text on a black background accompanied by a resonant voice-over. On El cartel it reads: “This is a work of fiction inspired by the book ‘The Cartel of Snitches.’ The characters and situations it presents are equally fictitious.”¹ The “equally” in this disclaimer signifies ambiguously: it may indicate that the characters are as fictitious as the situations, or that the telenovela itself is as fictitious as the book. Tellingly, the book El cartel de los sapos, written by former narcotrafficker, DEA-collaborator, El cartel co-screenwriter, and current Miami jetsetter Andrés López López (Rincón 161), earned its notoriety and best-seller status precisely through its claims to be a true secret history In announcing that it is as fictitious as the book, the telenovela either announces that it is not fictitious at all or it points to the slipperiness of truth claims—and the need for the interpretive protocols brought to bear on and through fiction—in a transnational mediascape of secret histories and official accounts, violence and corruption, snitches and TV shows.

El cartel sets its action to the sounds of Colombian cumbia, Puerto Rican reggaetón, Jamaican dancehall, US gangster rap, and Mexican narcocorridos, a complex matrix of circum-Caribbean dance music that performs at the level of sound what El cartel does at the level of narrative: operating across mediatized pathways worn smooth by the transit of slaves, merchants, migrants, commodities, capital, and arms, it is a matrix of borrowing, remixing, and collaboration that conspires to wrong-foot those who criticize it for its violence and obscenity. Like the foregoing musical genres, narco-themed telenovelas have been surrounded by controversy for sensationalizing, sexualizing, and profiting off the violence that has wreaked such transformational havoc in Colombia, as elsewhere. A popular serial form airing first in 2008 on Caracol TV in Colombia, then picked up for international distribution by Telemundo, El cartel negotiates its own precarious ethical status in this context through the protagonist Fresa (Manolo Cardona) and his doppelgänger Cabo (Robinson Díaz). This narrative doubling fuels the melodramatic morality play of El cartel, simultaneously attempting to humanize Fresa, a nickname that roughly translates to Preppy, without making the show vulnerable to claims that it whitewashes the tragedies unleashed by the drug trade and the ensuing efforts to suppress it. With these two characters, El cartel stages Colombia’s national debate over class relations and political economy in the narco-era, probing the degree to which drug trafficking disrupts the nation’s neoliberal values or aligns with them. However, this narrative doubling around the fulcrum of social class gets radically decentered as the show insists upon the transnational structure of the narco-economy, with Miami–the destination for the majority of drug cargo as well as the site of DEA headquarters–emerging as an alternative, circum-Caribbean supra-national capital. This cartographic doubling of political and economic power mitigates El cartel’s national discourse and forces viewers to reassess ethical questions under transnational structures of dominance.

El cartel juggles the protagonist and his counterpart, as it does discourses of fiction and truth. In this way it manages to “produce an image of illegality,” as O. Hugo Benavides argues about Latin American narco-dramas, “in a much more ambiguous and nuanced form than that imposed by official discourse … even [while] still heavily embedded in the political and cultural constraints of the melodramatic medium” (17, 9). The first episode of the series opens with Fresa in handcuffs being escorted out of Miami International Airport and motorcaded to a federal detention center where he is stripped and searched. As he puts on his orange jumpsuit, his voiceover narration begins: “Everything I am about to tell you you can think is a lie, and, well, it’s within your right to think what you want but what I’m about to recount (contar) is the truth, it’s my truth, it’s my version of what happened.” The opening lines of the show foreground the narrative mode of confession, which serves multiple ends in El cartel. Fresa’s pleading tone hints at a desire for atonement and redemption. However, as the scene cuts to Fresa in well-tailored black street clothes, sitting on a chair in front of a small digital video camera, in a dark room surrounded by purplish fluorescent lights and two armed guards, we wonder what other ends his confession may serve, what deals he may have cut. Given the origins of the show in the commodification of Andrés López López’s confession, El cartel’s Scheherezadian narrative frame foreshadows the conflicts and interests motivating characters to offer their stories, their “version[s] of what happened,” accessing the citational and multi-positional construction that, I argue, is inherent to the narco-narrative genre.

In his career as a narco, Fresa tries to stay aloof from violence and to treat his vocation as a straightforward pursuit of professional gratification and financial security; cartel boss Don Oscar even remarks upon how much Fresa revels in “moving merchandise (merca).” Yet pressures from within both the cartel and his family evacuate this neutral mercantilist middle ground. When she finally figures out that he is a narco, his grandmother kicks him out of the house, saying: “You have to reflect on the life you are pursuing. This path will only lead you to disgrace.” With Fresa cut off from his family, the cartel increasingly becomes a surrogate family. When Fresa refuses to carry a gun, Don Oscar’s partner Don Julio instructs him: “When you have reached the position you’re in, you don’t do the things that you like but the things you have to.” Fresa demurs once more, and Don Julio tells him to get out of the business: “You weren’t born for this,” and his wife adds, “Stop being naïve.” At this moment, Don Julio’s body guards rush up to tell him that the police have penetrated the perimeter of the ranch (finca) and that they have to flee. Don Julio says he’s tired of running, and the scene cuts to an Ultima Hora newsflash announcing his arrest, followed by a scene of Don Julio in a dank jail cell impotently vowing revenge against his captors. We then cut once more to Fresa, seen in the flip-out screen of the small digital video camera. The visual sequence of “documentary” frames documents that his initial years in the cartel gave him ample warning that he should get out. “In those five years, I travelled the road I’d dreamed so much about,” he reflects. “Glory. But I wanted more and more and more.”

In the unfolding of El cartel, Cabo emerges as a literal and symbolic obstacle to Fresa’s efforts to remain nonviolent, to retire from the business, and to reenter legitimate society. Cabo’s arc underscores the dark underbelly of Fresa’s desire for “more and more and more,” linking the pleasures Fresa takes in commodity trafficking to the violence that inescapably accompanies it. Cabo initially serves as Don Oscar’s campy, ultraviolent gatillero (trigger-man), with a handlebar moustache, exaggerated snarl, and nasally montañero (hillbilly) drawl. When Don Oscar sends Fresa to Miami to lay low, Cabo encourages an intensification of violence against rival cartels, enforcing a bloodthirsty code of honor that gauges status through markers of dominance rather than profit. To punish Fresa’s disengagement from the cartel and his intervention in saving the life of a contracted target, Cabo collaborates with the DEA in attempting to set him up, marking Cabo’s increasing obsession with Fresa and with the latter’s privileged position in Miami.

The structural relationship between Fresa and Cabo uses the device of narrative doubling to stage (but ultimately to interrogate) what Colombian cultural critic Omar Rincón refers to as “Narco.lombia”’s national allegory in the neoliberal era, which ostensibly allocates responsibilities for acts of violence in such a way as to keep the elites’ hands clean, to absolve them of responsibility for the narco-economy and its attendant bloodshed. This structural relationship echoes its US variant as mediated by Law & Order: hegemonic scripts of drug violence shunt responsibility onto fungible racialized and spatialized signifiers, rather than examining the role of official discourse and policy, not to mention white middle-class demand for narcotics, in producing and sustaining that violence. In the Colombian case, whereas Fresa represents an upwardly mobile, urban petite bourgeoisie pursuing neoliberal values, Cabo represents a resentful working class consigned to the position of gatillero. The show treats Fresa as a rational economic actor “who has been attracted to the rapidly-expanding, multi-billion dollar drug economy,” as Phillipe Bourgois has argued about crack dealers, rather than as an “‘exotic other’ operating in an irrational netherworld” (Bourgois 326). Fresa sympathetically embodies capitalist ideology yet comes to recognize the inseparability of this ideology in the narco-economy from Cabo’s violent, power-obsessed “irrational netherworld.” The show ambivalently makes this inseparability applicable to neoliberal capitalism in general through Cabo’s own upward mobility. After Don Oscar dies, Cabo begins dealing (traqueteando) and acquires the trappings of a jefe: a large finca and Don Julio’s ex-wife. This class jump provokes snide remarks from the traditional class of dons, but also trepidation. Tapping into a central trope of Colombian narco-narrative, the show dramatizes national anxieties over the cocaine-fuelled destabilization of traditional class hierarchies, an anxiety also at work in that circum-Caribbean narco-Ur-text, Scarface (1983), where ultra-violent Mariel refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino) usurps the dominant underworld position of post-1959, bourgeois Cuban exile Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia).² By raising the abominable specter of Cabo taking over the cartel, the telenovela may inspire viewers to long for precisely the traditional class hierarchy that Cabo contests, or it could lay bare for them the systemic unity of trade and violence undergirding that class hierarchy. This ambiguity acquires another layer of complexity when we take into account that the Colombian players operate in a world not of their own making. From generals in the Colombian army carrying out orders from civilian politicians under pressure from the US government as part of the Plan Colombia aid package, to cartel leaders taking advantage of new deals being offered by the DEA, the Colombian players in this narco-drama must navigate the whims of both US drug policy and US consumer demand. El cartel’s portrait of the narco-economy relies on our seduction by Fresa and, through this focalization, offers the experience of incremental dread as he finds himself increasingly haunted by his lower-class double Cabo. Yet the long shadow of US economics–funding both the war on drugs and the traffic in drugs–renders these characters, and Colombia more generally, as structured in dominance. The class-based critique of the narco-economy, which may or may not translate into a larger critique of neoliberal capitalism tout court, finds something for all Colombians to agree on by recognizing that it is the United States who has established the conditions for this ambiguity.

As in Colombia, the cocaine trade has also fueled transformational violence in Jamaica, dovetailing with a similar US-sponsored neoliberal transition at the beginning of the 1980s. By reworking Ernie Smith’s 1974 popular reggae number “Duppy Gun Man” through doubling its temporal and cartographic orientations, Yellowman’s 1982 song “Duppy or Gunman” uses the citational practices of dancehall to chart a ghostly history of this transformational violence that is anchored in a critique of hemispheric political economy. Specifically, “Duppy or Gunman” responds to the overwhelming bloodshed leading up to and persisting after the 1980 elections in Jamaica. Caught up in US Cold War proxy politics, more than eight hundred people were killed as the CIA-backed Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) took power from the left-wing People’s National Party (PNP). The electoral conflict solidified a map of Kingston crisscrossed by heavily armed, politically affiliated garrison communities partly funded through CIA-encouraged cocaine transshipment (Edmonds). A sequence of repetitions mediates between Yellowman’s aestheticization of local gunfire and a spiritual, cartographical critique of this hemispheric violence. The 1982 track “Duppy or Gunman” opens with Yellowman covering Smith’s 1974 hit “Duppy Gun Man” over “Junjo” Lawes’s 1980 “Gunman” rhythm track. Reconstructing the original rhythm track of “Duppy Gun Man” with a dub-infused, ghostly sound, Lawes’s “Gunman” renders the duppy of the original title even more spectral. Smith’s 1974 song reflects a moment just before the horrific violence unleashed in 1980, recounting a semi-humorous parable about a would-be Romeo frightened off when “a dread from ‘cross de Gully / just passin’ through / decide fe run little joke” and shout “don’t move.” Overreacting to the dreadlocked passerby from a potentially antagonistic neighborhood, the protagonist of the 1974 “Duppy Gun Man” fails to “keep his head” and assumes the dread to be either a ghost or a gunman. This either/or registers the violence that haunts 1974 Kingston’s past and threatens its future; Yellowman’s 1982 version marks such violence as the inescapable condition of the present:

Must be a duppy or a gunman
I man no find out yet
I and I was so frightened
All the M-16 I forget.

While Smith was so frightened that he forgot the name of the girl he was with, so frightened was Yellowman that he even forgot the M-16s around him. With American-made weapons having flooded Jamaica in the lead-up to the 1980 election, “Duppy or Gunman” marks the pervasive violence that continued to plague society in its aftermath, as “party leaders,” in Laurie Gunst’s account, “menaced by an outlaw underworld they could no longer control, turned the Jamaican police loose in the ghettos to execute their former paladins” (xv). Nadi Edwards comments on the reggae/dancehall rendering of Kingston’s violence: “It is a nightmare world, haunting and haunted, a world in which gunmen turn their victims into duppies, but the killers themselves are ghosts, spectral bodies that materialize only as agents of violence” (12).

The dialogic reggae/dancehall aesthetics of versioning and dub production moves this haunting in two temporal directions: Yellowman’s “Duppy or Gunman” is melancholically haunted by the lightheartedness of Smith’s original, while it simultaneously haunts Smith’s song with the “nightmare world” of what was to come. Yellowman turns the ubiquitous gunfire of the present to aesthetic ends:

Gunshot it no respect no one
Gunshot it no respect no one
It kill soldier man, it kill policeman
It kill bad man, also gun man
It kill animal, also human

“Duppy or Gunman” calls out to Michigan and Smiley’s musically embodied trope of contagion to narrate the escalation of violence as an infectious transnational disease carried across borders by “M-16s” and “Magnums.” Yet whereas the Biblical righteousness of Michigan and Smiley’s “Diseases” warns of God’s vengeance against loose women, Yellowman revises the traditional Christian prayer “For Health and Strength” in order to invoke Rastafarian faith talismanically for protection against the disease of transnational violence: “For health and strength and daily food / we praise thy name oh Jah.” Through this citational layering of generic doubles, “Duppy or Gunman” articulates itself as a local critique, a prayer in the face of a geopolitical cartography shaped by US-manufactured weapons, drug trafficking to feed US demand, structural poverty, and Cold War political interference.

Also attending to US-Caribbean Cold War relations, Russell Banks’s 1995 novel Rule of the Bone processes a geopolitical cartography of violence through the subject position of the white US consumer of both drugs and Jamaican culture. Banks’s Bildungsroman appropriates a classic narrative structure of US fiction, the white hero and his non-white sidekick,³ in order to lay bare the circum-Caribbean racialization of both drug violence and narrative violence. Rule of the Bone conjures a narrative space of doubles and repetitions to foreground its own participation in these racialized discourses, to insist upon the necessary incompleteness of any one narrative site of redress, and to direct readers to its intertextual doubles within the transnational field of narco-narrative production.

Rule of the Bone’s doubling intertextuality stages and historicizes the narrative workings of white privilege via a white American adolescent’s tutelage by a Rastafarian elder. The iconic nineteenth-century friendship between Huck and Jim gets reworked through the late twentieth-century characters Bone and I-Man, the latter an undocumented Jamaican migrant laborer while in the US, though in Jamaica he is part of a Rastafarian group that supplies white American drug traffickers with marijuana. Bone, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, was sexually abused by his stepfather as a seven-year-old and now sports a mohawk and piercings, has dropped out of high school, and sells a bit of pot in order to pay rent with his friend and a scary bunch of bikers in Upstate New York. He eventually meets I-Man and learns about the production of his undocumented status:

The deal was [he was] supposed to work on the apple trees in the spring and then in June the same crew was supposed to go to Florida on a bus and cut sugarcane all summer for a different company and come back north in the fall and pick apples. Once you signed on you couldn’t quit until six months were up without losing all the money that you’d earned so far and your work permit so if you left the camp you were like an international outlaw, an illegal alien plus you were broke. (155-156)

While this passage, especially with its reference to sugarcane, registers the historically resonant state of bondage in which Jamaican migrant laborers circulate in the US, Bone’s use of the phrase “international outlaw” nonetheless attaches a sense of dangerous romance to I-Man as well. As Jim O’Loughlin notes, Rule of the Bone “explicitly interrogates” this romance as intertextually linked to “the white privilege inherent in fantasies of escaping from society in Huckleberry Finn” (31). In spite of Bone’s working-class, victimized social status, his development (Bildung) through friendship with I-Man prompts him to examine the privileges, complexities, and limitations of his role as white observer and narrator of this particular Black experience. As O’Loughlin comments: “Bone is forced to acknowledge his participation in a racialized system. In fact, his growth as a character becomes dependent upon that recognition” (40).

This racialized system is as literary and linguistic as it is economic. In another scene of intertextual doubling, Bone watches I-Man garden with Rose, a wan blonde six-year-old girl whose crack-addicted mother sold her to a sketchy character named Buster Brown. Bone devised her escape from Buster and took refuge in an abandoned school bus that I-Man, no longer on the migrant labor route, had converted into a trailer home. Observing them, Bone thinks:

They made a real nice picture, the two of them and it made me think of that book Uncle Tom’s Cabin which I got from the library and read in seventh grade for a book report but my teacher was wicked pissed at me for saying it was pretty good considering a white woman wrote it and gave me a D. My teacher was a white woman herself and thought I was being disrespectful but I wasn’t. I just knew it would’ve been different if it’d been written by a black man, say, or even a black woman and it would’ve been better too because the old guy Uncle Tom would’ve kicked some serious ass and then he’d’ve probably been lynched or something but it almost would’ve been worth it. In those old slavery days white people were really fucked up was what I meant in my book report and the white lady who wrote it was trying not to be, that’s all.(161)

This invocation of Little Eva and Uncle Tom racializes authorship and emphasizes how Rule of the Bone self-reflexively limns the risks of its intertextual filiation with dubious literary ancestors. Just as I-Man, as a Rastafarian spiritual elder to Bone, echoes Uncle Tom’s relationship to George Shelby, his owner’s son, the reader is asked to attend to Banks’s relationship with Harriet Beecher Stowe. The novel acknowledges its inextricability, inside and outside the book’s cover, from the shadow of those melodramatic characters.

The confessional mode connects the racialization of authorship and the weight of these iconic figures to the present moment. Recalling Fresa’s opening claims to offer “the truth, my truth, my version of what happened” in El cartel, Bone opens the Rule of the Bone saying: “You’ll probably think I’m making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but I’m not. … The fact is the truth is more interesting than anything I could make up and that’s why I’m telling it in the first place” (1). This confession asserts Bone’s commitment to truth and “interesting”-ness, while recognizing that this story may provoke readers to consider Bone to be bragging about his international adventures with a charismatic Rastafarian elder. Disavowing any interest in self-promotion, this preface preemptively addresses the way the accumulation of racialized echoes and models might inflect the reader’s sense of what motivates Bone to share his story.

After accumulating nineteenth-century echoes overshadowed by the violence of slavery, Banks’s novel pointedly sets the violence of the present within a geopolitics of the Cold War that Bone has now been properly formed to read and recite. Having relocated from Upstate New York to Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, host to the Maroon polity Accompong, Bone has joined I-Man’s brethren working their marijuana fields:

After we had the dirt ready we planted the seeds for the new crop and hauled water and got the rows real soppy and for shading them while the plants were still babies we ran strings from poles and hung these humongous thin camouflage sheets that I-Man said’d been left behind in Grenada after the United States Army finished invading and went home. Dem hiding sheets spread all over de Caribbean now, mon. Dem de bes’ t’ing ‘bout dat invasion so as t’ mek de ganja reach him fulfillment undisturbed ‘neath de Jamaica sun an’ den return to Babylon an’ help create de peaceable kingdom dere. Jah mek de instruments of destruction come forward fe be instruments of instruction.(330)

Bone’s first-person narration subtly integrates I-Man’s Rastafarian dialect through an unmarked, free indirect discourse, suggesting Bone’s own habitation of this nation-language. Whereas Yellowman prays for his own salvation amidst cocaine-fuelled, Cold War garrison politics, I-Man’s Rastafarian dialectic optimistically reflects on marijuana traffic to the US as a project of spiritual enlightenment that will turn America away from proxy wars and foreign intervention. Yet a racialized and spatialized double-vision marks both “Duppy or Gunman” and The Rule of the Bone: I-Man’s cold-blooded assassination at the hands of his white American distributors underscores the persistent and casual destruction rained down upon expendable Black lives caught up in feeding US drug demand, precisely that “proximity and vulnerability to imperial and neoimperial forces” that, Stites Mor notes, informs the circum-Caribbean’s critical vantage point on the possibilities of “transnational solidarity” (279).

Disclosing the expendability of Black life in the eyes of many Jamaicans and Americans alike, one of the assassins says to his partner, “We shouldn’t do a white kid… The tourist board’ll go nuts” (339). At this point in the novel, Bone not only has grown comfortable speaking a Rasta-inflected patois, but he has been initiated by I-Man and his brethren into a ganja-assisted process of “coming to know I-self” (329). His Bildung fulfilled, Bone can confront his white privilege head-on, recognizing that “it was my white skin that’d saved me from being blown away like Prince Shabba and I-Man” (342). At the end of the novel, Bone sits docked in Montego Bay, about to depart Jamaica, left to reflect on what Achille Mbembe calls the “racist distribution of death” in the hemispheric “economy of biopower” (17), as well as on the racist distribution of death in the narrative economy of drug violence that his own story participates in. While Bone preserves I-Man’s language and spirit, the death of violence-averse I-Man confirms the novel’s participation in that racialized narrative economy. Which of course begs the question: on the book’s own terms, then, must we conclude that Rule of the Bone, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is “pretty good considering a white [man] wrote it”?

Maybe Russell Banks himself does not tell the story of “the old guy kick[ing] some serious ass and then … probably [getting] lynched or something but it almost would’ve been worth it,” because the novel signals that that story has already been told, and that, for all his linguistic dexterity, it still wasn’t Banks’s to tell. Recurrent intertextual cues prompt readers of Rule of the Bone to seek out the outlaw rude-boy epic The Harder They Come–the novel’s transnational narrative double–to fill this narrative space that the novel conjures but necessarily leaves empty. Bone and I-Man’s crossing from the US to Jamaica is scored by the epoch-defining soundtrack of the 1972 film in which reggae star Jimmy Cliff plays outlaw folk-hero Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin (237). “A male subaltern exemplar of early postcolonial resistance” (Bogues 22), Ivan quixotically challenges the position he has been allotted in the global narco-economy. Upon seeing on television that a planeload of Jamaican ganja seized in Miami was valued at $100,000, he recognizes that the money involved far exceeds the meager take he risks his life for as a street dealer, and furthermore that the state itself is one of the major players in a semi-official international commodity trade. With fearless grace and with guns blazing, he takes on the police and military over the course of a manhunt that captured the Jamaican public’s imagination in the film and in history. Ivan’s grace itself represents the rude-boy, outlaw anti-hero’s performative resignification of the heroic, colonialist Hollywood westerns Jamaican audiences both laugh at and learn from at the beginning of the film. The Harder They Come concludes with a wounded Ivan on the beach at Lime Cay, waiting for a boat that will carry him to his “big welcome” in a Cuba that in 1972 Jamaica embodied the liberatory aspirations channeled by Michael Manley’s ruling People’s National Party. As a military unit surrounds him, Ivan joyously rises from behind the bushes and meets his death, fulfilling the transcendent performative destiny integral to the rude-boy genre, as well as its offspring in the dancehall, such as Vybz Kartel’s gun song “Send a Hell” (2008); in literature, as reworked in A Brief History of Seven Killings; and in Jamaican nation-language itself, where as Bogues notes, “death is ‘tek life,’ a spectacle that affirms [the] life [of young men who participate in violence] in the absence of positive alternatives” (24).⁴

While preserving its distribution of death, The Harder They Come completes Rule of the Bone by offering an alternative aesthetic of violence to that of the pitiable, long-suffering death of Uncle Tom, and, in the figure of I-Man, that of the rote, routinized death of yet another white protagonist’s sidekick. Banks’s novel suggests that this was aesthetic work his book could not, should not do, at least not alone. With Bone poised to depart Jamaica by sea, the novel concludes with his privilege of navigating away from the scene of violence. Like his doubles Huck Finn, ready to light out for the territories; Shawn Foreman, living off his rap royalties; and Fresa, poised to retire in Miami, he occupies a narrative space not permitted to his subaltern, raced and classed double. The citational texts of circum-Caribbean drug violence register this privilege while calling upon multiple narrative sites, cartographic scales, and generic modes to do justice to those left behind.

