Category: Volume 27 – Number 3 – May 2017

G Douglas Barrett
G Douglas Barrett is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Salisbury University. He has enjoyed lives past and present as an artist, composer, writer, and tech worker. He has published in Mosaic, Tacet, and Contemporary Music Review and is the author of After Sound: Toward a Critical Music (Bloomsbury, 2016). The current article is part of a work-in-progress project on experimental music and theories of posthumanism.

Michelle Chihara
Michelle Chihara is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at Whittier College. Her current research project examines the relationship between contemporary American cultural production and behavioral economics’ push to ground realism in the quantification of the human subject. She is the co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics, due out in 2018. Her research has appeared in Studies in American Fiction, and she has published fiction and articles about contemporary culture in Avidly.org, n+1, Mother Jones, The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle, The Green Mountains Review, The Santa Monica Review and the Echoes blog at Bloomberg.com, among others. She is the Economics & Finance Section Editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Alexander Keller Hirsch
Alexander Keller Hirsch is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He is the author of many articles, as well as co-editor of the forthcoming volume, The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss (Rowman & Littlefield). He is at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled Moral Inadequacy and the Will to Chance.

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús
Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Graduate Program of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature at Emory University, where he worked on Latin American and Caribbean literature and French and German contemporary thought. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Reading Danger: Literary History After Historicism. The book seeks to both diagnose the persistence of historicism in the contemporary literary-theoretical landscape and to rethink literary history as a paradoxical form of dangerous “knowledge” whose truth can only be measured through a confrontation with the perils of illegibility and immemoriality. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in several edited volumes and in peer-reviewed journals such as Mosaic, Oxford Literary Review, New Centennial Review, Diacritics, CENTRO Journal, Revista Iberoamericana, Política Común, Revista Pléyade, and Transmodernity.

Warren Montag
Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and his Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014). Montag is also the editor of Décalages, a journal on Althusser and his circle, and the translator of Etienne Balibar’s Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness (Verso, 2013).

Peter Y. Paik
Peter Y. Paik is HK Research Professor of the Humanities at Yonsei University. He is the author of From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (Minnesota, 2010) and has written on such topics as the new South Korean film, horror cinema, animé, and apocalypticism in contemporary culture. His article, “Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Apocalyptic Imperialism,” appeared in Postmodern Culture 14.1. He is currently at work on a study of the category of the aristocratic from the 19th century to the present.

David Parry
David Parry is an associate professor of Communications and Digital Media, and department chair at Saint Joseph’s University. His work centers on understanding the transformations brought about by the change from an analog broadcast communication structure to a digitally networked one. Particularly he is interested in how this transformation alters power relations within communities and between institutions. He is a dedicated open access scholar.

Herman Rapaport
Herman Rapaport is Reynolds Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He published The Literary Theory Toolkit (Wiley, 2011), and has also contributed chapters to several recent books published by Bloomsbury: Dead Theory, Desire in Ashes, and Performatives after Deconstruction.

Dorin Smith
Dorin Smith is a PhD candidate in English at Brown. He writes on the intersections of the novel and history of science in the US during the long-nineteenth century. He is currently finishing his dissertation, Fictional Brains: Reflecting on Necessity in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel, which explores how the formal possibilities of narrative action in the novel were prefigured by contemporary neuroscientific and biological models of material cognition.

David Parry (bio)
Saint Joseph’s University

As review of Jordan, Tim. Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society. Pluto Press, 2015.

You can order the hardback of Tim Jordan’s Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society from Amazon.com for $60.19, or you can pay $21.98 for the paperback. That the two versions have different prices based on different materialities does not seem remarkable. But you can also “purchase” the book for $20.24 and read it on Kindle or on a computer with the Kindle app. “Purchase” is in quotes because if you choose to access the information that Jordan has authored in this way, you are not actually purchasing the book. You are rather purchasing a license to access the information according to certain terms and conditions set out by the publisher and by Amazon. You are renting access to the information. The fact that in this third case, the same information is presented to you at a radically reduced material cost (no printing), yet you only save $1.74, is a peculiarity of the digital age we have constructed. (There is of course a fourth option here: if you are privileged enough to have access to an academic library, you can read the information at no direct cost by checking out the book.) Information Politics seeks to explain how the same information comes to be available through a variety of means, yet with marked differences in materiality and cost. What are the circumstances that inform information structures and that politicize them in this way?

Jordan’s central tenet is that information is a new site of political struggle, and that to understand political power in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to engage the handling of information. Any theory that seeks to explain exploitation in the twenty-first century must now evaluate information as one of the sites of exploitation. Jordan is clear from the beginning that information is not some new master category that subsumes all other political antagonisms, but rather is one of multiple sites of engagement; he argues that information should be added alongside class, race, gender, and other more established sites of political struggle. Starting with this framework is one of the strengths of the book. Jordan recognizes that political struggle is multiple and takes place across myriad antagonisms, and that isolating one point of conflict allows for a deeper understanding only on the condition that it is then connected back to other political struggles. This is what the book sets out to do: to examine the forces that use information to structure exploitation and to use this investigation to expand our understanding of exploitation.

To make this argument, Jordan divides the book into three sections. The first explains the theory of information politics, analyzing both what it is that allows information to be leveraged for political gain, and also, perhaps more importantly, what about the digital makes information an especially powerful (and perhaps new) site of struggle. The second section examines particular patterns that develop as a result of these information structures, and the third is dedicated to engaging case studies meant to demonstrate the argument.

The idea that asymmetrical access to information produces inequality is not new to the twenty-first century, or even the twentieth: there is a long history of thinking about information as a central locus of power. Through one lens, the Protestant Reformation developed from a question about access to information, structured around changes in the material conditions of the reproduction of information. One can think about the field of communication studies as the study of how information helps to structure communities and distribute power; the work of James Carey is particularly instructive in this regard. As many critics have noted, the digital era has reshaped our relation to information because its substructure is now digital, not analog. One of the strengths of Jordan’s book is to provide specificity to this claim. Rather than asserting that digital information is a different type of information, Jordan supplies three reasons why the power of information has grown exponentially. The primary reason for this change is something Jordan labels “simultaneous complete use” (194): the idea that when information’s material structure is digital, more than one party at a time can completely use the information. Only one person can use an analog hardbound copy of Information Politics at a time: if I check it out from the library, you cannot also read it. But when information’s materiality becomes digital, this restriction is lifted. Everyone can share in a bit of information and use it to its full extent. Scarcity no longer becomes the defining means by which information is controlled. As a non-rivalrous good whose cost of distribution drops to near zero, and whose consumption does not preclude another’s consumption, the power of information thus changes. You can have your cake and let your neighbor eat it too, at least potentially.

But why then has this feature of the digital—the ability to simultaneously and completely use information—not led to the drastic lowering of the cost of information, coupled with universal access? Why is information now a more powerful site of political antagonism and not a lesser one? Why is it that despite information abundance, access to information is becoming increasingly unequally distributed? Why is it that the digital version of this book cost nearly as much physical one? The answer of course is copyright, or copyright as a stand-in for the numerous ways in which legal, cultural, and technical barriers have sprung up in the digital era. Instead of creating spaces where information is equally distributed, such barriers control information as a site of political power. Or, to put the matter simply, political power first inhered in land, then in factories, and now in information: Crops, Commodities, Copyright. This is all well-worn ground by media theorists, legal scholars, and political organizers alike. Since the late 1990s Mckenzie Wark has written about this change in power from materiality to information, with A Hacker Manifesto his most significant work. From a political and legal angle, Lawrence Lessig’s early work, Code, and then later, Remix, are directed at the history of legal battles around this question. Drahos and Braithwaite’s Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? is also particularly good on the history of this question across cultures and milieus. More recently, Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age provides an approachable history of the way information has become the new site of control in the information age. In this regard, Jordan’s argument that information is now a key site of political conflict does not break new ground, even as it articulates the specificity of this moment in a useful way.

Jordan does outline why it is that information is easily controlled in the digital era (despite its non-rivalrous material nature) and points to places where we can observe this. The three places he points to are (1) recursion, (2) the devices we use, and (3) the way the network and protocols shape the flow of information. Each of these is instructive in its own right: the power of information to act upon information, the affordances and limitations of the devices we use to interact with the information flows, and the structures to which information must adhere to be transmitted across the network. But taken together, the interaction of these three aspects forms the ground through which Jordan wants us to build our understanding of the political power of information. We need to pay attention not only to information that one places in the Google search bar, but to the ability of Google to use that information to act upon other information, to build information that grows exponentially, and to claim ownership both over the recursion itself (the algorithm) and the product of that recursion (more information). We must also assess the limits of the devices through which we interact with Google, and the strict language of protocols and networks that provide access to Google servers and all of the places through which Google interacts with the web.

None of this is natural, of course; the way that these forces interact together to produce political winners and losers, to exploit some and empower others, is a matter of numerous complex decisions. For example, there is no reason that Google needs to own the information that is produced from recursion; this is a legal decision. That a digital book should require payment equal (or nearly equal to) a physical one says a great deal about who gets to own information, control access to devices, and determine how it interacts with the network.

The second part of Jordan’s book points to particular aspects of the adherence of power: cloud computing, securitization, and social networks. Each of these places creates a particular set of circumstances that leads to information inequality and ultimately serves as a site of exploitation.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the cloud is anything but magical and ethereal, and instead, by leveraging recursions, devices, and protocols, it is as a place where ownership of information is asserted. The entity that controls the cloud asserts property rights over the information it stores, creating a significant opportunity for exploitation. Similarly, nation states, claiming to keep citizens secure, now track and store massive amounts of data, creating information platforms that aim for total collection and control of all their citizens’ data. Finally, the seemingly public nature of data production on social networks is captured for private institutional profit. Social life is turned into free labor whose value is then captured by monopoly-level social media corporations. That all three of these sites of information creation, storage, and transfer carry political weight, again, is not particularly new. Much has been written on cloud computing, the information state, and social media networks. But in this case, the initial set up that Jordan provides helps the reader to focus on the particular ways in which information is being politicized through recursion, devices, and network protocols to create power inequality.

The final section of the book is somewhat different from the first two. While the second section is a broad analysis of sites of information exploitation, the third section takes up specific case studies (or “battlegrounds,” as Jordan calls them): the iPad, digital games, and hacktivism. The earlier sections provide a strong theoretical lens for analyzing information politics; the battleground section ends up delivering less. While all three of these sites are significant, each is too individually complicated for the space allowed them here. Each section barely covers the history and the introduction to the topic before closing and pointing out that further study is required to fully understand how information is politicized in these areas. If one wants to think about any of these specific battlegrounds, it would be necessary to read one of the numerous books that treat these topics with nuance and complexity. Hacktivism has a deep and complex history, and understanding the way that recursions, devices, and network protocols control information to generate political antagonisms requires far more analysis than Jordan is able to muster in one chapter. The same is true of the diverse field of digital game studies. And this is even more true of the iPad, both in terms of the politics of production (the labor that goes into it) and the politics of labor done on it (the jobs for which it is suited and those for which it is not).

This brings me back to the Kindle version of the book, available on the iPad. For a book that pays so much attention to the politicization of information, it really fails to address the way in which it engages in this politicization. Why restrict the simultaneous complete use of the information in the book? Or even more simply, why charge a near equal price for a digital version when its cost of distribution is so much less? To be certain, information, data, and knowledge are different categories, and the book is dealing primarily with the first two while producing the latter. But still one wonders how this book itself participates in the exploitation through information control that it so readily points to in other locations. How might we understand the book itself as a recursion of other places of information (through Jordan’s reference to the work of others), as a device (the choice to publish in print affects the interface and form), or as situated in the network (the legal means by which it is inserted into the network affects the flow)? More to the point, what would it mean to publish a free version of the digital book, not asserting property rights over the information, instead of restricting access? How would it flow across the network then? What information inequalities would be reduced if ownership were not asserted over the information, if the recursions in the book were not a site of the right to assert control but rather a means of liberation? That a book whose topic is information inequality unreflectively reproduces the inequality it analyzes by capturing its recursive information production, exploiting device affordances and limitations, and restricting the way that its information can flow across the network demonstrates the difficulty of engaging ethically with this antagonism.

Works Cited

• Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Routledge, 2009.
• Doctorow, Cory. Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age. McSweeney’s, 2015. Drahos, Peter, and John Braithwaite. Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? New Press, 2007.
• Lessig, Lawrence. Code: Version 2.0. Basic Books, 2006.
• ———. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin, 2009.
• Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard UP, 2004.

Dorin Smith (bio)
Brown

A review of Weatherby, Leif. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. Fordham UP, 2016.

The place of critique has, perhaps, been in question for too long; not that it was wrong to critique critique but that the activity has exhausted itself. While publications on the topic mount and ever-new modes of “reading” are figuratively proposed (close, too-close, critical, post-critical, surface, new formalist, and distant—non-reading is clearly on the horizon), what is beneath our readerly theorizing is almost certainly less about “reading” and more about the metaphors which have displaced theory as our form of critical interlocution. At one level, metaphors seem indispensable for articulating the kind of unsettled knowledge the humanities traffic in; at another, they seem routine tools for normalizing thinking and eliding complex differences. In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski acknowledges the necessity of metaphor as “the basis for any kind of comparative or analogical thinking,” even as she challenges how the metaphors we read with, like “digging down” and “standing back,” ossify the figurative potential of the mediating distance across which we encounter our texts (52). It is not simply that we deal in metaphors, we read in metaphors—a second-order investment that takes the positionality of metaphor as its problematic. It should then be no surprise that our critical moment coincides with renewed interest in the arch theorist of metaphor, Hans Blumenberg.

Blumenberg’s work, which has been available in German for decades, is finally being translated into English, with Paradigms for a Metaphorology and The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory among the more recent notable publications. For an earlier generation of scholars, Blumenberg’s work on metaphor has only been accessible in English through his Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Though metaphor then and now is often treated as a cognitive tool that culminates in a new concept, Blumenberg understands metaphors as meaningful in themselves, as historical entities reducible neither to lived experience nor to the theoretical necessity of conceptualization. Developing an inter-animating account of theory and metaphor, Blumenberg frames the possibilities of theoretical knowledge as a problem of positionality, as something emerging out of the distance between a shipwreck and its spectator or between a stumbling astronomer and a passing Thracian woman. As touchstones that elide final conceptualization, these metaphorical events (the witnessed shipwreck and the laughing woman) become the place from which theory marks its conceptualizing capacities and from which it organizes its capacity to influence the very form of the lifeworld. The method of metaphorology, as Blumenberg develops it and as Leif Weatherby utilizes it in his new book, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx, is a tool for striking against positivistic conceptuality and becomes a way to effect change in an increasingly technological world that, in contrast, is increasingly moving toward metaphysics.

One would be right to presume on picking-up Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ that it is a dense study of the “organ” in early German Romanticism with a wide array of ancillary interventions into the history of ideas, the history of science, critical theory, and the intersections of literature and philosophy. But at its core Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a work of the recent Blumensance. Theoretically, it extends the problematic of metaphorology to the moment of German Romanticism in which the organ became not only the primary metaphor of the understanding, but also the tool with which the distantiating power of metaphor was internalized as the organs of sense, understanding, and reason. Where Blumenberg reads Romanticism as an awkward age of metaphysics (“the semantic grasping after a lost stability”) between the classical moment of Aristotelian Being and the modernist moment of metaphorical free-play in the creative constitution of new ontologies, Weatherby digs deeply into German Romanticism to demonstrate that this period sought a ground for metaphysics in the manipulable (albeit fragile) world of “organs” (42). As Weatherby notes in his introduction, “it has become a historiographical refrain that the Romantics aestheticized metaphysics on the basis of an organic model of the universe” (23), yet this reduction of Romanticism’s “organs” to the biological hinges on our presentist sense of organs as the functional locations of an organism (23). The simplicity of Weatherby’s question (“what, then, is the organ?”) and response (“the answer is not simple, and never has been”) is refreshing for the way it privileges the task of conceptualizing over the recovery of some then-contemporary concept as the motive for re-engaging pre-Romantic philosophers (Leibniz and Kant), the German Romantics (Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis), and the post-Romantics (Goethe, Hegel, and Marx) (7). One is left, like Weatherby’s dramatis personae, with the task of metaphorizing the “organ.” In this respect, Weatherby’s book marshals its metaphorological project and its commitment to the possibilities of conceptuality against organicist readings of Romanticism like Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism and Robert J. Richard’s The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, and against attempts to identify the pre-Critical Kant with organicism as in Jennifer Mensch’s Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy and Catherine Malabou’s Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality.

Structurally, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is organized into three historical sections: “Toward Organology,” “Romantic Organology,” and “After Organology,” each of which contains chapters organized chronologically. Revolving around the metaphysical and metaphorical richness of the 1790s as the moment in which the “organ” moved from metaphorical to metaphysical technology, Weatherby’s analysis begins from a contextualization of the problematic of the “organ” in post-Aristotelian metaphysics. Asking the reader to suspend the intuition that “organ” is “bodily, ‘organic,’ or part of the order of the living,” he fixates on the absence of “organ” as a term in the German-speaking world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, lasting until the mid-1790s when, suddenly, it “was now on everyone’s lips” (33, 111). Alongside the emerging sense of the biological organ, “organ” signified metaphorically between functional, instrumental, and cosmological semantic fields. From Aristotle, organon was “that which is potential with respect to a field of actuality on which it is concentrated” (17). This functional, and for Weatherby primary, sense is the tool: wherein the actuality of something (e.g., a fire) is immanent in the possibility of something else (i.e., a flint). When the flint makes the fire real, it is an organon, bridging nature and artifice, making the possible actual. Another sense of the word, also used by Aristotle but perhaps more resonant to those familiar with early modern philosophical discourse, is the organ as instrument, exemplified in early-modern references to “instruments of perception” which included both the eye and the microscope. The other important sense was cosmological. Weatherby argues that for philosophers in the eighteenth century like Leibniz and the pre-Critical Kant, the desire to reconcile logic with cosmic understanding is a potent undercurrent beneath the desire to produce a metaphysical organ (a tool for metaphysics) that can bridge the understanding of truth and the order of the cosmos. But though the “organ” was vested with bridging mind and cosmos, it also created conceptual problems over whether or not the mind is an organ, and, if not, how its actuality is to be understood. The larger argument in Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is that throughout the eighteenth century, German metaphysics was concerned with the metaphysical potential of the “organ” even as German lacked a clear term to circumscribe the work of the word. By the 1790s the early German Romantics deployed the metaphorics of the “organ” as crossing speculatively between the functional, instrumental, and cosmological semantic fields “to reinvigorate speculation after Kant and provide theoretical justification for human intervention in natural and historical processes” (23).

The three chapters in “Toward Organology” historicize the operant metaphorics of the “organ” in the German-language from Leibniz to the 1790s with Kant. And more than other chapters in this book, these reveal the distinctly German condition for the Romantic metaphysics of organology, which relies on the complex conceptual inheritance of das Organ rather than to the simpler, functionalist definition of the term in English and French. Chapter one details the “beginnings of the metaphorization of the ‘organ’ for Metaphysics” to Leibniz, who “never uses the term in its biological sense” (53). Though Leibniz’s search for a “tool of tools” that could connect necessary truths of the understanding to the cosmos courted contemporary language of embryology and pre-formation, it was ultimately in the service of producing metaphorical senses of das Organ that would leverage the functional and instrumental senses of “organ.” By contrast, prominent German-speaking scientists, like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Albrecht von Haller, who were engaged in the development of physiology and embryology in the eighteenth century, never used the German word and wrote hesitatingly, despite the immanent necessity of it for their respective projects, to conceptualize the “organ”; in fact, they “wrote in part to avoid that term” (66).

At the edges of conceptuality, the “organ” became a metaphorically invested term for articulating and then satisfying the desideratum of yoking necessary truths to the pre-formation of the understanding. In the second chapter, Weatherby traces the influence of the metaphorics of the “organ” on Kant’s and Herder’s respective philosophical projects. Through an insightful and occasionally brilliant comparative analysis of Kant’s pre-Critical search in the 1760s for an organon of metaphysics and his post-Critique metaphysical restriction to a canon of the understanding, Weatherby argues that what Kant introduced to the metaphorology of the organ was a concern with methodology: how does judgment unify whole and part? Ultimately, this metaphysical question, dropped by Kant, is said to be taken up subsequently by Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis in the mid-1790s. Herder, by contrast, is taken as the source for the metaphorical content of the “organ,” as he came to speak of “organs analogically in metaphysical, epistemological, and cultural spheres indifferently” and so popularized the metaphorical capacity of the concept, such that the “organ” registered cosmological order and biological processes alongside its functional and instrumental senses (97). All of this comes to a head in one of the book’s best chapters, “The Organ of the Soul: Vitalist Metaphysics and the Literalization of the Organ,” in which Weatherby’s careful attention to the metaphorics of the “organ” demonstrates how the renewal of metaphysical speculation in the 1790s was less a turn to organicism than a return to the close imbrication of judgment and metaphysics which Kant ultimately rejected. Balancing Alexander von Humboldt, Ernst Platner, Johann Reil, Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, and Samuel Thomas Sömmerring’s On the Organ of the Soul, Weatherby reads the 1790s as the decade in which the metaphorical range of the “organ” broadened to name several conceptual pressure points simultaneously (111). In this way, the “organ” galvanized the conceptual ground of the “tool of metaphysics” and suggested an interface for metaphysics that would be developed by the early German Romantics.

The second section (“Romantic Organology”) divides its attention across four chapters covering Hölderlin and the dialectical organ of tragedy (chapter four), Schelling and the transcendental organ (chapter five), Novalis and the metapolitical ends of Romantic organology (chapter six), and then the opposition of Naturphilosophie to Romantic organology (chapter seven). Though these chapters are ordered as a philosophical history of the development of organology, chapters three through five are more hermetic and author-centric in their scope than are the previous chapters. Consequently, though these chapters do the most to articulate “organology,” they are recruited to challenge received critical accounts of the early German Romantics. The chapter on Hölderlin, for example, negotiates the space between critical interest in his “reaction to Kant and Fichte on the one hand, and the emergence of his poetic theology” on the other by introducing Hölderlin’s theorization of literary genre (tragedy) as an organological interface between judgment and being (132). Similarly, the chapter on Novalis falls into an analogous critical closeness of argument as Weatherby is most preoccupied with positioning Novalis beyond the organicist reading of Romanticism. Though Novalis is the thinker whom Weatherby identifies as developing the most “robust form of Romantic organology” and is thus central to the project of carving out a space for Romantic metaphysics, the chapter feels confined to the technical significance of the Romantic Encyclopedia as “the genre of Romantic organology” (234, 240). The overarching claim here, as in the chapter on Hölderlin, remains that the concerns of form and aesthetics among the early German Romantics are not in opposition to metaphysics but rather the means of manipulating the interface of metaphysics. While these chapters are occasionally too hermetic, the chapter on Shelling excels in part because he was so wide-ranging and capacious a figure in German intellectual life that tarrying with his uses of “organ” between drafts of Naturphilosophie and System of Transcendental Idealism can speak to the broader conceptual sea changes in the period. For Schelling in the late-1790s, organ and organon are necessarily linked, and their relationship subtends the value of art and “intellectual intuition” in his thinking. Bridging the difference between organ and organon, the “organ” “becomes an analytical tool capable of synthetic intervention in its field of potential” (173).

The last chapter of section two narrates the cultural end of Romantic organology, if not organology more broadly, with the rise of Naturphilosophie and the loss of the metaphysical potential of the “organ” following the extensive mapping of the concept of the biological organ onto the order of being. In this chapter, Weatherby offers a compelling account of Naturphilosophie as “directly inspired by Schelling” even as its “resulting cosmology is Herderian in quality” (258). Philosophers identified with Naturphilosophie, like Lorenz Oken, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, and Joseph Görres, were concerned with transposing the biological organ onto metaphysics rather than deploying the metaphysical and metapolitical possibility of organology towards realizing a fundamentally open-ended world. According to Weatherby, the revolutionary ambition of Romantic metaphysics was lost by Naturphilosophie. Consequently, Hegel’s critique of the “organ” in The Phenomenology of Spirit as an overt concern with “observing reason” marks the moment where the “organ” loses its conceptual capacity to facilitate the philosophical crossings of organ, organon, and the biological organ. Though Naturphilosophie is the end of Romantic organology as a program, Weatherby argues that there remain a few lingering strands in Goethe’s late-career work on morphology (chapter eight) and Marx’s balance of naturalism and revolutionary politics in his technological metaphysics (chapter nine)—both discussed in the final section of the book, “After Organology.” This section’s title is somewhat misleading, as Weatherby is concerned with demonstrating the longevity of Romantic metaphysics even after the loss of the metaphorics of the “organ.” He attempts to save the late-career Goethe from the charge of political retreat and “intellectual senility” by contextualizing his attempt to navigate the Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier debates as a means of returning the organon of Romantic organology to metaphysics (281). In this light, Goethe’s concern with developing a practice of observation is not only a means of attending “to phenomena in their generality and concreteness,” it is also an attempt “to found a system of experience capable of altering the world, a technological metaphysics” (281). The final chapter, “Instead of an Epilogue,” reprises Marx’s relationship to Darwin in order to tease out the significance of technology for Capital and redresses the extent to which Marx’s twentieth-century interlocutors elide his metaphysical roots in a Romantic organology. Though no chapter of this book is easily extricated from the whole, “Instead of an Epilogue” is the most exportable and the most likely to find an audience outside of Romanticist studies.

Though there are many reasons to recommend Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ, the intensely interconnected yet sprawling nature of the book will likely confine its theoretical intervention into technological metaphysics to a smaller readership than it deserves. After all, the appeal of re-engaging German Romanticism neither in terms of the philosophical prominence of Fichte in 1794/1795 nor in terms of the discursive impulses of the Athenaeum between 1798 and 1800 but rather through the early Romantic return to Kant in 1796/1797 will attract a very self-selecting reader, despite the value of Weatherby’s attempted fusion of method and politics. The challenge of the book, to follow the articulations of organology at the level of metaphorics, remains an obstacle for its method, because the possibilities of metaphorology (or organology) depend upon clear metaphorical points of contact. Making metaphorics manipulable is a key desideratum of metaphorology. When Weatherby praises Blumenberg for being “a practitioner of this metaphorization,” he highlights how the latter makes metaphorology a tool for illuminating metaphor’s capacity to challenge conceptuality and actualize change in the lifeworld (40). Weatherby pursues a practical metaphorology by making room for German Romanticism’s alternative to Aristotelian metaphysics and the metaphorical free-play of modernism. In his account, what emerges out of the Romantic metaphorics of the “organ” is “a new metaphysics—that of the organ, a ‘technological’ metaphysics paradigmatic of modern concerns with the point at which speculation and politics, theory and praxis, can communicate” (43). This reveals an interesting direction for literary theory, as Weatherby navigates past the disappearing landmarks of our post-theory landscape to discover “an unexpected Romanticism” in our technological present which makes a return to Schelling more explanatorily powerful than a turn to Stiegler (352).

As a metaphorological work concerned with carving out space for Romantic metaphysics beyond Romantic metaphorics, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ tasks itself with maintaining two competing impulses: one diachronic and comparative, the other hyper-critical and devotional. The more comparative chapters juggle multiple thinkers as they attempt to conceptualize the “organ” metaphysically or cosmologically, whereas more focused chapters, like chapter five, burrow deeply into the nonconceptuality underlying an author’s shifting distinctions between organ and organon across the drafts of a single work. Both impulses are usually well-executed, but the general effect for the reader is one of cognitive whiplash. Similarly, the use of metaphorology requires balancing the metaphor’s leaning towards conceptuality and lingering with its logical perplexity, which in Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ leads to practical confusions about the exact semantics of “organ.” Any reader coming to this book will likely struggle with the array of distinctions Weatherby deploys. The expressions that distinguish between the three basic senses of “organ” are generally vague throughout and border on inconsistency in a few instances. Moreover, I feel obliged to note that this book has more typographical and copy-editing errors than any work from a major publisher that I can recall in recent history. Mistakes happen in every published work, of course, but these errors are regrettable. In respect to more substantive issues with Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ, the chapters dedicated to Hölderlin, Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe are rich but not equal in their ability to balance the competing impulses of historical breadth and critical depth. For this reason, the book’s scope feels inflated by its dogged devotion to the most canonical early German Romantics and its need to provide a distinct position for each thinker in the development of organology. Similarly, the weakest argumentative strand of the book is the identification of Romantic metaphysics’ concern with producing open-ended systems to positive political philosophy. It is only in the book’s final chapter and its turn to a Romantic Marx that the confluence of metaphysics and politics is ultimately compelling. Generally, however, concrete political commitments are underrepresented in favor of meta-political reflections, a fact which is strikingly clear in the omission of any discussion of slaves in this very large book. Aristotle’s definition of slaves as “living tools” in the Nicomachean Ethics and the historical presence of the slave trade around 1800 make the discursive absence of slavery a significant oversight.

These points aside, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is a deeply impressive work of scholarship. It will serve some readers as a renewed introduction to and impetus to engage with Romantic metaphysics, while others might find in it a means of returning to the metaphorics of technology and its conceptual history. In this respect, it will likely come to resemble Edward S. Casey’s 1997 book The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, written early in the ecocritical movement as a phenomenologically inflected history of the concept of “place” that had been neglected since Descartes’s reflections on “space.” Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ turns to the metaphorics of the “organ” with such strength and intellectual vigor because in the brief window of the 1790s the “organ” became a metaphor for the realizable metaphor, for something both literal and instrumental. As such, this book will act as a foundation, if not a theoretical position, for future analyses of the “organ” and the possibilities of conceptuality.

Works Cited

Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.

Herman Rapaport (bio)
Wake Forest University

A review of Eyers, Tom. Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Northwestern UP, 2017.

Some ninety years ago, C.D. Broad argues in “Critical and Speculative Philosophy” that “the discursive form of cognition by means of general concepts” can never “be completely adequate to the concrete Reality which it seeks to describe.” According to Broad, “thought must always be ‘about’ its objects; to speak metaphorically, it is a transcription of the whole of Reality into a medium which is itself one aspect of Reality.” Speaking of F.H. Bradley, Broad opines that he cannot agree with the conviction that “this scheme involves internal contradictions.” Broad thus imagines a scheme of Reality and a process of thought that is “about” its objects as free of internal contradictions.

Central to Tom Eyers’s brilliant Speculative Formalism is an interrogation of the correspondence of formalized thought in the form of imaginative writing and what Broad calls Reality. Contrary to Broad, Eyers maintains that there are internal contradictions within discursive forms of cognition, and further, that such contradictions exist as well in the material life world, something that has been made clear by Marx and Engels and many others. Eyers writes, “Form, as it will be understood in what follows, becomes the conflicted, multiply distributed, and plastic site where truths specific to literature are rendered contingent but also given their only opening to the world, and from which other formal logics in other domains may be better understood” (6). In this context, the speculative refers to the conviction that we can only apprehend the Real by means of the mediation of forms: imaginative, logical, paradigmatic, and so forth. The speculative must necessarily recognize, therefore, that it is determined by interfaces in conflict that enable a “creative capacity of impasses” (8), a view not so different from the New Critics’, who saw literary writing as a medium for speculation that opened on significance in terms of ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies.

Along these lines, Eyers writes: “Literature stages better than most phenomena the manner in which, far from shutting down the possibility of meaning, the impossibility of any final, formal integration of a structure and its component parts is the very condition of possibility of that structure” (8). The possibility of structure and meaning, we’re told, is predicated upon its incompletion (the impossibility of integration): “central to my argument will be the claim that form resists meaning as much as it enables it” (9). Again, he tells us, “it is [the] very resistance to semantic recuperation that, paradoxically enough, lies at the root of literature’s capacity to refer, even to transfigure, annul, boost or remain strikingly indifferent to, its historical and political conditions” (9–10). This idea of indifference likely would not be accepted by traditional historians who place considerable emphasis on historical contextualization, about which, they would claim, by definition the work cannot be indifferent.

Speculative formalism, as may already be evident, makes claims for literary readings that cannot be verified by means of naïve, direct reference to the things themselves, including the facticity of historical context. For the speculative is defined in terms of a thinking that recognizes and works through the strictures of formal systems or logics, which, according to Eyers, may be internally contradictory. Not only literature, but history, politics, economics, and culture may also be considered as formal contradictory logics, as posited by French theory of the 1960s that invalidated totalizing programs of literary and cultural study (Derrida), along with the invalidation of a naïve Cartesianism whereby subject and object (observer and observed) are thought to be self-evidently given as intelligible, congruent substitutes for one another (Foucault).

As we can see, although Eyers makes a case for returning to formal literary analysis, his speculative formalism is by no means a return to the kind of formalism that pits the work as a static artificial construct against the teleological historical givens of the life world. This work/world distinction, of course, is endemic to long discredited traditional historicist practices of scholarship wherein researchers simplistically attempt to connect the dots between a work and its immediate historical context in order to forensically determine the meaning of the work on the basis of what exists on the outside, whether that be the writer’s biographical experiences, the time’s cultural conventions, or historical events. Eyers writes, “history is not to be conceived of as ‘context’ per se, as an externality ranged dynamically against the passive content [that is, the work] that it molds; rather, literary history and politics are especially vivid folds in literary form as such, envelopes that both determine and are determined by the textual or conceptual scientific structures that too often are assumed to be their mere passive products” (10). The work, according to Eyers, should not be treated as a passive entity, like data or mere information.

In terms of the politics of the profession of literary study, Eyers repudiates a state of affairs that has become evident since 2000, namely, the large-scale obviation of theory in favor of a return to a pre-New Critical moment of crude forensic research that is information-based and not sensitive to hermeneutical problems and methods. Whereas interpretation has always been sensitive, to some degree, to the non-correspondence of words or discourse and what Broad called Reality, emphasis on information presumes the self-evident, passive transparency of data in relation to world. Whereas hermeneutics has usually been skeptical of logocentric clotûre (see, for example, the Rabbinical tradition or Buddhist tradition), informatics (big data) is predicated on cybernetic programs that are aggressively totalitarian and logocentric in ways that make us take them for granted as a reality that is grounded in fact, or numbers.

Eyers’s five chapters cover a dazzling range of figures drawn from the present and immediate past that represent what we could call high culture. Chapter one critiques the opposite of the speculative approach, namely, positivism. The immediate target for critique is Franco Moretti, whose “distant reading,” Eyers claims, “remain[s] at such an abstract scale, of reified patterns of consumption and distribution, that he is prevented in advance from being able to understand the more obscure kinds of cultural forms that pool between the cracks of their ostensible networks of distribution” (47–48). Moretti’s reduction of literature on a large scale to big data is, of course, part of a wider trend in literary studies that is opposed to close reading. Since the mid-1980s, close reading, a mainstay of the Yale School, has receded into the background as an influence on literary critical analysis. Among Eyers’s aims is the rehabilitation of close reading and interpretation, and he criticizes Moretti for taking market forces as a natural determinant for plotting relationships between works that have been statically rendered. In addition, he claims that Moretti embraces a social Darwinist model that gauges the success and failure of various kinds of works in terms of their popularity and dominance. As a whole, Eyers makes the point that distant reading forecloses speculative formalism, which is, among other things, an appreciation of the inconsistency, incompletion, and catachrestic dimensions of formal relations that invalidate the reductiveness of the quantitative method.

For Eyers, New Historicism had been very much allied with an emergent positivism as early as the 1980s and 90s, which accounts for at least one reason the positivist turn came about, though the computer has, of course, played a huge role. According to Eyers,

That New Historicism generally, and Greenblatt in particular, have at least rhetorically resisted the lures of a totalized understanding of historical context is without question, but what remains, as unapologetically anecdotal as it so frequently is, lacks a sufficient sense of its a priori theoretical investments. Jameson himself has referred to this obscuring of a priori theoretical commitments as an insistence on immanence over the transcendence of abstract analysis and interpretation, even as transcendent principles—not least the very transcendentality of the injunction to reject the transcendental—persist beneath the cover of darkness.(43–44)

In other words, missing in New Historicism is sufficient attention to structuration and structure, or “formativeness.” Not to be overlooked is the question of how speculative formalism concerns overdetermination, something that is lacking when forms are denuded of their formativeness as in New Positivism and New Historicism. Greenblatt’s privileging of practice over theory is, in Eyers’s view, an explicitly anti-theoretical position that impedes conceptual speculation (or the cognition of structures) as opposed to direct experience, of which the anecdote is a species.

Chapter two concerns the word/reference relation. To what extent do words correspond to things? The two figures of interest here are a French poet and a scientific thinker, Francis Ponge and Jean Cavaillès. Both Ponge and Cavaillès are suspicious of “any delimitation of a pure space of perception impervious to its apparent linguistic or conceptual opposites” (29). Although Ponge’s poems often describe objects in ways that seem to capture their essence, he registers “in the formal paradoxes of his poetry the inability of language to latch neatly onto the object-world” (29), although he also claims that the “surface logic” of the poetry presents “a phenomenologically pure account of the things-in-themselves” (30). Eyers looks at Cavaillès’s notion of thematization, which concerns a resistance to empirical transparency that inheres in a reflexivity that is the consequence of formal structuration. This formal structuration is, to some extent, frictional, agonistic, unstable, and hence refuses a “static relation between an object and the symbols that would, in vain, wish to correspond with it. Cavaillès’s name for this paradoxical form of generative impasse or productive misprision is thematization” (81). This “particular kind of abstraction” (81), oriented around horizons, is reminiscent of Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological conception of the schematized aspect. Indeed, it is hard to read far into Eyers’s book without wondering if Ingarden wouldn’t count as a speculative formalist par excellence, excepting his Husserlian grounding. That raises a question Ingarden might have asked: why is Eyers stripping consciousness away from a conception of the speculative? Eyers doesn’t seem to imagine one could talk of formativeness as a construction of consciousness along Husserlian lines.

Chapter three discusses Wallace Stevens, a poet who seems to be of endless interest to philosopher-critics. Eyers situates Stevens between two contemporary philosophers, Simon Critchley and Alain Badiou. Critchley and Badiou “reflect the two sides of [a] neo-romantic totality, with the former arguing for the quiet pathos of acquiescence in the face of the fallen world, and Badiou projecting a faith in the power of poetic language to recover the epic or heroic tendency otherwise lost in the attempt to translate the expanses of epic verse into the alienated spaces and temporalities of modernity” (99). In short, resignation is contrasted with heroism. These states may be akin to what the early Heidegger called moods. Of interest to Eyers is how modernist form subtracts itself from “the ideology of the sensible” (100). Describing his admiration for Stevens, Eyers identifies a core principle of his book:

It is in poetry’s determinative inability to present the whole, an inability written into the very productive constraints exemplified in poetry by the marshaling of language into meter, that it gains momentary access to the similar failures of completion and rational totalization that define its referents, referents otherwise assumed to lie submissive in anticipation of poetic representation; Stevens, needless to say, instantiates for us this paradox better than most.(101)

We have to resign ourselves to incompletion and the failures of rational totalization, though we could just as easily look upon this as a heroic triumph brought about through the resolve of the poet. Some may wonder about the choice of Stevens because this kind of resolve is much stronger in someone like Pound, who was much more self-conscious about failure and his responses to it. In The Cantos, one picks up from Pound not only resignation, despair, and an overall sense of powerlessness, but unbridled ambitions concerning knowledge and aesthetic power on an epic scale that are in direct conversation with political philosophy and the rise and fall of civilizations, something I imagine to be more in line with Badiou’s thinking.

Chapter four is a meticulous analysis of Paul de Man’s materialist reading of Kant. Eyers writes, “One of the tasks of this chapter is to demonstrate how de Man’s deconstructive literary theory was as concerned with the paradoxes of the material world as it was with the riddles of language per se, even if, in his strictly literary analyses, the linguistic tended to win the day” (125). At issue for Eyers is de Man’s “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in which a “repressed kernel” is retrieved from Kant, namely, his materialism, “understood as in opposition to the neutralization of the language of literariness, its disquieting effectivity in opening up a space for what Tom Cohen usefully describes as the ‘the site of memory, a mnemotechnics…which, in advance of every hermeneutic system, marks the inevitable materiality and exteriority accorded the human apparatus’” (127). Presumably that site is ambiguous, external and internal to the mind, and, I’m guessing, though Eyers doesn’t specify, that it probably relates to écriture. The argument that the signifier is a material trace doesn’t seem to require the painstaking unpacking of Kant’s critiques that Eyers performs. Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida have all made this case more directly. Eyers tells us that “de Man, far from being the linguistic idealist of legend, seeks to find in Kant the ontological limits of the aesthetic as a kind of materiality (insofar as it must be expressed through the more general texture of language as itself a material thing, at least of a kind): as something, at any rate, that is not simply a passive, ideal vehicle of correlational sense” (131). Again, I wonder if we need the kind of back-breaking analysis of Kant that Eyers develops in order to establish this. Isn’t the point made quite clear in Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Annette Messager, Kara Walker, and Nam June Paik?

In another complicated formulation, which a viewer of Picasso’s Three Musicians could comprehend quite independently without recourse to Kant, we’re told that “[i]nsofar as, for de Man, the aesthetic figures both a projected unity for Kant’s philosophy and, more pressingly, the sign of the necessary failure of that unity, this resistance in Kant to viewing the corporeal as a unity while it is under the aesthetic gaze helps us underline the importance of that constitutive disunity for Kant’s system more generally. Kant, that is to say, explicitly links the body as disunified with the aesthetic point of view that might otherwise have served as the broader system’s unifying cement” (133). I fully appreciate Eyers’s interest in a materiality related to aesthetics that concerns the “impasses of the world, of the density of things, [and] the unpredictable circuits of the word” (134), but you could also find this on the surface of, say, Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego. If my criticisms appear to be taking the side of empirical observation, this isn’t really the case, as I’m not talking about the literal, something that wouldn’t lead one to imagine “unpredictable circuits of the word” in Poussin, given that this requires interpretation or speculation. Rather, I’m talking about conceptual constructions we can much more easily infer in art that preempt the lengthy and prolix sort of analysis undertaken by de Man. This is not to say that I’m unappreciative of the fact that elsewhere de Man has written brilliantly and originally on literature.

Chapter five turns to language poetry, psychoanalysis, and the formal negotiation of history and time. The chapter offers a very suggestive and interesting reading of Ron Silliman’s “Albany”:

History appears here as another formal logic, at the moment at which an agent, whether linked to collective political action, to sexual violence, to ethnic classification, both appears and is effaced by the temporal movement of the verse’s underlying structure, by the inevitability of the end of one sentence and the beginning of another; temporality, that is, gives out onto signs of historical events, only for history to succumb to the temporal once more, in a movement of repetition that is also defined by the power of retrospective assimilation, neutralization, and erasure. (159)

“Albany” is written in what amount to short non-sequiturs (it appears at the outset of the collection The Alphabet). In “Albany” Silliman lists disjunct aggressions, occurrences, and observations that, as Eyers says, efface each other simply in terms of their substitutive emergence, leaving a sort of historical trail while existing always in the present. Whether these sentences are supposed to relate to one another is left in ambiguous or even contradictory suspense. In any case, something is always ending and beginning, coming to light and being suppressed. Eyers contrasts “Albany” with Bruce Andrews’s “Blueier Blue,” in which temporal plotting is freed: “its gusts of nouns and neologisms form nothing but a blowsy temporal grid, albeit one powerfully distinct from the austerity of Silliman’s” (164). Andrews’s poem “can be read as a testament to the repression of historical depth, one only ever incompletely achieved in ‘Albany’” (167). The unpredictable patterns of Andrews’s poem resist interpretation, which is to say, the poem requires the kind of provisional reading that we’re all incapable of getting beyond, given that there isn’t sufficient closure to make truth claims relative to content. Eyers is a very good observer of poetic details, and these may be two of the best readings of language poetry to be published in a long time. He does quite a bit of synthesizing, however, and one might ask whether his readings of Silliman or Andrews aren’t like interpretations of a Rorschach test. Correlation is under erasure, but that’s probably at work in any reading of abstract poetry.

Speculative Formalism is one of the better theory books to have appeared in recent years. Because it is written for a sophisticated audience well versed in philosophical parlance, it probably won’t do the work of rolling back the positivist turn, given that positivists don’t read this kind of thing and wouldn’t be converted if they did; however, the book draws an important line in the sand with respect to reclaiming a space for the interpretation of literature and culture, and makes a claim for the revival of the humanities generally, which have become impoverished of late in the absence of serious hermeneutical reflection and practice.