Footnotes

1. “Esta es una obra de ficción inspirada en el libro ‘El Cartel de los Sapos.’ Los personajes y situaciones que se presentan son igualmente ficticios.”

2. See, for example, Vallejo and Restrepo.

3. See Lawrence, chs. 4, 5, and 11; and Fiedler.

4. In “Send a Hell,” Kartel deejays:

Miller 9 clap, clap it mek di cops seeSomebody haffi dead an yuh threaten me, fi box miTwo inna dem face coof coof I’m get drop seeDem ah go rush I’m go doctor but I’m dead inna di taxi. (2008)

Alternative to this classical expression of rude-boy “tek-life,” in A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James ambivalently fashions for Josey Wales, based on the real-life figure Lester “Jim Brown” Coke, a different sort of death-embracing “heroism” as he is consumed by a prison-house fire at the behest of the CIA and Jamaican government. Mastermind of his own success, Wales sabotages the 1978 Downtown Kingston Peace Treaty and the prospect of a Rasta Revolution, thereby buying himself total immunity from both the CIA and the JLP-government of Edward Seaga, which allows him to manage safely for more than a decade a drug trafficking network that stretches from Colombia, through the Caribbean, and across the United States. The reader’s admiration for his diabolical effectiveness, his ability to see the geopolitical balance of power better than condescending Americans and Uptown Jamaicans, presses hard against his responsibility for the shooting of Bob Marley and the undermining of the peace treaty, the hopes for which, the actual possibility for which, are best expressed in the novel by Tristan Phillips, based on the real-life Trevor Phillips:

People need to know. They need to know I guess that, that there was this one time when we coul’a do it, you know? We could’a really do it. People was just hopeful enough and tired enough and fed up enough and dreaming enough that something could’a really happen. … Even people who usually expect the worst did, if only for two or three month, start to think peace a little then a lot, then peace was all they could think about. Is like how before rain reach you can taste it coming in the breeze. (James 568-9)

Yet Tristan/Trevor was part of the leadership within the Downtown underworld that, according to Josey Wales, speaking about Papa-Lo (real-life Claude Massop), his mentor and double from the previous generation, “Start to act like he no longer like the world he himself help create. … He the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better. … He not getting soft, he thinking deep, which politicians don’t pay him to do. … He want to forget them. I want to use them” (James 42-3).

Works Cited

• “Ain’t No Love.” Screenplay by Dick Wolf, Rose Sweren, and Lois Johnson. Law & Order 15.13. NBC. 12 Jan. 2005. Television.
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• Benavides, O. Hugo. Drugs, Thugs, and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-Dramas in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Print.
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• Bourgois, Philippe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Print.
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• Brathwaite, Kamau. “Jazz and the West Indian Novel (I-III).” The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. Allison Donell and Sarah Lawson Welsh. Routledge: London, 1996.
• Cabañas, Miguel. “El narcocorrido global y las identidades transnacionales.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 42.3 (2008): 519-542.
• Edmonds, Kevin. “The CIA, the Cold War, and Cocaine: The Connections of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.” NACLA Report. NACLA, 14 July 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.
• Edwards, Nadi. “Notes on the Age of Dis: Reading Kingston through Agamben.” small axe 12.1 (2008): 1-15.
• El cartel. Screenplay by Juan Camilo Ferrand and Andrés López López. Dir. Luis Alberto Restrepo. Caracol Televisión, 2008. Television.
• Fiedler, Leslie. “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.” Paris Review (June 1948): 664- 671.
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• Gunst, Laurie. Born Fi’ Dead. London: Canongate, 2003. Print.
• The Harder They Come. Dir. Perry Henzell. Perf. Jimmy Cliff. Screenplay by Perry Henzell and Trevor Rhone. International Films Management, Ltd., 1972. Criterion Collection, 2000. DVD.
• James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings. London: Oneworld, 2014. Print. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. Reissue Edition. Ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print.
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• Polit-Dueñas, Gabriela. “On Reading about Violence, Drug Dealers and Interpreting a Field of Literary Production Amidst the Din of Gunfire: Culiacán-Sinaloa, 2007.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 42.3 (2008): 559-582.
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• Vallejo, Fernando. La virgen de los sicarios. Bogotá: Alfaguara, 1993. Print.
• Vybz Kartel, “Send a Hell.” Self Defense Riddim. Kingston: Jamdown Ltd., 2008. MP3. Yellowman. “Duppy or Gunman.” Mister Yellowman. London: Greensleeves, 1982. CD.

Julia C. Obert (bio)
University of Wyoming

Abstract

This essay argues that contemporary postcolonial cities are definitive of Anthony Vidler’s “architectural uncanny,” and it forwards Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, as a particularly palpable example of this phenomenon. This essay reads local literary texts and other historical documents to investigate how Windhoek’s architectural spaces condition structures of both power and subversion. It identifies where local bodies are marshaled by the city’s constraints and where they can contest those constraints. Ultimately, despite the fact that Windhoek still bears the inhospitable imprints of two successive colonial powers, its subjects can find ways to take root, at least in part, in their uncanny city.

Namibia was settled for thousands of years by indigenous groups—largely the Damara, Nama, and San—and, from the fourteenth century forward, by immigrating Bantu; German imperial forces declared it a colonial holding in 1884. Seeing their land and cattle appropriated by settlers, the Herero and Nama peoples rose up against German occupation in 1904. The German Schutztruppe, under the command of General Lothar von Trotha, determined to “annihilate” the resistance (von Trotha, qtd. in Mamdani 11), and wiped out the vast majority of both ethnic groups in the first act of genocide of the twentieth century. During World War I’s South-West Africa Campaign, South Africa seized control of the German colony, and administered the area from 1919 onwards as a League of Nations mandate territory. After World War II, South Africa refused to surrender South-West Africa to UN control and continued to occupy the area. When apartheid was implemented in South Africa in 1948, so too was it enforced in South-West Africa, with white settlers, so-called “colored” groups, and black South-West Africans being segregated by race (and with the latter further divided by ethnicity: Ovambo, Damara, Nama, Herero, Ovambanderu, and others). In the 1960s, the military wing of the South-West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) began its armed struggle for independence, and in 1988, South Africa agreed to end its occupation of the country. Namibia became officially independent on March 21, 1990, and SWAPO’s Sam Nujoma took office as the country’s first democratically elected President.

Despite the fact that Namibia has been independent for 25 years, it is in many ways visibly haunted by its colonial past, with its urban spaces in particular remaining redolent of the area’s sedimented political histories. Nearly all colonial regimes are driven by what Edward Said calls a “cartographic impulse”: the notion that redrawing borders, renaming spaces, and rebuilding places can literally shift the ground beneath subjects’ feet, disorienting and dominating local populations (78). 79). This violent “impulse” leaves the proprietary stamp of the imperial center on the spaces of the imagined wild frontier—the fantasy space projected as the postcolony by white power, to rely on Achille Mbembe’s analysis—making it a crucial tool of imperial hegemony, a rule to which both Germany and South Africa held true in South-West Africa (On the Postcolony 4). The built environments of liberated postcolonial spaces retain spectral traces of their subjugation and oppression, and so to some degree these environments remain anxious, unsettling, even inhospitable.

Anthony Vidler refers to “estranging” urban spaces, forms that “express the precarious relationship between psychological and physical home,” as examples of what he calls the “architectural uncanny” (12, xii). Borrowing from Freud, Vidler discusses places that are at once familiar and foreign, using the concept as “a frame of reference that confronts the desire for a home and the struggle for domestic security with its apparent opposite, intellectual and actual homelessness” (12). Although Vidler focuses primarily on neo-avant-garde architecture and its expressions of postwar alienation, contemporary postcolonial cities—spaces that are at once domestic and unhomely, that are both fit for today’s deep dwelling and reminders of yesterday’s displacements—would seem to be virtually definitive of the “architectural uncanny.”¹ Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, is a particularly palpable example of this phenomenon. In its cartography and architecture, it reveals histories of genocide and apartheid as well as its independent present. The scars of the city’s one-time symbolic significance as the headquarters of the German Schutztruppe, as well as of its place as a staging ground for the spatial segregation of South African apartheid, are barely beneath the skin of its post-colonial, post-apartheid built environment.

Literary representations of Windhoek tend to foreground this unhomeliness, often while critiquing the squandered promise of independence. Many texts feature the wide gap between the elite inheritors of the country’s bounty, most of whom live in fortified gated communities on the hills overlooking the city, and chronically poor black Namibians, who live in meager quarters in the old apartheid-era “locations” (the underdeveloped townships to which black communities were relocated under South African rule) and in informal squatter settlements on Windhoek’s outskirts. Frederick Philander’s play The Porridge Queen, for example, stages the “fanfare” of a Presidential motorcade—“ten expensive cars” manned by a “new brand of white collared Black civil servant”—as it blows blithely past a group of township women selling crafts from temporary stalls at “Busy Corner” (48-50). The irony that this makeshift market is located at the intersection of the recently-renamed Sam Nujoma Drive and Independence Avenue is, of course, not lost on Philander; these semantic changes to the post-independence cityscape, he implies, have not yet been matched by substantive progress. Several authors also note that the buffer zones between communities built during apartheid have been reinforced rather than remedied in recent years, and that post-independence city planners have repeated colonial (il)logics of “surveillance” and hygiene (“health, safety, order”) when projecting the future of the city’s poorer districts (Windhoek Municipality Structure Plan). Moreover, while several new monuments have been erected in Windhoek since independence, colonial memorials and buildings—among them Alte Feste, a German fortress, and the Reiterdenkmal, a memorial to the Schutztruppe killed during the Nama and Herero revolt—still dominate the cityscape. Windhoek is, in some ways, a kind of ghost space, an uncanny neocolonial revenant of the colonial city. Brian Harlech-Jones’s novel A Small Space describes dwelling in this space as a feeling of “living in two worlds,” an anxious sense of double vision or “dissonance” (184).

Nevertheless, the power of this unhomely geography is not absolute; it is sometimes destabilized by the subterranean routes and subversive navigational strategies of particular pedestrians. As Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu and Chong Thai Wong remind us, “postcolonial space is both a reminder of a colonial past and a salutary gesture towards the future. It conveys both a negative moment that displays… binary constructions and fixed categories and a positive one of a promise of becoming for new… subject positions and new modes of spatiality” (7). This essay reads local literary texts and other historical documents for these “salutary gestures,” examining, to borrow a term from Guy Debord, how personal “psychogeographies”—“insubordinat[e]” wanderings; “fragmented, subjective, temporal experience[s] of the city”—can potentially work against “the seemingly omnipotent perspective of the planimetric map” in Namibia (Debord, “Introduction” 7; Sant). In other words, it investigates how Windhoek’s architectural spaces condition structures of both power and subversion, identifying where local bodies are marshaled by the city’s constraints and where they can contest its “currents, fixed points and vortexes” (Debord, “Theory” 50). This treatment of geography in Namibian literature echoes Achille Mbembe’s hope, in the South African context, for “the de-racialization of urban spaces”—a hope yet inseparable, Mbembe concedes, from the “interiorize[d] … presence of [past] physical destruction.” Mbembe describes this bifurcated view of place as a means of “giving the theme of the sepulchre its full subversive force,” and defines the sepulchre as a symbol of “the extra bit of life that’s needed to raise the dead which lies at the heart of a new culture that promises never to forget the vanquished” (Eurozine interview). Ultimately, despite the fact that Windhoek still bears the inhospitable imprints of two successive colonial powers, its subjects can find ways to take root, at least in part, in their “sepulchral” city. These subversive ways of being in place, as Mbembe suggests, are ways of “raising the dead”—of simultaneously reckoning with loss and imagining a more settled future.

I. Building Windhoek

The German presence in Windhoek dates back to 1890, when Reichskommissar Curt von François decided to station his garrison in the area. Von François chose the location as a strategic buffer zone between Nama and Herero communities, whom he had determined to fight separately in his effort to “annihilat[e] … the enemy” (44). He laid the foundation stone of the Schutztruppe headquarters, now called the Alte Feste (Old Fortress), in October 1890, thus establishing a German architectural foothold in the region. Designed by von François himself, the fortress’s imposing walls and four surveillance towers, along with its position overlooking the valley, projected German political dominance and military might. After the defeat of the indigenous forces in the early years of the twentieth century, a concentration camp was established in the shadow of the fortress—one of several the Germans built around the country—in which prisoners died by the thousands, a mass murder conspicuously erased from the cityscape in subsequent years (and only commemorated on site for the first time in 2014 with the erection of the Genocide Memorial).

Fig. 1

Once the locals were overpowered, German architects and builders raced to erect what Itohan Osayimwese calls “signifiers of Germanness” in the area, buildings that would lay claim to local territory while reflecting domestic familiarity for incoming settlers (Osayimwese 82). Many scholars note that architecture and design were crucial to asserting political power in colonial outposts under the sign of imperial spectacle. Thomas Metcalf, for example, describes colonial building practices as “political authority t[aking] shape in stone,” and explains their primary objective as “the enhancing of the hold of empire over ruler and ruled alike” (xi). Nevertheless, colonial settings also exerted a troubling “pull of difference” (Metcalf 5), which often prompted anxious efforts to ensure continuity with the imperial center. Although South-West Africa is typically represented in German writing of the time as the uncharted “wild West” (Haarhoff, Wild South-West 2), local architecture often took extreme pains to assert German national identity—a sign that settlers were civilizing the landscape rather than being uncivilized by their frontier. This meant that Windhoek became a prime example of Wilhelmine architectural eclecticism, a revivalist hodgepodge of historical styles with particular reference to Classical and medieval Romanesque forms (Osayimwese 128). Neo-Classical tropes link the Kaiserreich to dominant historical empires, while the neo-Romanesque Rundbogenstil—influenced by Roman and Byzantine techniques and characterized particularly by rounded arches—promotes “an association between the new Reich … and the golden age of the Kaiserreich during the Hohenstaufen period of the Middle Ages” when Romanesque design held sway (Curran 352). Both styles were designed to project German imperial authority and technological prowess, and were used throughout the empire at the behest of Wilhelm II. Windhoek therefore was, and remains today, a striking example of Deutsches Kaiserreich “power architecture” in the middle of the Namib desert (Osayimwese 286).

The Windhoek Turnhalle (Gymnasium), designed by architect Otto Busch and inaugurated in 1909, echoed a number of buildings on the German home front and became an architectural centerpiece of the colony. With a timber-girdered roof and rounded neo-Romanesque arches, the Turnhalle’s elaborate, imposing design was both a “rallying point” for German settlers and a “distinctive symbol of [the colonial] presence to be beheld with respect and even with admiration by the natives of the country” (T. Roger Smith, qtd. in Metcalf 1)—in other words, an explicit mark of racist superiority. The building was used as a practice hall for the Windhoek Gymnastic Club—itself a symbol of robust imperial masculinity—but as an icon of colonial dominion over South-West Africa, it was also appropriated for extravagant celebrations of Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday each year (Brummer 135). The Turnhalle’s lavish appearance clearly lent itself to authoritative expressions of imperial power, as it was used in turn during WWI by German forces and South African Union troops, and it later housed the 1975-1977 Turnhalle Constitutional Conference, an attempt to reinforce white rule in Namibia’s transition to independence and to stifle the resistance of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (the military wing of SWAPO).² It therefore served for many years as an example of what Mark Crinson calls an “architecture of allegory”: a building that “announce[s]” itself.—and that, by extension, announces the power relations it heralds—by way of “facades, disjunctive form … sheer height, or a new relationship to the city” (229).

Fig. 2

Similarly, the Christuskirche (Christ Church), a German Lutheran church designed by Gottleib Redecker and erected between 1907 and 1910, became a monument to German territorial and ideological expansionism. Located on a promontory above the city, the Christuskirche literally overlooked the local population—an occupation of rarefied air that “enhanced its representational power” (Osayimwese 305). Also designed in the neo-Romanesque style with some fanciful Art Nouveau influence in its undulating roof line, the impressive building signifies the effectiveness of German and Finnish Lutheran missionary efforts in the region—Namibia is one of the most heavily Lutheran countries in the world today—and sets a uniquely German theological tradition in stone. The building’s aims were as much political and ideological as they were religious; the stained glass windows in the sanctuary were a gift from Emperor Wilhelm II, and a plaque (which remains there today) was mounted inside following the Nama and Herero uprising to commemorate the German soldiers who died in the conflict. As Jeremy Silvester points out, the plaque also names the places where each soldier died, and in so doing, it “proclaims both the metaphorical and physical occupation of the land by the German troops” (“Sleep with a Southwester” 275).

Fig. 3

The Germans also erected a number of important monuments in Windhoek in an effort to make their mark on the region. The first was the Kriegerdenkmal, a heavy iron obelisk crowned by an imperial eagle and surrounded by spiked cast-iron fencing, built in 1897 to memorialize the Schutztruppe who died fighting the Nama and Herero. Next, the Reiterdenkmal, an imposing bronze sculpture of a rifle-wielding corporal on horseback atop a stone plinth designed by Berlin artist Adolf Kurle, was inaugurated near Alte Feste during Kaiser Wilhelm II’s 1912 birthday celebrations. It too was constructed, as its commemorative plaque suggests, to honor the German soldiers who died “for emperor and empire to save and protect [South-West Africa] during the Herero and Hottentot uprisings between 1903 and 1907, and during the Kalahari Expedition in 1908,” as well as “German citizens that died [at] the hands of the indigenous [peoples].” The statue looms 31 feet above street level, and its armed rider seems to survey all who move beneath his gaze. These repeated efforts to name and to remember German civilians, and to count German losses, are also efforts to leave unnamed and unrecognized the many thousands Nama and Herero who were killed during the period. The fact that the Reiterdenkmal was erected on the site of a former concentration camp makes this silencing all the more ominous; as Elke Zuern argues, the rider “visibly present[ed] victor’s justice and offer[ed] a warning to those who might continue to resist” (3). Incredibly, this token of “victor’s justice” remained in place until 2009, when the statue was finally removed during the building of the new Independence Museum.³

Fig. 4

Finally, the von François statue, an 18-foot tall sculpture of the former German Reichskommissar rendered in military pose—one hand on hip, the other clutching his sword—was unveiled on Windhoek’s Kaiserstrasse in 1965. Although the street has since been renamed Independence Avenue, the hulking sculpture remains in place. Several writers mention this paradox: can Independence Avenue really be a symbol of postcoloniality with a statue of the first commander of the conquering German Schutztruppe at its heart? Keamogetsi joseph Molapong’s poem “In Search of Questions,” for instance, mentions the “insult” of “standing guard with Von Francois” every time he walks through the heart of downtown Windhoek (95).

As these observations suggest, German monumentalization is dominant in Windhoek even today. Although some few buildings and memorials have been moved or renamed, “[t]he visitor arriving in downtown Windhoek for the first time would be forgiven for wondering if it really had been almost a century since the end of [German] colonial rule” (Zuern 21). The specter of colonial rule hovers menacingly over the postcolonial city; “ghostly reminder[s] of the German colonial state” haunt Windhoek’s post-independence streetscapes (Steinmetz 306). Some of these German buildings are beautiful—the fachwerk (timber-framed) façades in downtown Windhoek that now house shops and restaurants, for example, are of great architectural interest. They are also, however, conspicuous reminders of German rule. Since Germany remains one of Namibia’s most important trading partners and aid donors, and since the relatively privileged German community remains central to the Namibian economy, the Namibian government has often been reluctant to push for the removal of German landmarks (Steinmetz and Hell 158). By and large, then, the city feels painfully unhomely to many of its inhabitants, and this sentiment is frequently reflected in its literature. As Molapong succinctly puts it, Windhoek is full of “[b]uildings and architectures that scream insult, / that harbor artefacts of colonial descent” (“In Search” 95). These “artefacts” motivate both the biting satire and the aching disillusionment of Molapong’s poetic voice; as he puts it elsewhere, the desert’s “white sand” was “paged away” so that a “road … to Hell” could snake through Windhoek’s center (“Omukurukaze’s Thoughts,” Come Talk 95).

When South Africa began administering the area in 1919, Afrikaner settlers slowly trickled in to Windhoek. Although their architectural footprint in the city was smaller than that of the German colonists, they did erect a handful of their own memorials in subsequent years. Foremost among these are the Oudstryder an Bittereinder Monument (1951), which commemorates the Boer diehards who moved to German South-West Africa after the Boer War rather than accept British rule, and the Owambo Campaign Memorial (1919), a monument to the members of the South African Army who died fighting King Mandume Ya Ndemufayo of the Kwanyama Owambo in 1917.

Fig. 5

However, the South Africans played a hugely significant role in the spatial reshaping of the city: in 1948, when officials in South Africa began to implement apartheid at home, the same was mandated for the country’s northern colony. A 1948 housing report compiled by the South-West Africa Administration (SWAA), “Housing for Non-Europeans in Urban Areas,” laid out the principles of urban design by which Windhoek was subsequently organized. It built on the “locations” established for indigenous populations by the Germans and recommended developing further “self-contained…townships” in the area to ensure absolute racial separation. The Natives (Urban Areas) Proclamation, No. 56 (1951), established compulsory segregation of black and “coloured” South-West Africans from white settlers, along with setting curfews, requiring “registration” of location dwellers, establishing “permits” for non-white laborers to enter white areas of the city, and so forth (Simon, “Desegregation in Namibia” 293). The city center was designated “whites only,” and the SWAA took pains to limit “the native population of the town to its actual labour needs” (NAN, “Memorandum for Guidance”) and to “remov[e]…redundant Natives” from urban areas (NAN, “Memorandum on Municipal”).

Following the publication of these reports, South African authorities began to express concerns that the main indigenous location (now known as the “Old Location”) was restricting the westward expansion of the white city, “present[ing] a very serious problem in the future development of the town” (NAN, Windhoek Municipality, 1952). Moreover, a 1952 inspection report of the Old Location delivered to Windhoek’s Chief Native Commissioner describes the location as “depressing” and “nauseating” and tellingly asserts that “the Windhoek location as it stands is a menace not only to the health of its inhabitants but inevitably also to the European community of Windhoek” (NAN, “Inspection Report,” emphasis mine). These racist anxieties led to the construction of Katutura and Khomasdal (“black” and “coloured” locations, with the former further segregated by ethnicity) about five to six kilometers northwest of the city center, a distance that limited non-whites’ contact with “white Windhoek” and restricted access to shared amenities. “[B]uffer zone[s] of at least half a mile” (NAN, “Memorandum for Guidance”), whether green spaces or industrial areas for “noxious trades,” were constructed between segregated communities to minimize interracial contact—zones that have only partially been filled in today and that continue to “reinforce the…geographical and social dislocation” of Windhoek’s urban poor (Frayne 88). When African populations refused to leave the Old Location and began to protest, the government undertook a policy of forced relocation. In December 1959, the police opened fire on protesters, killing 11 and wounding 14 in an event now known as the Old Location Massacre. Mass relocation to Katutura followed, and the Old Location was turned into Hochland Park, a white residential suburb. The name Katutura itself, bestowed by the displaced Africans and meaning “Place Where We Do Not Stay” in Otjiherero, became a symbol of opposition to apartheid in South-West Africa (Pendleton 5). Nevertheless, living in a “place where we do not stay” reinforced a sense of unhomely temporariness for indigenous populations under South African rule.

Katutura was organized around the principle of what might be called “surveillance space,” with streets regularized in a grid pattern, a single road for entrance to and exit from the location, perimeter roads surrounding the community allowing police to encircle the settlement, and floodlights throughout the area (Müller-Friedman, “Deconstructing Windhoek” 6). Dorian Haarhoff’s poem “The Old Location” describes Katutura as being “cemented and segmented / like a blood orange / with tankwide boulevards, / a strong block of offices / plus rented breeze bricks / without ceiling, / single siege quarters / for fenced tenants” (35-42). Beyond the ominous reference to the “blood orange” of the invading Boers, the turn of phrase “tankwide boulevards” suggests the increased militarization of the city, while “fenced tenants” implies that African populations were treated like cattle by South African rule. While the Old Location’s mazy roads, “narrow lanes that def[ied] roadmaking” (NAN, “Inspection Report”), could shield and shelter non-white bodies, Katutura’s “cemented and segmented” streets allowed for no such comfort. As John Ya-Otto, a former trade unionist and SWAPO activist, explains in his memoir, Battlefront Namibia, while the streets in the Old Location “snaked and jogged” around “irregular rows of shacks,” allowing people to “f[ind] a reprieve from the Boers’ efforts to implement their apartheid state,” there was “nowhere to hide” in the new township (35, 44). As displaced communities expanded northward and white suburbs consumed the rest of the city, non-white South-West Africans were further and further distanced from Windhoek’s central amenities. Moreover, the construction of the Western Bypass highway in the late 1970s just west of Katutura and Khomasdal provided “a largely impenetrable barrier between the residential townships…and the rest of Windhoek” and ensured that “native” areas could never be physically contiguous with white suburbs (Frayne 88).

The pattern of segregation established in Windhoek under apartheid troubles the city today; as Jane Katjavivi indicates, this history can still “be seen, and felt” as one moves through the city (5). Insofar as urban space is concerned, the specters of South African rule linger on, such that residents of Windhoek must try to reconcile “the struggle for domestic security with its apparent opposite,” feelings of exile or displacement even at the heart of homeplace (Vidler 12). In other words, Windhoek’s contemporary built environment is at once postcolonial and neocolonial—an uncanny vacillation between heimlichkeit and unheimlichkeit. Indeed, a good deal of apartheid-era (il)logic has been repeated, inadvertently or otherwise, in post-independence city planning. The “politically oppressive urban model [of apartheid is now] regarded as normative and neutral in the post-apartheid era,” meaning that apartheid has effectively been used as a “blueprint” for contemporary urban design (Müller-Friedman, “Just Build it Modern” 49). The 2009-2014 Strategic Plan released by Namibia’s Ministry of Regional and Local Government, Housing, and Rural Development essentially concedes this point, identifying the “lack of proactive town planning” in Namibia’s post-independence period as a barrier to social equality in the country today. As Bruce Frayne puts it, while independent Namibia has had to contend with other “overriding political objectives” that have perhaps prevented the development of more positive planning strategies, the “persistence of elements of colonial city planning” has reinforced a “degenerative cycle of urban fragmentation” in Windhoek (i, 66).

Because independent Namibia is dominated by wealthy whites and by a new class of non-white elites (mostly associated with the SWAPO regime) while the vast majority of black Namibians remain desperately impoverished, it is perhaps unsurprising that “colonial attitudes” are still being “encoded in legislation, building codes, [and] surveillance procedures” in the city (Rogerson 39). The 1996 Windhoek Structure Plan, which is still the city’s guiding urban planning document, often repeats the rhetoric of the SWAA’s housing reports; it promotes “health, safety, order,” proposes “prestige” buildings for the city center and “functionalist” architecture to be erected elsewhere, and suggests that “new street layouts [should] concentrate on designs which improve local surveillance.”⁴ The report also bemoans the fact that rural-to-urban migration is making poverty in Windhoek increasingly “visible” and condemns the building of “unsightly” home businesses in the city. Similarly, Libertina Amathila’s memoir Making a Difference, which focuses on her 20 years as SWAPO’s Minister of Regional and Local Government and Housing, Minister of Health and Social Services, and Deputy Prime Minister, repeatedly articulates her desire for Windhoek to be “clean” rather than “unhygienic.” At one point, Amathila says outright that “[a]s long as [she] was [in office], Windhoek would not be a dirty African town.”

The primary result of this approach to post-independence city planning is the reinforcing of what Fatima Müller-Friedman calls apartheid “archipelagoes” in Windhoek (“Toward a (Post)apartheid Architecture?” 40). These archipelagoes are islands of wealth—often taking the form of fortified, securitized, gated communities, scattered throughout formerly all-white suburbs and proliferating on the southern and eastern edges of the city amidst crushing poverty. White communities and black elites are often tempted towards occupying these gated communities by estate agents’ language of colonial nostalgia (“raising children ‘like many years ago’”; developments called Camelot, Nu Hamlet, Rome, Trafalgar Court), by a fear of urban crime and a desire to “rebuild a sense of territorial control over their direct environment,” or by the presumptions of status ascribed to Gated Residential Developments (GRDs) (Folio, et. al. 894, 899, 891). The titular Dante of Sharon Kasanda’s novel Dante International, for example, lives atop a hill in an “exclusive” estate with an electrified gate and an intercom system for security, an arrangement that reveals “just how decadent and detached the rich in Namibia” are (79-80). Philander caustically describes Windhoek as the “Fort Knox of Africa,” a place where the wealthy retreat behind security fences from the ground-level realities of privation and scarcity (100).

On the other hand, so-called informal settlements,—crowded groups of temporary shacks sanctioned by the city—are largely accepted as a housing solution for Windhoek’s poor, many of whom are black in-migrants from the country’s northern rural areas. (However, there is no tolerance for “illegal” squatting in the city; in 2008, the city demolished shacks in Havana Extension 6 because they had been built without the municipality’s consent.⁵) These settlements typically have little in the way of clean water, electricity, or constructed roads, let alone schools or medical services (CLIP Profile 80-102). Neighborhood names like Five Rand Camp, Illegal, and Sonderwater (Afrikaans for “without water”) are “fitting representations of the lived experience of the places they describe” (Lühl, “The Production of Inequality” 29). There are very few bridges between the spaces occupied by rich and poor in Windhoek, especially because the informal settlements are so far removed from the city center—a stratification that hews closely to the physical segregation enforced under apartheid. Kavevanga Kahengua’s poem “From Within” (from his collection Dreams) makes precisely this point: it identifies the vast physical and psychological distance between the privilege of Klein Windhoek, where “[t]he chosen occupy large spaces / In accordance with the master plan / As laid down to insure / The postcolonial continuum,” and the relative disadvantage of Katutura, where people are huddled “like ants,” where “shelter is a basic need,” and where “days and nights are insecure” (17-20, 41-46).⁶

That said, some of the building that has been overseen by successive postcolonial SWAPO governments has actively contested the scopic regime established under colonial rule. A sprawling new State House complex south of the city center, commissioned by President Sam Nujoma in 2002 and completed in 2008, replaced the South African-built Old State House as the country’s Presidential residence in 2010. As previously indicated, the Reiterdenkmal was moved in 2009 to accommodate the erection of the Independence Museum, the Genocide Memorial, and a statue of Nujoma.⁷ The ponderous, solid museum looms over the nearby Christuskirche, dominating the city’s skyline (a nod to Nujoma’s decree that the museum be taller than any colonial structure in Windhoek) and dwarfing the more curvaceous and decorative German building (Kirkwood 40), while the new commemorative sculptures signal “a state project to transform the memoryscape of the country’s capital city” (Zuern 3).

Fig. 6

Similarly, Heroes’ Acre, a 732-hectare site ten kilometers outside the city organized around a 35-meter-high marble obelisk and an eight-meter-high bronze statue of an Unknown Soldier gripping a grenade and an AK-47, is a testament to both the sacrifices and the successes of the SWAPO revolution (Kirkwood 19). The Windhoek City Council’s website indicates that the site is intended to “foster a spirit of patriotism and nationalism” in future generations of Namibians, and both the militant symbolism and the epic scope of Heroes’ Acre connote the power and grandeur of the postcolonial state (Windhoekcc.org.na).

Fig. 7

Likewise, outside the city’s Parliament Gardens, three bronze statues of indigenous leaders—Herero Chief Hosea Kutako; Reverend Theofilus Hamutumbangela, an Anglican priest and founding member of SWAPO; and Nama hero Hendrik Samuel Witbooi, all of whom led anti-colonial resistance struggles—now jockey with von François for visual command of the city center and for narrative command of the city’s history. Finally, Windhoek’s Street and Place Naming/Renaming Committee has gradually been expunging colonial signifiers from the cityscape: Kaiserstrasse has become Independence Ave.; Curt von François St. has become Sam Nujoma Ave.; Göring St. is now named after Daniel Munamava, a SWANU revolutionary; Louis Botha St. has become Axali Doëseb St., in honor of the composer of the Namibian national anthem; and so on.⁸ All told, the iconography of an independent Namibia appears to be taking hold in the city, at least to some degree, often actively staging a “metaphorical confrontation with [artefacts] of the colonial period” (Kirkwood 40).

Curiously, however, much of this post-independence building has been outsourced to a North Korean company called the Mansudae Overseas Project—the international division of Mansudae Art Studio, North Korea’s state art and architecture firm. As Megan Kirkwood explains, Namibia’s founding President Nujoma traveled to Pyongyang while in exile and became friends with Kim Il Sung. He evidently admired the fact that Mansudae’s work helped to “aesthetically unify the city”—virtually everything in Pyongyang was designed by the firm after the city was nearly leveled during the Korean War—and to “project state ideology” (Kirkwood 9). By hiring Mansudae to design and implement the incipient postcolonial state’s signature building projects, including the State House, Heroes’ Acre, and Independence Museum, Nujoma broke clearly with colonial precedents, but he also ensured that an independent Windhoek would emulate North Korean authoritarian spectacle. Echoing North Korean landmarks like the Kumsusan Memorial Palace and the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery, Windhoek’s Mansudae buildings are hulking Socialist Realist structures that signal state power both in terms of their bulk and heft and in their insistence on a modern, forward-looking aesthetic (a move that counters the Classical nostalgia of colonial building practices). However, they also ring more of dictatorship than of democratic rule; for example, the Unknown Soldier in Heroes’ Acre bears more than a passing resemblance to Nujoma, and the opulence of the State House’s marble floors and grand chandeliers stands in stark contrast to the tin shacks on the city’s northern fringes, suggesting the concentration of postcolonial wealth in the hands of an elite few. Further, while the Namibian Institute of Architects recommended that Independence Museum be erected in Katutura, a location that would allow it to benefit the daily lives of people who participated in the independence struggle, its pride of place in the Central Business District (CBD) distances the museum “from the very people whose freedom it is supposed to represent” (Kirkwood 41). Likewise, the fact that Heroes’ Acre stands at a ten-kilometer remove from the city leaves it almost entirely inaccessible to residents of the black townships, most of whom can little afford the transportation costs associated with such a trip. This explains, in part, why the author’s 2015 visit to Heroes’ Acre found the site eerily underused and falling into disrepair. Rather than becoming a gathering-place in which ordinary Namibians might reflect on their liberation from South African rule, Heroes’ Acre instead has inadvertently come to symbolize the lingering distance of the SWAPO government from the plight of Windhoek’s urban poor.

Many local commentators have remarked on Windhoek’s post-independence “architectural identity crisis”; architect Jaco Wasserfall, for example, argues that “[visually], we are being colonized by the east,” and critiques the city’s failure to draw on indigenous resources in contemporary design and building practices (Wma-arch.com).⁹ In a moment of supposed renaissance, then, Windhoek faces further erasure and loss, missing an opportunity to create “public buildings…[that] reflect…the new Namibian nation, its beliefs, cultures and values, however diverse” (Kisting, The Namibian, 08/27/10). In fact, it might be argued that the Mansudae builds are themselves uncanny, absent as they are of visual references to local landscape and climate, and expressive as they are of the achievements and desires of a select few government officials rather than of democratic nation-building. (Even the new Genocide Memorial, which ought to reflect the cultural and aesthetic practices of the Herero and Nama communities, is overwhelmed by the iconography of the SWAPO freedom struggle.) While this uncanniness is different from that of colonial builds, in that Socialist Realist forms were chosen by the post-independence government precisely because of their refusal to echo European architecture, it nevertheless signals a country estranged from itself—a country willing to outsource control over its built environment to an abusive, authoritarian regime in Pyongyang rather than recognize its own citizens as productive of cultural worth. Similarly, the renaming of streets in Windhoek, while a symbolically significant move, has been satirized by several local authors as a largely cosmetic change to the cityscape. Kahengua’s poem “From Within,” for instance, points to the irony that Klein Windhoek’s Nelson Mandela Avenue signifies stratification rather than liberation for the majority of the city’s residents, given its inaccessible location in a well-heeled suburb (Malaba 21). Likewise, his “The Rumbling Stomach” lists several Windhoek intersections “[w]here great names meet”—“Corner of Robert Mugabe / And Sam Nujoma / Corner of Laurent Kabila / And Nelson Mandela”—but notes that these nominal changes aren’t accompanied by substantive ones, and argues that streets like Sam Nujoma and Laurent Kabila actually shelter those “trapped in their wealth” from Windhoek’s urban poor (17-22, 25). Kahengua’s lines suggest Windhoek’s lingering unhomeliness, noting that despite the changes to the city’s built environment effected since independence, Windhoek still frequently feels like a “precarious,” “estrang[ing]” place (Vidler xi, 12). The supposedly postcolonial city, in other words, is yet haunted by colonial forms; its built environment is shot through with traces of historical persecution and oppression.

II. Writing Windhoek

The power of this unhomely geography can occasionally be shaken by the subterranean itineraries and subversive navigational strategies of individual pedestrians. Although Windhoek’s architectural spaces—its colonial landmarks, apartheid-era townships, and more recent state tendencies towards visual authoritarianism—often seem inhospitable, many local subjects find ways to route through this inhospitality and to take root in their uncanny city. A number of Windhoek writers produce what the Situationists call “psychogeographic maps” of the city: they note the psychic effects of their built environment, revealing the “constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” and critiquing the seeming coercions of the city’s contours (Debord, “Theory” 50). Others go on to contest these coercions, documenting their unconventional uses of “dominated space”—their efforts to turn “a master’s project” (Lefebvre 164, 165) on its head by way of defiant shortcuts, derisive nicknames, intimate reappropriations of official spaces, or casual “wanderings that express … complete insubordination to habitual influences” (Debord, “Introduction” 7). Therefore, while local bodies are often marshaled by the city’s constraints, the literature also argues that personal geographies can sometimes move against official cartographies.¹⁰ Ground-level experiences of place, in other words, can occasionally oppose the “seemingly omnipotent perspective of the planimetric map” (Sant).

The branch of contemporary Namibian literature that might be referred to as “literature of protest,” work that expresses a sense of disillusionment with the postcolonial regime and that highlights the country’s ongoing social problems, frequently focuses on the psychogeography of place. These texts study the “specific effects of the geographical environment…on the emotions and behavior of individuals,” making visible the often difficult experiences of Windhoek’s architectural spaces, especially outside membership in the city’s elite classes (Debord, “Introduction” 5). In so doing, they undermine the rationalizing, hegemonic viewpoint of city planners, revealing nodes of tension and of prohibition that the Windhoek Structure Plan leaves unremarked. For example, Philander’s spare stage space, along with his work’s disregard for the theatrical fourth wall, suggest Windhoek’s informal settlements as “comfortless world[s]”—overcrowded, desperately impoverished areas where, as his characters’ repeated acknowledgments of the audience’s prying eyes indicate, privacy is at a premium (Oliphant 7). When characters from these settlements try to move into the city’s shared spaces, like The Porridge Queen’s titular figure, who sets up a food stall on Independence Avenue and dreams of getting a loan from the “People’s Bank” to “expand [her] business into a more permanent one,” they are beset by feelings of nervous temporariness—the Porridge Queen’s loan, she accepts, is “[w]ishful thinking,” and her claim to a space along the city’s central corridor is fleeting at best (49). Philander also focuses on spaces excised from maps, like Windhoek’s rubbish dumps, where the city’s overlooked citizens live by scavenging. These otherwise unrepresented places appear, too, in poet Hugh Ellis’s work; Ellis’s poem “Hakahana,” named after one of Windhoek’s northern townships, describes a place where “People are living in small-box houses / People are scavenging dumpsites / … / People are living on borrowed time” (2-17). The poem reminds us that “Hakahana” means “hurry up” in Otjiherero, and this prompt, alongside Ellis’s line about “borrowed time,” indicates the sense of impermanence, indeed of unbelonging, felt by many on their home turf.

Similarly, Kahengua’s “From Within” reveals the prohibitive “currents … and vortexes” that restrict access to Windhoek’s wealthy suburbs (Debord, “Theory” 50). “The affluent are privileged,” Kahengua says, “To live in the privacy of hills, / Among the rocks / Like rock rabbits / Amid the silence of a cemetery. / “BEWARE OF THE DOG” / Snarls at me. / From behind the fortress of walls / Dogs bark at the sound of feet, / Of the presumed poor intruder. / The clack of the electrified fence / Makes me an outright alien” (3-14). Architectural and topographical barriers—here electrified fences and a remote hillside location—condition the poem’s emotional economy; Kahengua’s speaker feels like “an outright alien” in Klein Windhoek, dislocated and disaffected. However, this poem takes its psychogeographic work a step beyond critique or lament: its speaker seems less a “poor intruder” than an unruly wanderer, one whose movements “express…complete insubordination to habitual influences” (Debord, “Introduction” 7). To borrow another Situationist term, Kahengua’s speaker is a recalcitrant dériviste or “drifter”: one who roams the city, “slipping” into “forbidden” places, capitalizing on the “labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction,” and both observing and transgressing the city’s “principal axes of passage…exits and…defenses” (Debord, “Theory” 53). For one thing, the poem is called “From Within,” its very title a rebellious gesture. The speaker has already crossed a seemingly impermeable border; s/he is obviously out of place in this “affluent” suburb, but is nevertheless “within” where s/he should be “without.” Similarly, Kahengua’s repeated use of the word “here” (“Here down Nelson Mandela Avenue,” “Here housing is a status symbol,” “Here streets are wide / As highways” [15, 21, 22-23]) insists on his speaker’s locatedness in Klein Windhoek. Although the easterly hillside suburb is far distant from the speaker’s Katutura home, s/he has drifted “here” and he refuses to be deterred (29). In fact, Kahengua’s speaker goes so far as to refer to Klein Windhoek as “Klein /Ae //Gams,” rebelliously speaking the predominantly white suburb’s name in Khoekhoe, the Nama and Damara language (2). This is a subversive assertion of belonging, even of ownership. Moreover, given that “/Ae //Gams” means “hot springs,” the term in a sense returns Klein Windhoek’s “fortress of walls” to its source, articulating a feature of the landscape—the waters—that no architectural intervention can change.

A number of other Windhoek writers echo Kahengua’s sentiments; both Masule Sibanga and Ellis, for example, feature the figure of the cyclist-dériviste, one who flaunts his mobility on two wheels despite the psychogeographic prohibitions against entering some communities in Windhoek. The cyclist-dériviste covers a wide swathe of territory, offering litanies of street names as he rides to counter the fragmentation of the neo-apartheid city. This tactic also writes back to the difficulty of “casual encounter” in the auto-focused, monofunctional city (Lühl, “The Production of Inequality” 27). . Windhoek’s lack of effective public transit and the distance of its black townships and informal settlements from its central spaces of commerce and leisure tend to set segregation in stone; as Phillip Lühl puts it, “the socio-spatial conditions for different groups to interact and actively negotiate thei r… antagonisms are non-existent” in the city (27). The cyclist-dériviste, however, finds his own means of mobility and generates his own encounters. While Sibanga’s ice-cream man in “The Ice-Cream Seller” does so in service of work, peddling his wares down Independence Avenue and Sam Nujoma Drive, Hugh Ellis’s “Babylon by Bicycle” moves instead in pursuit of pleasure or play. Ellis’s speaker rides between Ludwigsdorf and Katutura, wending his way through the city and observing all passers-by, from “[d]omestic workers” to government officials (7-8). Although he is clearly most comfortable in Katutura, “hit[ting] that famous roundabout” in its “[r]ush hour bustle” and being carried along by its crush of bodies, he is more than willing to breathe the “rarefied air” of the city’s affluent easterly suburbs (14, 18). Although Katutura, he observes, is generally “still a world to herself,” he refuses to be confined to that world, riding under the Western Bypass, through Dorado Park, and towards “[t]he castles of Ludwigsdorf” (13, 1). Ellis’s speaker even describes “[c]linging to the hillside with [his] wheels”—a refusal to be shaken loose, even where he appears not to belong (18). Ellis therefore writes back both to the seeming immobility of neo-apartheid space and, in his leisurely progress, to the history that associates cross-racial movement through the city exclusively with labor—the history of migrant workers moving each morning from black compounds to white-owned houses and businesses and back to their compounds in the evenings before curfew. While Ellis’s speaker can subversively skirt Windhoek’s wealthy GRDs, however, he cannot take root there; although he flaunts the geographical gulf between the city’s northern townships and its affluent suburbs, he recognizes that the economic gulf between those spaces is manifestly unbridgeable. These lingering schisms suggest that the dialectic of homely and unhomely that defines the architectural uncanny cannot be neatly resolved: a city shaped for more than a century by colonial powers cannot be fully domesticated by twenty-five years of independence. The postcolonial city therefore does not present a choice between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Instead it gestures towards a topographical hauntology where even the most familiar of spaces are marked by enduring estrangements.

A number of local writers turn to the process of diversion or détournement when negotiating Windhoek’s architectural spaces, a process that recognizes these estrangements but nevertheless insists on self-presencing. The Situationists originally theorize détournement in broad aesthetic terms: “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble” (SI Anthology 55). Later, after his break with the Situationist International, Henri Lefebvre borrows the term to describe a set of specifically spatial practices—“divert[ing],” “reappropriat[ing],” or “put[ting space] to a use quite different from its initial one” (167). In Windhoek, colonial landmarks and monuments have frequently been reappropriated in this way, subversively diverted from their intended uses. For example, the Reiterdenkmal was notoriously reclaimed for indigenous protest rather than colonial memorialization on a few occasions. In 1959, after the Old Location Massacre, Herero activists stealthily covered the rider’s head with a linen bag and decorated the rest of the statue with flowers as a show of resistance to the violence of the South African regime.¹¹ In 2008, anonymous protesters erected 51 crosses inscribed with phrases in Otjiherero around the statue, then inserted a Namibian flag into the barrel of the rider’s rifle. This diversion of the Reiterdenkmal from a locus of German nostalgia to one of Namibian nationalism ignited debates about the function of colonial iconography in a postcolonial state, and may have contributed to the recent removal and relocation of the statue.¹² Similarly, while the Ovambo Campaign Memorial, inaugurated by the South Africans in Windhoek in 1919 after the defeat of King Mandume Ya Ndemufayo, last king of the OvaKwanyama people, was intended to be a testament to the power of Union forces, many OvaKwanyama appropriated the site as a memorial to the king himself. Reports that the South Africans had installed the king’s severed head in the monument actually prompted this subversive détournement; the monument was taken as “an affirmation of [the king’s] presence within the capital city,” and became a site of OvaKwanyama pilgrimage (Silvester, The Colonising Camera 147).