Works Cited

Broad, C.D. “Critical and Speculative Philosophy.” Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements (First Series), ed. J.H. Muirhead. G. Allen and Unwin, 1924, pp. 77–100. Digital Text International, www.ditext.com/broad/csp.html. Accessed 28 December 2017.

Peter Paik (bio)
Yonsei University

A review of Hicks, Heather. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Post-apocalyptic fiction has become arguably the defining genre of the contemporary period. A search on WorldCat reveals that Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) — which depicts the near-total extinction of the human species in a pandemic and its replacement by bio-engineered humanoids — has been a topic in over sixty dissertations and the subject of over 400 articles. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) has figured in roughly eighty dissertations and over 1,300 articles. Novels such as these have exerted an outsized influence on popular culture, given the current fascination with the post-human in such series as Westworld or the reboot of The Planet of the Apes — as well as the great success enjoyed by the narrative of the zombie apocalypse, which parallels the basic plotline of The Road, where a father and son must guard against being captured and eaten by cannibals. But the significance of today’s post-apocalyptic fiction remains very much in dispute. Should we understand the intense interest as a symptom of collective fear, whether of religious extremism, economic collapse, or catastrophic climate change? Does the spectacle of the destruction of a technically advanced civilization constitute a form of metaphoric atonement for the colonization of the globe by the Western powers? Or is the apocalypse a kind of figure for a fundamental psychic deadlock, a response to the loss of an otherness that could serve as a source of sociopolitical renewal for a society that remains incapable of transforming itself to avoid catastrophe?

In The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage, Heather J. Hicks analyzes six works by authors who have become widely known as representative of the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction – David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2012), in addition to the aforementioned Oryx and Crake and The Road. Her thesis — that the key theme of the post-apocalyptic novel is the collapse of modernity — challenges the familiar version of literary history, according to which the modernist aesthetic that is defined by seriousness of purpose and aspires to depth of insight is succeeded by a postmodern aesthetic that revels in irony, strikes deliberately superficial poses, and insouciantly repudiates the cultural authority accorded to high culture. Post-apocalyptic literature by contrast forms a sort of middle ground between the modern and the postmodern – it is marked by a certain seriousness in posing urgent questions about the future of humankind and the fate of the planet, while being close in formal terms to such more accessible genres as adventure fiction or horror fiction. Post-apocalyptic fiction is preoccupied with survival, which leads it to place an intense focus on the material conditions of existence. The collapse of industrial society throws the characters in these works back on their own resources to save themselves and their loved ones or to preserve the remnants of civilized ways.

For Hicks, the patron saint of the apocalyptic novel turns out to be Robinson Crusoe, the solitary survivor of a shipwreck who draws on his knowledge, instinct, skills, and religious faith to recreate on his desert island as best as he can the civilized existence that he has lost. In the novels under consideration, there has been or takes place a calamity on a planetary scale, such as nuclear war, a global epidemic, a zombie apocalypse, economic collapse, or the depletion of natural resources. The preoccupation with disaster results not in a wholesale repudiation of modernity as the source of inescapably destructive enterprises, but instead in the efforts of the protagonists to “salvage” various elements of the ruined civilization in the furtherance of life (15). Robinson Crusoe serves as the emblematic figure for such an undertaking. His presence can be felt in the watchfulness of the father in McCarthy’s The Road, whose “competence and acuity” ensure that he will lead his son to safety in the less contaminated and more civilized zones of the South (103). The protagonist who goes by the name of “Snowman” in Oryx and Crake is likewise a survivor of a genocidal catastrophe who echoes the endeavors of Crusoe, in this case serving as a teacher to the Crakers, a new humanoid species that has been designed to replace human beings after a pandemic has driven the latter to extinction. In The Stone Gods, a novel that spans both galaxies and centuries, Jeanette Winterson names the three protagonists, two of whom are female, after Crusoe himself. One section of the novel involves the familiar plotline of shipwreck which leaves the male Crusoe stranded on Easter Island just as its people descend into a vicious civil war, while the primary threat to one of the female Crusoes comes not from nature but from corporate control..

But if civilizational collapse or the near-extinction of the human species serves to give new life to this paradigmatic figure of modernity — one who is distinguished by his independence, self-sufficiency, and the will to master his environment — Hicks also emphasizes the ways in which the novels in her study engage in critiques of racism, colonialism, and sexism. In Oryx and Crake for example, human trafficking plays a significant role in the storyline, condemning a world in which anything can be for sale. The character Oryx, who becomes the lover of both the scientific genius Crake and the pathetic protagonist Jimmy, is born in an impoverished village in an unnamed Southeast Asian country and sold to a con artist at an early age by her mother. She enters the lives of Crake and his friend Jimmy as one of the sex workers supplied by the student services division of the prestigious university Crake attends, and is later hired by the scientific prodigy to work in his laboratory. Eventually, Oryx is sent around the world by Crake to promote and distribute the pills he has invented, which she believes to be a combination aphrodisiac and contraceptive. But the pills unleash a deadly epidemic that wipes out most of humankind. A young woman with a Southeast Asian background who serves one man while sleeping with his friend and plays a major part in the destruction of civilization — such a representation runs the risk of reinforcing the image of the subaltern woman as hyper-sexualized, lacking inwardness and the capacity for unconditional loyalty, or reproducing the idea of feminine desire as inherently harmful to the institutions that run civilization. Hicks takes the side of critics who defend Atwood’s decision to ascribe to Oryx characteristics that fit the stereotype of the “exotic Asian woman,” on the grounds that she would not otherwise have been able to expose the economic and social forces at the root of the stereotype itself (41). For Hicks, the character of Oryx serves as the most significant link in the novel between the apocalypse and post-colonialism. She is a victim of the modernity that has colonized the entire globe as well as the agent of apocalypse, evoking the figure of the Whore of Babylon in a revisionary mode.

Hicks’s approach that brings together the critique of colonial modernity and the representation of apocalyptic catastrophe works well for Oryx and Crake, but runs into difficulties with The Road. McCarthy’s novel is similar to Robinson Crusoe in featuring both cannibals and a child who is in need of receiving an education to become properly civilized. But while the preoccupation of the father in finding ways to survive in a harsh and brutal environment recalls the struggles of Defoe’s castaway, Hicks’s reading of the novel does not address the disparity between the endeavor to maintain a hold on civilized ways after civilization has for all intents and purpose met its demise and that of seeking to establish and practice civilized ways while cut off from a civilization that nevertheless continues to exist. While it is the case that the father in The Road and Robinson Crusoe both fear being caught and eaten by cannibals, the barbarism evoked in Defoe’s adventure novel is of a completely different order from the apocalyptic narrative of McCarthy. Hicks notes that the cannibalism practiced by the natives is for Crusoe a marker of their inferiority. Crusoe’s feeling of superiority is a hallmark of the imperialism that brought most of the globe under the rule of the European powers. But the thought that the cannibals in The Road are “inferior” to the father and his son would strike the reader as a most incongruous sentiment. In the post-apocalyptic world of McCarthy’s novel, civilization is fast becoming a dim memory, so viciously have the survivors abandoned all restraint in order to survive. Hicks ascribes the terror of cannibals in The Road to the fear of “barbarism” that arose in the West as a response to the attacks of 9–11, yet a postcolonial approach does not do justice to the theme of the demise of civilization, which would call for insights and concepts drawn from the collapse of civilizations and the ruin of empires.

Would the act of salvaging modernity ultimately restart an historical process that leads inescapably to conquest and colonization? The fear that a salvaged modernity would turn into an imperial modernity arises in Hicks’s reading of Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, a young adult novel set in an impoverished United States, the coastal regions of which have been submerged by the rising seas. The hero, Nailer, is part of a crew that makes a living by scavenging abandoned oil tankers, but over the course of the novel he learns how to read maps and masters the art of sailing. These newfound skills enable him to rescue a girl from a wealthy merchant family who has been taken hostage by her unscrupulous uncle and to join the crew of a clipper owned by the girl’s family. Hicks observes, “Bacigalupi turns to the very origins of modernity as the source of development for Nailer – the craft of seafaring” (150). The clipper ship, the vehicle that takes Nailer to a better life, exemplifies for Hicks a “retromodernity,” in contradistinction to the “petromodernity” of the present era, where the global economy remains dependent on the burning of fossil fuels that increases carbon emissions in the atmosphere. The return of three-masted, wind-powered ships, especially as the setting for the hero’s coming of age, would appear to extol the famous sea voyages with which the modern age commenced – the sea voyages that led to genocide and slavery in the New World. But Hicks insists that “retromodernity” in the novel is at least as “forward-looking” as it is “nostalgic,” in that it corresponds to a “life without oil as an inevitable future that will call on technological innovation and new social formations” (159). She makes this point toward the end of her commentary on the novel, but she does not appear wholly convinced by it either. Indeed, the triumph of Nailer over his tyrannical father has explicitly Oedipal overtones that foreshadow the tragedy to come from the act of liberating one’s self from the world of one’s parents. Modernity, which Hicks admits is the most “unruly” of the terms employed in her study, keeps coming back, perhaps because it has become formidably difficult for us to conceive of freedom and fulfillment apart from its categories.

Yet there is fresh about Hicks’s idea of “retromodernity,” inasmuch as it presents an alternative to the oppressively linear movement that leads from modernity to the dead end of apocalypse, understood in its secular and destructive sense. A cyclical conception of time stands at odds with the linear model of history that, in the words of Elizabeth K. Rosen, reflects a “rigid tyranny of time” (xxiv). In the chapter on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Hicks focuses on the ethical and political possibilities offered by a cyclical understanding of time, one that breaks with the liberal belief in moral and political progress. Mitchell’s novel explores historical recurrence in six interconnected stories set at different points in time, from the 1850s to the distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each of these stories centers on a protagonist who finds himself or herself victimized by hostile forces that are more powerful than him or her. They fight these forces and produce documents of their respective conflicts that influence the characters who appear in the subsequent narratives. The protagonists include a primitive and superstitious farmer named Zachry, who lives on the big island of Hawaii after a nuclear war has destroyed most of civilization, a clone named Sonmi-451, who is likewise a figure from a dystopian future, in her case a totalitarian state formed by the reunification of North and South Korea, vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose story unfolds in the UK of the present, muckraking reporter Luisa Rey from the California of 1975, a musician named Robert Frobisher from the Belgium of 1931, and a notary named Adam Ewing, who travels from Sydney to San Francisco in 1850.

As Hicks points out, the stories that make up Cloud Atlas recount the exploitation and oppression of the weak, who are “poisoned, cuckolded, blackmailed, assaulted, imprisoned, enslaved, and, ultimately, eaten in a system of organized cannibalism” (64). But the connections that the novel draws between the protagonists, who never meet each other but who influence each other through the texts and documents they leave behind, evokes a “solidarity” between victims and rebels across time that would defy the “homogeneous and empty time” that Walter Benjamin famously attributed to historicism (71). The madcap escape of Cavendish from a tyrannical nursing home is made into a film that inspires Sonmi-451 centuries later, while the clone herself becomes worshipped as a goddess by Zachry’s tribe on Hawaii, long after the disintegration of industrial civilization across most of the globe. Luisa Rey listens to the music composed by Frobisher and comes across his letters to his former lover, the scientist who is murdered for trying to expose the dangers posed by a nuclear power plant. Adam Ewing writes a book about his voyage across the Pacific and his journey to becoming an abolitionist, which Frobisher reads while working as a secretary to a famous composer. As Hicks points out, none of these characters is transformed by coming into contact with the writings or artworks produced by their fellow protagonists; rather, these instances of contact are simply part of the culture in which they happen to be immersed. But the unexceptional and undramatic manner in which the novel’s protagonists come into contact with each other serves to reinforce the basic conviction of the novel that “individual acts can become collective historical transformations” (71). The mysterious affinities that inspire resistance to tyranny and struggles for liberation are thus as much a constant in the novel’s idea of history as the injustices they attack.

What some readers will find to be the most challenging part of this argument is Hicks’s reliance on the idea of cyclical history in the work of Mircea Eliade, the influential and controversial scholar of religion who during the 1930s in his native Romania had expressed support for the Iron Guard. For Eliade, the key difference between the mythical view of cyclical time and the modern idea of linear time is that in the former, human beings were capable of finding meaning in catastrophic events and so were better able to endure them. The modern category of history, by contrast, places humans at the mercy of the “blind play of economic, social, or political forces” and prevents them from seeing any “sign” or any “transhistorical meaning” behind “the horrors of history – from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings” (Eliade 151). The cyclical view of history appears to accord wider latitude for human action, in that an act is not the personal gesture of a lonely and isolated ego, but rather an impersonal deed that reaches across identities and across distant expanses of time, drawing on the energies of collective memory. In such an act, the individual renounces her or his significance as an individual in order to tap into the store of meaning that resides in the founding myths of a culture. For Eliade, such potency is proper to a traditional society, whereas modern society is based in part on the repudiation of a historical vision in which predetermined roles matter far more than the freedom exercised by the individual and particularity of his or her identity as an individual. But the paradox here is that Mitchell seeks to press this transhistorical symbolic in the service of an emancipatory politics that centers on an oppressed underdog figure struggling against an oppressive status quo, which is not the same as the traditional hero who purges the corruption in his society by calling for a return to its original principles and whose acts are understood to repeat the gestures of the culture’s founding father.

Mitchell’s emphasis is on resistance rather than on foundation. Central to the novel’s scheme of affinities across historical time is the concept of reincarnation: the main characters are revealed as having the same soul. Progress is no longer identified with civilization but comes to reside in the progressive movement of the soul towards enlightenment across its incarnations. Hicks notes that the antihistoricist approach of Cloud Atlas has the consequence of flattening its characters: “the more audaciously Mitchell plays with literary styles and genres, the less these characters seem like individuals and the more they appear to be the repetitions of archetypes derived from the history of Western literature” (75). Somewhat surprisingly, she does not regard this statement as a criticism of a shortcoming of the novel. Instead, she argues that Mitchell’s use of “literary” and “cultural archetypes” and his “invocation of literary icons” are aimed not at exploring “how individuals can become historical agents in order to derail our momentum toward apocalypse” (75). Rather, the novel seeks to “resist” or defuse the “terror of history” by calling on the reader to “invest” himself or herself in “older, larger stories” (75). But Hicks errs in identifying historicism with the overpowering and stifling presence of archetypes, whereas for Eliade the modern susceptibility to the “terror of history” arises from the modern insistence on liberating itself from archetypes. There is in other words a trade-off between freedom and autonomy on one side and the conviction that historical tragedies and disasters have a transhistorical meaning on the other that Hicks resolves too quickly in her reading of Cloud Atlas. Indeed, Hicks misses the bitter irony in Eliade’s comparison of an imagined “anhistorical” society of the future, which would prohibit in spiritually suffocating ways the “making of history” as such, with the “myth of the golden age” (Eliade 154, qtd. Hicks 60).

Hicks deserves credit for breaking into politically provocative and intellectually promising territory by taking up the work of Eliade, whose work, in spite of his reactionary political affiliations, merits greater attention today in light of the sociopolitical malaise that has overtaken the liberal West and the resurgence of militant religion as well as the more recent rise of populist nationalism. Eliade’s speculation regarding the possibility of a “desperate attempt” to “prohibit” historical events, which would include not only wars of conquest but also revolutions, presents a fruitful way of viewing the insistence of the capitalist Right that “there is no alternative to free market capitalism” as well as Francis Fukuyama’s version of the end of history (Eliade 153). Eliade’s prediction anticipates Jean Baudrillard’s point that Islamist terrorism and the futile state response against it constitute the “violence of a society in which conflict is virtually banned and death forbidden” (94). Hicks’s study of post-apocalyptic literature is an important contribution to the scholarly work on the genre. It compares well with recent studies, such as Elizabeth K. Rosen’s Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination and Andrew Tate’s Apocalyptic Fiction, though like the latter it suffers somewhat from its brevity. Hicks’s focus on modernity in the fictions of apocalypse provides a rigorous vantage point from which to study the genre, and it should serve as a fruitful springboard to studies of work that have not received the attention they deserve, such as George Stewart’s Earth Abides and James Howard Kunstler’s cycle of peak oil novels.

Works Cited

• Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Anchor, 2003.
• Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 2003.
• Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. Translated by Willard Trask, Princeton UP, 2005.
• McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
• Rosen, Elizabeth K. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lexington, 2008.
• Tate, Andrew. Apocalyptic Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Warren Montag (bio)
Occidental College

A review of Martel, James R. The Misinterpellated Subject. Duke UP, 2017.

James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject is a work of great interest, and not simply for those seeking to apply Althusser’s theory of interpellation beyond its sphere of origin. For those of us who, more cautiously (perhaps too cautiously), have limited ourselves to an attempt to excavate and examine Althusser’s strange formulation, convinced that it remains in certain important ways unintelligible, Martel’s notion of misinterpellation poses new and very welcome questions. First among these is the question or problem of the untranslatability of the word most associated with Althusser’s project, the word “interpellation,” and the effects of this untranslatability on our understanding of Althusser’s entire theory of ideology and ideological subjection. In fact, I would argue, not as a criticism, but by way of a recognition of the necessary materiality of discourses, that the text’s most effective formulations appear in those places where it demonstrably mistranslates (or simply adopts pre-existing mistranslations of) Althusser’s notion of interpellation. This is not to say that Martel’s basic assumptions are simply wrong, or, in contrast, that he has replaced, perhaps without knowing that he has done so, the Althusserian account of interpellation with something more powerful or true. Althusser’s notion of interpellation is irreducibly contradictory and complex, and its complexity is indistinguishable from the theoretical specificity and singularity that give it its power.

If Martel’s study constantly poses questions to Althusser, it does so without necessarily formulating them as such and exhibits a way of thinking that, in my view, can be fully realized and put to work only when it is examined in the light of Althusser’s discussion of ideology in the essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses.” There is nothing more Althusserian than this apparent paradox: as he wrote with reference to Canguilhem, the history of science, and we might add, the history of concepts and knowledges, has a bit more imagination than any logic of scientific discovery.

Not very long ago, Pierre Macherey wrote that

the text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,’ where the thesis of the interpellation of the individual as a subject is advanced for the first time, while undoubtedly one of his most innovative, is also particularly disconcerting. Its exposition, by exploiting a rhetoric that combines ellipses with a kind of rhetorical violence, results in the construction of an enigmatic space that the reader must decipher for himself.(51)¹

The fact that Macherey, who was a participant in the discussions that led to the formation of the concept of interpellation, can describe the ISAs essay as an “enigmatic space” will undoubtedly surprise Anglophone readers, few if any of whom have found it particularly enigmatic. Martel’s citations and arguments may well help us recover an appreciation of the difficulties of Althusser’s text by “making speak” its ellipses and its forcing of concepts and images. We might start by acknowledging the fact that we do not exactly know what the term “interpellation,” as used in English, much more than in French (or Spanish), means: what are its synonyms or antonyms, for what words can it be substituted? I do not recapitulate here the effects of translating the French word “interpellation” as “interpellation,” a word that had all but disappeared from the English language, where in any case it never possessed the semantic range that it did and does in French (Montag, “Signifier”). Few English speakers could have made any sense at all of the term without the addition of “hail” (no equivalent of which exists in the French text), which translator Ben Brewster decided, without any indication that he had done so, to add as a synonym of interpellation. The result: for decades no one thought to ask what interpellation means in French: everyone knew it meant “hail.”

Ben Brewster’s translation gave us a text very different from the French text, and not only because of the repeated coupling of “interpellation” and “hail” in the places where the original text simply says interpellation. More importantly, the term interpellation in English in 1970 was what I have elsewhere called an empty signifier, that is, a kind of place holder marking the site where a specific meaning, or rather set of meanings necessary to Althusser’s theory, was nevertheless absent. Brewster attempted to fill this determinate gap with “hail” which, through an extension of the same paradox previously noted, has by means of Brewster’s translation and the innumerable commentaries, friendly or hostile, competent or incompetent, that took his translation as their starting point, become an actually existing synonym of interpellation in academic usage. This discursive sequence has succeeded in fortifying certain meanings and inflections of meaning, and diminishing and excluding others. A series of consequences follows from this fact, and anyone who seeks to develop the theses concerning ideology stated in the ISAs essay (and perhaps The Reproduction of Capitalism) must find a way to confront them.

I want to insist, though, on one crucial point: Brewster’s decision, for reasons that will become clear, to leave interpellation essentially untranslated rather than render it as “hail” alone, but instead (with exceptions), “interpellate or hail,” cannot simply be dismissed as an error. Brewster adds to or replaces interpellation with “hail” sixteen times, all concentrated in the two pages between “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects” and “An Example: Christian Religious Ideology” (in which the word “hail” is not to be found). There is no equivalent of the French interpellation in English, so if Brewster’s choice was an error, it was a necessary error, objectively and materially determined, and therefore at the time unavoidable. It may now be possible, however, to re-open the case of interpellation. Martel’s book compels us to return with a renewed sense of wonder to Althusser’s enigma.

When Althusser wrote the manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism, from which the ISAs essay was extracted, shortly after the events of May–June 1968, one of the obvious senses of “interpellation,” the sense in which it was and still is used in the French media, made it directly relevant to Althusser’s essay: the act by which the police stop, detain, arrest or keep in custody an individual suspected of committing a crime, including rioting, destroying public or private property, etc. In English a reference to the police hailing a suspect, although not idiomatic, would certainly be understood, but its meaning stops short of the French term, denoting no more than a calling out to someone. In everyday life, police interpellation typically produces a chain of speech acts, specifically commands or orders: “hey, you there,” is regularly followed by “stop right there,” “don’t move” or “get over here,” commands that can be ignored or disobeyed only at the risk of a violent response on the part of the authorities. For this reason, ordinary usage dictates that we do not describe what the police do when they “address” a suspect or person of interest in terms of language or discourse: it is far more common to say I was stopped, grabbed, held, restrained by a police officer than that he or she yelled at or to me, let alone that he or she hailed, called out or simply spoke to me. Further, an adequate, that is, legally valid, response to the demand to stop and speak, that is, to answer questions, begins with what cannot finally originate in me and cannot take the form of a merely oral declaration on my part. As Althusser wrote in 1966 in the posthumously published Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses, “it is the Prefecture of the Police which provides the individuals whom the policemen interpellate with the identity papers the policemen request (demand) that one show” (83).