In the literature, we often encounter these diversions of official space, along with accounts of “non-places,” places absented from maps of the city, being subversively appropriated as usable spaces (Trigg 107). For instance, Vinnia Ndadi’s Breaking Contract, an “oral life history” of the independence struggle recorded by Dennis Mercer, describes moving through the apartheid-era city by way of these “non-places” in order to evade white surveillance. When Ndadi is contracted to work for Thromb Brothers, a construction company building houses in Klein Windhoek, he cuts a path “through the bush” and slips unseen through it every time he wants to go “to town” (47). Likewise, when he and a friend are being pursued by the police, they hop into a sewer pipe to shake their followers, successfully evading capture. The sewer pipes offer clandestine routes through the city, routes invisible to colonial eyes but carefully mapped by those working against the regime; Ndadi’s friend Erastus knows immediately that the pipe behind Terrace Motors Garage will “le[a]d underground to the railway station” (42). Kahengua employs similar tactics in his writing, suggesting that there are palimpsestic layers to the city even after independence: some itineraries are claimed by Windhoek’s elites, while others—usually subterranean spaces that maps obscure or repress—are used by the city’s poor. To take just one example, Kahengua’s speaker narrates “The Rumbling Stomach” from underneath a bridge—beneath the teeming life of the city, he prophesies his country’s future. Although the poem is set on Independence Day, March 21^st and others are celebrating Namibia’s liberation, Kahengua’s speaker remains skeptical of the SWAPO government. In fact, his lines explicitly connect the corruptions of the postcolonial state to those of the foregoing colonial regime: “Fireworks rock the night / Like colonial gun motors / From underneath the bridge / Inside my empty stomach / Air rumbles like a thunderstorm” (28-32). This liminal perspective can only issue from a liminal space, and so Kahengua’s speaker claims his spot beneath the overpass as a pulpit of a kind, making a (provisional) home of a supposed “non-place.”¹³

Some texts also toggle between different visual perspectives in order to develop “insubordinate” relationships to local space (Debord, “Introduction” 7). Significantly, several authors allow their characters to take a bird’s eye view of the city—a panoptic gaze that only city planners and denizens of wealthy hillside suburbs are authorized to inhabit. Sylvia Schlettwein’s short story “Blood Brothers,” one of a series of supernatural tales collected in Schlettwein and Isabella Morris’s Bullies, Beasts and Beauties, centrally features this top-down point of view. Its main character is Kobus Visagie, an Afrikaaner with “a white South African rugby player’s face” who spends virtually all his time at Kiepie’s, a (real-life) Windhoek dance club off the Hochland Road that caters to an almost exclusively white clientele. However, after being turned by a vampire during a fight at Kiepie’s, he “trie[s] to walk and discover[s] he [can] fly” (15-16). He subsequently soars over Windhoek. Although he is on the hunt, his newfound perspective is revelatory: he finds himself trying to “spot human movement between corrugated iron, plastic and threadbare blankets below” as the depths of the city’s poverty are laid bare to him for the first time (17). The story also provocatively ascribes a kind of vampirism to Windhoek’s elite hillside suburbs: these areas overlook (in both senses of the word) the townships beneath, allowing the city’s wealthy few to live at the expense of, but at arm’s length from, the impoverished many. Harlech-Jones’s 1999 novel A Small Space offers a similar critique of the neo-apartheid city, turning throughout to the bird’s eye view to both illuminate and contest who is granted access to this proprietary perspective. The book frequently points out that “[t]he SWAPO leadership guys are…buying expensive properties” up in the hills—“[t]hey want swimming pools, big entertainment spaces, en suite bathrooms, covered patios with views, the works” (209). However, even Harlech-Jones’s less advantaged characters subversively seek out top-down views of the city, challenging the privilege of surveillance space and staking their own claims to place. Again and again, these characters find elevated sites overlooking Windhoek, sites that seem to give them some purchase on not just someplace, but (to use Vidler’s word) homeplace. For example, when Simon meets a colleague in the Weimann Building in the CBD, he immediately takes the lift to the roof and walks over to the parapet, wanting a view over the downtown area (227-29). 9). He and Julienne rendezvous at a hilltop knoll, admiring how “across the rolling golden-coloured grassland, Windhoek stretche[s] out on a south-north axis, lying low against the backdrop of mountains” and reveling in the “feeling of boundlessness” that this point of view obtains (110, 117). This almost vertiginous perspective allows for a kind of intimacy with place, even for a transgressive sense of ownership—Simon and Julienne now share “the views” coveted by the “SWAPO leadership guys.” From above street level, Windhoek is a thing of beauty, and Simon and Julienne drink in that beauty “with the gorge at their back, surrounded by space, looking over to the city spread out below in the distance” (116).

Although the desire to domesticate an existing hauntology—in other words, to find ways of navigating difficult spaces instead of dismantling those spaces entirely—may read as quietistic rather than revolutionary, I argue that even such small steps represent major transgressions by members of a profoundly marginalized population. Indeed, in the absence of a dominant political will to alter the fabric of the city by desegregating spaces and eliminating apartheid geographies, the insubordinate movements of subaltern bodies through those spaces become significant gestures of resistance. Moreover, if Sara Ahmed’s assertion that “being at home is a matter of how one feels or fails to feel” holds true, then the individualized labor of engaging one’s own structures of feeling is itself a political act (89). Even if this labor is stealthy rather than overt, and even if it takes the body rather than bricks and mortar as an agent of change, it nevertheless insists upon its own homing refrain as a counterpoint to the city’s unheimlichkeit. Some Windhoek writers take this embodied resistance to the city’s visual regime a step further by asserting, as Bachelard does, that “the world exists through the porous retention of our bodies” just as much as it does through the map (11-12). As Dylan Trigg, describing the phenomenology of memory, puts it, “[w]e carry places with us”—including the ghosts of past places that we bear with us into the present (11). Although Windhoek is undeniably a neocolonial revenant of the colonial city, a space sedimented with traces of both German and South African conquest, “the body [is] the original haunted house” (Trigg 321). In other words, we cannot deny the cityscape’s uncanniness, but if we accept that “places live in our bodies, instilling an eerie sense of our own embodied selves as being the sites of a spatial history that is visible and invisible, present and absent,” we can imagine individual bodies as agents rather than objects of this unheimlichkeit (Trigg 33).

Authors who populate the city with their own ghosts can therefore reclaim the uncanny as a more positive affect—their characters may feel a sense of doubleness, but they are the sources of that doubleness. Katjavivi’s story “Louis Botha Store” makes precisely this point: the Hochland Park in which Katjavivi’s protagonist Uapiona lives is overlaid throughout with memories of the Old Location. Uapiona’s grandparents lived in the Old Location before being forcibly relocated to Katutura, and their stories of that place “invite … a no-longer existing world … into the experience of the still-unfolding present” (Trigg 33). Her grandfather constantly superimposes Old Location landmarks on contemporary Hochland Park, despite the fact that current maps of the city would rather repress this history. He tells Uapiona that his old house was “not far from where we live now,” and he reminds her of the “German stores by the bridge into town” that were razed along with the Old Location shacks (3). Even Uapiona’s name, meaning “the one who wipes away the tears,” allows this “[h]istory [to] be seen, and felt”: she was born on the anniversary of the Old Location Massacre, and her very presence provides a spectral reminder of that event (5). Relocating the focal point of place, as Katjavivi does, in the body instead of in the map, is a gesture of reclamation; each pedestrian makes of the city a personal palimpsest, loosing hordes of her own ghosts in its streets.

Harlech-Jones’s A Small Space similarly suggests that “lived spatiality is not a container that can be measured in objective terms, but an expression of our being-in-the-world” (Trigg 4). Just before independence, Harlech-Jones’s Saul is accused by SWAPO leadership of being a South African spy and is imprisoned by his one-time collaborators for months in a dark dungeon. In order to stay sane, he imagines himself moving freely through the city, accessing familiar itineraries in his mind’s eye. Saul later tells Julienne and Simon

I’d plan my days—for example, one day I’d say, okay, today I’m going visiting in Windhoek…. Then, when I decided, I’d make my mind work. Not just general impressions, that was too easy, that wasn’t really working at it. If I was going to see my parents—for example—then I’d imagine all the details of the route, like each building along the way, the colours of the walls, the shape of the road.(182-83)

The routes he envisions embed themselves in his flesh, and he carries them with him even after he is released. This produces, for Saul, a sense of “dissonance”—a feeling that “the past…[is] almost more real than [his] experiences in the present” (184). This feeling is particularly unsettling because “the two worlds [past and present] resemble each other so closely”; the changed streets that Saul moves through after he is freed seem both familiar and foreign—in other words, uncanny (184). While this experience of “doubling” may be vexed (Harlech-Jones 184), it nevertheless asserts Saul’s body as a source of place, reframing “received geography” as lived space (Allen and Kelly 8). Saul, like Katjavivi’s characters, becomes the locus of Windhoek’s uncanniness, and the fact that past “places live in [his] bod[y]” grants him a kind of ghostly agency in his relationship to the city (Trigg 33). His body, that is to say, is a repository of living history, not simply meat to be corralled by urban planners.

Windhoek is in many ways a “precarious” place (Vidler xii). Virtually everywhere one turns, the city is painfully redolent of its histories of genocide and apartheid. From colonial memorials that negate indigenous losses to the entrenched morphology of segregation, Windhoek’s built environment is indelibly shaped by these violent histories. Even postcolonially, the specters of conquest and subjugation have not been fully banished; while streets are being renamed and monuments to a newly independent Namibia raised, apartheid is still being used as a “blueprint” for future urban planning, and state-mandated projects have tended worryingly towards visual authoritarianism (Müller-Friedman, “Just Build it Modern” 49). For many of its residents, Windhoek is therefore both familiar and foreign, both domestic and unhomely: an example of Vidler’s “architectural uncanny” (xii). That said, however, as A Small Space reminds us, place lives “eerily” in bodies just as bodies live in place, and this observation opens even the most forbidding of official cartography to the détournements of individual pedestrians (Vidler 12). Indeed, as Harlech-Jones and other Windhoek writers indicate, the city is as much a private tapestry of cycling paths and scenic overlooks as it is the public spectacle of the German Alte Feste or the Mansudae-built State House. Moreover, these subterranean itineraries invite rebellious intimacies with place; tellingly, Harlech-Jones’s final line reads, “It was time for them [Simon and Julienne] to go home” (292). Ultimately, if the Freudian uncanny is a kind of “oscillation” between heimlichkeit and unheimlichkeit (Trigg 33), many Windhoek writers reach boldly towards the former, forwarding Windhoek as a site of possible belonging, a space beyond “nostalgia, homesickness, exile, or alienation,” a space to call home (Vidler 12).

Footnotes

1. I should note here that my use of Vidler’s argument is slightly different than his own. Vidler is interested in the ways in which neo-avant-garde architects like Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi employ “the presence of absence” (182) as a defamiliarizing tool in their work, their projects intentionally undermining the supposed security that buildings provide in order to comment on the unhomely, unsettled modern condition (182). In so doing, these architects also reflect on that which is repressed by high modernist architectural practice and commentary immediately following WWII: the fact that the barrier between inside and outside that buildings purport to provide is always permeable, and that the home is always (at least potentially) subject to the pressures of not-home. While Vidler is therefore primarily concerned with specific Euro-American builds from about 1960 onward—builds that reveal the pressures of exile and estrangement—I am applying his terms to the entire urban fabric of a postcolonial city. This relocation, I argue, lends new weight to Vidler’s concept of the “architectural uncanny,” as colonial powers’ attempts to rebuild home abroad and colonized subjects’ efforts to resist these architectural impositions evoke precisely the kind of oscillation between intimacy and strangeness to which Vidler refers. Indeed, postcolonial cities, perhaps more than any other built environments, are suggestive of the “architectural uncanny”: they are at once hospitable and uneasy, at once productive of both belonging and alienation.

2. Between 2005 and 2012, the building housed the Southern African Development Community Tribunal, although the courtroom was destroyed when the building caught fire in 2007.

3. The Reiterdenkmal is still the subject of ongoing controversy—the National Heritage Council has been working to deproclaim the statue as a national monument, and several local German organizations threatened the Namibian government with legal action after the rider was removed. See (“Reiterdenkmal disappears overnight”; “Court battle looms over Reiterdenkmal”; “German groups defend Reiterdenkmal legal threat,” Namibian Sun, 12/26/13; 3/23/14; 4/6/14). The statue has since been relocated to the Alte Feste courtyard, where it is out of the public eye; it has been removed from its stone pedestal and is now supported rather less regally by metal posts.

4. See also the 1995 Residents Survey Report (prepared by TRP Associates for the Municipality of Windhoek) and the National Habitat II Committee’s National Plan of Action (March 1996) for similar language and sentiments.

5. See Sasman, “Windhoek in Serious Growth Squeeze,” AllAfrica.com, 8/31/10.

6. Happily, at least some attention is finally being paid to the importance of thoughtful city planning in Windhoek. The Namibian government’s Vision 2030 policy document, which spells out the country’s longer-term development strategies, recognizes the importance of positive experiences of space and place for urban residents’ “well-being” and cautions against the damaging effects of “uncontrolled urban sprawl” (Namibian Govt 172). (However, the document appears to be much more concerned with the growth of so-called “informal areas” than with the unchecked expansion of upper-middle class suburbs [172]—and this national-level concern legitimizes the Municipality of Windhoek’s demolition campaigns against the squatters’ shacks and shanties springing up on the city’s outskirts.) The City of Windhoek has started to respond to Vision 2030’s aims by promoting mixed-use development, at least in the Central Business District (CBD). For example, the construction of Freedom Plaza, a major downtown redevelopment project spanning several blocks, is now underway. The proposed design comprises hotels, office towers, high-end apartment blocks, retail spaces, community resources (a craft market, a bus terminus, etc.), green space, public squares and arcades, a casino, and so on. If these plans are fully realized, Freedom Plaza will become a major draw for tourists, a gathering-place for (at least some of) the city’s residents, and a model for vertical rather than horizontal expansion that may check the outward growth of GRDs and limit the physical marginalization of the city’s poorest citizens. Additionally, during the author’s 2015 visit to Windhoek, a plan called the CBD Urban Design Framework was being advertised on a downtown billboard, promoted by both the City of Windhoek and a company called the Urban Design Institute of Namibia. The billboard claims an interest in “vibrant, integrated, and multifaceted” design in the CBD, mentioning the development of a “CBD residential strategy,” a concern for the area’s “visual identity,” and an investment in “enhancing arrival and movement through the city.” These are all important principles for strengthening the bonds between local bodies and their lived spaces—a particularly important goal in light of non-white Namibians’ long exclusion from the city center. While Windhoek’s Urban Design Framework project has seen little tangible progress thus far, if it moves forward, it will help to counter the apartheid-era logic in which post-independence urban design has been mired.

7. While the Genocide Memorial, which occupies the former site of the Reiterdenkmal, is an important reminder of one of the darkest episodes of Namibia’s colonial history, its efforts at memorialization have proven somewhat unsatisfying to members of the communities most affected by the genocide. Nowhere does the memorial actually use the word “genocide,” and the uninitiated viewer might interpret the sculpture as yet another commemoration of the SWAPO freedom struggle, emblazoned as it is with the struggle’s unofficial motto, “Their Blood Waters Our Freedom.” Also, while the friezes across the sculpture’s plinth do feature imagery of the genocide, the memorial is topped by a bronze man and woman in modern clothing casting off chains—a gesture far more evocative of the anti-apartheid struggle than of the historical violence done to the Nama and Herero peoples.

8. A relatively up-to-date list of renamed streets in Windhoek can be found at http://www.map-of-namibia.com/windhoek-streetrenames.html.

9. Of course, this is not universally true; several new buildings designed by private firms are much more subtle, and a number of them invoke elements of Namibia’s landscape and ecology in their construction. To take just one example, the lovely new Hilton Eliakim Namundjebo Plaza Hotel, designed by Windhoek firm Wasserfall Munting and completed in 2012, privileges “[l]egibility and transparency” and “invite[s]…Nature…into the building” by way of local stone, indigenous plants, and the building’s “arid” color palette (Wasserfall Munting Architects, wma-arch.com). (These design principles are, of course, a far cry from those of the Mansudae projects; the State House’s bordering steel fence and surrounding guard towers, for example, project illegibility and opacity.) Nevertheless, the fact that Mansudae has been tapped for so many marquee state-mandated projects is telling. In fact, Mansudae is now suing the Tender Board of Namibia’s National Planning Commission for awarding a contract for a new Ministry of Information building to a local construction company rather than to Mansudae, indicating its sense of entitlement to Windhoek’s public projects (Menges, The Namibian, 04/01/14).

10. These texts do have an impact on public discourse in Windhoek and around Namibia, although they are read and discussed primarily by the country’s educated elite. Several of the volumes analyzed in this essay, for example, are assigned to students in Namibian Literature in English courses at UNAM, and so are widely known in postsecondary education circles. Plays and poetry tend to reach slightly larger audiences in Namibia than do novels by virtue of being staged and performed; Hugh Ellis and Keamogetsi Molapong often read their work at Spoken Word Namibia—a poetry-in-performance series that has been running for 10 years now in Windhoek—and Frederick Philander’s plays have been mounted on a number of occasions, usually directed by Philander himself. These events often inspire conversation and sometimes controversy about the social issues facing Namibia today. That said, the adult and youth literacy rates in Namibia are 76.5% and 86.9%, respectively, and only 54% of the population attends secondary school, so access to literary texts in country is fairly limited (Unicef.org). Additionally, cultural events are concentrated in urban centers like Windhoek and Swakopmund, so rural populations have far fewer opportunities to come into contact with the materials discussed here, even in oral form.

11. Interestingly, this protest was carried out at a German rather than a South African monument, perhaps to equate the Boers’ violence with earlier German acts of mass killing in Namibia.

12. These stories are recounted in a number of places; I first encountered them in a discussion of the monument at www.waymarking.com.

13. Moreover, from this pulpit, he rebelliously links the routes of rich and poor, collapsing distances that those in power would rather keep prohibitively expansive. In the same breath, he gestures towards Maerua Mall (“Corner of Laurent Kabila / And Nelson Mandela”), a site of up-market investment and privilege, Hage Geingob, an elaborate rugby stadium in the prosperous suburb of Olympia, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere Street, a road on the northwestern fringe of the city that runs through the impoverished township of Maxuilili (19-22). As Debord explains, “the [psychogeographic] distances that actuallyeffectively separate two regions … …may have little relation with the physical distance between them”—and the vernacular map of Windhoek that Kahengua sketches makes precisely this point, competing with official cartographies of the city (“Theory” 53).

Works Cited

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James J. Hodge (bio)
Northwestern University

Abstract

This essay argues for the impersonally social character of phatic communication in the context of contemporary networked media culture. Georg Simmel’s theorization of sociability as a playfully impersonal mode of social being prior to difference provides the basis for a discussion of the pleasures of phatic communication in digital media in terms of connection not with persons but with the network itself. This pleasure has two distinct poles of experience: being and relating. The latter portion of the essay examines this distinction through the analysis of two digital artworks, Frances Stark’s My Best Thing and David OReilly’s Mountain.

The Network as a Felt Relation of Non-relation

What is a phantom cell phone vibration? As a number of recent scientific studies show, the sensation of a vibrating cell phone in its actual absence has become increasingly common.¹ While explanations vary, the term evokes the neuroscientific concept of phantom limbs, a phenomenon marked by the (often painful) felt sensation of a missing limb as if it were present. Accounts of phantom limbs illustrate the existence and plasticity of the brain’s internal representation of the body, or body maps.² Such studies presuppose a prosthetic logic of embodied incorporation, augmentation, and extension familiar to media studies since at least Marshall McLuhan. By contrast, phantom phone vibrations plainly exceed the logic of technical prosthesis. Like older telephone technologies, mobile telephones extend the human body’s capacity to communicate and act across vast distances. Phantom vibrations, however, index a different transformation in the human techno-sensorium than the old modernist tale of the conquest of time and space.³ More sensational, intensive, and strikingly non-agential, phantom phone vibrations evince the diffuse and ordinary sensation of being “always on.”

The notion of living an “always on lifestyle,” as danah boyd calls it, imagines the contemporary networked subject as a kind of machine without an off button (boyd 2010). While devices may shut down, their networked infrastructure does not. Neither Facebook nor Google nor my cellular network provider turns off. Human subjects, of course, do need to “power down.” As Jonathan Crary notes, human beings need to sleep! (Crary 2013). Simply put, always-on networking problematically implies a fantasy of symmetry between lived experience and its technological infrastructures (smartphones, wireless networks, ubiquitous media). The availability of the network is not, however, the availability of the networked subject. The phantom phone vibration’s spastic hum from nowhere exemplifies this impossible, asymmetrical relation of network and subject, a relation of non-relation that desires so much more possibility, so much more symmetry. Defined in light of this situation, the ordinary fantasy of being “always on” is less a “lifestyle” than a series of technical and discursive practices through which one manages, cultivates, and tends to the oddly ambient demandingness of networked infrastructure. More specifically, one tends not so much to the infrastructure itself as our indirect relation to it.

Phatic communication plays a crucial and variable role in managing the felt relation of non-relation to the network central to being “always on.” Phantom phone vibrations and e-mail alerts are phatic insofar as they establish, affirm, or sustain the possibility of connection. Many more digital habits are primarily phatic: checking email incessantly, scrolling social media newsfeeds or waterfall displays, gaming during moments of micro-boredom, swiping left and right again and again, and even just the urge to pull out a phone for no reason other than to unlock the screen and check, well, whatever. These ostensibly “active” practices seem to reinforce the reigning characterization of digital subjectivity as at least vaguely purposeful and driven by a need for “productive” intersubjective or personal connection. The actions most common to being online—scrolling, swiping, tapping, browsing, and clicking—are, however, perhaps first and foremost responses to the felt fact of networked connection. They’re about living in networked relation generally. Being networked, then, is less about striving for connection to anyone or anything than it is about maintaining and managing the felt experience of connection as such. Phantom phone vibrations are merely one of the more vivid examples underscoring the impersonal sociability of always-on networking, of living life on the basis of an ambient possibility of being connected otherwise afforded by networked digital infrastructures.⁴

In this essay I describe the simultaneously impersonal and social character of connection in contemporary media culture. The first half of the essay examines linguistic theories of phatic address to specify the impersonal nature of networked connection. Georg Simmel’s notion of sociability, or the fundamental drive for relation as such prior to social affiliation, helps to flesh out the pleasurably social dimension of phatic communication. Even as Simmel’s short essay on sociability appeared over a century ago, his discussion of conversation and flirting as artful and playful modalities of sociability uncannily resonates in the age of texting and Tinder. The key distinction is, of course, that while Simmel theorizes sociability as impersonally intersubjective, sociability in the era of digital networks concerns impersonal connection to the network itself.

The second portion of the essay discusses two digital moving image artworks: Frances Stark’s feature-length video My Best Thing (2011) and David OReilly’s art game Mountain (2014). Impersonal connection is a frankly difficult subject to thematize in a sustained critical idiom. As the example of phantom phone vibrations illustrates, impersonal connection is at once embodied and highly resistant to representation if not wholly non-representational. It is also distinctively ephemeral and persistently peripheral. Digital art becomes valuable and instructive here for the way it offers striking reflexive and sustained presentations of these problems. My Best Thing and Mountain alike emphasize the impersonal dimensions of the experience of digital media. My Best Thing almost completely brackets any direct human presence in its serial narrative of one woman’s Internet chats with two different Italian men. The video features basic animations of the three main characters set against a monochrome green background. Synthesized digital text-to-speech programs provide the dialogue through which we experience indirectly (or quite indirectly) conversational flirting and mutual masturbation. Like My Best Thing, Mountain suspends any direct representation of human experience. Much of the game features a mountain/planet floating in outer space occasionally offering subjective yet highly impersonal remarks on its own emotions and the weather. Despite such bare bones, anti-anthropomorphic, or impersonal modes of address, both works exert a powerful hold on their audiences. It is precisely if improbably by means of their manifest impersonality that the phatic emerges more clearly as the affective engine of networked digital sociability.

Critics discussing social media and networks too often assume that the allure of connection lies with interpersonal or intersubjective relationality. In her study of Facebook, for example, José van Dijck argues for a distinction between “connectedness” and “connectivity” (van Dijck 2013). The former refers to users’ relations to one another; the latter refers to users’ more ambivalent relation to “Third Parties,” e.g. corporations and advertisers. Connection here denotes living in explicit or implicit relation to a potential somebody or a group of somebodies. It ignores, however, the more fundamental and ordinary impersonal pleasures of simply being connected to the network. This mode of sociality overlaps with but ultimately exceeds identity-based discussions of personhood and sociality, discussions that typically return to problems such as the public, private, and anonymity. To be sure, several critics, such as Steven Shaviro, do recognize the profoundly impersonal dimensions of networked connection. But even for Shaviro, the problem of identity remains paramount as something “implanted from without, not generated from within” (13). Instead, I take a cue from media theorist Scott C. Richmond’s observations about the appeal of Candy Crush Saga and Grindr.⁵ For Richmond, such media don’t show up too much. They don’t demand that I perform my subjectivity in any lasting, defining, or decisive fashion. Casual, desultory connection to the network allows me not to have to be myself too much. As Richmond notes, the pleasure of not having to be oneself too much can mean quite a lot in the context of digital neoliberalism’s constant opening up of markets (e.g. friendships as monetizable data). And to be clear, I imagine this impersonal pleasure as conceptually and phenomenologically distinct (if not wholly separable) from the much-noted carnivalesque performance of identity online, the work of crafting avatars, handles, and profiles. In contrast to analyses of online identity typically centering around immersive virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, I argue that many of the pleasures of connection are profoundly impersonal. They’re not about being or becoming someone else. The ordinary and impersonal pleasures of networks are about not having to be oneself too much; impersonal connection is about the bare sensation of feeling connected.

Alongside recent work by scholars such as Richmond, Patrick Jagoda, and Kris Cohen, I offer this essay as an effort to re-orient the study of new media toward ordinariness, art, and the social dimensions of networked affect.⁶ Much prominent work in digital media theory emphasizes the nonhuman and implicitly impersonal character of human experience and knowledge as networked and technical. Yet this work often retreats to airy frames of metaphysical inquiry unfriendly to the more granular and the frankly messy experience of contemporary subjectivity. It is revealing that the very subject of subjectivity feels more native to affect and queer theory than to digital media studies, which too often favors masculinist discussions of the technical operation of software or the suspiciously sex-free domain of ontology. Approaches to media culture attendant to the subject as the focal point of critical investigation—and which combine approaches to digital media with affect and queer theory—are more urgently needed.

Recent work in queer and affect theory focuses on the impersonal dimensions of experience. While digital media theory privileges various spectra of experience such as varieties of non-conscious cognition running from intelligent machines to humans to rocks and other things, queer theory concerns itself with the “non-sovereignty” of the subject (Hayles 2014). Unlike digital media theory, queer theory by and large has no problem with anthropocentrism. Conceived in opposition to the implicitly straight, white, male, educated, financially solvent liberal self of classical economics (homo oeconomicus), the economic subject who can act in the world and make decisions unbeholden to anyone else, queer theory’s characterization of the subject as non-sovereign acknowledges the ways in which the self and its attachments to others and the world remain variously incoherent, ambivalent, and dynamic. On this point, I aim to build on Lauren Berlant’s work on affect, ordinariness, and the historical present. Berlant writes, “To think about sensual matter that is elsewhere to sovereign consciousness but that has historical significance in domains of subjectivity requires following the course from what’s singular—the subject’s irreducible subjectivity—to the means by which the matter of the senses becomes general within a collectively lived situation” (Berlant 2012, 53). While attending resolutely to subjectivity, Berlant’s concern with non-sovereignty resonates with digital media theory’s concern with the impersonal dimensions of contemporary technologies. Berlant’s goal, as I understand it, is to examine how forces beyond our own apparent agency nonetheless exert tremendous influence on lived experience in its constitutive incoherence, its non-sovereignty. These forces include both the network in its parallel operation to human consciousness as well as much of our own, quite local and amodal embodied experiences called “affect.” The problem is to grasp the points of intersection or mediation by and through which the subject reckons with the forces shaping its ongoing formation and articulation. How is subjectivity produced not only by the powers that exceed it but which it can never know? This essay argues that the phatic form of address in digital networked media represents a key point of connection between subject and network. As such, the phatic plays a key role in producing the digital subject and its promotion of impersonally sociable connection.

Feeling the Call of Networks: From the Phatic to the Sociable

The network calls out. And it feels good!

The network calls out constantly. My phone buzzes. A ding or trill accompanies the arrival of a text message. My Macintosh laptop “breathes” when it’s sleeping. Pop up ads “pop up.” While these noises, lights, and small animations sometimes feel annoying, they also remain deeply appealing. Few people manage to put their phones away or keep them away from their persons, and this seems instructive. Without succumbing to the rhetoric of addiction—“Are you addicted to your phone???”—it is important to note how even the arrival of an e-mail may carry with it a faint libidinal promise. E-mail is perhaps the least sexy mode of networked connection. But, if—like me—you’ve stopped reading a good novel to attend to an e-mail that ended up being something from a listserv, then you know what I’m talking about. That e-mail wouldn’t feel so deflating or disappointing if its sonic arrival didn’t tap into a latent urge for connection, for being or living otherwise in even the thinnest of quotidian or fleeting fantasies. Instead of understanding hailing in terms of interpersonal communication in the scene of contemporary media, I argue we may best grasp the forms of digital address as impersonal and social. We need to understand better how such apparently unappealing forms of address sustain a powerfully persistent—if simultaneously ambient and soft—libidinal promise of connection. We need to understand, in other words, digital forms of address in terms of their phatic character.

Phatic communication feels good because it’s primarily social. Yet this crucial aspect of phatic communication has been oddly displaced in its travels from anthropology to linguistics via information theory. Indeed, the phatic begins as part of a theorization of social life.

In the early twentieth century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski coined the term ‘phatic communion’ to describe how language establishes and maintains social bonds. Importantly, phatic communion does not depend upon semantic content. It occurs even in the absence of a shared language. Malinowski writes,

Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfill a social function and that is their principal aim, but they are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the listener. Once again we may say that language does not function here as a means of transmission of thought. (Malinowski, 330)⁷

Phatic communication shores up social bonds or establishes and re-establishes a connection. It names a form of ongoing acknowledgment of co-presence and social proximity. Its primary role is social over and above any need to transmit ideas or content. When I say “How are you?” to an acquaintance in passing I’m just acknowledging our momentary co-presence in time and space. I’m not actually asking how she is (a lengthy response would feel like too much). All the same, the phatic communicational event remains irreducibly social.

In his influential account of the phatic as a linguistic function, however, Roman Jakobson de-emphasizes this founding dimension of the phatic. Jakobson’s re-theorization of the phatic comes in the larger context of his synthesis of linguistics and information theory. The resulting combination de-privileges the social function of the phatic in Malinowski’s formulation. For Jakobson, phatic messages serve

to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (‘Hello, do you hear me?’), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (‘Are you listening? Or in Shakespearean diction, ‘Lend me your ears!’—and on the other end of the wire ‘Um-hum!’). (Jakobson 355)

The word ‘communion’ drops out in Jakobson’s treatment. While communication inevitably implies or implicates some social dimension in play, Jakobson’s description feels decidedly less social than technical; a social bond here becomes a channel. In the wake of Ferdinand de Saussure’s synchronic linguistics, the phatic designates a function of a language system whose larger functioning maintains an aloofness from concrete, historical social interactions. For Jakobson, the phatic is technical and linguistic over and above its mediation of the social. His reworking of Malinowski remains suggestive because it affirms an affinity between the historical theorization of the phatic and the advent of information theory at the origins of contemporary media culture. As Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan shows, Jakobson adapts the structure of Claude Shannon’s diagram of information theory for his own model of linguistic functions (Geoghegan). This move remains relatively unappreciated, however, for the way it privileges a technical model of operation over and above Malinowski’s emphasis on the social. In Jakobson’s re-theorization, the phatic becomes a technical aspect of language, not the self-sustaining and pleasurable mode of social affiliation it is for Malinowski. In the section quoted above, Jakobson discusses the phatic in relation to the part of his diagram labeled “contact.” All of his examples imagine a person talking to another person. And yet one of his examples sticks out for the way it masquerades as intersubjective communication. As Jakobson himself specifies, the phatic functions “to check whether the channel works.” In such cases, and even if such acts require a response from another human interlocutor, the phatic serves to verify the infrastructural viability of communication. Such instances privilege technical modes of communication. What’s more, they ever so slightly displace human communication as the default frame of communication. Even as one may speak to a somebody—can you hear me now? Good!—such phatic communications primarily address a technical system.

A further glance at the similarities between Shannon’s and Jakobson’s diagrams reveals something of the probable motivation for this subtle but hugely significant shift. Jakobson’s “contact” corresponds to Shannon’s “noise.” For Shannon, noise signifies the measure of disorder in communication. It is not an obstacle to communication but rather constitutive of it. Taken a step outside the mathematical purview of his theorization of information—a step Shannon warns against but which has been done countless times—noise can also be considered in terms of its address to human experience.⁸ Rendered phenomenally as “noise”—white noise or non-semantic elements such as glitches or fuzz—noise indicates the availability or existence of a channel of communication. Whether considered strictly as an engineering problem or more broadly, noise names a property of a technical system. As much as Shannon’s theory of communication has obvious ramifications for the study of communication, it privileges the technicity of communication over and above what Malinowski would call “social bonds.” In synthesizing Malinowksi with Shannon, Jakobson quietly brings attention to the impersonally technical and mediated nature of communication. My argument is that this quiet transformation of the phatic reorients its relation to the social. Jakobson effectively pivots away from the profoundly intersubjective scene of the social sketched by Malinowski, a move that has much broader implications when considered against the historical backdrop of the massive influence of Shannon’s theory for the development of networked information systems.⁹ The question arises: does the phatic lie similarly at the basis of contemporary media culture?

In his elaboration of the rise of “phatic culture,” sociologist Vincent Miller gestures toward an affirmative answer to the question. Taking up the emergence of networked digital culture through the rise of social media such as blogs, social networking websites and microblogs, Miller cites Malinowski’s (but not Jakobson’s) notion of the phatic in a discussion of phatic technologies: “technologies which build relationships and sustain social interaction through pervasive (but non-informational) contact and intimacy” (395). More concretely, for Miller, Twitter represents a paradigmatic instance of phatic culture because it sustains a sense of connected presence that “is necessarily almost completely devoid of substantive content” (396). Miller’s account helpfully sketches out the phatic character of networked media culture. What Miller misses, in his resolute focus on networks of persons, is the deep phatic appeal of a media culture that, of necessity, also includes technologies. Indeed, Miller neglects the revealing extent to which Twitter is only just mostly human. As a 2014 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals, a significant percentage of active Twitter handles do not properly belong to individual persons but rather to bots, that is, automated programs whose very job is simply to call out (Mottl).

Our devices call out. But it’s only partially right to say they’re calling out to us or that they call out to serve as mere vehicles for interpersonal exchange. Our devices do not call out in the form of a direct address. They do not call out to us or for us because they do not primarily mediate person-to-person networks but rather the connections of machines to other machines or other technical systems. As much as Apple and similar-minded companies strive for new forms of personal computing and branding such as the iPhone or iPad, digital media hail human subjects in an irreducibly impersonal idiom. Amazon may hail me “personally”—Jim, we recommend X for you—but it does so algorithmically. Amazon.com hails me as market data, not as a person with parents and psychological depth. To synthesize Althusser and Deleuze, the network does not call out like a policeman in the street (hey! You there!). The network does not hail me as a disciplinary subject of the law and possible incarceration. The network hails me as a dividual, a collection of data points to be sifted algorithmically. Big Data is not Big Brother. To put the matter otherwise, networked digital media simply do not partake of what Émile Benveniste terms the “I-You” structure of address central to the construction of linguistic subjectivity (218ff.). Digital media’s phatic character does not evoke the structure of one thing (a subject, an I) acting upon or communicating with another (an object, a You). It operates more like expression in the middle voice, a tense not found in English or Romance languages but present in a minority including Ancient Greek, Swedish, Tamil, and Icelandic among others. The phatic character of digital media evokes more a sense of an impersonal “it happens” rather than an enunciation founded in the familiar and arguably inescapable structure of I-You in English and other languages. And in the context of digital media, the “it happens-ness” of phatic address seems to index a happening elsewhere.

Digital media work at scales and speeds that largely exceed the purview of human perception and cognition. The operational withdrawal of digital technics, especially in its invisible and ubiquitous proliferation “out of the box and into the environment” begs for further inquiry into the question of how human experience comes into contact with contemporary media as infrastructure (Hayles 2009, 48). As media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen notes, this means that digital media’s address to human experience, in contrast to older media such as print or cinema, may be characterized as massively indirect or oblique (Hansen 2012, 53). This means that even as much as digital media unquestionably structure our lives as a largely insensible or inaccessible domain of infrastructure (Wi-Fi, undersea cables, the microprocessural nature of code) the question arises as to how we interface at all with such infrastructure or if “interfacing” may be reduced to the surface effect of a system that remains deeply opaque?¹⁰

The phatic address of digital networks working in concert with our phatic habits provides a powerful scene for confronting the feeling of non-relation to digital media infrastructure. In the context of digital media’s “massively indirect” address to human experience, Hansen argues for the relatively novel significance of the periphery of experience, or what he also calls “sensibility.” Sensibility names the dimension of lived experience beyond the modal specificity of perception as well as the deliberative privilege of higher-order consciousness (Hansen 2015). I affirm the spirit of this project in my own inquiry into the phatic sensibility of always-on networking. While Hansen theorizes this media historical condition in onto-cosmological terms, my own concerns return to the ordinary. Why does the phatic feel good? Or, if that question is too naïve, why does the phatic successfully conscript us into feeling always on?

Why is the phatic more than just annoying? A person tapping you on the shoulder over and over again engages in phatic communication. It may be annoying, but the implied promise (however thin) of inhabiting another social relation feels good. In a similar vein, e-mail can be annoying, but it can also feel good for the simple reason that it establishes or sustains a form of technical connection. In an essay from 1910, sociologist Georg Simmel builds on Aristotle’s famous characterization of man as a “social animal” with insights crucial for understanding the pull of today’s phatic media culture. Sociability, for Simmel names the “drive” for relation as such. For Simmel, “the impulse to sociability distils, as it were, out of the realities of social life the pure essence of association, of the associative process as a value and a satisfaction” (128). Sociability names a dimension of social life prior to affiliation. Sociability is social relation, in other words, prior to identity. Even as Simmel presupposes the field of the social as that toward which sociability strives, his theorization of sociability prior to social distinctions or differences—a drive for association as such—furnishes the basis for articulating the allure of contemporary media’s phatic address. The blinking lights and bells of mobile and networked media call out, and by so doing solicit a response in the mode of sociability, or in the idiom of social media, connectivity in general over and above connection to anyone in particular. Texting, for example, is pleasurable not precisely because of who we’re texting; the open-ended and associational character of texting or instant messaging is an end in itself.

Simmel’s two main examples of sociability are flirting (discussed as “coquetry”) and conversation. The pleasures of both practices vividly exemplify Simmel’s emphasis on the open-ended nature of sociability. On a fundamental level, the pleasures of both flirting and conversation involve being in relation as such. Anticipating Malinowski’s discussion of phatic communion, Simmel writes, “in sociability talking is an end in itself; in purely sociable conversation the content is merely the indispensable carrier of the stimulation, which the lively exchange of words unfolds” (136). Even as a conversation may turn upon revelations, disagreements, and negotiations, sociability as a play of relation itself “may retain its self-sufficiency at the level of pure form” (136). Texting and instant messaging function in a similar way. Only the emergence of a “business-like” point in the conversation vanquishes sociability. Sociability diminishes when decisions must be made or contracts signed, i.e. the serious and decidedly unpleasurable points in an exchange that put an end to the phatic play of possibility. Pick you up at 7? It is no wonder so many people complain of an increased inability to make plans after the introduction of smartphones. Making plans actually works against the reigning fantasy of always-on computing in its phatic sociability. The network’s job, indeed the being of the network is to not make plans to the extent that any such decision would mark an exit from networked sociability and its phatic pleasures. The crucial turn, again, lies with the impersonal nature of networked sociability.

Art and play also figure centrally in Simmel’s account. Simmel defines sociability as “the play-form of association” insofar as “the fact that in every play or artistic activity there is contained a common element not affected by differences of content” (128). To be sure, Kant’s aesthetics lingers in the foreground and background of Simmel’s discussion. Kant’s famous discussion of aesthetic experience as “purposive purposelessness” and the “free play of the faculties,” resonate with Simmel’s emphasis on the open-ended character of sociability (what we might call today being “always on”) and his emphasis on the artful play of sociability. Departing from Kant, however, Simmel’s emphasis on the ordinariness of social relations and their exemplification in aesthetics holds powerful lessons for assessing the value of art in examining contemporary media’s networked sociability.¹¹

Shot-Reverse-Shot After Instant Messaging: Phatic Sociability in My Best Thing

The centrality of art and play in Simmel’s account suggests that analysis of digital artworks can help us grasp the low-level pull of phatic sociability characteristic of ordinary networked experience. Such analysis helps particularly because the phatic, so difficult to grasp in ordinary experience, plays a strong formal and aesthetic role in a number of important digital artworks. Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s digital installation Listening Post (2001), for example, sonifies network subjectivity in its computer-synthesized pattern repetitions of “I am” statements.¹² A machinic beep precedes each utterance. Untethered from specific sources and divested of the singular grain of individual human voices, each “I am” statement functions as a bare utterance of indexical hereness absent local particularity. In the nascent genre of data visualization, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s online We Feel Fine (2006) project gives variable form to “I feel” statements culled anonymously from the web. Its animated Java applet interface depicts these statements as colorful phatic particles floating against the black vacuum of networked space. Like Listening Post, We Feel Fine brackets statements from their personal sources. Instead of promoting the singularity of personal emotion, We Feel Fine reveals the generic and therefore impersonal quality of despair, love, and depression without the grain of embodiment. After reviewing a number of samples, each colorful dot starts to feel like any other, an expression of sameness grounded in the fact that somebody somewhere wrote an “I feel” statement. Confession becomes phatic.

A number of digital artworks might well demonstrate the intimate ties between the phatic dimension of communication and networked sociality. No artwork, however, better concretizes the phatic and playful dimension of networked sociability than Frances Stark’s 2011 My Best Thing. Stark’s feature-length video demonstrates how Simmel’s two forms of sociability—flirting and conversation—remain central to networked culture, albeit in a profoundly impersonal manner. My Best Thing is a quasi-fictionalization of the artist’s own experiences with online communication, flirting, and mutual masturbation with two Italian men over the course of 10 and “a half” episodes. With the exception of a few inserted video clips, My Best Thing consists largely of animation generated by the formerly free (and now defunct) website Xtranorml, whose motto “if you can type you can make a movie” provides the project’s technological basis. Xtranorml animation software renders Stark and the two Italian men as minimally expressive Playmobil-like figures with computer-synthesized speech. The video thrives on the disjuncture between the complexity of the dialogue and implicit but unseen action with its bare bones visual correlate. On screen we see two figures facing each other. But sex and dialogue clearly occurs via instant messaging and video chat. Other interfaces and technologies unevenly disturb the conversational rhythm between Frances and the two Italian men: chatroulette, Facebook, gambling, television, and phones. Comical elisions in the dialogue also indicate the intrusion of time spent away from the computer inflecting the continuing but disjunctive nature of dialogue. A continual tension between form and content allows the video to denaturalize the phatic dynamics of online communication and to critically dilate the dynamics of network sociability.

My Best Thing makes special use of the classical Hollywood editing technique of shot-reverse-shot, an editing convention the video strains to near breaking point in its evocation of networked relations (Fig. 1).

As Kaja Silverman has shown, shot-reverse-shot sequences play a crucial role in connecting the spectator to the discourse of the film. Such sequences “suture” the spectator within cinematic narrative by cutting back and forth between camera angles representing the points of view of two characters in dialogue. In the tradition of the classical Hollywood cinema, shot-reverse-shot sequences render cinematic space coherent (See Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson). Shot-reverse-shot also gives psychological coherence to the cinematic illusion of presence, a sense of spectatorial adhesion or “you-are-there-ness.” There is, however, nothing inherently coherent about the “profilmic” space of My Best Thing. The figures stand against a green background suggestive of green screens and the digital apparatus of post-production.¹³ The use of shot-reverse-shot to dramatize the play of instant messaging reveals a different kind of suture at play: the felt relation of nonrelation instanced by phatic sociability.

At a key moment, Marcello tells Frances she must promise him something. Not knowing what it is, Frances expresses anxiety. Playing upon her worry, Marcello types demands to her one word at a time, a practice realized formally by the stilted, staccato rhythm of the computer synthesized dialogue, and reinforced by the use of shot-reverse-shot close-ups. He types,

you / must / promise / to / me / that / am / an / Italian / boy / living / in / Rome / that / you / that / are / an / American / woman / living / in / L.A. / that / the / day / after / the / beginning / of / the / next / year / I lose myself. / Aaaaaahhhhhhhh…

Two shots accompany every single word in the sequence: close ups of Marcello and a reaction shot of Frances. The readymade quality of My Best Thing plays an important role here (indeed, the video references Duchamp’s infamous Fountain later on). Frances reacts “emotionally” to every single word with a small repertoire of facial reactions including blinks, smiles, frowns, and tilts of the head. Such excessively melodramatic editing—as if each word needed to be felt by itself—underscores its real world source in instant messaging one word at a time. Notwithstanding the cartoonish character of the human figures in My Best Thing, they gradually become naturalized as avatars for specific persons who never actually appear in image or voice. All of the Italian’s man’s speech is subtitled. Here, the conspicuous absence of a subtitle for the word you negatively foregounds the impersonal character of this exchange. The absence of the word ‘you’ suggests a movement beyond its ostensibly personal form of second-person address toward what I earlier described as the middle voice-like character of digital media’s phatic address.

This sequence further undoes the scene’s personal naturalism by juxtaposing the familiar conventions of cinematic “suture” with a mode of networked connection playing upon the felt expectation of waiting for a text or instant message to arrive. The thread of dialogue ultimately falls apart. Insofar as sociability thrives on flirting and conversation—and stops dead only when business is contracted, as in a promise made—this breakdown of conversation actually signals its continuation. The whole sequence plays in the elliptical zone of the messaging bubbles familiar to iPhone users (Bennett 2014). Such bubbles indicate that someone is typing a message and so play upon the general experience of connection in its vaguely futural orientation. The “promise” Frances must make, which Marcello can never articulate, is merely the allegorical pretense for the more massive yet always thinly expressed promise of networked sociability embodied by every blip, bloop, ding, or buzz: the promise of being potentially otherwise.

The ‘thing’ in My Best Thing refers to a penis. Marcello asks Frances, “do you want to see my best thing?” Stark’s title draws our attention to this curiously meaningful phrase. Yet why is My Best Thing named after something so concrete yet so manifestly absent? True, it’s a bit of a crude joke. But like My Best Thing, which ranges over politics, literature, and art, it’s also playfully profound. Put simply, My Best Thing is about networked sex. Like Marcello’s nonvisible penis—and like the missing rocket, the phallic symbol at the center of the dream sequence quoted at length from Federico Fellini’s 8½—literal and visible sex remains off stage. Marcello’s “thing” here operates as a sign multiply signifying penises, sex, and artistic production—it is, after all Frances Stark’s “best thing,” her self-proclaimed best work of art but also another absent phallus.