Interpellation thus cannot be reduced to hailing or calling but must be understood as a point at which a number of different material practices or “modalities of materiality” (169) conjoin (“Ideology” 169). This is not to say that the physical movements, which Althusser defines as rituals and prescribed gestures, are not accompanied by words and sounds, thought to be spoken freely but, much more commonly, cited, read out loud in “an external verbal discourse” or silently in “an ‘internal’ verbal discourse (consciousness)” from the liturgies of daily life whose most important effect is to bring about their own forgetting (169). Significantly, Martel tends to avoid referring to language or discourse per se, perhaps as much for tactical reasons as in principle. Discourse is especially encumbered with negative associations (“everything is discourse,” as uttered circa 1980), so overused that it has lost it specificity as a concept distinct from language or speech. But Althusser did use it in relation to ideology and was careful to distinguish discourse from langue, langage or parole (“Three Notes”). Further, it is important to recall that discourse for Althusser, whether external–that is, spoken or written–or internal–consciousness, what thought silently says about itself–possesses a material existence: it is irreducible to anything prior to or outside of itself of which it would be the expression.

This brings us to the powerful opening of Martel’s text: an example from Kafka’s Paradoxes and Parables of what might be called, following Althusser, Jewish Religious Ideology. In Scripture, God calls out to Abraham (Gen 22:1), although the Hebrew verb used in the passage is not “to call” ( ) but simply “to say” , introducing a sequence that will culminate in Abraham’s demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his son if God should request it. In Kafka’s rendering, when God pronounces the proper name Abraham, every Abraham in the world at that moment hears and prepares to answer. But God intends to test Abraham with a most painful sacrifice; all but one of existing Abrahams have little to sacrifice. It is not them that God will test. But apart from Abraham the patriarch, there remains one other Abraham prepared to heed the word that he knows might not be meant for him at all. He has a son and is ready to perform the sacrifice, but he is old, dirty and poor, in short, unworthy. His heeding the summons, Kafka tells us, would be like the worst student in the class standing up to receive a prize for the best when it is announced, and being humiliated by going up to the front of the class unsummoned. Martel emphasizes the agency of the one who insists on answering a call that the evidence suggests is not clearly directed to him or the one who refuses to respond to the call that is directed to him. Here, the necessary instability of interpellation arises from the initiative of the individual subject himself who, intentionally or unintentionally, does not respond to a summons as he should. But Kafka’s parable demonstrates less the failure of interpellation to find its proper target, the capacity of the targeted individual to elude the call, or the untargeted to answer it, than the constitutive ambiguities proper to language itself, any language, even (Kafka would have said especially) the Holy Tongue spoken by God himself to Abraham.² Surely, it is significant that the parable of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son finds its analogue in the Ideological State Apparatus of the school with its disciplinary spaces and individualizing techniques, few of which are more feared by the students than that of being “called on” by the teacher.

Kafka is almost certainly drawing on a history of questions about and objections to this passage in Genesis, which deeply perplexed commentators, whose concerns are registered in the Midrash and Talmud. The commentators’ anxieties do not directly concern the fact that God proposes a test that Abraham will pass only if he is willing to kill his own son (although the problematization of this passage can hardly be disentangled from the nature of the test). Instead, their perplexity arises from (or perhaps is displaced to) the strange manner in which God’s request (and not a command, as indicated by the form of the verb according to both the Talmudic reading and that of the medieval commentator Rashi) to take Isaac to the mountain: “And He said, Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, yea, Isaac.” In the Talmud, this sequence of identifying attributes (precisely what is missing from the address to Abraham in Kafka’s parable) is understood as a kind of apostrophe on God’s part, as if he were answering a set of questions asked, but unreported in the text, by an uncomprehending Abraham whose comments are thus interpolated:

“So also did the Holy One, blessed be He, say unto Abraham, ‘I have tested thee with many trials and thou didst withstand all. Now, be firm, for My sake in this trial, that men may not say, there was no reality in the earlier ones. Thy son. [But] I have two sons! Thine only one. Each is the only one of his mother. Whom thou lovest. I love them both! Isaac! [ ](Sanhedrin 89b).

It is striking that the anxiety Genesis 22:2 has produced among commentators for over a millennium has everything to do with interpellation as a call or, perhaps even more, as a summons in its legal sense. Rashi and his forbears would prefer to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty by making him deceitful, willing to trick Abraham, than call this sovereignty into question by acknowledging what Kafka built his parable around: the recognition that even God, by speaking to human beings, must submit or subject himself to their language. But how are we to understand language here? Certainly not as a hidden order or system of rules and even less as an order of univocal signs. On the contrary, it appears as if, in speaking, God has descended, as he did in the case of Babel, in order to confuse human speech ( ), subjecting himself to the irreducible equivocity that he himself instituted and cannot abolish. Speech in this passage resists the thought that animates it and frustrates God’s attempt to communicate at every turn. In fact, it is an “angel of God from heaven” rather than God who calls out to stop Abraham from killing his son ( ) (Gen. 22:11). Kafka’s addition to the Talmudic sequence, the proper name, Abraham, if indeed it is an addition, underscores the sequence of amphibolous statements, “your son,” “your only son,” “the son you love most.” Given that the proper name, Abraham, yelled out loud in the street in any one of a number of Eastern and Central European cities during Kafka’s lifetime, would have immediately produced a crowd of responders, the parable suggests the impossibility of eliminating the threat of miscommunication, through slippage, reversal and drift of meaning, from speech.

To push the matter to an extreme, we might compare the composition made up of Genesis 21–22, Talmud, Rashi and Kafka to the well-known joke first performed by the comedy team of Abbot and Costello in the 1930s:

Abbott:
Strange as it may seem, they give [base]ball players nowadays very peculiar names.

Costello:
Funny names?

Abbott:
Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the St. Louis team we have “Who’s on first,” “What’s on second,” “I Don’t Know is on third—”

Costello:
Well, then who’s playing first?

Abbott:
Yes.

Costello:
That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.

Abbott:
I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third--

Costello:
You know the fellows’ names?

Abbott:
Yes.

Costello:
Well, then who’s playing first?”

Abbott:
Yes.
(“Who’s on First”)

Michel Pecheux, whose Language, Semantics and Ideology (Les Verités de la Palice, 1975) was one of the most ambitious, if not exactly influential, attempts to develop Althusser’s theses on ideology, insisted, following Freud and Lacan, on the importance of the joke, on the very possibility of something like a joke in its “crudest” forms, such as the pun, for any understanding of the nature of language. Language cannot be grasped as an immensely complex system of rules whose discovery would allow us to resolve the ambiguities of statements. Instead, for Pȇcheux, langue, scattered among the discourses, themselves embedded in the material existence of ideologies which are subject to the aleatory and plural temporality of history, can exist only through a systematic repression of what Françoise Gadet and Pêcheux would later call, following Jean-Claude Milner, the “real of langue”: the fissures (failles), gaps, and contradictions that set this order against itself in a perpetual production of equivocity (L’amour). There exists “in every langue a segment” that can be “both itself and at the same time other through the homophony, homosemy, metaphor, glissement of the lapsus and word play, and the double meanings (double entente) of its discursive effects” (Gadet and Pêcheux, La langue, 51. Thus, the process of the production of discursive effects is simultaneously and necessarily a production of side-effects and by-products, making the historical existence of discourses something other than the actualization of already existing logical possibilities, that is, something resembling a process without a subject or end(s).

Rather than understand Martel’s notion of “misinterpellation” as a failure on the part of Althusser’s Subject to hail the particular individual at whom the call was directed, something like bad aim or, conversely, the ability of “bad subjects” to duck the call coming their way, as well as the possibility that good subjects, motivated by a sense of guilt, might be moved to answer a call not in fact addressed to them, we might follow his suggestion that “failure is internal rather than external to interpellation,” given that “every act of interpellation is also an act of misinterpellation” (50). The failure, equivocity, and drift that convert interpellation into misinterpellation thus take place at the level of the utterance, the constitutive heterogeneity that incessantly opens it up to new meanings and the ever-present possibility of a forgetting of once established meanings, not subjectively, but in an entirely impersonal and objective forgetting that takes place at the level of discourse itself. Not simply a refusal to understand an order, but a failure, a slip, an infelicitous substitution irreducibly inscribed in the actual words of the order itself, addressed, as in the case of Kafka’s parable, to both the one and the many Abrahams and therefore a failure of the individualization that such orders require.

The absence of a notion of the materiality of discourse, its irreducibility to founding meanings, its constitutive and inescapable instability, and the inescapable heterogeneity of its every utterance, weigh on Martel’s argument. To clarify the theoretical stakes involved I focus on only one of his three “historical examples of interpellation and misinterpellation” (58): the case of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and its relation to the Haitian Revolution.³ In an important sense, the Declaration represents a condensation of all the problems and questions that attend the concept of interpellation both as it is developed in Althusser’s texts and as others attempt to apply it. For Martel, the Declaration instantiates a call, a call to the universal and the rights it guarantees, not simply to the citizen, but to every human individual as such, and therefore a call to assume the role of possessor of rights. The problem here is that the call of the so-called universal is not directed universally; it is unjustly particular in its application, illegitimately withheld (according to its own norms) from the laboring, propertyless majority of the human species, not only by virtue of the forms in which it was communicated, but also, as a kind of second line of defense, through its promotion of a series of mechanisms internal to the so-called universal itself that work to maintain inequalities of wealth and power outside the reach of legal reform. The enslaved masses of Haiti were the last to whom the call was addressed; among other things, their status as property meant that their freedom threatened the inalienable rights of proprietors also guaranteed by the Declaration of 1789. But they, or the literate among them and among the free black population, could not help overhearing and answering the summons to right, based on the fact that they considered themselves human. As in the case of Kafka’s Abraham, the call overshot its intended audience, bearing a vision of a universalist politics whose immanent promise was that of what Balibar has termed equaliberty. Its power of attraction, as if it engendered the very universal it proclaimed, was irresistible.

From this perspective, the specific misinterpellation in question was irreversible, the call was heard, understood and remembered, awakening not simply a desire for inclusion in the community composed of the proper addressees, but a refusal to be excluded from its audience or to tolerate exceptions to what might legitimately be called the universal. Martel cites Illan rua Wall to describe the misinterpretation that necessarily accompanies the misinterpellation: when the Haitian people, both slave and free, “took up the words” of the Declaration, “they did so out of a purposive misunderstanding” (63). Here, the misunderstanding is subjective, imposed on a text whose sole failure is that it, as they understand or misunderstand it, does not apply to them. The problem is not the objective, material form of the Declaration, but the fact that its truths are illegitimately withheld from those whose lives would be most improved by them. The discrepancy between the promise and the extent of its application creates an expectation that, if ignored, may be thought to propel the people to political action to bring all of humanity under the protection of the universal.

To speak of the Declaration carrying out a form of interpellation, however, let alone one that could be appropriated by a purposive, if not intentional, misreading or misunderstanding by those to whom it was not addressed, requires a confrontation with its concrete form. The Declaration consists not of meanings, expressed in words (implying that these same meanings might be better or at least differently expressed by other words), but of words whose meanings are other words (determined by relations of synonymy and antinomy, substitution and duplication) situated in historically determined sequences. If indeed the Declaration is a call, it is not immediately clear to whom the first sentence of the first article, “Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits,” is addressed (although one of the meanings of interpellation in French is apostrophe—an address to someone absent or off-stage). Nearly all of the terms of this phrase, its plural nouns, its verbs and adjectives, contain possibly undecidable ambiguities, beginning with “men” (les hommes). As Etienne Balibar has argued, not only does the word potentially exclude women, but its subsequent history exhibits a movement to differentiate men from those who in certain respects may appear to be men but are not, that is, a process of the differentiation of the human from subhuman or the inhuman (universalism). We should recall how easily a man can “quit,” or “renounce” his affiliation with, the human species in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Through murder or even a single act of theft, a “man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature” (11). Such ex-humans, including those who are taken prisoner after initiating an unjust war, are justly reduced to slaves who, to cite Orlando Patterson’s formulation, have died a social death and thus live or die at the pleasure of their masters.

Every term of Article I of the Declaration appears to surpass in its enunciative heterogeneity the ambiguities that perplexed the redactors of the Talmud and fascinated Kafka in Genesis 22:2. Moreover, and this is critical for any interpretation of the declaration as a call, it is difficult to imagine a commentator as relentless and thorough as Rashi failing to ask at the very beginning of the inquiry who made this declaration and to whom it is addressed. The very deliberate avoidance of the first person plural, “we,” as in “we the people,” a formulation well-known to those who drafted the Declaration, only defers this inevitable question. If this is more than a constative utterance, to use Austin’s distinction, and is endowed with a performative dimension, is there really something like a call, not to speak of a “hail” or a hailing at work here? The very word “declaration,” as opposed to something like “decree,” remains suspended between an affirmation of facts and a marker of a discursive event whose function is to introduce change. But a declaration can perform both functions simultaneously: the utterance “men are born and remain free” frees (in principle, in the abstract) those deemed to be “men” from the false assertion of natural authority and subjection, and all the more so in that it substitutes “born” for created, thereby eliding the question of the origins of earthly dominion in the will of God. To be more historically specific, the first sentence of the first article at the very least suggests that the forms of obligation and authority that characterize the feudal order in France are “unnatural” and sustained by a demonstrably false theologico-philosophical foundation. But nowhere does it address the case of the individual, a participant in a solitary or collective act of aggression, who “by his fault forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death” (Locke 17). The person “to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service” (17). The power the person to whom Locke refers as a “conqueror” acquires in this way is both “absolute” and “perfectly despotical” (93). This is the “perfect condition of slavery” (17), that is, the form of its legitimation, applied to those not born into servitude but transported across the Atlantic to a living death.

Martel is sensitive to the constant movement of qualification that occurs in the Declaration, a movement that cannot be reduced to the specification of its terms. To say that “men are born and remain free” en droits, that is, “with respect to rights,” inevitably poses the problem of the relation between power and right. Can we be said to possess or be endowed with rights that we nevertheless cannot exercise? The Declaration, as Martel notes, seems to answer this question, raised by Spinoza more than a hundred years before the Declaration, in the affirmative: the fact that men are born and remain free and equal does not mean that “social distinctions,” that is, forms of real inequality (above all, of wealth) disappear. Their justification derives not from law but from their economic “utility,” the fact that real as opposed to formal inequality might be necessary to the prosperity of the nation. The necessity of social distinctions is, as both Adam Smith and the Physiocrats affirmed, a natural necessity in precisely the same way that certain rights must be understood as natural and imprescriptible: they are both part of the same system of nature. Seen in this light, the four rights identified in the fourth sentence of the Declaration may be and in fact were (although by no means universally) read as organized around the defense of property, including property in persons, offering a guarantee of freedom of commerce, security of property and resistance to oppression from below and from above. The constitutive equivocity at work in the Declaration is not a matter of speculation: the discrepancies noted above are precisely what the draft Declaration of 1793 sought to resolve in favor of those without property, including at the extreme, those without property in their own persons, adding to formal right, the actual, physical ability to enjoy that right, opening a dynamic that called the private property of the means of subsistence into question and challenged the market theodicies that justified inequality on the grounds of its utility.

There is a sense in which the universalism of the Declaration is suspended before the end of the Declaration’s first sentence and forced to confront the insoluble problem, posed by its own unfolding, of defining the human and differentiating it from the subhuman, superhuman and inhuman/nonhuman. This problem, as Althusser argued in a 1966 lecture on Locke, was never defined exclusively or even primarily in what we would now call biological terms; on the contrary, a “cultural” line of demarcation runs through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant. From this perspective, the interpellation of the individual as a legal person or subject is simultaneously to submit the individual to more or less permanent inquest whose purpose is the determination of his species being, given that a single act of violence, even restricted to the taking of someone else’s property, represents, in the case of Locke, an eruption of “animality” (“Locke” 283). The criminal is thus situated at the limit of the species: having renounced reason, he represents, according to Althusser, “the inhumanity at the heart of humanity. Reason is haunted by its radical negation, non-reason, whose natural figure is bestiality” (288–9). Those determined to be inhuman (predators in human form, to follow Locke’s formula), whether on the grounds of the specific actions of a given individual or the age-old customs of entire peoples, are placed outside the jurisdiction of natural law with its alienable rights, as well as outside the civil law that arises on its foundations. Such individuals or populations can be destroyed, just as one, Locke argues, “may kill a wolf” or a wolf pack. “Such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey” (14). Having “forfeited” their membership in the human species with the rights and privileges such membership entails, they may be made the slaves of any master who chooses to defer the moment of their death. As Althusser writes, “Slavery is death deferred or suspended” (289).

Althusser’s discussion of interpellation in the ISAs essay, however, is concerned with the act by which individuals are subjected in order that agency and authorship can be imputed to them. In fact, Althusser called what is perhaps the first form of the interpellated subject, the subject of imputation (Psychoanalysis 73). Imputation is indeed a legal/moral form of address: the individual is through law addressed as if he possessed free will, was the cause of his actions and thus was responsible for them both causally and morally/legally. The primary effect of this particular attribution of agency is to render the imputed subject accountable and punishable:

In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission. This last note gives us the meaning of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection “all by himself” [l’individu est interpellé en sujet (libre) pour qu’il se soumette librement aux ordres du Sujet, donc pour qu’il accepte (librement) son assujettissement, donc qu’il “accomplisse tout seul” les gestes et actes de son assujettissement]. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they “work all by themselves.”(“Ideology” 182)

Althusser does not say that individuals are interpellated as (free) subjects so that they will believe they are free to determine their own actions (which would make ideology a form of false consciousness), but in order that they will freely submit or be submitted to (se soumettre) the commandments (ordres) of the Subject. Pour que, translated here as “in order that,” essentially indicates a causal relation. Interpellation, to follow the sentence, brings it about that the movement by which the body of the individual is determined to submit to the orders of authority simultaneously produces the belief in her or his having done so by her or his own free will. Submission and subjection in this sense cannot be understood as mental attitudes or internal preferences which would then determine the body to act according to these attitudes. They consist of “the gestures and actions (actes) that an individual makes (accomplisse: performs or executes) ‘all by himself.’” The Spinozist thesis of the simultaneity of thought and corporeal action at work here questions the very notion of interpellation as a hail or call separable from the physical regime of subjection. For Althusser, as for the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, a focus on consciousness, deceived or manipulated, as the instrument of domination simply serves to conceal the forms of coercion and subjugation that simultaneously cause the body to act and the mind to think. If interpellation cannot be as understood as a call or hail but as conjunction of materialities in the production of subjection, must we then reject the idea of misinterpellation, and perhaps even more importantly, the very notion of resistance?

If we can speak of interpellation as a summons immanent in apparatuses, practices, and rituals, its precise wording inseparable from the exercise of coercion and constraint proper to it, we must reject the notion of a universalist clarion call, even one that reaches the wrong audience, thereby exploding its own limits. Who is to say that the summons heard, or felt, or hallucinated by a half a million enslaved people in Haiti was not the demand inscribed in every one of their innumerable acts of resistance and revolt, returned, as through a feedback effect, upon itself, mediated through the revolution in France, from the masses to the masses? Or that the unceasing struggles, not simply or even primarily against the juridical form of slavery established in Le code noir, but for the bare possibility of continuing to live, combined and crossed the Atlantic to detonate the explosion that was the French revolution. Rather than understand trans-Atlantic chattel slavery as the exception to the formal equality whose development it followed step by step like a shadow, an injustice that Europeans had slowly come to believe they could no longer tolerate, we might say that the forms of violence and subjection proper to it, suddenly given new visibility by the very force of the resistance against them, could be understood as the terminal point on a spectrum of extraction, control and torture, where cruelty and accumulation coincided perfectly, and on which could be located the concrete existence of the newly freed laborer and the peasant. But there is no question that the modern form of slavery was the terminal point; beyond it, there was only death, whether by direct force or abandonment. These struggles, from daily resistance to mass insurrection, in the mutual immanence of their discursive and corporeal forms, crossed the Atlantic in both directions, invading and doing violence to the language of the Declaration in a kind of discursive equivalent of Bois Caiman. They infiltrated and occupied the sublime discourses on property and freedom, found their weak points and hiding places, and from there released the compound that would decompose or paralyze these discourses. Here we understand why the Haitian revolution was so long ignored: from it emerged a new historical figure, of which Frankenstein’s monster was a dim and confused sign: nameless and uninterpellable, a singularity so irreducibly multiple and heterogeneous in its composition that no call could reach it, no summons could compel its obedience.⁴

Althusser taught us to judge books by their theoretical and practical effects. The effect of James Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject is to show that confronting the problem of subjection, and Althusser’s reflections on it, remains an unavoidable, even urgent, task. It is part of the struggle in theory that is inseparable from the practical struggles of that war without refuge we call the present.

Footnotes

1. This translation is my own.

2. The parable poses the problem of proper names in a way that condenses a series of philosophical reflections on the topic from Frege to Kripke.

3. The other two examples are 1) Wilson’s speech to the US Congress on January 8, 1918 known as the fourteen points; in particular, the fifth point, establishing the right of colonized populations to have a voice equal to that of the colonial power in determining the future of the colony; and 2) the Arab Spring in Tunisia at the end of 2010, where the contradictions contained in the call of neoliberal universalism exploded. Martel sees both as forms of a call that reaches the wrong audiences and is given by them a meaning that exceeds or is opposed to that of the original utterance

4. I am indebted to Scott Henkel’s careful reading of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, the focus of which is the image, word, and concept of “the swarm.” From the slave masters’ perspective, referring to rebel slaves as a “swarm” or simply to describe their activity as “swarming” at the end of the eighteenth century was to both call their humanity into question and to grant each of them an individuality that perpetually vacillated between visibility and invisibility, decomposing and recomposing with the movement of the swarm in a way that excluded the assignment of fixed personal identities. But “swarm” possessed what Foucault called a “tactical polyvalence:” it represented a mode of collectivity irreducible either to an organic hierarchy or to a carefully engineered coincidence of individual interests. An organizational form immanent in slave resistance, it represented both a new form of decision-making and deliberation and a military strategy (see pp. 29–48).