The manifest absence of sex in any carnal sense brings us back again to the issue of the erotics of phatic sociability, suggesting that networked sex hinges on a sense of sex in an expanded and non-representational sense, an idea long familiar to scholars of theories of sexuality. In Berlant’s formulation, “Sex is not a thing, it’s a relation; it’s a nonrelation in propinquity to some kind of a recognition” (Berlant 2007, 435). Sex is not an object in the sense of a discrete event or form with definable contours; sex is rather a peculiar form of relation resonant to what I’ve been discussing here as subjectivity’s felt relation of non-relation to the network. For Berlant, sex is a non-relation in indeterminate intimacy with something recognizable, i.e. something resolvable, knowable, and capable of repetition.

I want to propose a schematic distinction to help clarify these abstract terms. We might discern a continuum between the ideal poles of objecthood and relationality. This continuum would include various modalities of subjectivity situated or oscillating between being and relating. In particular, between relationality and objecthood or being lie the mediating twin dynamics of nonrelationality and thingness. The object denotes something known while the thing expresses the unknowableness of an object born of a manifest asymmetry or opacity of relation, in short, its non-relationality. With Berlant we can say that sex is not a thing. But we may propose that sex expresses a certain thingness in its proximity to the objecthood of being without losing its relational character precisely as a non-relation, a chasm, a governing opacity. Refracted through Stark’s title, My Best Thing invites viewers to consider sex as thingness. Such thingness never, of course, comes into view. Instead, the video’s playfully impersonal erotics render in textual form the habitus of phatic sociability (instant messaging) by other means (cinema). In other words, My Best Thing explores sex in its thingness as a play of technical and formal relations over and above any intersubjective drama.

Another way to cast the continuum between objecthood and relationality would be to say that My Best Thing interrogates the pleasurably slippery spaces, the give and take, the variable synchronies between being and relation that more generally characterize networked life. Leo Bersani calls attention to the way sociability dissolves or at least brings into proximity the seemingly distant poles of being and relating, the respective avatars of the individual and the social. “Sociability,” Bersani notes, “is a form of pure relationality uncontaminated by desire.” “Why, exactly,” Bersani queries, “is pure relationality so pleasurable?” (9). Following Simmel, Bersani locates the impersonal pleasures of sociability in rhythm. Bersani writes, “It is as if there were a happiness inherent in not being entirely ourselves, in being ‘reduced’ to an impersonal rhythm.” The happiness or pleasure that inheres, moreover, in the rhythmic play of sociability found in flirting and conversation, is, more specifically, “the non-masochistic one of escaping the frictions, the pain, even the tragedy endemic to social life” (11). If this mode of pleasure seems familiar, it is the dominant form of ordinary pleasure in contemporary networked culture. Texting, for instance, isn’t pleasurable because of shared content; its pleasures derive from a shared and impersonal rhythm of exchange to the network itself.

Consider the reigning complaint of exhaustion and being busy accompanying so much small talk. When the norm feels like exhaustion, soft—or, phatic—forms of connection from checking a phone to instant messaging and texting at once represent symptoms and compensatory reactions to the challenges of managing the uncertain project of subjectivity between being and relating.¹⁴ 21^st century experience is simultaneously slackened and overstimulated, 24/7 and always on. The value of social media, casual games, and networked connection lie with the way that they enable a subject to divest from the burden of selfhood. Crucially, divesting from subjectivity does not mean unplugging so much as doubly investing in sociable forms of relationality that loosely articulate being and relating. Bersani asserts,

Most profoundly, the pleasure of sociability is the pleasure of existing, of concretely existing, at the abstract level of pure being. There is no other explanation for that pleasure. It does not satisfy conscious or unconscious desires; instead, it testifies to the seductiveness of the ceaseless movement toward and away from things without which there would be no particular desires for any thing, a seductiveness that is the ontological ground of the desirability of all things.(11)

Like Berlant earlier, Bersani does not have networked digital media in mind. All the same, one could not give a better description of the appeal of the minimally constant hum of attachment governing the networked sociability modulated by phatic communications. Sociable pleasure does not derive from communicating with someone. It arises from the sheer fact of social being. In Bersani’s elegant formulation, being does not recapitulate some Cartesian scene of ultimate, skeptical withdrawal from the world but rather a presence to the world at arm’s length. Some light inevitably seeps under the door into the dark room of the subject. Following Simmel, Bersani (and Berlant) open the way for grasping the mutual articulation of being and relationality through their sociable others: the impersonal dynamics of thingness and nonrelationality.

“Being or relating, that is the whole question”: David OReilly’s Mountain

If My Best Thing illustrates the relational pole of phatic sociability, David OReilly’s Mountain embodies this thingly pole. Mountain foregrounds questions of being and thingness more latently expressed in Stark’s drama of relation and nonrelation. The ordinary real world correlate of thingness lies in the quietly desultory pleasures of networked connection, of the pleasures of just being. If My Best Thing discloses the pleasures of networked impersonal relation, Mountain helps us discern the pleasures of a network of impersonal things.

Part videogame, part screensaver, part simulator, part long duration art project, Mountain is a remarkable work of new media art that speaks to the networked pleasures of little-b being. Much of Mountain consists of a mountain rotating in the vacuum of space. On the surface, Mountain seems to be about isolation. However, various objects, or things, erratically crash land on its slopes. Objects vary but mine include a bowling pin, a pie, a trash can, a film reel, a tooth, an orange cone, a boat, and an anvil. Zooming out to see the mountain against the background of stars in space, one occasionally catches sight of other objects whizzing by but never landing. Their origin and destination remain unclear. Such actions imply the existence of some kind of larger social field. Why, we might ask, would a giant pie fly through space? And is it even a “pie” when it’s a giant pie floating through space like an asteroid? Something much weirder is going on.

Mountain begins after the user executes several drawings in response to variable prompts, e.g. “draw your relationship with your mother” or “draw forgiveness” or “draw love.” Upon completing these exercises with a basic paint program, the application builds the titular “mountain.” A message reads “Welcome to Mountain. You are Mountain. You are God.” Unlike “God games” such as The Sims, however, Mountain does not put its player in the position of an interventionist deity. There are no points, no enemies, no levels. Some call it a “non-playable game.” Once opened, Mountain runs fairly unobtrusively on my laptop as I mostly do other things. Most of the action seems to happen outside my possible participation. The application works hard to render the graphics, and so the fan turns on. My students complain that the application drains their devices’ batteries abnormally fast.

And even in the game not much “happens.” Seasons change, snow falls, fog lifts, day turns into night and back again at an accelerated but even pace. Every once in a while, a piano key sounds a resonant note, a phatic note seemingly from the mountain itself. A variety of messages appear onscreen: “I CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF THIS ENIGMATIC NIGHT.” “I FEEL VERY SAD TODAY.” “I CAN’T PROPERLY DESCRIBE THIS SUMMER MORNING.” “I’M BASICALLY THIS DIM NIGHT.” “I’M TAKING IN EVERY PART OF THIS SWEET DAY.” What could be more phatic than talking about the weather?

The game’s only menu even denies there’s anything to do. Under “Controls,” it says, “MOUSE—NOTHING / KEYBOARD—NOTHING.” After some time, however, one discovers there are in fact quite a few things to do. The keyboard can be used as a piano. Playing songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” one makes it rain blood, frogs, and hearts. By playing the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind one can summon a catastrophic rogue star or other object to destroy the mountain unless one intervenes by “spamming” the keyboard perpetually, thus creating a glowing force-field. A sort of chorus-like sound plays variously during normal game “play.” This sound recalls elements of the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The game itself acknowledges this influence during the near-destruction of Mountain as the music played during encounters with the monolith, Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, heightens the alien drama of the cosmos. Of course, most of the gameplay in Mountain is predominately non-dramatic. One can tinkle around on the piano keyboard, zoom in and out, and solicit messages by pressing the period key. But mostly it’s a game that plays in the background of one’s laptop or tablet while one is doing something else.

Mountain is not networked in any traditional sense. One downloads it and then it runs locally. At the same time Mountain is profoundly redolent of networks. It would be difficult to learn of its many easter eggs without Reddit or other sites. More strongly, the game itself expresses the experience of networks. Like us, and like our networks, Mountain exists in a state of being always on. Its existence is primarily phatic, calling out while talking about impersonal feelings and the weather, available for almost literal “pings,” or gentle forms of play. With this context in mind it becomes possible to reconsider just why all those object/things keep floating by or crashing on the mountain. More than objects, these things are phatic communications themselves: hailings from the invisible universe of the network.

Far from any monadic entity, I propose Mountain functions as an inverse antidote to common visualizations of the Internet. Such images portray the network as composed of uncountable lines and nodes in constant, determined connection (Fig. 2).

As sublimely impressive as such images may be, as Alexander R. Galloway notes, “every map of the Internet looks the same” (85). All such images try to represent a totality, and they all fail. Mountain does something related but quite different. In one sense, Mountain seems like a zoomed in picture of a tiny aspect of such maps. Seen thusly Mountain suggests that the nodes do not appear to connect if we look very closely. The occasional crash landings of various things, however, suggest the contingency and opacity of networked connection. Things hail us but we don’t know why or from where they call out. From a perspective divested of any vision of synoptic totality, Mountain allegorizes the experience of networked connection in the heterogeneous rhythms of phatic sociability (Fig. 3 & 4).

The imaginary of “always-on” networking posits a kind of impossible symmetry between the subject and the network. This tends to produce expressions that either anthropomorphize the network or de-humanize the subject (the network “calls out,” the subject needs to “power down”). The game’s opening statement—“You are Mountain. You are God”—foregrounds precisely this problem. Ian Bogost helpfully argues that “the ‘you’ in ‘you are mountain’ doesn’t refer to the terraformed 3D game object, at all. Instead, it describes the game itself as a piece of software. You are not this mountain; rather, you are Mountain” (Bogost 2014). Drifting, working, not working, playing, fidgeting, Bogost’s main point rings true. “I” am more Mountain the software and game than I am “mountain,” or the cartoon representation of a game onscreen. Taking Bogost a step further, however, to say that I am Mountain invites us to inquire as to the meaning of inhabiting such a strange subject position.

Bogost believes Mountain has much to teach us about being. For Bogost, Mountain represents a game version of what he calls “alien phenomenology,” a variant of object-oriented ontology that de-privileges human experience in favor of the investigation into “what it’s like to be a thing.” While I agree that Mountain helps to think about thingness, the question of what it’s like to be a thing here resonates more with the thing in Stark’s title than it does with the quasi-lyrical litanies of objects populating Bogost’s (and Graham Harman’s, and Bruno Latour’s) prose.¹⁵ In his speculative zeal, Bogost discusses the mountain and its objects in an astonishingly literal manner as if they actually stood in for real objects. Bogost discusses Mountain’s interest in being as though it actually solicits the viewer to consider what it’s like to be a mountain. Rarely, however, do giant pies or film reels crash land on mountains. Notwithstanding the work of sculptor Claes Oldenburg, giant pies and giant film reels do not exist in reality. Instead of interpreting Mountain as an allegory of reality de-privileging human experience, I believe it is more fruitful to attend to how Mountain’s evokes problems of networked experience and subjectivity. Mountain is not at all what it’s like to be a thing, unless of course we consider that question from the standpoint of networked human experience. How, then, might we pursue this phatic and sociable thingness at Mountain’s core?

Mountain playfully brings into focus the problem of navigating the vague boundary of being and relating in the impersonal idiom of networked phatic sociability. In We Have Never Been Modern, the groundbreaking work that in large part inspired the pursuit of the very brand of philosophy Bogost promotes, Bruno Latour argues, as Bill Brown neatly summarizes, that “modernity has artificially made an ontological distinction between inanimate objects and human subjects, whereas the world is full of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘quasi-subjects.’” (12). For us, the inheritors of the so-called ‘moderns,’ the problem consists in the “proliferation of hybrids” that saturate and overwhelm the modern ‘constitution,’ or the strategies cultivated to sort and manage things. The creation of a few vacuum pumps doesn’t pose much of a threat. But the proliferation of a number of contemporary phenomena do: “frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers…” (Latour 50). Significantly, digital media and networked technologies figure prominently in Latour’s litany even from 1991. Digital relationality contributes heavily to Latour’s need to re-think the old problem of the subject/object divide. But it is not Latour specifically who helps to re-think this problem so much as his friend, Michel Serres, from whom Latour derives the notion of the “quasi-object.”

The quasi-object (and its conceptual double, the quasi-subject) troubles the sharp division between subject and object.¹⁶ Moving toward a conclusion, I want to suggest that Serres’ quasi-object articulates the variable and playful continuum between being and relating so central to the impersonal dynamics of always-on networks. In a moment strikingly resonant with Bersani’s discussion of Simmel, Serres proclaims how the quasi-object opens onto the matter of “the whole question”: namely, “being or relating.” The “quasi-object is not an object, but it is one nevertheless since it is not a subject, since it is in the world; it is also a quasi-subject, since it marks or designates a subject, who, without it, would not be a subject” (225). For Serres, the strange traffic between subject and object does not merely undo the rigidity of their division, which typically redounds—as Latour shows—into a categorical purification of human and nonhuman in modernity writ large. The quasi-object doesn’t replace the terms subject and object so much as it forms their ground, which we now grasp in terms of the coupling of being and relating. Serres illustrates the concept with reference to games and sports. In games such as the furet (a game in which a circle of children furtively pass along an object while a ‘hunter’ in the middle tries to guess who has the object) or soccer, the movement of an object or ball orients collective forms of relationality. In its playful movement, the ball re-organizes sociality insofar as it becomes a quasi-object and its movement bestows upon the players the status of quasi-subjects.

To re-open Bogost’s question: what does it mean that the program declares you are mountain? What is the nature of such indistinction? Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mountain is that it doesn’t vanish completely into the background of experience. It re-engages my interest not just because it calls out; like the network, it calls out for phatic play. To invert David Golumbia’s critique of the normative mode of videogames, Mountain is not so much an example of a game “without play,” but rather a mode of “play without gaming.” Even in the absence of any rules of the game, it’s fun to spin the mountain like a top. When one spins the mountain, however, it is not the mountain that spins but rather the visual perspective on the mountain. Focusing on just the mountain it seems like a top, but the background of stars spins, too. We don’t spin the mountain, we spin ourselves as Mountain. This is a curiously dizzy state of affairs, indeed, especially as it works upon the inaugural indistinction between subject and object announced at the outset: you are mountain. When the mountain, or, game perspective spins, it’s hard to know who is the subject and who is the object. Who is the quasi-object? And who is the quasi-subject? In lieu of an answer, what matters is the phatic play of association between software and human experience that blurs the distinction. This, I venture, is a small pleasure, and it is pleasurable largely because I don’t really have to be myself too much. But it is also, more profoundly, something like the pleasures of being always on, or living between being and relation. When delineated schematically, being and relating sound like two, isolable elements. Yet as My Best Thing and Mountain demonstrate, considered against the ambient infrastructure of contemporary networked life, the difference between the two often collapses into modalities of ordinary pleasure: flirting, conversation, but also the pleasures of thingness found in the felt relation of non-relation of being always potentially otherwise.

Footnotes

1. See Greg Miller, “What’s Up With That? Phantom Cell Phone Vibrations”; and Michelle Drouin, Daren H. Kaiser, and Daniel A. Miller, “Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics.”

2. See V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.

3. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918.

4. I have explored this idea in relation to Spike Jonze’s Her. See James J. Hodge, “Gifts of Ubiquity.” Several other scholars make related formulations. On “connected presence” see Christian Licoppe and Zbigniew Smoreda, “Are Social Networks Technologically Embedded?” Mark B. N. Hansen argues that web 2.0 mediates not so much content as “sheer connectivity.” See Hansen, “New Media.”

5. See Scott C. Richmond, “Vulgar Boredom, or What Andy Warhol Can Teach Us About Candy Crush”

6. See Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics; and Kris Cohen, Never Alone, Except For Now.

7. On the phatic in linguistics more broadly, see Gunter Senft, “Phatic communion.” The phatic also figures in J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

8. For example, see William R. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information.

9. See Paul Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise Introduction.

10. Nicole Starosielski raises a version of this question in her discussion of “lag” in relation to global online gaming and undersea cables. See Starosielski, “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure.”

11. I take inspiration here from Sianne Ngai’s post-Kantian and post-Cavellian efforts to theorize ordinariness and aesthetics together. See Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.

12. See Rita Raley, “List(en)ing Post.”

13. Mark Godfrey analyzes the green background as an allusion to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. See Godfrey, Frances Stark: My Best Thing.

14. See Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy; and Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism.

15. See Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. For a strong critique of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology attentive to its rhetorical strategies, see Scott C. Richmond, “Thought, Untethered: A Review Essay.”

16. Pierre Levy and Brian Massumi have respectively discussed the import of Serres’ quasi-object for the fields of digital media and affect theory. More recently, David J. Alworth evokes the quasi-object in his Latour-inspired revision of setting in literary fiction.

Works Cited

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• Benveniste, Émile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971. Print.
• Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Print.
• —. “Starved.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (2007): 433–444. Print.
• Bennett, Jessica. “Bubbles Carry A Lot of Weight: Texting Anxiety Caused by Little Bubbles.” The New York Times. 29 Aug. 2014. Web. 4 July 2016.
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Christopher Schmidt (bio)
LaGuardia Community College

Abstract

This essay examines the split function of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules as both research archive and unrealized art project. It suggests that the Time Capsules epitomize Warhol’s career-long preoccupation with consumption and waste (a concern animating much of his art production), and that the extreme materiality of the 610 Time Capsules is a complicated response to dematerialization in conceptual art practices and the post-war global economy. Finally, the essay reports on his on-site research of the Time Capsules, analyzing contradictions in the Warhol Museum’s maintenance of the project as both art and archive.

Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules (TCs) enjoy a curious dual role in the Warhol catalog, functioning both as an active research archive and as an unrealized art project. Like a hydra pulled in two directions at once, this split purpose compromises the TCs’ ability to succeed at either pursuit. As an archive, they have been rendered too instrumental to maintain their art integrity; yet their artistic disorder and contingency inhibits their usefulness as an archive. In this tension, the TCs epitomize conflicts around waste matter, collection, and preservation that animate much of Warhol’s cultural productions. The TCs also serve as a compelling site to assess Warhol and other artists’ turns toward what Hal Foster has called an “archival impulse” in postwar art. Although Warhol’s TCs are not the first such archival art project, they may well be the most sprawling, and their extreme materiality is striking when considered against the backdrop of conceptual art’s “dematerialization of the art object” (in the words of influential art critic Lucy Lippard) as well as the broader dematerialization of the US economic base in the 1970s, when the TCs were inaugurated. This essay attempts to think through the dialectical relationship between materiality and dematerialization in post-war art practices using the trope of waste, a central concern of Warhol’s. A second interest of the essay is to describe the uncanny ways that Warhol’s TCs, while representing an alternative archive to that of the museum or library, frustrate attempts by later archivists to govern and systematize them. In sketching dual purposes for the TCs as both art and archive, Warhol performs a posthumous institutional critique—not of the art museum per se, but of the museumification of the artist in his relics and after effects.

The TCs consist of approximately 610 boxes full of mostly ephemeral media that Warhol collected periodically throughout his working life and stored on shelves in his studio spaces, before removing them to off-site storage (Fig. 1).¹

Warhol formally inaugurated the project in 1974, when he moved his studio from 33 Union Square West to a larger space nearby, 860 Broadway. According to some sources, it was the boxing up of materials for the office move that gave Warhol the idea for the project (Wrbican, Interview). The construction of the TCs was regular and periodic, with boxes assembled at the rate of one to three per month (Warhol refers to them as his “box-of-the-month” in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol [145]). However, several thematic boxes also appear, such as the “party box” and the “Concorde box,” which contains items Warhol retained from his many cross-Atlantic flights on the airline. While the TCs largely contain correspondence, announcements, magazines, books, photographs, and reproductions from Warhol’s desk and studio (Fig. 2), more eccentric objects also can be found in the boxes, such as Warhol’s wigs, a piece of cake wrapped in a napkin, dental equipment, and a mummified human foot (“Andy Warhol Museum Archives”).

The TCs were never exhibited during Warhol’s lifetime and remain largely inaccessible except to a few archivists and researchers in the Archives Study Center of The Warhol Museum, where they are maintained and catalogued. (The last box was only recently opened, in 2014 [Wrbican, Personal Interview].) Interested viewers may see the contents of one TC on display in a gallery vitrine in the Warhol Museum, and there are plans by the Archives Study Center to digitize the entire contents. Yet even describing this much about the boxes is contingent and uncertain. When I made a research trip to view the TCs in 2014, I was provided limited access to only one of the boxes. It would take years of unlimited access for researchers to build up a full sense of the TCs’ contents and contours. Because this is impossible under the TCs’ current administration, much of my analysis here rests on the testimony of John W. Smith and Matt Wrbican, former archivists in the Archives Study Center at the Andy Warhol Museum; various Warhol associates who helped in the organization of the boxes; and Warhol’s own unreliable writings about them. The book Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21 and archivist Matt Wrbican’s recent inventory of TC 51 provide a more penetrating look at the contents of two of the boxes. But as we shall see, these accounts are often inconsistent, and the inaccessibility of the TCs’ contents renders my own analysis more conceptual than detailed. That said, my visit to the Warhol Museum in 2014 to research the TCs did uncover some key information about their design and contents.

I describe the TCs as a “problem project” not because there is something politically problematic about them. Rather, like one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” the TCs resist easy explanation and seem even to have given trouble to the artist. The TCs’ unrealized status as art, as well as their volume and variety, suggests an inability on the part of the artist to control their form. In some ways, Warhol seems more possessed by the TCs than an agent of their making. That Warhol never found a way to publicize or market the TCs creates an additional aura of failure or unrealizability about them. Yet if the TCs are in some sense an artistic failure, it is a failure trumped by their monumental scale and duration, their variety, and their mutability. The TCs are metamorphic, fulfilling different needs depending on the context and the interested party. The ultimate uncategorizability of the TCs—are they art, archive, or junk?—undermines our ability to analyze them fully, not just because of their conceptual recalcitrance but also because of their material inaccessibility. This struggle to describe the TCs is not mere academic concern, but of practical import. How we categorize the boxes informs and determines the conditions of their maintenance. An art piece is maintained differently from a research archive, which is in turn treated more respectfully than a collection of esoterica.

It is increasingly common practice to view the TCs in this latter regard, as the less valuable (and certainly less salable) leftovers of Warhol’s voluminous collections of paintings, decorative arts, books, and mass produced kitsch objects, which were organized and sold at Sotheby’s in 1988, after Warhol’s sudden death. However, to describe the TCs as merely an instance of Warhol’s collecting impulse—a hobby gone haywire, if you will—is an incomplete view. Warhol was first and always an artist, and analyzing the TCs as art allows us to appreciate new aspects of Warhol’s larger art practice and make connections to other object-oriented art practices that similarly engage forms of collecting, archiving, and waste making. Short art historical treatments of the TCs have appeared in Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy, Michael J. Golec’s The Brillo Box Archive, and Ingrid Schaffner’s exhibition catalog, Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art. However, the TCs have been treated more extensively in cultural studies contexts, by Michael Lobel, Jonathan Flatley, and Scott Herring, who consider the TCs one aspect of Warhol’s larger practice as a collector. The Warhol Museum has also contributed to this line of research by publishing an entire book entitled Possession Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting, which includes shorter versions of Lobel’s and Flatley’s articles, and suggests that Warhol’s collecting was a form of artistic practice. None of these studies pathologize Warhol, and indeed these critics all use queer theory to repair the stigma that haunts Warhol’s collecting habits. Yet in Herring’s account, Warhol becomes a case study of the excessive collector—a “hoarder” (however much nuance Herring adds nuance to this designation by analyzing phobic journalism about the TCs). Nudging the TCs out of the realm of cultural case study—a symptom of consumerist acquisition—and closer to the provinces of art analysis will help use see both the TCs and Warhol’s broader art production more clearly. This analysis may also have practical effects, helping us understand how to organize the TCs going forward.