Works Cited

• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and The Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, New Left Books, 1971, pp. 127–186.
• ———. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences. Translated by Steven Hendall, Columbia UP, 2016.
• ———. “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses.” The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, translated by G.M. Goshgarian. Verso, 2003, pp. 33–84.
• ———. “Locke.” Politique et histoire: de Machiavel à Marx. Cours à l’École normale supérieure, 1955–1972, Éditions de Seuil, 2006, pp. 281–299.
• Gadet, Françoise, and Michel Pȇcheux. La langue introuvable. Maspero, 1981.
• Henkel, Scott. Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas. UP of Mississippi, 2017.
• Locke, John. Second Political Treatise. Edited by C.B. Macpherson, Hackett, 1980.
• Macherey, Pierre. Le sujet des normes. Éditions Amsterdam, 2014.
• Milner, Jean-Claude. L’amour de la langue. Éditions de Seuil, 1978.
• Montag, Warren. “Althusser’s Empty Signifier: What is the Meaning of the Word ‘Interpellation?’” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, Summer 2017, Vol. 30, Iss. 2. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/Empty_Signifier, Accessed 3 February 2018.
• Pȇcheux, Michel. Language, Semantics and Ideology [1975]. Translated by Harbans Nagpal, St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
• ———. La langue introuvable. Maspero, 1979.
• ———. “Dare to Think and Dare to Rebel! Ideology, Marxism, Resistance, Class Struggle.” Décalages, Vol. 1, Iss. 4 (2014), pp. 1–28. http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages/vol1/iss4/12, Accessed 3 February 2018.
• “Who’s on First.” Script. http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/whos.html, Accessed 3 February 2018.

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús (bio)
University of Southern California

A review of Bradatan, Costica. Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. Bloomsbury, 2015.

What kind of book is Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers? Although in Costica Bradatan characterizes his book its opening pages as “an exercise in an as yet uncharted ontology: the ontology of ironical existence,” those who might expect a phenomenological or even deconstructive inquiry into the ontological status of irony, existence and, above all, their coming together, will be disappointed (4, my emphasis). As its subtitle, The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers, suggests, Dying for Ideas inscribes itself within a doxographical tradition that extends back to Diogenes Laertius’s Vitæ philosophorum—a genre better suited to the narration of anecdotes about the lives of philosophers than to the construction of any theory of being. Indeed, given Bradatan’s endorsement of Pierre Hadot’s call to rethink philosophy as an “art of living,” the ontology that could be read out of Dying for Ideas would be an ontology that understands being directly from the ways in which philosophers have lead their lives philosophically (26).

Although such calls to return to a more “practical” understanding of philosophy as a “way of life” have become commonplace in recent years, Bradatan’s contribution to this recent turn in philosophy could be located in his characterization of philosophical praxis as coinciding with a form of existence that would be constituted by irony. And if, for Bradatan, the philosopher’s life is “ironical existence at its best”—thus providing the exemplary being that the task of sketching out an ontology of ironical existence requires—this most excellent form of irony can only be gleaned, in turn, from the ways in which exemplary philosophers, such as Socrates or Thomas More, died for their ideas (200). This explains why it would be somewhat misleading to characterize Bradatan’s book as a doxography. For Bradatan clearly intends for his book to exceed the purview of the merely anecdotal and move into the terrain of the more dignified genre of philosophical hagiography, if not even of martyr passions:

Human beings have been dying “for a cause” for as long as they have been around. They have died for God or for their fellow-humans, for ideas or ideals, for things real or imaginary, reasonable or utopian. Of all the possible varieties of voluntary death, the book you’ve started to read is about philosophers who die for the sake of their philosophy.(4)

If philosophy is ultimately an “art of living,” and if death constitutes the “culmination” of life, then it stands to reason that the death of those philosophers who not only thought philosophically about death but actually died for their philosophical ideas may have something interesting to tell us about the philosophical status of existence, of death, and of irony. Unfortunately, Bradatan’s book not only fails to make a convincing case for granting this privilege to philosophy’s martyrs, but also does not tell a compelling story about their martyrdom, taking these deaths as an occasion to rehearse unexamined ideas that are philosophically bankrupt.

Bradatan structures his philosopher’s hagiography around the metaphor of the “layers” of death. This choice of metaphor is never interrogated or justified, and Bradatan himself admits that talking of death as having “layers” may be an “oversimplification” (40). Although he suggests that there could be multiple layers of death, his book only focuses on two, which are simply distinguished as “the first” and “the second” layers, and which also provide the titles of the book’s second and fourth chapters—which together constitute almost half of the entire volume. As their numerical ordering suggests, the movement between these two layers is progressive. Inverting the typical platonic schema, the book goes from the abstraction of the first layer to the concretion of the second, where the first layer of death presents us with the abstract or theoretical encounter with finitude that characterizes the lives of those philosophers who, as it were, have no skin in the game of life and death because they have not been condemned to die for their ideas. When the second layer of death is reached, “death can no longer be a ‘topic,’ there cannot be anything abstract about it. On the contrary, this layer of death is entangled with one’s flesh; it occupies one’s living body inch by inch” (126). This sequence accounts for the tight, if a bit predictable, structure of the book, which takes us from an examination of philosophers who have written about death as a theoretical issue to a rewriting of the lives and deeds of philosophers who, in dying for their ideas, have actually performed a good, philosophical death.

In the opening chapter, “Philosophy as Self-fashioning,” Bradatan takes as his guiding example Montaigne’s understanding of his own self as the product of the performative force of his Essais (37). Although Montaigne did not die for his ideas, the performative force of his writings is grounded in his relentless confrontation with mortality. For Bradatan, Montaigne mastered death by looking at it in the eye and finding in its abyss “all he needed to know about himself” (38). As such, Montaigne exemplifies the way in which a philosophical self can assert itself only by turning death into its source of constancy. In this way, the first chapter lays the foundation for the book by proposing a conception of philosophical existence that coincides with the domestication of mortality. This domestication can only be achieved through a series of performances that enable philosophers to measure themselves against the imminent danger of death and enlist death to the cause of a philosophical life, becoming the basis on which the possibility that existence may have any meaning at all is secured.

After establishing, with the help of Montaigne, a conception of philosophy that locates in the philosopher’s confrontation with death the sole source of the validity and authenticity of any philosophy, the second chapter turns to the “first layer” of death, focusing on the ways in which philosophers, artists, and writers who were not themselves under the threat of a death sentence conceived of death in what Bradatan calls a “naive” and “abstract” way (40, 83). Bradatan uses Edgar Munch’s Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to show how artists present our mortality as enabling us to lead a more authentic and meaningful life. The counterpoint to these artistic examples of a philosophically meaningful life is provided by Bradatan’s engagement with Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, which takes up a suggestion made in a footnote of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), in which Heidegger refers to Tolstoi’s novel as an illustration of inauthentic death, that is, death experienced under the aegis of das Man or “the they.”

Although Bradatan’s readings of Munch, Bergman, and Tolstoi are interesting and entertaining, his engagement with the philosophical approaches to death in Heidegger and Paul Landsberg lacks philosophical rigor. First of all, Bradatan makes a mistake about Heidegger’s thinking about death in Sein und Zeit that merits being discussed at some length, because it is symptomatic of what I find most problematic about his understanding of philosophy, irony and death. Bradatan claims that Heidegger relies on a “metaphor” to “liken human life to a process of ripening,” in which “the riper we become the closer to death we are” (57). Although Heidegger does use the “metaphor” of a fruit in §48 of Sein und Zeit, Bradatan misconstrues the gist of Heidegger’s argument. For Heidegger draws this analogy to make the exact opposite point, that is, to insist on the ontological difference between the way in which a fruit’s ripening unfolds as a progressive movement towards its end (Ende) and the way of being-towards-the-end that characterizes Dasein’s “relation” to death. Whereas the fruit’s end coincides with its fulfillment or completion (Vollendung), this cannot be affirmed of Dasein. For, as Heidegger states, “even unfulfilled Dasein ends” (235). Dasein’s ending does not and cannot take the form of any process of organic maturation in which the death of Dasein would also coincide with its completion. The incompleteness of human existence is such that death, far from being the coming to completion of Dasein, is instead the removal of even that very incompleteness which human life is: death, as Heidegger states, “means the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence” (251). Furthermore, to the extent that Dasein’s proper way of being-towards-death is bound up in the disclosure of death as the possibility of an impossibility that knows no limit, it follows that any attempts to “domesticate death”—the fundamental goal that structures Dying for Ideas, for which a certain reading of Montaigne (no doubt a domesticating reading) provides the blueprint—would amount to a futile rejection of the very possibility of experiencing human mortality (Bradatan 40).

In turning the death of Dasein into a sort of organic process, Bradatan not only makes a mistake; he also reveals the extent to which his own understanding of what philosophy ought to be coincides with the elimination of the philosophical claims of a radical understanding of finitude. This much is confirmed by his discussion of Landsberg’s Essai sur l’éxperience de la mort which, for Bradatan, provides a corrective to Heidegger’s death-centered philosophy. A German Jew who converted to Catholicism and a former student of Heidegger, Landsberg came to reject Heidegger’s characterization of human life as finite in favor of an understanding of death that, according to Bradatan, sees in it only a step towards the human person’s infinite “self-realization:” “If Montaigne thinks that, to render death less savage, we have to make it our guest, and Heidegger that, far from being death’s host, we are its hostage, Landsberg sees death’s visit as our greatest opportunity. Death is here only to take us elsewhere” (71). In refuting Heidegger’s “philosophy of death,” Landsberg relies on the authority of Jesus, who revealed “a spiritual realm inaccessible to death” (Landsberg, qtd. in Bradatan 73), and on the Christian mystics, whom Bradatan describes as “God’s traffickers,” who “routinely smuggle bits of eternity into our corrupted world, keeping it on eternal-life support, as it were” (Bradatan 73). Although it is clear that Bradatan prefers Landsberg to Heidegger, the specifically philosophical reasons that justify such preference are difficult to ascertain—unless approaching the enigma of death on the basis of the Christian dogma of the resurrection is to be counted as a philosophical argument.

The third chapter, “Philosophy in the Flesh,” provides a transition between the first and the second layers of death by focusing on the body of the “martyr-philosopher,” and specifically on the ways in which martyrdom, as a process of “dematerialization,” requires the transcendence of the body: “Since our embodied selves are designed to maintain and preserve life, philosophers ‘dying for ideas,’ to be successful, have to transcend their embodiment” (110, 87). Focusing on the “martyrdom” of figures like Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Simone Weil, Jan Patočka and Mahatma Gandhi, Bradatan’s interest in this chapter is supposedly to develop a “hermeneutic able to make sense of a unique rhetoric: that of the dying flesh,” telling us, at the end of the chapter, that he has “looked closely at the philosopher’s body in the process of withering away, seeking to transcribe what it had to say. I’ve read its gestures and written down the message. I’ve listened to its silence, and especially to its being silenced. I’ve charted the flesh that lies between the two layers of death” (124). As this passage makes clear, the underlying tone of this chapter is evangelical; here the Platonist and crypto-Christian tendencies already present in the first two chapters of the book take center stage. And yet, because the chapter basically boils down to a series of statements praising these larger than life figures for their stoic confrontation with their death sentences, for their ways of commanding power over others through their bodily practices, or for their displays of integrity in times of extreme hardship, it is hard to see what new message—let alone what specifically philosophical message—was inscribed in these dying bodies that only Bradatan, armed with a hermeneutics that is nowhere even schematically developed, has been able to interpret. Though he claims to have “charted” these dying bodies, what he brings back to us from his foray into this supposed terra incognita is a repetition of those aspects of the Christian worldview that justify Nietzsche’s characterization of Christianity as “Platonism for the masses.” Under the weight of a traditional theological philosophy, a book that promised to rethink philosophy as an embodied performance becomes another repetition of the Platonic denunciation of the flesh.

The last two chapters, “The Second Layer” and “The Making of a Martyr-Philosopher,” focus on the imprisonment and eventual martyrdom of Socrates, Boethius, and Thomas More. Having examined the role that bodily transcendence plays in philosophical and non-philosophical martyrdoms in chapter three, Bradatan spends most of chapter four retracing the ways in which these philosopher-martyrs turned their very philosophizing into an attempt to fashion for themselves an authentic self by welcoming resolutely their impending and unjust death. Although chapter four promises to finally take us to the layer of death in which mortality is no longer a theoretical abstraction, it is in chapter five that Bradatan ties together all the threads that he had been weaving since the beginning of his book. One such thread is the relation between death and narrative which, introduced at the very beginning of the book, is fleshed out in greater detail in the context of Bradatan’s “meta-reflections” on the conditions that are required in order to produce a philosophical martyr. Throughout the book, Bradatan argues that death, as the limit of existence, is the only source of finality and certainty in our lives and therefore plays an essential role in enabling life to be narratable. But the relationship between death and narrative extends beyond the single trajectory of a life or a biography, since one of the conditions of possibility for the production of a philosopher-martyr is the witnessing agency of a doxographer or a hagiographer who will write his or her story. Bradatan uses the term montatore (Italian for film editor) to refer to what the biographer of the philosopher-martyr does to his or her life story: she or he must “incinerate all the irrelevant details, the embarrassing little facts, and blushing moments, and preserve only that which can fit into a legible story” (169). In this way, Bradatan not only gives his reader examples of the exemplarily dangerous lives of those philosophers who have died for their ideas, he also puts his own book forward as a kind of manual for becoming a montatore of the foundational philosophers of our choosing. It is telling, however, that what has to be sacrificed for the sake of aggrandizing the sacred nature of these philosophical lives is the very truth of these lives themselves. His willingness to “incinerate the details” for the sake of producing a cohesive narrative that intensifies the myth of these lives reveals the extent to which Bradatan understands both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history as the continuous unfolding of one monumental sacrifice, from Socrates onward. He may deserve praise for the honesty with which he endorses editorializing the truth for the sake of aggrandizing philosophy’s aura, but Bradatan’s boldness does not compensate for the fact that he never asks whether philosophy (or, indeed, humanity) actually needs more epic stories of our great ancestors. In fact, Bradatan’s book reinforces the logic of sacrifice that is part and parcel of western philosophy since at least Plato, according to which the ritualized killing of life provides a way of accessing a form of spiritual life that lies beyond the reach of death. By endorsing this logic of sacrifice, Bradatan’s “ontology” ironically requires that more philosophers be placed under a death sentence, if only so that those who are not yet subjected to capital punishment can continue to have material for their stories.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Bradatan ends his book with a postscript, “To Die Laughing,” in which he depicts philosophical existence as the apotheosis of ironic existence, which emerges when the philosopher, confronting his impending death, laughs at the entire cosmos:

The philosophers’ laughing at existence at the very moment of their departure from it must be their most significant feat—the ultimate philosophical masquerade. And what is such laughter if not the best possible way to act out your final philosophical insight — the notion, that is, that you were made in mockery and your life is a cosmic joke? …. Ironical existence at its best. That’s how you can preserve some dignity in the comedy of being in which, unasked, you have been cast to play.(199–200)

This is Bradatan at his most Nietzschean: the Platonic-Christian conceptual matrix that guides Dying for Ideas until this point vanishes when the philosopher is, at the end, forced to confront the ontological comedy that is existence, in which “life is a cosmic joke.” Unlike other kinds of martyrs who die in the name of a god or for the sake of political or religious causes, philosophers who have died voluntarily—and for philosophical reasons—are not shielded from the painful realization that existence itself is meaningless and that the promise of the afterlife is a mere anesthetic contraption, meant to prevent them from collapsing in the face of an existential horror vacui. And yet, even at this point, Bradatan manages to save the possibility of turning this joke into a source of meaning by identifying in the philosopher’s laughter the possibility of mastering even this comedy that life and death are. If the philosophical way of life is the most ironic, the “best” example of such irony is therefore provided by the philosopher who, in laughing at life at the moment of death, laughs at death itself and is able to master it, to “trick the trickster” (200).

Can the irony of life and death—the realization that death does not grant meaning to life but renders it meaningless—be mastered by the philosopher’s hyper-ironic laughter? Bradatan believes that this is the case, though I am not so sure. At any rate, nowhere in the book will the reader find a justification for this belief in the power of philosophical irony to rescue the “dignity” of philosophers’ lives and deaths. Indeed, although Bradatan states at the beginning and at the end of his book that the underlying goal of his project is to chart the terra incognita of this “ontology of ironical existence,” there is no serious attempt in Dying for Ideas to come to terms with the philosophical stakes of Bradatan’s project. This project is undermined by the very impossibility of experiencing one’s own death and therefore of knowing it, so that the goal of charting an ontology of this terra incognita ought to be drastically reformulated, if not abandoned. If absolute irony is only on the side of death—since the only thing the philosopher can do to death is ultimately to laugh at death’s laughter—it stands to reason that the irony of existence has very little to do with the possibility of finding any form of meaning or dignity in death. Existence would be ironic to the extent that death is the “permanent parabasis,” as Friedrich Schlegel puts it, that interrupts any attempt to settle on the meaning of existence, keeping it open until the very end, and thus never fully known.

Instead of confronting these questions, Dying for Ideas takes its readers on the equivalent of a philosophical via cruxis, a barely secularized procession that celebrates the deeds of the great men (and the occasional women) whose sacrifice founded the tradition of philosophy that Bradatan wants to champion. As I read Bradatan’s book, I could not but hope for the end of so much sacrifice—for the chance of a philosophical story with a different beginning, and perhaps no foreseeable ending.

Works Cited

• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh and edited by Dennis Schmidt. SUNY Press, 2010.

G Douglas Barrett (bio)
Salisbury University

Abstract

This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier’s neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor transformations of late capitalism. Read as staging the performer’s “brain at work,” Music for Solo Performer appears here as a response to post-Fordist economic models that prioritize cognitive over manual forms of labor.

Introduction

When asked about his compositional process, John Cage often explained that he could not hear music in his head (Retallack 86; Duckworth 27, 112). Cage, so the story goes, radicalized this supposed shortcoming by using chance and indeterminacy to remove his musical tastes from the artistic process. In a seemingly converse gesture, Alvin Lucier began in 1965 to use the literal contents of his head, specifically brainwaves, to perform experimental music. Following a conversation with Cage, Lucier premiered Music for Solo Performer, a work in which electrodes are attached to the scalp of a performer who sits motionless as electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are routed to percussion instruments distributed throughout the performance space. Upon producing alpha waves, a process referred to as a “skill” (Mumma 81) and even “work” (Lucier qtd. in Kahn, Earth 101), individual speakers activate the instruments, which pulsate at frequencies analogous to the performer’s brainwaves.

Lucier’s work can be viewed as an attempt to relocate the labor of musical performance to the site where Cage’s interlocutors had expected to find his composing: the brain. In the score to Music for Solo Performer, Lucier asks the soloist to produce alpha waves by manipulating psychological states, typically obtained by closing one’s eyes and refraining from visualizing—a task the composer says requires specific training and endurance (Kahn, Earth 99). “Working long hours alone in the Brandeis University Electronic Music Studio,” Lucier recalls, “I learned to produce alpha fairly consistently,” given “the right physical and psychological conditions” (Strange 59). Lucier describes his composition further as an effort to bypass the body altogether and, using only the performer’s alpha waves, link the brain to musical instruments directly (“. . . to let alpha” 50). The composer construes his soloist, then, less as an embodied actor than as a kind of cognitive performer. Musical performance, including Music for Solo Performer, doubtless requires coordination between both mind and body, just as factory labor demands an amount of intellectual engagement. But considered alongside the economic and technological changes of the era, Lucier’s gesture resonates—consonantly, yet also critically—with historical shifts in the conception of labor that foreground cognitive over physical activity. These transformations, largely associated with the industrial shifts of post-Fordism, reconceive the worker as a kind of processor of information: a brain worker.

Music for Solo Performer emerges from Lucier’s artistic engagement with neuroscience research and biofeedback techniques adopted from cybernetics, an interdisciplinary scientific field premised on technological paradigms of control and communication first articulated during the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to laying important groundwork for Cold War military technoscience, cybernetics also assisted in many of the economic transformations associated with post-Fordism, including the shift to cognitive labor. More recently, cybernetics has been seen as the locus of a broader cultural movement based on the technological decentering of the human, later to become associated with the figure of the “posthuman.” The kinds of biofeedback and neuroscience research Lucier used in Music for Solo Performer have been central to this discourse. Considered more broadly, Cagean indeterminacy can also be viewed as a shift from the centrality of human artistic expression to the nonhuman forces of chance, natural processes, or, more recently, artificial intelligence (see, for instance, Yasunao Tone’s AI Deviation [2016]). Studies of Lucier and Cage have increasingly acknowledged the import of cybernetics; but equally pertinent to this conversation, I think, is the critical continuation of that discourse in posthumanism.

This essay examines experimental music of the 1960s, concentrating on Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer, in order to respond to historical debates around cognitive labor and posthumanism. Contemporary realizations of Music for Solo Performer (e.g., Cyngler) almost invariably use brain-computer interfaces, tools considered central to the development of computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Music for Solo Performer was a collaboration between Lucier and Edmond M. Dewan, a physicist (and friend of cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener) who had also linked brainwave analysis to artificial intelligence. Through a reading of Music for Solo Performer, I will speculate on the artistic and economic possibilities of neuroscience research that seeks to create fully functional replications of the human brain. This process, known as “brain emulation,” incorporates both artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience. Inaugurating what one could call without exaggeration a “neuromusical turn” beginning in the experimental music of the 1960s,¹ Lucier anticipates the rise of the kinds of neuroscience research central to brain emulation and recent theories of the “posthuman brain” (Stollfuß 82–90).

Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer, a work indebted to Cagean notions of indeterminacy and experimentalism, emerged alongside the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor transformations of late capitalism. When read as staging the performer’s “brain at work,” Music for Solo Performer appears as a response to post-Fordist notions of “cognitive labor,” wherein mental as opposed to manual work had become prioritized. Already in this literature one finds a discussion of automation (Ramtin 60–73), the consequences of which doubtless become exacerbated in scenarios of posthuman AI. I suggest then that indeterminacy might figure not only as a formal feature of experimental music, but also can be imagined here as a political response to capitalism’s slope toward the posthuman. That is, through Lucier’s reflexive use of cybernetics and his work with indeterminacy, experimental music becomes capable of a kind of inchoate critique of posthumanism and its requisite political economic conditions. Finally, I contrast indeterminacy with Catherine Malabou’s notion of automaticity in concluding my discussion of cognitive labor, experimental music, and the posthuman brain. Throughout I want to keep in tension some of the important yet under-discussed historiographical and theoretical threads connecting experimental music and posthumanism² through their mutual intersections and inheritances from cybernetics along with their shared relevance to contemporary technoculture.

Experimenting the Human: Experimental Music and Posthumanism

Posthumanism represents a heterogeneous body of thought that responds to the decentering of the human in an era of rapid technological advance, environmental instability, and economic crisis.³ Although posthumanism appeared initially in literary theory in the 1990s, most trace its origins to the formative discussions of the human–technology relationship found in the work of Wiener, Warren McCulloch, John von Neumann, and other cyberneticists during the 1940s and 1950s. Cybernetics was conceived as an amalgam of scientific disciplines based on mechanisms of regulation and systems of communication, emblematized by Wiener’s 1948 publication Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Its genealogical relevance to posthumanism is difficult to overstate; cybernetics was, as literary theorist Bruce Clarke puts it, “the technoscientific forethought of the contemporary posthuman” (Posthuman Metamorphosis 4). In addition to its inception in cybernetics, posthumanism originates through miscegenation between technological, biopolitical, and philosophical discourses, from French anti-humanism to artificial intelligence to recent debates concerning the Anthropocene. Rather than standing for an unchallenged anthropological category, the posthuman marks a moment when the privileged “human” enters into discourse—a discourse shaped as much by philosophy and science as by literature and art.

Experimental music is an artistic movement that began largely in postwar North American, British, and East Asian music circles (with roots heard already in the prewar avant-garde) and extends beyond concerns with technology to encompass a heterogeneous network of techniques, attitudes, and practices. Nevertheless, indeterminacy, open forms, and extended uses of music technology have been critical to the development of experimental music. Conversely, experimental music has played an important role in shaping the fields of biofeedback, artificial intelligence, and robotics—paradigms central to cybernetics and, later, to posthumanism. Experimental music, not unlike its postwar serial and postserial counterparts, has proceeded often through direct recourse to the methodologies of science and technology. Note the scientistic valence of John Cage’s 1955 definition of experimental music: “not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success or failure,” experimentalism stood for “an act the outcome of which is unknown” (Silence 13). Yet beyond the modernist project of subjecting sound parameters to the deterministic human control of serialism, experimentalism used indeterminacy—beginning with chance and natural processes and later incorporating computer algorithms, biofeedback, and artificial intelligence—in ways that mirror posthumanism’s challenge to the centrality of human agency.⁴

A clear tension can be located, then, between cybernetics as a control paradigm and experimentalism’s programmatic withdrawal of authorial control that characterizes indeterminacy. Examples of the latter can be found in Cage’s iconic 1951 silent composition 4′33″ and in the chance procedures Cage used to compose his piano work Music of Changes of the same year. If indeterminacy was amplified through engagements with technoscience, it was also complicated by its inheritances from cybernetics. Beginning in the experimental music of the 1950s, as computer algorithms, biofeedback, and robotics began to replace the composer’s individual aesthetic decisions, the “human” component in the human–technology relationship endemic to music was challenged and, in some sense, deprivileged. James Tenney suggested, for instance, that while composing Ergodos I (for John Cage) (an algorithmic computer music work generated in 1964 at Bell Laboratories), his “last vestiges of external ‘shaping’ ha[d] disappeared” (38). No longer beholden to the sole will of the human, experimental music cedes compositional agency here to the algorithm. Lucier extends this dynamic to the domain of neurological biofeedback.

In addition to experimental music, cybernetic feedback made possible precisely the kinds of technological and economic shifts associated with post-Fordism, including the full-scale automation of machine control. Once machines could use sensors that adjust for output and auto-correct for errors in performance, the formerly irrevocable role of the human was lessened up to the point of obsolescence (Dyer-Witheford 45). Feedback thus imparted to machines qualities once thought of as unique to living labor, including adaptability, flexibility, and even learning (Dyer-Witheford 45; Ramtin 45). Like cybernetics more broadly, feedback foreshadows the figure of the contemporary posthuman. Such a dynamic, moreover, represents another level at which feedback itself actually feeds back: the reduction in labor time afforded by machine automation (and feedback) figures as the new ground upon which capital’s own feedback loop begins another production cycle (Ramtin 68–9). Cyberneticists, furthermore, saw no fundamental difference between machines, organic life, and even the human brain: all could be placed within, or indeed could constitute, a feedback loop. Biofeedback inserts specifically biological life forms, including the human subject, into the cybernetic circuit, thus calling into question the boundaries of both entities—a contention imbricated programmatically throughout posthumanist discourse.

Posthuman Political Economies: From Biofeedback to the Posthuman Brain

Posthumanism thus responds not only to the kinds of cybernetic biofeedback found in Music for Solo Performer, but speaks to the crisis of the liberal humanist subject. “From Norbert Wiener on,” N. Katherine Hayles writes in How We Became Posthuman, “the flow of information through feedback loops has been associated with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject” (2), the version of the human that occupies the remainder of her posthuman critique. Hayles’s study periodizes cybernetics in three phases, calling the first, foundational stage, which includes Wiener and von Neumann’s focus on feedback loops and information, homeostasis (1945–1960); the second, which includes Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana’s second-order cybernetics and autopoiesis, reflexivity (1960–1980); and the third, based on brain emulation and AI, virtuality (1980-present). Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer relates most directly to the first phase through its use of biofeedback, while it also speaks to the third phase in ways that resonate with contemporary technoculture debates. Hayles opens her study with a reference to this third cybernetic phase, describing the sense of terror and amusement she experienced upon reading MIT robotics expert Hans Moravec’s 1988 prediction that it would soon be possible to “upload” human consciousness to a computer (Hayles 1).

There’s no mind uploading in Lucier, but a similar fantasy is at play in Music for Solo Performer’s basic premise of “offloading” cognition through a novel cybernetic feedback loop. For Hayles, though, such a fantasy of disembodied cognition represents nothing genuinely new, and in fact parallels a key feature of liberal humanism. Namely, the Cartesian subject’s identification with a rational mind that possesses a body (rather than being a body) was, paradoxically, both a product of and a condition for market liberalism in the first place. Liberal political theorists from John Locke to Thomas Hobbes to James Mill have similarly argued that the liberal subject is effectively constructed through a kind of internal split with the body. In the words of Locke: “every man has a property in his own person” (18). The posthuman can be seen, then, as an extension of the kind of possessive individualism (Macpherson) found at the heart of liberalism. Liberal capitalism and the posthuman, in this sense, both turn on a dematerialization of the body.⁵

Such a posthumanist critique of liberalism, when radicalized, requisitely becomes a critique of political economy (as Hayles’s nod to Marxist political scientist C. B. Macpherson [3] might suggest).⁶ Hayles and other posthumanists argue that the denial of bodily materiality has been key to preserving the liberal subject’s supposed universality through an erasure of sexual, racial, and ethnic markers of difference.⁷ This, along with the “dematerialized” character of digital media, is one sense in which Hayles argues that through the figure of the posthuman, “information has lost its body.” Political economic theorists would corroborate such a contention, as in, for instance, Philip Mirowski’s claim that the “economic agent” represented by neoclassical economics is ultimately nothing more than a “processor of information” (18). Already in cybernetics, as Mirowski notes, one finds the ambition to apply the same kinds of control and communications paradigms to financial exchange; Wiener acknowledged such an interest from the very beginnings of his engagements with cybernetics (18). Ardent anti-communist cyberneticist von Neumann, co-author (with Oskar Morgenstern) of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), is hailed in fact in Mirowski’s account as the “single most important figure in the development of economics in the twentieth century” (99).

It would not be until 1961 that cybernetics would receive what theorists cite as its first Marxist analysis in the work of Italian operaist (workerist) Romano Alquati. Here, as in Hayles’s account, information becomes primary:

Information is the most important thing about labor-power: it is what the worker, by the means of constant capital, transmits to the means of production upon the basis of evaluations, measurements, elaborations in order to operate on the object of work all those modifications of its form that give it the requested use value.(qtd. in Pasquinelli 183)⁸

Information thus forms both the medium of transmission and the object upon which labor works, marking a qualitative alteration in the means of production. What characterizes this shift, and indeed necessitates the term “cognitive labor,” is a change in work of a certain quality, not the fundamental, yet historically specific, status of the system in which it operates. That is, both physical and cognitive labor are subject to value generation as a function of time under capitalism. As Moishe Postone explains in his reinterpretation of Marx, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, “Value is a social form that expresses, and is based on, the expenditure of direct labor time” (25). Whether coding a computer application or working in a steel factory, labor as a category is united by the commodification of the worker’s time. Cognitive labor, in particular, is nevertheless a useful analytical category for apprehending labor’s shifting valences brought about through changes in industry and technology, here specifically through automation and cybernetics. It is through the advent of the latter that the worker, in Pasquinelli’s analysis, is no longer a “thermodynamic animal steaming in front of a machine but is already a brain worker” (183). Hence the posthuman brain at work.

A critical distinction is to be made, still, between the posthumanist critique of market liberalism and its posthuman amplification. Characteristic of this latter position (which is reflected across popular culture), for instance, is a desire to expand the category of the human to encompass “multiple forms of life and machines” (Nayar 2).⁹ Indeed, not all posthumanists (or would-be posthumanists) begin with a radical critique of democratic capitalism (at least not from the left), but a recent sampling of technoculture across the political spectrum reveals a variety of implications about AI and the posthuman brain. Right-wing Deleuzian and self-proclaimed “neoreactionary” philosopher Nick Land, for instance, claims that the one premise guiding his work for the past twenty years has been “the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence” (“Teleological Identity”).¹⁰ Roughly twenty years prior, Land conjectured: “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources” (“Machinic Desire” 479). This appears to be a strong claim, even from someone who thinks it’s a good thing. Yet considering the billions of dollars invested annually in artificial intelligence, institutions like Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the recently established Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) could be justified in corroborating warnings from popular figures like Stephen Hawking that the development of full artificial general intelligence could be disastrous for humanity (Cellan-Jones).¹¹

Many right-leaning thinkers, including Moravec, have actively participated in such endeavors.¹² Take libertarian economist Robin Hanson’s recent Moravecian prediction:

[S]ometime in roughly the next century it will be possible to scan a human brain at a fine enough spatial and chemical resolution, and to combine that scan with good enough models of how individual brain cells achieve their signal-processing functions, to create a cell-by-cell dynamically-executable model of the full brain in artificial hardware, a model whose signal input-output behavior is usefully close to that of the original brain.(Age 47)¹³

It will be purportedly through such a process that we will create the first operational artificial minds, what Hanson calls ems. “A good enough em has roughly the same input-output signal behavior as the original human.” Hanson, an investor in such technologies (and cryogenics), explains: “One might talk with it, and convince it to do useful jobs” (“What” 298, emphasis added). Another reason Hanson gives for the looming ascendancy of brain emulation technology is the ability to cheaply copy and run any number of emulations—potentially trillions—limited only by hardware costs. This promises a virtually infinitely reproducible source of labor power ultimately irresistible for investors. Wages for ems, then, become Malthusian (which turns out to be more efficient than enslaving them), reduced to an amount just above subsistence levels (the cost to run their hardware), while (non-investor) humans ultimately die off.

Much of the work is already underway to realize similar visions of the posthuman brain. The European Union’s Blue Brain Project and the Human Brain Project, along with the American BRAIN Initiative beginning under Barack Obama, collectively command billions in their efforts to map and emulate the human brain (Underwood; Chu). Research conducted by the Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative promises important benefits to brain disorder treatments, along with a better understanding of neurological diseases and brain injury trauma. But work remains to be done to achieve complete brain emulations: computers must become considerably faster, microscopy scanning techniques must improve, and functional models of the brain must become more robust. The BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project have only begun the modest goal of mapping the brains of mice and rats. Moravec’s “mind children” have yet to even crawl.

Such an approach to engineering virtual life forms nevertheless represents a key goal of computational neuroscience, a relatively new field based on the intersection between cybernetics, informatics, and neuroscience. This emergent discipline draws significantly upon the kinds of neurofeedback technologies used in Music for Solo Performer, but represents neuroscience’s radical shift “from a life science approach (biology and medicine) to a computer science approach in order to perpetuate a techno-rationality that concentrates on engineering [rather than] representing nature” (Stollfuß 81). The object of computational neuroscience is, as already with neurofeedback, the posthuman brain.

The posthuman brain emerges as the result of a process beginning with the biofeedback loops of first-phase cybernetics, which find artistic expression in experimental music works like Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer, and culminates seemingly in one of various eschatological scenarios of posthuman AI. More recent experimental music works like Tone’s AI Deviation (2016) make direct use of artificial intelligence. But Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer was one of the first compositions based on neurofeedback, and concerns pertinent issues related to cognitive labor. Additionally, through its use of experimentalism and indeterminacy, Lucier’s work posits, as I discuss in conclusion, a response to the kind of “automaticity” that undergirds scenarios of posthuman AI. Automaticity, wholly distinct from but not unrelated to the problem of technological determinism,¹⁴ is a term Michel Foucault borrows from psychology to describe an individual’s conditioned responses to stimuli (Fedler 78); Malabou extends the concept in her political and philosophical critique of posthuman AI (“Metamorphoses”).

Music for Solo Performer, through its reflexive adoption of cybernetics and use of indeterminacy, figures as an incipient, even preemptive, response to the crisis of the posthuman. Thinkers like Hayles have criticized the fantasy at play in both biofeedback and brain emulation, and clearly the topic involves myriad philosophical questions about consciousness, identity, and the self (see Blackford and Broderick). Contemporary technoculture has suggested that runaway posthuman processes might emerge through capitalist economic interests alone, irrespective of questions of embodiment, the uniqueness of the biological human, and so on. Furthermore, Moravecian predictions like Hanson’s point to capitalism’s properly speculative and “experimental” nature: capitalism simultaneously forecasts a future—dynamically yet with a kind of infallible automatism—and experiments, relentlessly trying out programs, up to and including various “sci-fi scenarios,”¹⁵ to achieve such results. This structure, I want to suggest, finds an unlikely correlate in experimental music: in the words of Cage, “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work” (qtd. in Straebel and Thoben 17). (Only perhaps that it is good enough.)

Music for Solo Performer and Cognitive Labor

Those were Cage’s words to Lucier on the eve of the latter’s 1965 premiere of Music for Solo Performer for enormously amplified brain waves and percussion.¹⁶ The score for Music for Solo Performer¹⁷ calls for EEG electrodes to be placed on the performer’s scalp to activate a battery of percussion instruments arranged throughout the performance space. Lucier’s work attempts to transduce a performer’s alpha waves, the relatively faint pulsations of electrical activity of the brain historically associated with states of cognitive idleness, into electrical signals that are subsequently amplified. These pulsations, which oscillate (as Lucier’s score notes) between 8 and 12 Hertz, or cycles per second, are well below the range of human hearing. Yet when amplified “enormously” these vibrations can readily be perceived as rhythms.

Exploring this feature of alpha waves, Lucier’s score calls for the brainwaves to be routed to an array of speakers which are themselves affixed to various percussion instruments: “large gongs, cymbals, tympani, metal ashcans, cardboard boxes, bass and snare drums (small loudspeakers face down on them),” along with switches that trigger a set of pre-arranged, sped-up brainwave recordings. When the soloist produces alpha waves, which can be achieved by closing one’s eyes and refraining from visualizing, the speakers sympathetically resonate the various instruments to which they are attached at a frequency analogous to the amplified brainwaves. The soloist, now embedded in a kind of feedback loop, is exposed to the resulting percussion sounds, which may end up halting alpha wave production. Lucier’s performer is thus interpellated into a biofeedback loop constructed through a network of neuroscientific cybernetics.

Music for Solo Performer anticipates the rise of computational neuroscience through Lucier’s artistic appropriation of cybernetics and neuroscience technologies. Lucier’s work inaugurated what I’ve suggested calling a neuromusical turn beginning in the experimental music of the 1960s. As noted, John Cage, James Tenney, Manford L. Eaton, David Rosenboom, Petr Kotik, and Nam June Paik had all worked with brainwaves in their respective musical practices. Importantly, such a musical incorporation of neuroscience began in parallel with the expansion of the military-industrial complex and on the cusp of late capitalism’s post-Fordist labor transformations. As Douglas Kahn explains, “it becomes impossible to talk about American experimentalism in any comprehensive way distinct from the knowledge and technologies flowing from the militarized science of the Cold War, more specifically, cybernetics” (Earth 86). Experimental music not only appropriates the rhetoric of scientific experimentation but here also reflexively incorporates the tools and working methods of Cold War technoscience.

Yet beyond an analysis of Lucier’s work as an instance of “sonification,” or an exploration of electromagnetic waves, I want to read Music for Solo Performer as an attempt to index cognitive labor through a cybernetic network of neuromusical technics. Although Lucier’s work seems to require only a soloist sitting still for an extended duration with electrodes attached to her/his head, the work’s score asks the performer to produce alpha waves by manipulating specific mental and psychological states, a job that demands, as noted, special preparation and training. “This is a specially developed skill which the soloist learns with practice,” Gordon Mumma contends, “and, no matter how experienced the soloist has become, various conditions of performance intrude upon that skill” (“Alvin” 81).

During the premiere of Music for Solo Performer on May 5, 1965 at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, Lucier remained virtually motionless for nearly forty minutes while attempting to periodically drift in and out of alpha states by exercising the composer’s newly acquired cognitive “skill.” Following Cage’s opening performance of 0′00″ (4′33″ No. 2) (1962), which consisted of the composer performing an amplified “disciplined action” (in this instance, he typed out correspondence letters using an onstage typewriter), Lucier sat down as electrodes were affixed to his head. At first nothing happened. But then, as he closed his eyes and settled into place, the various percussion instruments and objects distributed around the room began to rumble. After a while the sounds stopped, and this process continued throughout the performance. Overall, the event seemed to test not only Lucier’s but the audience’s endurance as well (so much so that one of his Brandeis colleagues reacted by giving another faculty member, who had been pretending to sleep, a “hotfoot,” an adolescent practical joke in which a match is inserted into one’s shoe and lit [Kahn, Earth 90]). In order to produce alpha waves consistently, Lucier worked to avoid such distractions while remaining unperturbed by the recurring percussion sounds. Video documentation of a performance staged roughly a decade later, for instance, shows Lucier on multiple occasions raising his right arm to cover both eyes with his thumb and middle finger to induce concentration (Ashley).

Musical performance becomes a cognitive activity that resembles a form of labor. While it can be argued that in Lucier’s work the “performer performs by not performing” (Kahn, Earth 101), in such a view performance figures as a primarily somatic process.¹⁸ Music for Solo Performer, seemingly in response to discourses that mark capitalism’s shift to cognitive labor, displaces the site of artistic labor from the body more generally to the brain in particular. As though realizing the fantasy of a technological interface between mind and music, Music for Solo Performer attempts to link “the brain to the instruments, bypassing the body entirely” (Lucier, “. . . to let alpha” 50). (Lucier went even further in his 1966 “dream” to link the brain of the performer with audience members in order to exchange thoughts and aural sensations directly.)¹⁹ In Lucier’s composition, the soloist becomes what Fernando Vidal has critically identified as the “cerebral subject” of neuroscience, the realization of an equality between the modern “self” and the brain—designated by the phrase “You are your brain”—that began in the mid-twentieth century and strengthened with the introduction of fMRI scanning in the 1990s (Vidal 6, 22).²⁰

Cognitive labor discourse was, to be sure, still in its infancy when Lucier premiered Music for Solo Performer in 1965. The conceptual groundwork for cognitive labor can be traced to the Italian Marxist feminist movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, which also developed the related concepts of “immaterial labor” and “affective labor” through the work of Leopoldina Fortunati and Silvia Federici. Similar engagements have arisen from those associated with the Italian autonomia movement (Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Christian Marazzi); more recently, this discourse has expanded into areas such as digital labor studies and what Jodi Dean has called “communicative capital” (19–48).²¹ As early as 1961 Alquati, as noted above, published his unique study of the Italian Olivetti Factory, which Pasquinelli considers both the first Marxist study of cybernetics and a founding inquiry into the notion of cognitive labor. Within this paradigm, Alquati argues, “Productive labor is defined by the quality of information elaborated and transmitted by the worker” (qtd. in Pasquinelli 183, emphasis removed). As such, these theories of cognitive labor mark capitalism’s shift from the energy-producing body to the information-producing brain. As Pasquinelli notes, “At the beginning of the industrial age, capitalism was exploiting human bodies for their mechanical energy, but soon it became clear that the most important value was coming from the series of creative acts, measurements, and decisions that workers constantly have to make” (183). Along these lines, the soloist in Music for Solo Performer, when restricted solely to the task of producing alpha waves, is not being asked to make these kinds of creative decisions. The focus there is rather on achieving and manipulating specific mental states.

But here it is important to consider the formal differences, especially as related to musical divisions of labor, between Lucier’s indeterminate score and the hyper-specificity associated with serial and postserialist modernism. “The score specifies a task to be accomplished, not a composer’s idea of a fixed object,” Lucier explains (“Notes” 254). Typical of Lucier’s compositions of this period, the composer leaves a variety of musical parameters open to the creative discretion of the performer. This includes, as we’ve seen, the number and types of percussion instruments. The score also invites the soloist “to activate radios, television sets, lights, alarms, and other audio-visual devices,” and suggests that the performer “experiment with electrodes on other parts of the head” in order to pick up alternate frequencies that may produce stereo effects. Finally, Lucier’s score allows the performance to be of any duration. Such a delegation of the “creative acts, measurements, and decisions” to the performer/worker (as is the case with other experimental music scores of this era),²² accords with the post-Fordist redefinition of the worker, which required workers to be more than “obedient hands” and to actively participate in production (Dyer-Witheford 45; Antunes 39).