Boxed Waste

While I stress the importance of examining the TCs within a lineage of archival art projects, I want to resist labeling the TCs as art simply because this designation serves the interests of the Warhol Museum. In a recent publication elaborating on the contents of TC 51, Chief Archivist Matt Wrbican writes:

One of the TCs was opened and discussed at a meeting of the tripartite founders of the Warhol Museum, held in New York in October 1992, during which Warhol’s longtime business manager Fred Hughes clearly stated, “He [Warhol] thought of them as sculpture.” This characterization has been variously confirmed and rejected by other former Warhol assistants. Although they are held in our Archives collection, the Warhol Museum considers them to be a work of art. (687)

Even granting the reliability of Hughes and his account, the artist’s intentions are particularly fraught in the case of Warhol, who left us volumes of anecdotes and aphorisms about his social habitus and “philosophy,” but who was notoriously slippery when discussing his art, often refusing interviewers’ attempts to project depth and meaning onto it. Using Warhol’s own statements about the TCs as a warrant for adjudicating them as sculpture is also problematic because Warhol describes them differently depending on the context. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Warhol offers extensive descriptions of the project as a kind of aestheticized storage, a symptom of his conflicts around waste and materiality, informed by a queer lineage of collecting. Meanwhile, in the posthumous Andy Warhol Diaries (itself a riveting archival project that was assembled after Warhol’s death), the artist indicates his use of the TCs as a curated historical archive, rather than as chance-based sculpture.² None of this is to suggest that the TCs cannot function in all these ways at once. I only wish to disentangle my own analysis of TCs’ art function from the Warhol Museum’s more self-interested motivations for describing them as art, and to call into question “the artist’s intentions” as a warrant.

While Warhol considered marketing the TCs as art during his lifetime, he never seemed to land on a satisfactory format for exhibiting or selling them. (Nor, it seems, did Warhol adjudicate how the project should be treated after his death.) Warhol at some point considered selling the TCs to collectors, not as a unified series, but individually, with each collector buying a different box (Smith 12). Warhol even considered inserting a drawing into each of the boxes, to quell the disappointment of a collector who, by the luck of the draw, might end up receiving a box full of unexciting newspapers or Interview magazines (Bourdon 348). On the one hand, this suggests a chance-based element to both the assembling as well as the dispersal of the work; a collector would not be informed of the contents before purchase. On the other hand, the drawing compromises the TCs’ Duchampian conception as an accumulation of readymades. Diluting the integrity of the Time Capsules as a project of pure appropriation, the drawing—and the particular drawing it is alleged to be—takes the project somewhat nearer to another of Duchamp’s works, recalling his Valise-en-Boite, or museum in a box. Matt Wrbican, former Chief Archivist at the Warhol Archives Study Center, suggests that the artist had in mind a specific drawing to supplement the TCs, the same drawing Warhol produced for the 1968 Moon Museum (Personal Interview). The project may be dismissed as “corny” (to borrow a Warholian epithet), but it possesses a Duchampian influence in its self-referentiality, its portability, and its liquidation of the museum frame into other contexts. The Moon Museum was a minuscule ceramic chip containing six miniature drawings by Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, David Novros, Claes Oldenberg, and Forrest Myers that may or may not have been deposited on the lunar surface during the Apollo 12 mission to the moon (Vergano). Warhol’s drawing is a phallic rendering of the artist’s initials, AW, rendered as a playful and pointed phallus (Fig. 3, upper left.) Were one prone to psychoanalytic idées reçues, one could construe the putative inclusion of this drawing in the TCs as a queer joke about the congress of the phallic and the “anal,” the stage in which Freud suggested that repressed homosexual collectors were stalled.

Because the formal link between the Moon Museum and the Time Capsules is weak, it may in the end be best to treat this information about the identity of the drawing (or drawings) with skepticism. Yet even if the connection is unfounded, comparison between the Moon Museum and the TCs allows us to appreciate a few aspects of the latter project more clearly. As with the Moon Museum, the TCs depend on being materially displaced (buried, “lost,” exiled to storage in New Jersey) before being recovered at some later date—a feature shared by all time capsules. Also key to both projects is the notion that Warhol’s signature might literally or figuratively lend “aura” to otherwise banal material or artifacts. That Warhol never successfully marketed the TCs may indicate his insecurity about defining a massive collection of ephemeral media as “art” simply through his association with it. More than Duchamp and the US-based conceptual artists who followed him, Warhol retained a conservative belief in artistic talent, even as he wished for his own talent to be mediated by the machinic or by chance.

Even if it never actually occurred, Warhol’s notion of opening the closed containers of the TCs to insert a drawing suggests that the artist saw the TCs as being more permeable than his previous box art, such as the Brillo Boxes (1964). Indeed, despite their shared serial form, these two box projects could not be more different. The Brillo Boxes are ersatz readymades, and their intervention is entirely on the exterior, with their interiors void. (Or at least we presume the interiors of the boxes to be void; their impermeability prevents us from plumbing them.)³ Where the Brillo Boxes are empty, the TCs are overfull. The former is one of Warhol’s coolest Duchampian thought experiments;⁴ the Time Capsules are hot and inchoate, containing the messy interiors that Warhol insisted were nowhere to be found in his art. The TCs seem to suggest a kind of pop unconscious underlying the cool façade Warhol advanced in the Brillo Boxes and elsewhere. Warhol typically presents himself as a dandy cipher: “Just look at the surface of my paintings, it’s all there” (Berg 90). The interiority that Warhol represses from his Brillo Boxes and gridded paintings finds a home in the TCs, now secreted away in the bowels of the Warhol Museum, in a hometown Warhol similarly wished to repress from memory: Pittsburgh.

One can locate an even more extreme version of containment and impermeability outside of Warhol’s corpus, in the Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s notorious Artist’s Shit (1961), a sealed production of 90 labeled tins that supposedly contain Manzoni’s own excrement. The project is an intervention into notions of value and devaluation, as well as the waste that inevitably results from the consumption of commodities. Manzoni unites post-consumerist waste and human waste in a mass-produced form that is canny in more ways than one, preceding Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans by many months. The occlusion of interiority is even more central to Manzoni’s project than to the Brillo Boxes. Their sealed impermeability keeps us forever guessing as to their true contents, and to open the cans would destroy them. In the end, we are left guessing whether the artist put more stock in the conceptual speech act (these cans are full of X) or in the baseness of the material he used. Are the interiors truly full of shit, or is the artist? While Warhol’s notion to sell the TCs shares with the Manzoni sculptures a similar investment in the blind faith of the buyer, the epistemological pressure is quite different. The expectation with the TCs, as with any vernacular form of time capsule, is that the containers eventually would be opened and their contents revealed to view.⁵

Joseph Cornell’s boxes may also be compared to the TCs in their similar framing and repurposing of media detritus for the viewer. While the tableaux of Cornell’s boxed works are carefully composed for the viewer, Warhol’s TCs are relatively random accumulations, at least visually. Indeed, it is not clear that the retinal matters much at all in the case of the TCs. Cornell’s surrealism and outsiderness is also tonally distinct from Warhol’s insiderish cool. (If anything, the works of Warhol that seem closest to Cornell’s boxes are his paintings, with their necrophiliac celebrity avowals.) Other artists in the intertext of the TCs include Joseph Beuys, whose work and reputation were well known to Warhol (the two were photographed together during one of Warhol’s visits to Europe), and whose exhibition of personally sacred objects may have informed the TCs’ reliquary qualities. However, Warhol’s TCs possess neither the totemic ceremony of Beuys’ Stuhl mit Fett (1964), say, or the political message of Economic Values (1980). Meanwhile, the procedural time period of the TCs—their “box-of-the-month” duration—relates them to On Kawara’s Today Series (1966–2013), in which the conceptual artist marked each day with a painting of the date, along with a copy of that day’s newspaper (at least for some of the series). This dual production of an historical archive and a painting makes On Kawara’s series in some ways the opposite of Warhol’s (who, as discussed earlier, may have intended to supplement each box of ephemeral media with a drawing). Mierle Ukeles Laderman’s various Maintenance Art projects and manifestoes (1969–) may have provided Warhol with a conceptual and behavioral model oriented around the revaluation of waste—although the feminist aspects of Laderman’s project are not likely to have influenced Warhol. Finally, Dieter Roth’s Flacher Abfall, or Flat Waste archival project (inaugurated around the same time as Warhol’s TCs, in 1973) bears a remarkable similarity. Over the course of years, Roth compiled more than 600 binders of food packaging, scraps, and other waste, which he then later exhibited on bookshelves. While the notion of influence is not paramount in this discussion, it must be noted that Warhol rarely mentions conceptual artists in his interviews and writing and, except for Beuys, seems to show little awareness of non-American art developments, so it is not clear that Warhol would have known Roth’s project, much less been influenced by it. In the end, the similarity of Roth’s project to Warhol’s shows the extent to which cultural shifts were compelling artists on both sides of the Atlantic to produce material archives in response to accelerated consumption and economic dematerialization.

The artworks most likely to have influenced the actual form of Warhol’s TCs are the refuse containers, accumulations, and poubelles of Arman, who suspended waste and damaged commodities in transparent Plexiglas vitrines, allowing their contents to be visible to the viewer. Warhol was a friend of the artist, and owned two of Arman’s waste-filled vitrines, along with one other Arman sculpture, Amphetamines (Angell 30).⁶ In fact, Warhol collaborated with Arman on two TC-like refuse-portraits. Late in his life, Warhol gave Arman license to peruse his studio and home closets for materials to assemble a “robot portrait” of the artist, as Arman termed it (Marck 4). When Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987, Fred Hughes delivered the items that Arman had chosen for the two sculpture-portraits. It is not known if Arman plumbed the TCs for material. Yet even if he did not, there are clear similarities between the two projects, both of which are boxed sculptures built out of Warhol’s relics. The actual mechanics of how Arman made his selections of Warhol’s effects is uncertain; however, a story circulates that Warhol (or perhaps Hughes, following Warhol’s directions) provided ersatz relics to Arman for his sculptures.⁷ If true, this story may explain the curious lack of charisma in Arman’s resulting robot portrait of Warhol (see Fig. 4).

Regardless of this particular story’s truth, it does point to a chariness and privacy typical of Warhol. It was unusual for the artist to give permission for anyone to access his private collections or even to cross the threshold of his home. Warhol was secretive and self-conscious about the disorder of his living environment, and anxious about his many possessions—an anxiety that extended even to his trash. Consider the following charged example from the Andy Warhol Diaries, dated February 22, 1981, in which the artist reflects nervously on his encounter with an infamous “garbage man”:

When I was on my way home I ran into Alan J. Weberman, the “King of Garbology[,]” who was on the corner making a phone call. I knew who he was because he handed me a resume with all his garbage credits on it. He said he’d just been through Roy Cohn’s garbage and Gloria Vanderbilt’s. I think he began his career with Dylan’s. I was scared that he’d see where I lived so I went in the other direction. (359)

After his shooting by Valerie Solanas, it is understandable that Warhol would be nervous about revealing his address to potential obsessives, particularly a “garbologist” who would delve into the artist’s unmentionables. But there seems to be something particularly symptomatic here about Warhol’s secrecy, an anxiety about controlling his waste that is manifest elsewhere in his writing and in his art. In this sense, might the TCs be viewed as a form of prophylactic through which Warhol could retain his discards rather than release them into the public sphere for a Weberman or an Arman to expose?

The formal similarity of Warhol’s TCs and Arman’s poubelles may be another reason for Warhol’s reluctance to exhibit the TCs, as if they more properly belonged to another artist’s idiom.⁸ By the same token, there are significant formal differences between the two projects. The double hiddenness of the TCs—dumped in opaque cardboard boxes then hidden in storage—renders them notably different from Arman’s transparent poubelles. Arman’s poubelles also operate in a different signifying context from Warhol’s TCs. Both projects address post-war commodity consumption, and the poubelles share with Warhol’s TCs a use of material consumerist waste and ephemera to signify excess, loss, and obsession. However, Benjamin Buchloh suggests that Arman depicts the wages of consumerism in order to implicate European amnesia regarding the horrors of the war years. As Buchloh points out, post-war European art was deeply preoccupied with the ruins of World War II, and Arman’s refuse-based sculptures seem to draw an equivalence between discarded objects and the subaltern persons discarded in the extermination of the Holocaust (“Plenty or Nothing” 274). While the transparency of Arman’s vitrines positions them as a kind of witnessing, the opacity of Warhol’s TCs indicates the subtler ways that waste is purposefully occluded in the capitalist circuit of production, consumption, and circulation. Arman’s materials are clearly degraded—trash by any measure. Warhol’s materials do not inherently qualify as waste, and do so only through the excessive size and indiscriminate nature of the collection as a whole.

In the end, it is the punishing logic of the archive that allows us to view the TCs as a form of waste and waste management. The archive asks us to discriminate and retain only what is representative and valuable, discarding the trivial and historically insignificant. Yet Warhol’s appetite for indiscriminate collection undermines such traditional archival values. The TCs may contain treasures, but on the whole they signify wasted time, wasted effort, and most of all wasted space. If the TCs qualify as waste—especially when seen in the context of Arman’s and Roth’s similar projects—we might ask to what end Warhol collected this media. Was it Warhol’s Rumpelstilskin-like desire to transform waste into something valuable? Did he wish to avoid creating waste by not throwing these items into the garbage, and thus avoid the parasitic recycling of a Weberman or an Arman? Or was Warhol’s goal subversive, to create waste by retaining this unmanageable bulk of ephemeral media?

Time Capsules as Historical Archive

Although Warhol gives us evidence in the Philosophy to consider the TCs an unfinished art project, he is equally prone to discuss them as a practice of historical archiving. In assembling the TCs, Warhol seems to have operated in a middle ground between a chance-based proceduralism and a more selective—and sometimes acquisitive—curation of the boxes’ contents. To what degree do the TCs hew to quasi-Cagean chance operations, as some critics have claimed (Golec 2)? And to what degree should they be viewed as a curated historical archive, with items selected for future importance as a relic or historical artefact?⁹ The balance matters in describing the TCs’ art and archival functions properly. Wrbican claims that the TCs fit with Warhol’s pop manifesto of “liking things” (687).¹⁰ But Warhol’s own attitude toward the contents of the TCs is equivocal at best, and often quite anxious and exasperated. Introducing the project in the Philosophy, Warhol writes, “I want to throw things right out the window as they’re handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month” (145). Here Warhol evinces a disdain for the retention of material objects, one that will continue throughout his discussion of storage and waste themes elsewhere in the Philosophy. Warhol’s comments suggest that the TCs were from their inception informed by hygienic regularity (“box-of-the-month”) and minimal curatorial agency, as material was “handed to” the artist. Former Warhol archivist and museum director John W. Smith follows this line of thinking, arguing that the TCs “functioned less as an edited attempt to capture and convey a specific historical moment, but rather as a memento hominem, a register of the everyday” (“Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules” 12). Pat Hackett, Warhol’s secretary and collaborating editor on POPism, the Philosophy, and The Andy Warhol Diaries, corroborates this account, while also suggesting that Warhol exercised more evaluative editing in the creation of the TCs. According to Hackett, after Warhol arrived at the office to begin work, he would open the “stacks of mail he got every day, deciding just which letters, invitations, gifts, and magazines to drop into a ‘Time Capsule,’ meaning one of the hundreds of 10” x 18” x 14” brown cardboard boxes, which would be sealed, dated, put into storage, and instantly replaced with an identical empty box” (Diaries xv). In these descriptions of the TCs, they rank just one level above the trash, as retainers of ephemera.

Once the project gained steam, however, Warhol grew emboldened to actively collect and archive objects of historical importance rather than passively accept unwanted matter. In the following passage from the Andy Warhol Diaries, the artist admits actively curating materials for the “box,” as he referred to the TC of the month: “Stevie [Rubell, manager of the nightclub Studio 54] gave me a Quaalude and Halston said, ‘For the box, for the box.’ Victor’s [sic] told him about the system. . . . Victor used to bring me some of Halston’s notes like from Jackie O., but then Halston realized he should start saving them himself” (186). Here we see Warhol soliciting and gladly accepting precious cargo of enhanced historical interest, such as Quaaludes—truly time capsules of the ’70s, in many senses of the phrase. Elsewhere, Warhol shows sticky-fingered acquisitiveness in seeking out items to fill the TCs: “When we sat down to dinner there were packages of Philip Morris cigarettes at each place—they were the sponsor—and when nobody was taking them I took them ‘for the box.’ There was one red one but I couldn’t get it” (82). One box begets another. Affects typical of consumer consumption inflect this passage: a sense of greed (acquiring what he doesn’t need), the thrill of a bargain (in this case gratis), and perhaps even a sense of pity for the unwanted commodity (“when nobody was taking them”). On the one hand, this acquisition of items for the TCs compromises the more procedural dimensions of the project (while also revealing that many of these “historical” items are indeed trivial). It also suggests, to a degree not yet recognized, that Warhol was in his art and publishing projects a variety of queer historian.¹¹

It is now taken for granted that Warhol is a crucial figure in post-war art, in ’60s urban countercultures, in ’70s fashion and celebrity cultures, and as a validating presence in the ’80s downtown inter-arts scene. Yet when considering the TCs as a form of historical archive, it is important to bear in mind how precarious queer histories were during the period, especially in the ’50s when Warhol first emerged as a graphic designer and illustrator. As flaming and camp as many of Warhol’s productions may seem, his homoerotic works were frequently censored.¹² Because queer histories were silenced and erased during Warhol’s era, the archive takes on crucial importance. Ann Cvetkovich has argued how a queer “archive fever” emerged in the twentieth century as an attempt to counteract the neglect and stigmatization of queer histories in normative journalism and publishing. The massive volume of Warhol’s TCs reflects such an imperative, to counteract the neglect and erasure of queer history in official records and archives. This line of thought is even more compelling when we consider that Warhol’s on-record antecedent for the TCs was not one of the heterosexual waste artists mentioned earlier, but another queer luminary, the writer Tennessee Williams. Warhol writes:

Tennessee Williams saves everything up in a trunk and then sends it out to a storage place. I started off myself with trunks and the odd pieces of furniture, but then I went around shopping for something better and now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year. I really hate nostalgia, though, so deep down I hope they all get lost and I never have to look at them again. That’s another conflict. I want to throw things right out the window as they’re handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month. But my other outlook is that I really do want to save things so they can be used again someday. (Philosophy 145)

As Reva Wolf has suggested, Warhol was attracted to the literary sphere as a place where homosexual expression could find a better outlet than in the visual arts. Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Proust, Genet, Burroughs, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Williams, and Warhol’s friend Truman Capote were trailblazing queer representations in writing, while the fine arts were in the ’50s and early ’60s dominated by the macho theatrics of Abstract Expressionism, (7).¹³ Indeed, there is something of a literary quality to the TCs: the materials within the TCs are largely text-based, comprised of letters, magazines, books, and announcements. And as is the case with any archive, the TCs generate yet more text in the indexes and finding aids that flourish around them. The TCs’ archival nature also connects them to other literary projects of Warhol’s, such as a: a novel, the Philosophy, and The Andy Warhol Diaries, which were produced from archives of transcribed tape recordings and were influenced by Warhol’s desire to join the queer literary tradition of Burroughs, Capote, and Williams.¹⁴

In the passage from the Philosophy quoted above, Warhol’s dominant affect is anxiety about whether to conserve or abject the material object. Throughout Warhol’s discussion of the TCs in the Philosophy he frets about the status of these and other “things”—including his own art—and the possibility that these things would be considered “waste” or “junk.” Indeed, Warhol’s interest in selling the TCs seems at times to emerge from a need to rid himself of the psychological conflicts generated by his collections. In the passage below, Warhol introduces the TCs amid a broader discussion of possessions and storage, in which he tries to solve the conflicts generated by his collections of material things:

If you live in New York, your closet should be, at the very least, in New Jersey.…

Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it out.

What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can’t and you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less thing to think about, another load off your mind. (144–45)

As in much of the Philosophy, Warhol here combines acute cultural criticism—the burdensome obsolescence that follows the excitement of a purchase—with an impossibly utopian and humorous solution: everything in your closet should have an expiration date. Warhol foregrounds his own “conflict” around waste, and indeed, the contradictions surrounding consumption and wasting occur at both the conceptual and personal levels (145). While Warhol’s complaint arises from the problem of too much stuff, the expiration date will only lead to further consumption and waste: the planned obsolescence that causes us to constantly discard and renew our purchases. Even in this conflicted and guilt-ridden meditation on discarding and recycling, shopping yet again enters the frame, in Warhol’s search for the right container for his TCs.

Although Warhol’s frustrations about waste are historically grounded in the exuberance of post-war consumption, he also gives voice in the passage to the fundamental tenets of psychological abjection. According to its theorist Julia Kristeva, abjection is a process that defines the boundaries of the subject who, after a moment of disorienting confusion, identifies that some disgusting matter is not a part of me. Kristeva identifies the “maternal abject” as a foundational source of this abjection.¹⁵ I don’t want psychobiography to be the omphalos of any reading of the TCs; the danger here is that Warhol might be viewed as damaged, or as a psychological case study, as he has sometime appeared in others’ commentaries on his collecting habits.¹⁶ But it is compelling to speculate on how Warhol’s performances of waste management might arise from early encounters with the maternal abject and an intimate relationship with his mother lasting well into middle age. In this sense, the menstrual connotations of Warhol’s name for the TCs, and the waste they index, as “box-of-the-month,” are difficult to overlook. In an earlier article on the Philosophy and Warhol’s tape recording practice, I analyzed the relationship between Warhol’s omnipresent technological prostheses, his mother’s colostomy bag, and scenes of waste management narrated in Warhol’s writing—all of which seem equally pertinent to the TCs (Schmidt). In A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon makes similar connections between anal erotic “screen memories” recounted in the Philosophy, Warhol’s early Pop paintings, and the influence of Warhol’s mother as a kind of tutelary genius who oversaw scenes of bodily debilitation, sexual fantasy, and archiving (namely, the making of childhood scrapbooks while Warhol suffered from St. Vitus Dance).¹⁷

If Warhol’s collecting and archiving practices are governed by the maternal—and Julia Warhola’s personal relics do indeed enter into the TCs, comprising their oldest artifacts, in TC 27 (Kramer 15)—there are economic aspects at play here as well. Warhol, born in Pittsburgh in 1928, was raised in a poor immigrant household during the depression, when austerity, reuse, and thrift were paramount values. Several years after Warhol moved to New York City, his mother followed, cohabitating with him from 1952 until 1971, when she returned to Pittsburgh just before her death. Not only did Warhola oversee the household economy while living with Warhol, she also participated in Warhol’s graphic art productions (Bourdon 58–60). Together, mother and son developed a household economy of thrift, efficiency, and permeability between the personal and the professional. Because of his sustained financial success, however, Warhol was able to consume at a level that far outstripped the thrifty values of his childhood. The TCs and Warhol’s other personal collections can thus be viewed as a result of colliding economic values: a Depression-era economy of reuse and conservation learned from his mother, and a post-war economy of consumerist appetite and disposability. Warhol’s “conflict” about the TCs and his other collections emerges out of the incommensurability of these two economies.