Lucier has discussed labor, often in seemingly anthropomorphic terms, in connection with Music for Solo Performer. As the composer explains, “Most of the time my sounds do some kind of work” (qtd. in Kahn, Earth 101). At times Lucier seems to acknowledge less the artist’s labor than the equipment involved, relegating the human component to the work’s cybernetic and technological processes. Referring to the ways the speakers physically activate the percussion instruments, for example, Lucier suggests, “The speaker is a performer. . . . It’s doing something. It’s doing work” (qtd. in Kahn, Earth 99). Recall here the cybernetic tendency, though, especially in the context of biofeedback, to flatten operative distinctions between humans and machines. Musical automata have played a critical role in music technology and artificial intelligence dating back to the Enlightenment.²³ Lucier’s comment suggests that the speaker forms a kind of prosthesis, ultimately rendering the soloist as a kind of musical cyborg. Such a conception of musical labor, moreover, appears entirely in line with the cybernetic transformations of post-Fordism. “The first step was redefining the worker as part of a feedback loop,” Dyer-Witheford contends, “a sensor component in a goal-oriented process which was adjusted until the biological and machine components of the total system were in balance. The machine is not over and against the worker—because the worker is part of the machine” (51). Lucier’s soloist is subject to this machinic structure of cognitive capitalism.

Music for Solo Performer contributes to discussions of the movement from industrial to cognitive labor, which occurred alongside art’s concomitant shift toward conceptual and “dematerialized” practices (Lippard 5).²⁴ Along these lines, Music for Solo Performer marks a related movement from the sensorial and aesthetic to the cognitive and conceptual, domains more typically seen as relevant to postwar visual art. Music for Solo Performer predates foundational works of conceptual art (for instance, Sol LeWitt’s 1969 Sentences on Conceptual Art) by several years, yet Volker Straebel and Wilm Thoben argue for a consideration of the work as a form of “conceptual music” (27; cf. Kahn, Earth 100–1). Although they focus on technological “sonification” practices, Straebel and Thoben consider Lucier’s work as music “beyond the audible” that reveals “much more than sound” (27; see Barrett, After Sound). Corroborating such a claim, Lucier insists in his discussion of Music for Solo Performer: “it isn’t a sound idea, it’s a control or energy idea” (“. . . to let alpha” 48)—a statement that notably recalls the conception of cybernetics as a control paradigm. Along with cognitive labor, Lucier’s (post-sonic) neuromusic encapsulates experimentalism’s unique encounter between cybernetics and indeterminacy.

Cybernetic Indeterminacy

Music for Solo Performer was Lucier’s first work of experimental music and represents his foray into indeterminacy (Straebel and Thoben 19). Experimentalism borrows the iterative testing and verification procedures found in both capitalism and technoscience, while radically deracinating such procedures from their ordinarily correlated systems of value (and knowledge) production. Indeterminacy, practices that depart from the prescriptive form of the musical score or introduce unpredictable musical variables in composition or performance, was foundational for Cage’s conception of experimentalism, viewed as a set of processes whose outcome is unknown (Silence 13).²⁵ Indeterminacy does not refer to a particular musical or artistic style, nor does it necessarily exhibit perceivable qualities apart from, perhaps, a variable sense of unpredictability. Rather, the term describes an artistic process that produces events whose characteristics are not fully knowable in advance. Doubtless this notion of indeterminacy was influenced by work in cybernetics and information theory, such as, for instance, Claude Shannon’s 1948 “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which described the relationship between predictability and unpredictability in interpreting information encoded in signals that may also contain noise (Valiquet).²⁶ But some of the formative statements on indeterminacy also exhibit a desire to subvert desire itself, or, in Cage’s parlance, to remove the “dictates of [the] ego” from the artistic process (35).

On this account, indeterminacy contains an intimate link to the libidinal, which is further bound in Lucier’s work to the problem of cognitive labor. Indeterminacy can be seen as an attempt to undermine the goal-directed gratification associated with the creative process, emerging here from the context of music composition. Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer, with its open-ended text score instructions, posits a musical unknowable in the form of the indeterminate outcome of the composer’s neurofeedback network, imagined, in Cage’s terms, as falling outside the rubric of “success or failure.” It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work. Indeterminacy might be further reimagined as a kind of inhibitor of one’s conditioned responses to capitalist subjectivity as captured by the notion of automaticity. Cage, in fact, first turned to indeterminacy, in part, as an alternative to psychoanalysis and the ego fulfillment otherwise associated with composing music.²⁷ Indeterminacy appears, then, as a subtle kind of libidinal intervention, extended in Lucier’s case to labor and the economic.

A fundamental tension inheres between experimentalism’s program of indeterminacy and cybernetics as a control paradigm, and Music for Solo Performer critically straddles these two domains. The work is the result of a collaboration between Lucier and physicist and brainwave researcher Edmond M. Dewan, a close friend and colleague of cybernetics pioneer Wiener. Dewan worked for the US Air Force and was an adjunct professor at Brandeis University, where he had initially met Lucier, who taught in the music department. Interestingly, in the score to Music for Solo Performer, Lucier lists Dewan as “Technical Consultant,” even though he introduced Dewan as the composer of the work following its 1965 premiere. Dewan was important enough to Lucier’s development that Kahn devoted an entire chapter of his recent book to their relationship (Earth 93–105). Complementing Dewan and Lucier, Cage and Wiener rounded out this network of relations. Music for Solo Performer was, according to Kahn, “a manifestation of cybernetics within music, a meeting of Wiener and Cage, one step removed” (Earth 86).

Here I’d like to extend Lucier’s neurofeedback, especially considering this relationship with Dewan, to a discussion of the contemporary impasses of the posthuman brain. Brainwaves are central to Dewan’s understanding of consciousness, and consciousness is integral to his conclusions about artificial intelligence. “Let us start by loosely defining consciousness as ‘awareness,’” he proposed in a 1957 paper. “Recent investigations with the electroencephalogram [EEG] reveal interesting correlations between certain forms of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex and certain states of awareness.” Neurofeedback provides a marker of such an “awareness,” which in turn Dewan thinks lies at the root of consciousness. Dewan then discusses the possibility of artificial intelligence. As though presaging the transformations that would later become associated with computational neuroscience, he concludes that, “in order to decide whether or not a machine thinks, one would have to know all the physical correlates of consciousness; for only then could we know whether or not there is a structural isomorphism between the machine and that property of the brain which is associated with consciousness” (“‘Other Minds’” 74–6).²⁸ Once the brain is fully knowable, one possesses the tools to ascertain, and even create, its machinic equivalent.

What Should We Do with Our Brain Music?

Catherine Malabou, upon learning of the Blue Brain Project’s competitive goal of simulating the neocortical column of a rat—alongside the release of IBM’s “neurosynaptic” CPU chip, which promises the equivalent of neuroplasticity in silicon—suggested a revision of the title of her widely influential 2008 essay, What Should We Do with Our Brain? as “Rat Race; or What Can We Do with Our Blue Brain?” (“Metamorphoses”). This is because neuroplasticity, which the philosopher defines as the brain’s radical ability to both give and receive form, had fortified the human brain, for Malabou, against its potential capture via machinic duplication or emulation. According to Malabou, “The ‘plasticity’ of the brain refers to the capacity of synapses to modify their transmission effectiveness. Synapses are not in fact frozen; to this degree, they are not mere transmitters of nerve information but, in a certain sense, they have the power to form or reform information” (Plasticity 59). If IBM’s new chip could, in fact, simulate such plasticity in silicon, as it had claimed, this would challenge the conception of plasticity as a privileged feature of biological human brains.

For Malabou, plasticity creates the conditions for a genuine historicity—and hence, politics—of the brain. Drawing on Marx’s notorious statement about history, she proclaims, “Humans make their own brain, but they do not know they are doing so” (What 8). This had led her to posit a “critique of neuronal ideology” which insists upon plasticity against the kind of neoliberal “flexibility” that coincides with what Žižek paraphrases (in his 2006 discussion of What Should We Do with Our Brain?) as the resonance “between cognitivism and ‘postmodern’ capitalism” (209). Importantly, such a formulation of “neuronal politics” also gives way to her critique of the cybernetic conception of the brain as a computation machine. In a section of What Should We Do with Our Brain? entitled “End of the ‘Machine Brain,’” she criticizes “technological metaphors” of the brain such as Henri Bergson’s “central telephone exchange” and, of course, the computer brain. She argues, “Opposed to the rigidity, the fixity, the anonymity of the control center is the model of a suppleness that implies a certain margin of improvisation, of creation, of the aleatory” (What 35). Note her use not only of musical, but also of specifically experimentalist metaphors.

Yet, as we’ve seen, such an attempt to differentiate the biological from the machinic may simply not matter. Recently Malabou has acknowledged a conceptual impasse preventing assertions of the biologically essential, concluding that a “strategy of opposition” has become untenable. She continues,

Critiques of technoscience and biopower, deconstructions of sovereignty, denunciations of instrumentalization of life in particular produced by biopolitical and cybernetic modes of control lack actuality as long as they rely on the strict separation between the symbolic and the biological and think of critique as a possible outside, whatever its form, of the system. I now realize that the strategy developed in my book, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, was itself participating, in its own way, in this confidence in the outside. Because, again, I believed that neural plasticity, which I discovered and studied with such curiosity, such excitement—passion even—was the undeniable proof of the irreducibility of the brain to a machine and, consequently, also of intelligence to a flexible software program.(“Metamorphoses”)

Such overconfidence in an outside had inhibited Malabou from apprehending the overlapping non-identity between the human and the machinic, their mutual forms of co-constitution. The problem then becomes not that of ascertaining the uniqueness of the biological human over the machine’s supposed determinism, but rather that of disrupting “conditioned responses” to capitalist subjectivity: our own automaticity. So how can we break with the teleological relation between AI and capitalism when the latter appears simultaneously so erratic, dynamic, and, indeed, experimental? The kind of experimental indeterminacy shared by Lucier and Cage, along these lines, may already be seen as an artistic model for diverting capital’s libidinal pull toward the posthuman. Recall, again, that Cage’s turn to chance and indeterminacy was, in part, an alternative to psychoanalysis and the ego fulfillment derived from composing music, With this in mind, indeterminacy might be reimagined as a subtly construed obstruction to the conditioned responses of capitalist subjectivity.

Malabou notes that Foucault had similarly asked how we might be capable of interrupting our own automaticity. She answers, in fact, with a call for an experimentalism carried out through the “neurohumanities”—a category in which we can also include neuromusic. “The historical-critical attitude must be an experimental one,” Malabou insists. “Neurohumanities should then be the site for experimental theory, opening the path for diverse thoughts and techniques of self-transformation, inventions of the transcendental, and, again, interruptions of automaticity” (“Metamorphoses”). If Cage’s indeterminacy stages a potential challenge to technoscientific automaticity, then Lucier is seen to extend such a gesture through an experimental neuromusic.

A politics of the posthuman brain might take precisely the kind of speculative, experimental attitude found in Lucier’s neuromusic as a point of departure. Through its experimental use of cybernetic indeterminacy, Music for Solo Performer imagines an impediment to the kinds of conditioned responses to capitalist subjectivity that ultimately give way to the posthuman. One could, conversely, seek a more directed approach to technological crisis, attempting to calculate and anticipate catastrophes. Hanson admits that his Moravecian scenario can occur only in the absence of a large-scale “global effort” of resistance (Age 362). As suggested in this essay’s introduction, Music for Solo Performer can be said to playfully invert the common trope of hearing music “in one’s head” (instead, the contents of the brain are rendered as music). In the end, the rise of posthuman AI may similarly turn out to be “all in our heads.” As David Golumbia has argued, we may simply never become capable of achieving genuine artificial intelligence, through brain emulations or any other method.²⁹ Nonetheless, the fervor around such fantasies remains acutely real, as the billions of dollars presently invested in AI and brain emulation make clear. It doesn’t need to work in order to impact the present or indeed to shape the future.

Returning to the past—and in summation—Lucier’s experimental neuromusic, exemplified in his 1965 Music for Solo Performer, responds to the political economic crisis of post-Fordist capitalism through the reflexive use of cybernetic technologies and in its symptomal display of musicalized cognitive labor. When read through the contemporary impasses of the posthuman brain, Music for Solo Performer’s use of indeterminacy, as adopted from Cage’s notion of experimentalism, may ultimately figure as an ambivalent challenge to the cybernetic control paradigm as well as to the problem of automaticity articulated by Malabou. We’ve seen the intimate interconnections between experimental music and cybernetics expressed through Lucier’s biofeedback and his important relationship with Dewan. But considering experimental music and posthumanism’s mutual inheritances from cybernetics, along with a continued relevance to contemporary technoculture—whether by responding to political challenges posed by cognitive labor or in pondering futurist scenarios of posthuman AI—there remains perhaps more to learn by putting these two fields further in dialogue with one another.

Footnotes

1. For instance, John Cage’s Variations VII (1966) used brainwaves, as did James Tenney’s Metabolic Music (1965), various works by David Rosenboom, and Petr Kotik’s There is Singularly Nothing (1971–73), which incorporated brainwave data from fruit flies. Additionally, the instrumental parts of Kotik’s six-hour operatic setting of Gertrude Stein’s Many Many Women (1976–8) were derived from EEG graphs made by scientist Jan Kučera in order to study the effects of alcohol on the nervous system. Nam June Paik’s 1966 proposal for a “DIRECT-CONTACT-ART” (Kahn, Earth 278n4) shares many features with both Lucier’s piece and Manford L. Eaton’s work. For a detailed study of the latter, see Joseph, “Biomusic.”

2. Currently there are no major studies of experimental music and posthumanism. Music, more broadly, has appeared in certain isolated cases such as Cary Wolfe’s respective chapters on Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark and on Brian Eno (“When You Can’t Believe Your Eyes [or Voice]: Dancer in the Dark” and “The Digital, the Analog, and the Spectral Echographies from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” in What Is Posthumanism?). Worthy of mention is Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun, although Eshun’s influential call for an Afrofuturist posthuman music is typically identified as a manifesto rather than a scholarly study. Finally, the related but distinct field of sound studies has seen Cecchetto’s pathbreaking Humanesis and Pettman’s pathbreaking Sonic Intimacy.

3. A sampling of this rapidly expanding literature includes Halberstam and Livingston; Hayles; Badmington; Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis and Neocybernetics; Wolfe; Braidotti; Nayar; Cecchetto; Roden; and Braidotti and Hlavajova.

4. For Born, the disparity between serialism’s “hypercontrol of sound parameters” and the indeterminacy of experimental music represents a key difference between musical modernism and postmodernism (56). Piekut has argued, however, that Cage’s thinking, for one, never moved beyond a modernist ontology based on the strict separation between the human and nonhuman (135–148).

5. Roberto Esposito provides a recent contribution, and to an extent an alternative, to this discourse. He draws upon a confluence of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity to trace a genealogy of the thing/person distinction—which, he suggests, “biotechnologies,” for instance, threaten to reverse—in order to argue for a renewed primacy of bodily materiality (4, 104). I thank Patrick Valiquet for his thoughts pertaining to this reference.

6. Franklin takes Hayles as a point of departure in locating cybernetics as “a moment in the history of political economy [and] as the epistemic grounding for a worldview that posits all material objects and their interactions as digital and thus predisposed to exchange and valorization” (33).

7. For an incisive critique of posthumanism from the perspective of black studies and feminism, see Weheliye. Drawing on the work of black feminist literary critics Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, he argues that “posthumanism and animal studies isomorphically yoke humanity to the limited possessive individualism of Man, because these discourses also presume that we have now entered a stage in human development where all subjects have been granted equal access to western humanity and that this is, indeed, what we all want to overcome” (10).

8. For a recent history of the Soviet response to and development of cybernetics, see Gerovitch.

9. For Nayar, “Critical posthumanism . . . is the radical decentring of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple forms of life and machines” (2, emphasis removed).

10. For recent critiques of Land, see MacDougald and Haider.

11. See also Bostrom’s “paperclip maximizer” scenario (123).

12. These tendencies are particularly pronounced in the transhumanist movement, of which Bostrom and Moravec have been leading proponents. Moravec is also a frequent spokesperson for the transhumanist Extropy Institute, which promotes a form of libertarian techno-determinism (see Raulerson 51).

13. Hanson uses the terms “simulation” and “emulation” interchangeably to refer to the digital replication of a distinct human mind. Dutch neuroscientist and neuroengineer Randal A. Koene, however, distinguishes between the two terms: “We call the stochastically generated models simulations and the faithful copies [i.e., Hanson’s topic] emulations” (148); see Stollfuß 93. For a technical report on the 2008 state of the art of brain emulation technologies, see Sandberg and Bostrom.

14. For a recent historiography and metacritique of the concept of technological determinism, see Peters. Peters argues that, since its introduction in the work of Marx and the American economic sociologist Thorstein Veblen, technological determinism has played the role of a kind of intellectual slur that effectively stops “difficult but essential inquiry” (10), since, ultimately, “the drive to discover determination lies at the heart of inquiry” (23). Automaticity can be viewed as an alternative to this discourse in that it is concerned not with historical relationships between the social and the technical but with the effects stimuli have on individual psychology.

15. Capital “operationaliz[es] science fiction scenarios as integral components of production systems” (Land, “Teleoplexy” 515).

16. Prior to the score’s 1980 publication in Chambers, Lucier referred to the work as Music for Solo Performer 1965 (year included) in various letters (“Correspondence 1963–1976”).

17. There are multiple versions of Lucier’s score in addition to the commonly referenced version published in Chambers. Distinct from the latter, one of the unpublished score manuscripts contains a nine-point list describing in technical detail the 1965 premiere performance at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. A similar score manuscript by Lucier includes a dedication to John Cage in place of the extended title (“for enormously amplified brain waves and percussion”). Finally, yet another version of the score closely resembles the Chambers version but contains both a 1965 and a 1977 copyright (“Scores”). My quotations are taken exclusively from the Chambers version.

Before he used written scores, Lucier apparently relied on firsthand verbal instruction: “There is not much in the way of a score [for Music for Solo Performer], so I rely on an oral tradition, i.e., I tell-teach it to those who want to do it” (Unpublished Letter to Howard Hersh).

18. Kahn’s comparison of Music for Solo Performer to Cage’s 4′33″ as an instance of “withheld performance” (Earth 101) can be considered in light of Pickering’s thesis that the cybernetic brain is itself already performative. Pickering draws on the work of British cyberneticist Ross Ashby to conceive of “the brain as an immediately embodied organ, intrinsically tied into bodily performances” (6). Kahn does, however, locate a sense of “concentrated interiority” inherent to Music for Solo Performer (Earth 100), and discusses Pickering’s conception of cybernetics as a “nonmodern ontology” (Earth 86; see Pickering 17–36).

19. In an undated letter (ca. 1966) to composer and electronic musician Joel Chadabe, Lucier writes: “I also would love to be able to hook my brain up with the audience’s brains so that I can tell them how I hear and think without having to go through the air.”

20. From “you are your brain,” Malabou shifts to the first person plural and draws upon neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s notion of the “proto-self” (and Marx) to contend, “‘We end up coinciding completely with ‘our brain’—because our brain is us, the intimate form of a ‘proto-self,’ a sort of organic personality—and we do not know it” (What 8). See also Makari.

21. See also the highly influential Hardt and Negri, Empire. Additionally, see Crary.

22. For an art historical account of the turn to language beginning with Cage’s 4′33″ and the text score compositions of the 1960s, see Kotz.

23. See the study of piano-playing musical automata in Voskuhl. These androids or “Enlightenment automata,” Voskuhl notes, “are often taken to be forerunners and figureheads of the modern, industrial machine age, an age in which the economic, social, cultural, and aesthetic constitution of humans changed fundamentally and supposedly became ‘mechanized’” (2).

24. This literature is extensive; for an introduction, see Osborne.

25. Compare Cage’s quintessential 1955 statement on experimental music to the 1957 words of German scientist Wernher von Braun: “[B]asic research is when I am doing what I don’t know what I am doing” (qtd. in Arendt 231). It becomes clear why Arendt contended that the natural sciences had become fundamentally processual and, moreover, capable of triggering “processes of no return” (231). For a compelling critique of cognitive science that, among other things, compares this tendency of cybernetics to the sorcerer’s apprentice myth, see Dupuy xii–xiii (cf. Wiener’s own invocation of the same myth [176]).

26. Compare Shannon’s thesis to Lucier’s description of his experiments in preparation for Music for Solo Performer: “At first I couldn’t distinguish what was noise and what was alpha. . . . Alpha waves pulse from 8 to 12 cycles per second fairly regularly but in uneven bursts. They slow down and speed up a little, get louder and softer. Electrical noise is more complex and constant” (“Music.” Music 52).

27. “I got involved in [chance operations] in the middle and late ‘40s, and it took the place of psychoanalysis because I was not only in a troubled state personally, but I was concerned about why one would write music at this time in this society” (Cage qtd. in Miller). See also Cage and Charles, For the Birds, 116; and Cage, “Composition as Process III: Communication” (1958), in Silence (41–56): “Don’t you agree with Kafka when he wrote, ‘Psychology—never again?’” (47); cited in Joseph, Experimentations, 33n89; Joseph notes that by “psychology” Cage meant orthodox psychoanalysis (26). On the role of Cage’s sexuality in his rejection of psychoanalysis, see Katz (233–4).

28. Dewan’s 1957 statement, which privileges “consciousness” as a prerequisite for the creation of a thinking machine, warrants a comparison to the work of Ashby. Nearly a decade before Dewan, Ashby’s similar statement emphasizes not consciousness but the brain’s performative dimension: “To some, the critical test of whether a machine is or is not a ‘brain’ would be whether it can or cannot ‘think.’ But to the biologist the brain is not a thinking machine, it is an acting machine; it gets information and then it does something about it” (379).

29. More accurately, Golumbia provides a critical historiography of functionalism—the philosophical view that the mind itself must be a computer—along with a related genealogy of cybernetics, cognitive science, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence, to support his broader challenge to the cultural hegemony of “computationalism,” a program he defines as a “commitment to the view that a great deal, perhaps all, of human and social experience can be explained via computational processes” (8).