Warhol and Materialism

Warhol’s caginess about the TCs’ ontology—are they archive, disposal system, or art—points us toward a foundational engagement with waste and waste management underlying much of Warhol’s art and life practices. In the Philosophy, Warhol complains that his art making is in some sense a form of waste-making: “I’m still making some art, I’m still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty: i.e., I’m helping people waste their space when what I really want to do is help them empty their space” (144). This conflict between filling and emptying, between producing and clearing, can be seen in both Warhol’s art-making process and in his subject matter. The artist’s most recognizable idiom, his gridded silkscreen canvases, begins with the collection of mass-media detritus, sometimes literally collected from the garbage. Collage artist Ray Johnson recalls that he and Warhol found a box of discarded newspaper clippings on a New York City street, which they intended to share as a source for artworks. Yet after Warhol availed himself of the box, there was little interesting material remaining for Johnson to plumb (365 Takes 34). Warhol excavated these scraps of media ephemera, transferring them to canvases that became memento mori of celebrity loss and ruination. Not unlike Weberman’s excavations of Bob Dylan and Roy Cohn’s garbage, Warhol in his art similarly brings forward the unsavory aspects of celebrity consumption: the waste of Hollywood machinery, and the resulting damage to its subjects. Warhol’s engagement with the star system—both that of Hollywood and his own queer counter-system of Factory superstars—reveals how in late consumer capitalism humans themselves are treated as commodities, taken up by the culture industry and then disposed of when their youth, beauty, and relevance pass. Indeed, the inevitable decay of celebrity is implied in Warhol’s most famous maxim, “Everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” which gestures not only toward the ubiquity of fame, but its half-life. Meanwhile, with the Oxidation paintings (or Piss Paintings), Warhol simultaneously literalized and abstracted waste. The meaning of the enterprise hinges on the use of waste as a material, yet the waste is abstracted, revealed only in the paratextual apparatus surrounding the work. From the gridded boxes of the silkscreen paintings to the archive of screen tests to the exhaustively preserved audio recordings, which formed the basis of several books, it may be productive to consider all of Warhol’s art productions as forms of waste management. As critical biographer Wayne Koestenbaum has suggested, Warhol’s mantra might be: depict waste, but contain it—by placing it (repeatedly, compulsively) inside a series of rectangles: the grid, the box, the film frame, the cassette.

Besides Warhol’s own personal fraught relationship with waste, larger cultural shifts underlie Warhol’s development of a waste management aesthetic. Waste became highly valorized in the 1970s with the prominent rise of the environmental movement. In his uncanny way of cultural perception, Warhol incorporates ecological metaphors into his own aesthetic practice. A favorite Warhol aphorism imagines this ecological body as actualized on the Pop body, which according to Warhol, “took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside” (POPism 3). The ecological version of this pop body appears in the Philosophy, which was published in the middle of the ’70s:

I think about people eating and going to the bathroom all the time, and I wonder why they don’t have a tube up their behind that takes all the stuff they eat and recycles it back into their mouth, regenerating it, and then they’d never have to think about buying food or eating it. And they wouldn’t even have to see it—it wouldn’t even be dirty. It they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way back in. Pink. (146)

This metaphor more than succeeds as John Waters–style gross-out. But it can also be read as an allegory for Warhol’s entire aesthetic practice as a form of recycling, with a color overlay, as Koestenbaum suggests (29). It is also an image of ecology in the purest sense of the term: a system consuming its own waste products.

While Warhol avoided and regretted waste as much as any US subject—perhaps more so, because of his outsized shopping habits—he was also drawn to waste for its affective potential. Elsewhere in the Philosophy, Warhol notes, “I always like to work with leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good. I always thought it had the potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers” (93). In pointing to an error enjoyed against the grain, Warhol describes to an almost perfect degree the camp aesthetic, which Susan Sontag in “Notes on Camp” describes as an instance of failed seriousness enjoyed against the maker’s original intentions. While Sontag argues that camp is associated with a gay aesthetic tradition, Andrew Ross has argued for a more materialist analysis of camp as a mode of economic critique. Ross claims that camp occurs when “history’s waste matter” is taken up and recuperated in ways different from their original use values, and that in particular, camp emerges when modes of production are recognized as endangered or “outmoded” (320).¹⁸ If the TCs are camp, it is not in the homosexual sense of performative parody elaborated by Sontag and others, but in this more materialist sense elaborated by Ross. The TCs recuperate “history’s waste matter” in a very material sense indeed. In fact, they seem to index the outmodedness of materiality itself in an era of increasing dematerialization.

In The Condition of Post-Modernity, David Harvey identifies the year 1973 as the date when the economic paradigm in the US decisively shifted from a Fordist economy of production to postmodern forms of flexible accumulation and labor, which according to Harvey produced the superstructural condition of “postmodernity.”¹⁹ It is curious that at the precise moment when finance should grow more dematerialized and abstract, Warhol would begin to amass boxes of very concrete, material things, resistant to valuation and marketability. While Warhol himself would not have been attuned to economic dematerialization per se, he would likely have been aware of discourse surrounding the “dematerialization of the art object,” which Lucy Lippard describes in her Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Lippard does not herself tie the growth of conceptual art to financial dematerialization, and in some ways posits the opposite superstructural relationship. Borrowing the rhetoric of conceptual artists like Sol Lewitt, Lippard argues that conceptual art emerged in order to resist the marketing and commodification that attended heroic action paintings. (Oscar Masotta advances a similar argument directed at pop art in his manifesto, “After Pop, We Dematerialize,” addressing the efflorescence of the happening in Argentina.) In a “Postface” to Six Years, however, Lippard admits that the attempt to dematerialize the art object, as a strategy to foil commodification, was a failure; the documentation surrounding conceptual art sold just as easily as a painting.²⁰

More recently, Joshua Simon has argued that this discourse about aesthetic dematerialization helps us see more clearly a neomaterialist movement in post-war art, in the sense of being both more material (concrete) and more aware and responsive to materialist conditions behind the artist’s work. Although it would be difficult to ascribe any conscious dialectical materialism to Warhol, the TCs do bear witness to the increasing bureaucratization of Warhol’s work and point as well to the economic forces underpinning his art production. Increasingly in the’70s, and throughout the remainder of his career, Warhol tacked with increasing fluidity between traditionally material art objects and more dematerialized forms of media dissemination. With the TCs, Warhol made his most materially excessive project also his most conceptual—one that is philosophical, procedural, and marks the networks of media circulation that constellate around one notable personage: himself.²¹ Rather than emptying boxes so as to activate the space of the gallery, as minimalist sculptors did, Warhol filled boxes with personal detritus and placed them in the non-space of off-site storage. Warhol continued to produce paintings until the end of his life, but from the 1970s onward, his productions ramified into more easily disseminated, increasingly dematerialized forms: films, books, magazines, advertising, and what he generally terms “business art.” In the Philosophy, Warhol writes, “business is the step that comes after art” and being “good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art” (90). As the economy of New York City was shifting from an industrial to a post-industrial finance economy, Warhol’s workspace was casually rechristened from the famous “Factory” to the “office” (Bockris 377). And as part of his business art aesthetic, Warhol became increasingly interested in ways to market his “aura,” even as this dematerialization puzzled him. Warhol writes, “Some company recently was interested in buying my ‘aura.’ They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, ‘We want your aura.’ I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for it, I should try to figure out what it is” (Philosophy 77). The TCs—while not themselves successfully marketed—can be seen as an attempt to extend this aura over the most ordinary of materials.

Warhol’s dual interest in the material and the dematerial also informs his canny analyses of financial value. According to the “Economics” chapter of the Philosophy, Warhol was a believer not in credit or checks but in “cash”—to the degree that he made silkscreened paintings of dollar bills, a witty play on the old counterfeiter’s ruse of “printing money.” Money is a fitting Warhol subject because it is material as well as abstract, an arbitrary representation of exchange value. (In this sense, it has much in common with Warhol’s art, which comments on commodity culture even as it is itself commodified.) While Warhol kept stacks of money underneath his mattress—a testament to his continued investment in material value—the government dissolved even the alibi of a correspondence between dollars and real-world value when Nixon decisively lifted the dollar off of the gold standard in 1973. The media effect of this action was to render the gridded rows of gold bullion in Fort Knox even more of an obsolete symbol; no longer was there any pretense of exchanging dollars for their equivalent in gold. It is tempting to imagine the gridded boxes of the TCs as an imitation of the now obsolete gold reserves: a material collection backing the pop imagery Warhol was printing and circulating in the marketplace.

Archive of Past, Present, and Future

A factory produces commodities. An office, in developing less tangible forms of value, produces a paper trail of communications, correspondence, and contracts that need organization and storage—in short, a bureaucracy. The more important the office, the more essential and exhaustive the archive. Warhol began tape recording—perhaps his first important archival work—in 1964, and in this activity he was not alone. As the entire world would come to learn in 1974, President Richard Nixon was maintaining an extensive and incriminating archive of tape recordings during the same period. While Nixon was unlikely to have inspired Warhol’s magnetic tape archive, he was indirectly responsible for another of the artist’s archival projects. Warhol was convinced that his annual tax audits, beginning in 1972, were born from Nixon’s vengeance for a campaign poster Warhol created for his rival George McGovern (Bockris 358). One result of these IRS audits was that Warhol kept a more robust archive of his expenses, either calling his editorial assistant Pat Hackett to provide an oral account or creating tape recordings to be redacted by her with daily “expense reports” of his activities. After Warhol’s death, the “leftovers” of this archive were recycled into the gossip-filled Andy Warhol Diaries, one of several book projects that function as “waste books” of pensées, aphorisms, and anecdotes, including the Philosophy and POPism.

In a perverse way, the use of Nixon’s archives to expose and impeach the president may have affected Warhol’s sense of the archive as a significant cultural form, and amplified the artist’s sense that important figures maintain archives, while hiding them for fear of what secrets and illicit activity they may reveal.²² A letter sent to Warhol before he inaugurated the TCs (which is now, aptly enough, contained within them) may also have contributed to his understanding that even everyday materials passing through his hands could accrue value. Howard B. Gotlieb, Chief of Special Collections at Boston University’s library, wrote to Warhol in 1970 asking him to store his archives at the university. (The letter was Gotlieb’s second request to Warhol; the first request apparently went unanswered.) Gotlieb writes, “We are most desirous of establishing the Andy Warhol Collection at this University in this city, and we seek the honor of associating you with Boston University in this manner… it is our feeling that future scholars will be studying your life and work. It is important that your manuscripts, papers, and correspondence be carefully preserved under optimum archival conditions” (TC 61). It takes no great stretch to imagine that this solicitation influenced the development of the TCs. Indeed, why would the secretive Warhol, who frequently fibbed to interviewers about his own birthplace, wish to see his papers and artifacts made accessible within the academy—especially when they could remain firmly within Warhol’s own control?²³

It isn’t secrecy per se that Warhol achieves with the TCs. As Derrida reminds us, the archive needs a putative public to be constituted as an archive (“no archive without outside,” he writes [11]). But restriction and obfuscation of the TCs’ interiors is inevitable, despite the best intentions of administrators to allow access. As erstwhile director of the Warhol Archives Study Center, John W. Smith writes, “The Warhol Museum is an institution committed to research and open access and has worked to make the contents of the inventoried Time Capsules available to all levels of researchers and scholars” (“Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules” 12). Although the TCs are nominally available for scholarly research, use of them is severely restricted. Only a few select researchers are granted any access at all, and only then for a maximum of one week a year. When I visited the Archives Study Center at the Warhol Museum in January 2014, former Chief Archivist Matt Wrbican allowed me three and a half days to consult the TCs’ contents (reduced from four days by a staff meeting). Most of this research was limited to files containing photocopies of the first ninety boxes opened. Only after much negotiation and cajoling was I allowed to view an actual TC—and only one. (Initially, I was encouraged to look at previously unopened boxes that were believed to contain similar contents but which were in the end judged by the Warhol Foundation not to qualify as TCs, for unknown reasons.) On my last day in the museum, I managed to view the interior of TC 106; however, only the assistant archivist, wearing gloves, could handle its contents. (By contrast, when I reviewed an early sketchbook of Warhol’s travels in Asia, housed within another department in the museum, I was allowed to manipulate the pages with my own hands, unmonitored.) While I was allowed to take pictures of the TC’s contents, when I photographed a card explaining that an item had been removed to another institutional location, I was asked to delete the photograph from my camera. Gaining a sense of the entire collection is no easier. The Archives Study Center sells to potential researchers a partial catalog of the first 90 TCs opened, in the form of a Microsoft Word document. Catalogs of the other 520 TCs exist only in an internal museum database, which external researchers are not allowed to access, even on the premises. The Archives Study Center hopes that a full digital scanning and indexing of the TCs will occur, dependent on external grant funding. Whether this database will be accessible to those outside the Archives Study Center is unknown.

Initiatives to support the cataloguing and digitizing of the TCs return us again to their split function as art and archive. While grants to catalog the TCs presumably argue for the boxes’ potential usefulness to scholars, the logic of housing them intact, in a highly restricted environment at the Warhol Museum (rather than at a more accessible library devoted to such a purpose) rests on their putative art integrity. Digitizing the TCs may allow them to be accessed by more scholars. Another putative advantage is that this digitization may protect the TCs from further disturbance by researchers (a function the photocopies currently fulfill). However this priority—maintaining the physical integrity of the TCs in their original form—has been undone in some instances by the Archives Study Center itself. In my research at the Warhol Museum, I was able to see that in at least one case, the original pell-mell organization of a TC had been compromised by the introduction of standard acid-free archive file folders to organize its contents. Additionally, in examining both the photocopied files and the original TC 106, I saw evidence that some non-perishable materials had been removed from their original location in a TC to be archived elsewhere in the Archives Study Center. (To prevent infestation of the entire collection, some highly perishable materials have been removed entirely, including numerous boxes of cookies sent to Warhol by his Pittsburgh relatives.)

In all these instances, a normative logic of the archive has been imposed on Warhol’s more contingent assembly of the TCs. Some items are judged to belong with others; some items are deemed more valuable; and some items are disposed of entirely, to prevent the degradation of the collection. (Absent Warhol’s word on the matter, who is to say that this degradation would not be a welcome part of the project’s design? Warhol loved accidents and unexpected outcomes.) As a result, Warhol’s original logic, or illogic, of assemblage is compromised, or at least treated inconsistently. While Warhol’s detritus is on the whole accorded a quasi-sacred value as relic, the reliquary itself is being slowly renovated.²⁴ Rather in the manner of the half-completed Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, original plans for constructing a catalog of the archives have been outstripped and thwarted by advances in technology. An ad hoc Microsoft Word document has been superseded by a digital database, which may in turn be superseded by some more thorough digital imaging of the entire TCs. Each digital advance produces confusion and abandonment of the previous form. It is also unclear how the digitization of the archive will alter the original experience of opening and reading a TC. The evolution of digital archiving media will make the TCs more available to scholarly examination, but in a form entirely different from the one Warhol imagined. The TCs will be rendered not as a single monumental accumulation, crushing in its disorder, but as a dispersion of atomized representations of individual items within various boxes. Here again, as in so much of Warhol’s work, a tension arises between the work’s material form and its dematerialization into different media. In this instance, however, the dissemination has not determined or even influenced by Warhol’s hand.

I could end this essay by narrating my examination of TC 106 and describing its contents: piles of correspondence; photographs of Warhol at a book signing for the Philosophy; stacks of Interview magazines; and at the very bottom of the box, a hokey book of erotica unlikely to have aroused the artist. Yet this single shallow foray into the TCs cannot adequately describe the present of the archive in its totality, its massive volume secreted behind institutional restrictions. (Of the approximately 610 TCs supposedly extant, I saw the existence of only 97 or so boxes in the Archives Study Center; the rest were exiled to deep storage elsewhere in the museum.) I had selected TC 106 for review because it contained items related to the Philosophy, a book I knew well. However, very few items in the box were legible to me in a significant way. One item that was—a postcard announcement inviting Warhol to a show by Joe Brainard at the Fischbach Gallery—was meaningful only because of my familiarity with Brainard’s work, and because I had seen other versions of this postcard in the archives of the poets James Schuyler and John Ashbery. Innumerable other scraps of paper were for all purposes illegible and failed to register any meaning in the present whatsoever.

The vast and sublime volume of the TCs is one aspect of the project’s unknowability. Yet there is added to this the obliterating advance of time itself, which renders the past mute and further unknowable. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously describes an “Angel of History” overseeing a growing field of waste and ruin. The larger frustrations of the TCs—to Warhol and to us—mirror the frustrations we must confront when reading any history, which is legible only to the degree to which it resonates in the present. As Benjamin writes, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (255). It is possible to summon the past of the TCs using Warhol’s and his associates’ descriptions of the project. The future of the TCs will likely be digital: an archive for scholars and viewers to consult without disturbing the original boxes’ contents or disorder. But the present of the TCs is a mystery, with the boxes’ vast contents unavailable as research and indescribable as art. When will the present of the TCs arrive? Or will the queer meanings of Warhol’s materials become irretrievable before the administrators allow us access?

Footnotes

1. Wrbican puts the number at 610 (“Time Capsule 51”); John W. Smith, at 612 (“Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules,” 11).

2. Later in the Diaries, Warhol returns to the notion of selling them, suggesting that he saw no incompatibility between the archival and market aspects of the project. In the entry for Tuesday, September 30, 1986, not long before Warhol’s death, he notes: “Took a few time capsule boxes to the office. They are fun—when you go through them there’s things you really don’t want to give up. Some day I’ll sell them for $4000 or $5000 a piece. I used to think $100, but now I think that’s my new price” (762). Note the tension here between retention (“things you really don’t want to give up”) and dispersal into the market.

3. Only Paul Thek, in his 1965 Meat Piece with Brillo Box, took up the challenge to investigate their interiors. Thek set Warhol’s box on its side, opened its bottom, and inserted one of his own wax meat sculptures inside of it—a provocative transgression of Warholian vacuity. It should also be noted that the Brillo Soap Pad boxes exist alongside many less famous box series: Campbell’s Tomato Juice, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Del Monte Peach Halves, Mott’s Apple Juice, Brillo Boxes (3¢ Off), and Campbell’s Soup Box. (Frei and Printz 53–101).

4. The Brillo Box project prompted Arthur Danto to declare Warhol “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced” (459).

5. The time capsule depends on an interval of enclosure and later disclosure. However, the terms of this interval are open to debate: what is the proper interval for a time capsules to be closed? When is opening it too soon? And who is the right audience to open the time capsule?

6. A little-known photograph by Walter Steding shows Georgia O’Keefe visiting Warhol’s Factory at 860 Broadway, sitting in a conference room with one of Arman’s assemblage sculptures looming behind her.

7. Wrbican, Personal Interview.

8. Benjamin Buchloh asked Warhol point blank whether he was aware of Arman’s work in the early 1960s, when he began using serial repetition similar to Arman’s readymade accumulations. Warhol mostly evaded the question: “No, well, I didn’t think that way. I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was looking for a thing” (“An Interview” 323).

9. In a 1963 interview with Rugh Hirschman, Warhol said, “I would grant him [Cage], you know, a lot on purely experimental intellectual ‘freeing the other artists’ basis” (Hirschman 42).

10. In this Wrbican follows Flatley’s argument in “Like: Liking and Collectivity,” a discussion that links Warhol’s collections and his queerness. Flatley suggests that Warhol’s play with “likeness”—assembling objects that are like one another, substituting one object or person for another like person—is a queer activity not because its attraction to like things mirrors same-sex object choice, but because it unites desire (liking) and identification (likeness), contra Freud’s claims that the two must claim opposite gender positions. Flatley writes, “Warhol’s practice has its own utopian impulse; it is an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms could find a home” (72).

11. Daniel Rosenfeld notes that “so much of [Warhol’s] work seems tied to the social fabric that he helped to define, and chronicled obsessively” (qtd. in Binstock 6). While Warhol’s portraits, films, books, and inter/view magazines are the most obviously public aspects of this chronicling, the TCs also continue it—to wit, in Warhol’s collecting every front page of the New York Post in TC 232 (Colacello 294).

12. In his early years in New York City, Warhol attempted to exhibit a series of drawings of fey male nudes at the Tanager Gallery. Warhol’s erstwhile friend and former classmate, Philip Pearlstein recalls, “He submitted a group of boys kissing boys which the other members of the gallery hated and refused to show” (qtd. in Lobel 44). Even after Warhol began to enjoy enormous success and fame, he recalls resistance to his sexualized subject matter. In 1977, Warhol attempted to mount a show of male nudes in Venice. He recalls, “Doug’s assistant, Hilary, told me the workers were surprised when they saw that my paintings were closeups of naked bodies and I guess they didn’t think that was good art because they started to make jokes and compare the cocks to their own and they didn’t do much work.…If Italians laugh at you and lose respect, you can’t get any work out of them” (Diaries 68).

13. Emilio de Antonio suggested that even later, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were lovers, distanced themselves from Warhol because he was “too swish” (POPism 12–13).

14. Naked Lunch was reputed to be one of Warhol’s favorite books; Warhol reportedly suckled at the novel, reading it “at least forty times” according to Bockris (244). The book was equally influential on Warhol’s writing and life practices: “I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.… I used to want to live at the Waldorf Towers and have soup and a sandwich, like that scene in the restaurant in Naked Lunch” (Swenson 18).

15. See Powers of Horror.

16. Herring compiles an archive of such pathologizations in his discussion of Warhol.

17. In the passage in question, Warhol writes: “My mother would read to me in her thick Czechoslovakian accent as best she could and I would always say, ‘Thanks, Mom,’ after she finished with Dick Tracy, even if I hadn’t understood a word. She’d give me a Hershey Bar every time I finished a page in my coloring book” (Philosophy 22).

18. For example, Ross shows how a camp movie like All About Eve emerged from concerns with the obsolescence of studio-era film production, represented in the film via a self-reflexive anxiety about female desirability and the eclipse of Broadway theater by film (a screen for the studio’s obsolescence in the face of television).

19. In this book, Harvey also notes the relationship between the economic base and art production extends to the hyper-valuation of art itself: “Indeed it can be argued that the growth of the art market…and the strong commercialization of cultural production since around the 1970s have a lot to do with the search to find alternative means to store value under conditions where the usual money forms were deficient” (298).

20. There has been interesting work that connects conceptual art to information and systems theory, by Eve Meltzer in particular. However, further discussion about the relationship between economic and artistic dematerialization ought to take place.

21. While clearly material in the sense of being concrete, the TCs also have the potential to reveal, to the patient researcher, the network of contracts, commissions, and support that led to the creation of other artworks and commodities (e.g., I was able to peruse the planning and marketing correspondence for The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in the TCs).

22. In Bourdon’s biography of Warhol, Jed Johnson recalls that the one collection Warhol did send to the trash was—ironically enough—the most obviously valuable and personal: the graphic illustrations that predated his emergence as a fine artist in the early ’60s. Johnson also notes that Warhol carefully instructed him to leave these discarded artworks in other person’s trash cans, so as to not to be subject to garbologists like Weberman (348). Additionally, Warhol’s audio recordings led to legal problems much as Nixon’s did. The Diaries produced from audio recordings resulted in a libel lawsuit from Bianca Jagger that has caused the Warhol Foundation to be highly restrictive in using the tapes for research (Sebag-Montefiore).

23. Warhol’s disregard for the prestige of the University is evident in his decision, in the mid-1960s, to send actor Allen Midgette as a stand-in for himself on the college lecture circuit (POPism 247–48).

24. Aptly enough, considering their reliquary aspects, each opening of the box is treated ceremonially. The process is tape recorded, and the names of the participants present are recorded in the catalog. (Wrbican, Personal Interview.)

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