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Michelle Chihara (bio)
Whittier College

Two hit reality television shows, just before 2008 and in the foreclosure crisis just after, disciplined particular economic subjects and naturalized historically specific immanent power structures. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition re-imagined the leveraged construction of massive houses in the exurbs. Its sentimentality and its reliance on ethnic minorities dove-tailed with the rhetoric of social justice that politicians used to push for deregulation of mortgage financing, then later facilitated the popular right-wing narrative blaming minorities. After the crash, Hoarders visually mimicked the stages of foreclosure. While Extreme Home Makeover sought to contain the bodies of the poor as static reserves of value in their own neighborhoods, Hoarders re-identified real estate value with normative mental health and commensurable white feminine domesticity.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition or Extreme Home Makeover was an iconic reality television show for the real estate bubble fueled by subprime loans before 2008. Its racial dynamics supported the rhetoric of social justice, used—largely cynically—by politicians and real estate moguls to argue for the deregulation of mortgage financing and underwriting standards. The show’s emphasis on ethnic minorities inflated its sense of moral purpose, as it built more than a third of its homes for such minorities.¹ But after the show went off the air, its emphasis on minorities prompted a backlash—an early indication of the turn against both progressive anti-racist ideas and against the financial elite that helped bring Donald Trump to power.² Hoarders can be similarly analyzed as an iconic show for the foreclosure crisis that succeeded the bubble. ³ An analysis of these popular shows helps reveal how reality television participated in constructing popular economic logics that fed the later political ramifications of the 2008 crisis.

Before the crash, Extreme Home Makeover naturalized the economic logic of building McMansions in the exurbs and sought to regulate the bodies of the poor by keeping them as static reserves of value in their own neighborhoods. After the crash, Hoarders naturalized a logic that sought to re-circulate homes and re-identify real estate value with easy-to-sell white feminine domesticity. Hoarders visually mimicked the foreclosure process—staging work with trash-out crews, the owner under pressure to sell—as the return path to good mental and economic health. In the immediate run-up to and aftermath of the crash, homes on these shows illustrate what Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings describe as the “double movement of capitalist life” in popular cultural forms (248): the essential emotional logic of capitalism. A house is both a happy ending and a new beginning, a stable space outside the market and a liquid asset. Homes are the icon of the 2008 bubble, the signs of “a process regulated by the affectively charged tension between the necessity of contingency and the anticipation of certainty” (Cooper Konings 241). My argument amplifies the work of other critics who have discussed reality television’s formation of the neoliberal subject, including Laurie Ouellette’s important analysis of Extreme Home Makeover, which focuses on reality television’s manufacture of “‘idealized’ citizen subjectivities” (Ouellette, “Take Responsibility,” 224). Anna McCarthy insists on the historic specificity of the reality show and on its importance as an “arena in which to observe the vernacular diffusion of neoliberal common sense,” where the makeover is “key to social mobility, stability and civic empowerment” (1).⁴ The sentimental narratives of these shows disciplined and seduced particular subjects to participate in economic processes, instantiating the economic forces and reactionary racial and gendered logics that drove real estate markets and reality television to work together.

The specific economic pressures at work in the televised narratives can be understood through a Marxist account of hoard formation as a specific structural and necessary tendency of the cycle of production and circulation, which also manifests in psychological excess. Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Hoarders—prototypical of reality television subgenres like Flip This House and other makeover and hoarding shows—engages in the moral and financial regulation of the hoard. Marx describes the hoard in relation to the general equivalent and the specific functions of money, while recognizing the psychological aspect of a hoarder’s insatiable greed. Marx sees the hoarder as engaged in a fantasy about supreme equivalence, a fantasy that is itself partly driven by an economic need to preserve the value of the general equivalent.⁵ While these shows are not about gold, I argue that real estate and the dream of the American home bear a special relationship to money and the general equivalent during the housing bubble and crisis. The houses on Extreme Home Makeover are hoards to be kept out of circulation, while the houses on Hoarders are hoards that needed to be put back into circulation. The shows created and refurbished actual assets owned by families, overlaying these powerfully sentimental narratives with commercial activity; through real estate transactions and product integration, the shows both created participatory financial structures and shaped economic fantasies about the crisis.

Since the global financial crisis, in the media of the populist right as well as among many real estate agents, the communities that lost the most in 2008 have been held up as moral failures. In this narrative of blame, ethnic minorities are responsible for both the policy shifts that led to the crisis and for the collapse itself.⁶ In American Quarterly’s special issue about the subprime crisis, Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva read the high-risk borrower and the “subprime” as a “racial/postcolonial, moral and economic referent” (364) on a continuum with the trope of the “welfare queen,” (372), part of a logic of blame which exonerates those at the ‘top of the guilt [profit] hierarchy’”(363). Since the crisis, bailouts and gains have increasingly gone to that top, while the losses and blame have been disproportionately distributed among the original borrowers. Extreme Home Makeover and Hoarders played a role in disciplining economic participation and Gramscian common sense around the responsibilities borne by the poor.⁷ While Chakravartty and da Silva focus on ways that the global crisis rendered these high-risk borrowers “invisible,” my analysis focuses on spectacular rehearsals of the economic logic that made subprime borrowers and then foreclosure victims the protagonists, setting them up to be blamed after the shows had been produced and aired.

Race, the Rhetoric of Social Justice, and Big New Houses in the Exurbs

In 2006, Extreme Home Makeover found Eric Hebert’s family both needy and noble, so they tore down his existing home and replaced it with a large ersatz mountain lodge. Before the crisis, the Hebert family took out loans against the lodge. When the family hit harder times, the house fell into foreclosure. The community that had helped Hebert then blamed him. The Wall Street Journal wrote: “‘It’s kind of like we have egg on our face,’ said Sydney Icardo, a realtor with Century 21 RiverStone, who cut down aspen trees used to decorate Mr. Hebert’s bedroom. ‘It cuts deep. We’re a tight community’” (2010). This volunteer who helped build the mansion reacted with a powerful sense of betrayal at Hebert’s further loss. For volunteers and journalists who ran articles like the “Extreme Stories” series in the Wall Street Journal, any move by the families to use their homes as financial assets was a failure on the part of the family or on the part of the show—regardless of the crisis, this was a scandal apart, where the community was betrayed by working class and poor families or by a powerful media company.⁸ The Journal and myriad Internet commentators rarely if ever suggested that the show or society could have done more to help.⁹ Instead, the families were shamed for not being worthy of the gift they were given. ¹⁰

The show was also criticized for its extremity, for making the houses too big and too lavish. But just as the families’ troubles were representative of much greater societal needs, the homes were representative of building trends during the show’s run, not actually that far above a historically specific average. Some of the homes built during the bubble might seem lavish in retrospect, but during the show’s run, Extreme Home Makeover echoed actual construction taking place in peripheral and conventionally working-class neighborhoods. Its popularity coincided with a North American boom in housing construction, in real estate prices and in national household debt. A graph of the show’s ratings would track the housing bubble almost exactly (see Levy and Sacks): the show ran from 2003 to 2012 and peaked in 2005 as one of the most popular shows in America with 16 million viewers a week. Housing prices peaked in 2005–6. Housing debt doubled between 2000 and 2007, and household debt in America grew from 66.1 percent of GDP to 99.9 percent of GDP in the decade before 2007 (Blackburn 66, Brenner 38).

The size of the average new house peaked in 2007 at 2,500 square feet, with many outer suburban developments reaching 5,000 (the average has been shrinking since 2007) (Snyder). The homes on the show reached 5,000 but were usually around 3,000 square feet—bigger and more eccentric than many McMansions, but not by much. And during a boom in household debt, while changing underwriting standards led to the origination and distribution of “NINJA” loans (to people with No Income, No Job or Assets), Extreme Home Makeover created ownership investments for a specific group of people who seemed reliable but could not show proof of income. In other words, Extreme Home Makeover sentimentally justified the leveraged construction of massive structures in extra-urban areas.

Mr. Hebert was one African American person who lost his home at the beginning of a foreclosure crisis that ultimately affected more than 10 million Americans, and African American and Latino neighborhoods suffered the worst effects of the foreclosure crisis.¹¹ Between 1998 and 2006, African Americans are estimated to have lost somewhere between $71 billion and $93 billion in asset values due to subprime lending practices. For previous generations, housing discrimination had functioned largely through redlining, where the Federal Housing Administration and banks drew red lines around integrated or predominantly ethnic neighborhoods and then refused to back loans in those areas. Redlined loan restrictions were replaced by predatory lending during the boom, and by evictions after the crash. Yet the rhetoric driving these regulatory changes under both President Clinton and President Bush suggested that home ownership by any means would help redress the history of redlining and racial prejudice; Clinton identified homeownership as the “rising tide that lifts all of America’s boats” (Katz 30),¹² where “affordable housing” meant cheap loans for single family homes at market prices. In the name of helping to stabilize minority communities, predatory lending was ushered in along with financial deregulation, beginning with the dismantling of Glass-Steagall in 1996. As the barriers to private sector gambles in derivatives dropped away, it created incentives for mortgage originators to continually relax underwriting standards for loans they were immediately passing on to securitizers. Fannie Mae CEO James Johnson published a book of sentimental rhetoric about American homes that would not have seemed out of place on Extreme Home Makeover, writing that deregulation and new lending standards would “ensure truly equal access to home ownership,” and that ownership itself was a panacea. The stabilizing nature of home ownership was paramount to Johnson’s case, echoing Clinton’s earlier rhetoric: “nothing would do more to advance social justice, heal the wounds of past discrimination, and bank the fires of future tension and division” (Johnson 4).¹³ With its aura of a community-based religious movement, Extreme Home Makeover compounded the suggestion that owning a (big) home would stabilize and anchor families of color, both morally and financially. On the contrary, the subprime bubble de-stabilized the nation and hurt people of color in particular. But in part because politicians had used social justice rhetoric to emphasize deserving minorities in their deregulatory efforts, those minorities were blamed when financial policies failed. When leveraged construction and baroque securitization failed to bring about ownership utopia despite the rhetoric about community and antiracism, the Icardos of the world displayed a fragile white readiness to see the entire situation as one created by the Heberts.

Extreme Home Makeover’s special appeal combined “house porn” with a naturalization of this racial dynamic within subprime lending. Like other reality shows, Extreme Home Makeover diverted attention away from systemic economic and social problems and towards a narrow definition of individual responsibility, as Ouellette and other critics have argued. But this doesn’t explain why Extreme Home Makeover out-performed and out-lasted a number of what Ouellette calls the “Good Samaritan” shows by a wide margin, including all of the other Extreme Makeover shows in health and beauty, and many other television shows of all types during the bubble.¹⁴ Extreme Home Makeover was one among many in the explosion of home-and-garden programming on television, online and in magazines during the asset price bubble.¹⁵ The Extreme website clearly fit into this content boom, with pictures and linked advertising for every provider of Italianate kitchens and tropically landscaped waterfalls. The supposed transcendence of granite countertops helped to explain the increasingly vast amounts of money being invested in and borrowed against homes during the bubble. Extreme Home Makeover rendered mortgage originators, investment bankers, and building corporations less visible by making subprime borrowers both visible and liable. The moral argument for the houses on Extreme Home Makeover combined individual responsibility with an economic narrative circulating both in real estate markets and on HGTV about the supreme equivalence of home, or more prosaically, about the idea that home prices could always go up because the American home was a fairytale solution to all problems. Both the Structured Investment Vehicles and the Extreme homes rested on the idea that housing prices could go up even if the incomes of the working poor and of targeted minorities were the ultimate backstop for such investments.

The fantasy of transcendent value behind the “ownership society” relies on this nostalgic understanding of the stabilizing power of American homes. The economic assumption that home ownership anchors families rests on limited empirical observations of Americans under conditions that no longer pertained in 2008. Deregulation erased both the old underwriting standards and the financial policies that separated American mortgages from the speculative practices of investment banks. Earlier underwriting standards were enforced by bank agents who, like Extreme Home Makeover’s producers, assessed a borrower’s “character” and long-term prospects before giving a long-term loan.¹⁶ Before the bubble, specific agents at local banks could hold long-term relationship with individuals, and those relationships did have a stabilizing or controlling effect. During the bubble, liquidity in the financial markets was funneled into mortgage-backed securities, which in turn drove a vast demand for new loans. These loans were primarily pushed on the public by sales agents for mortgage-originators, companies that did not hold the loans on their books but were rewarded simply for signing people up. They had no relationship with and no incentive to assess borrowers. “NINJA” loans and “balloon mortgages” were rampant; balloon loans had interest rates that spiked up after the first three to five years of the loan period. When the balloon interest rates began to spike, foreclosure became inevitable for many subprime borrowers. Defaults on the McMansions in the exurbs hit historic highs. Many of the new breed of loans were made to people who were much less financially stable than the Extreme Home Makeover families. Also, the Extreme houses were outright gifts, not mortgages made with punitive terms. The show’s families actually did much better than the national average, partly because the show did the work that local banks used to do, creating both social pressure and economic conditions conducive to stability. The families on the show served as narrative justification for subprime loans, including an insistence on the continued presence of an institution that would assess character before bestowing a home. That institution was the show itself, which became indistinguishable from “the community,” which became indistinguishable from the advertisers, including many banks. ¹⁷ The show dramatized both the good character of the families and its good work in finding and rewarding them, relying on a financial nostalgia for the stabilizing power of American homes.

Of course, outside the show, both local banks and stable real estate investments were a thing of the past. Even the dataset underlying the mortgage-backed securities was a period piece. NINJA loans are pooled and then cut into securitized tranches. The investment vehicles made up of those tranches are priced by algorithms, which assess the securities’ level of risk. During the bubble, ratings agencies gave most of those tranches A-level grades. Those A-level grades rested in part on pricing algorithms assumed mortgage risk would be uncorrelated (to other mortgages), and that families would always pay the mortgage first. The securities were sold based on the assumption that people would behave as they had under the old underwriting standards.¹⁸ The volatile securities that drove demand for new homes and less financially stable borrowers were being pooled and priced, in part, based on the same nostalgia.

At a moment when huge numbers of Americans in general and African Americans in particular were facing pressure from salesmen to take on debt, Extreme Home Makeover gave a few hundred families a valuable asset that they could—legally—use as collateral. Despite this, only a small number of the Extreme families used it that way. The families who did try to use the Extreme homes as financial assets acted in response to the same desperate problems that brought the show to their doors. Nevertheless, the general tenor of any coverage when Extreme families sold was censorious and scandalized. The house was somehow supposed to obviate all other needs, and the families were blamed if it did not. It was considered a great betrayal for the families to want to, for example, sell their homes in order to move to a neighborhood with better schools.

Extreme Home Makeover’s depiction of the transformative gift of a house was meant to serve as both a righteous expression of community support for minorities, and as the revealed value of those minorities. During the national housing bubble, the show provided an implicit dramatization of the push to get minority families into “the ownership society” as the democratic community’s response to a history of redlining and housing discrimination. Extreme Home Makeover supplemented the narrative about “deserving” minorities who needed new underwriting standards and other financial de-regulation, and then after the crash the show was itself blamed along with suddenly “undeserving” minorities for the losses they suffered at the hands of the investment banks.

Building Something “Sustainable”

Counter to the scandalized coverage, most families did keep the Extreme homes because Makeover put enormous effort into making the homes something the families could sustain. In light of the show’s failed political consciousness and its role in political rhetoric about social justice, it’s worth noting that the direst effects of neoliberal housing and health care policies never made it on screen.¹⁹ The families on the show were often poor but never truly destitute; like a good subprime investment, they were marginal but stable. The houses were both just rewards and relatively good investments. Extreme Home Makeover could show only families who already owned houses, no matter how dilapidated. Houses were not given to the strata of society that falls entirely outside of the social safety net, to whom loans could not be made. Interviews with producers and the longest-term showrunner on Extreme Home Makeover, alongside a careful review of the show, indicate that it predominantly built lavish homes that its recipients could and would keep.²⁰ The show told a story about a wide swath of diverse families who were both hard-working and needy: people who showed an extraordinary strength of character and a baseline financial stability. One father lost his job as a trucker and took out a second mortgage to pay his young daughter’s chemotherapy bills. But a few families who appeared on the show later had trouble paying the suddenly outsized property taxes and utility bills, and there are valid ethical concerns about building mansions that dwarf their neighbors in the community. Producers in later seasons did build smaller homes and toned down the outlandish features. They began leaving out pools, working in solar panels, and finding people jobs.²¹ But given the broader economic realities, it’s actually remarkable how few of the homes from the show ended up in foreclosure. To date, the Wall Street Journal has found only five troubled owners out of more than two hundred (that’s under 3%, compared with the 50% default rates in the worst tranches of the mortgage-backed securities).²²

Extreme Home Makeover’s producers were under direct orders to build something “sustainable” (as per interviews), and families were cut from consideration if they posed too high a credit risk. Off-screen, the show encouraged sponsors and communities to set up funds for utilities, gave families financial counseling, and carefully selected baseline stable families. On-screen, this allows the show to depict families whose need seems momentary, like bad luck, and not like the result of systemic problems. “I don’t care how professional, or uncaring, you are,” one casting producer told me. “Once you’ve spent hours and hours with a six-year-old who has cancer, who started a foundation, and you’re in love with this kid, and then you can’t…” he trailed off, still emotional about the experience. For every family on the show, there were nine families who were interviewed at length and then denied—all some of “the best people you’ve ever talked to, with the worst luck you’ve ever heard of.” The casting producers who did these interviews performed the surplus emotional labor of witnessing and then suppressing the truly punitive economic realities for American families at the margins. Years after working on the show, the producer quoted above claimed that he still woke up at night thinking about families he wasn’t able to help. He said he had watched a number of his colleagues quit because they were so devastated by the experience of denying people help. “The people who really needed the very very most were in too much trouble for us to help,” he said. “If they were already truly struggling to pay the taxes or utilities, then you know they would just have to sell the house. That was my biggest regret. That we couldn’t do more for people who weren’t at least somewhat stable” (emphasis added).²³ Pre-existing stability was necessary to avoid the pressure to liquidate. Casting producers knew from the beginning that if the family sold the house, the show had failed. The show’s primary intentions included this drive to hide the true range of suffering of working families of all colors, suffering that might demonstrate the need for collective action or explicit governmental policies beyond an occasional carefully bestowed mansion. The scandalized reaction to the extremity of the show after a handful of foreclosures drew attention away from the hard-won success that the show’s producers had for portraying good emotional investments as equivalent to good financial investments.

Product Integration, Invisible Corporations, and Authentic Communities

Extreme Home Makeover used deeply-embedded product integration not only to equate emotional investment with financial investment, but to characterize corporate activity itself as “authentic” community involvement. Extreme Home Makeover didn’t sell corporate interference or activity as a panacea; rather, it became the iconic pinnacle of a trend towards integrated product placement in reality television. The special genius of Extreme lay in its use of corporate sponsorship to produce sentiment, which thus functioned as a mark both of authenticity and of a free market.²⁴ Out-sized sentiment matched the size of the homes, where deserving families received structures as big and beautiful as their lives were difficult (Jacobson). But the show never created the impression that specific corporations or corporate actors were coming forward to take care of these families. Instead, the “community” seemed to surge forward naturally, such that the logic of the market itself became embodied as a sentimental tsunami of support. As a result, there was little to no resistance to the idea that corporations were profiting off Extreme families’ misfortunes because the show was not perceived as an ad. Instead, the corporate donations became the mark of the human communities they represented and helped. Beyond home improvement, reality television’s “core brand identity” involves a promise of an unmediated “special access to ‘reality’” (Deery 2), meaning both intimate spaces and authentic feelings. That sense of special access helps to break down audiences’ documented resistance to messages perceived as ads (Gutnik). Extreme Home Makeover uses the sheer intensity of emotion generated by the sponsor involvement to mark it as “real,” both of the market and not of the market, with product placement itself as a sign of authentic community engagement.

Home improvement television shares a particularly synergistic relationship with the real estate market, and with the home decoration and building industries via explicit partnerships and sponsor relationships.²⁵ The drive to manufacture emotion for television coincided with economic boom times for contractors, builders and housing-ware companies who needed a way to place goods without losing audience. Survivor and American Idol were at the forefront of integrated branding in 2000 (Deery 3), and integrated deals went on to dominate the wider genre (Williams).²⁶ Endemol, Extreme Home’s production company, is a pioneer in the field.²⁷ As a leader in the television industry and the reality genre, the show is one of many new forms of content that increasingly blurred the line between “fiction” and reality, between ads and shows, between consumers and citizens, between sponsors and “real” volunteers participating in the show.

The perception that advertiser involvement is the mark of authentic community in Extreme Home Makeover is the show’s greatest and most profitable illusion, a pinnacle in the home improvement reality genre’s long history of close relationships with major corporations.²⁸ When Sears eventually signed on as the show’s central sponsor, the New York Times reported that the deal was one of the biggest integrated marketing contracts in the industry. Sears paid to play a central role on the show, apart from their potential purchase of any ads during commercial breaks.²⁹ And because Disney owns and operates ABC, on which the show aired, Extreme Home Makeover also sent most of its families to Disney World while their original homes were destroyed. In order to accommodate the needs of another major sponsor, the show sought to cast families facing increasingly obscure medical conditions whose pharmaceutical needs could be fulfilled by CVS (Smoking Gun). Yet the profusion of sponsors (and the Smoking Gun story) never prevented Extreme Home Makeover from delivering both strong branding recall and a large and passionately loyal viewership that never saw itself as in thrall to corporate advertising or to branded content in service of the banks.³⁰

It was always the “community,” and not corporate sponsors or even television producers, that supposedly effected change on the show. In this too, Endemol got a great deal. All building materials and labor were donated: Endemol funded the show but did not pay to build the homes. Instead, it served as a financial intermediary (almost like a mortgage originator), transferring ownership after the build. A primary builder in each city recruited its own volunteer subcontractors, suppliers, and hundreds upon hundreds of volunteer workers. These people participated in fervent tent revivals and worked many days for free. In each town, thousands of people gathered in local high school gymnasiums to participate in pre-build “pep rallies.” Executive producers from the show gave inspiring speeches alongside the sponsors and sometimes local politicians.³¹ Local newspapers provided free publicity by covering the builds and the stories of the families as “news.” The intense fervor generated by Extreme Home Makeover’s rallies and builds blurred the categories of citizen, consumer, and sponsor beyond recognition: the self-interested advertiser did not buy an ad to display in the community so much as became an avatar of the community.³² The pep rallies and shoots combined the passion of a rock concert with the fervent spirituality of a barn raising. After speeches in the big tent, the visual gestalt of the army of volunteers marching to rebuild a home in matching jumpsuits and banners recalls The Salvation Army: Extreme homes are both sign and means of salvation. Charitable volunteers are indistinguishable from contract laborers who could not say no to the large companies sponsoring the build. Smaller companies also needed to please larger sponsors. Charity and possibly semi-coerced labor, good will and marketing, citizenship, community spirit and strong branding were irrevocably fused.³³

Authentic Hoards, Petrified Reserves, and Rooms for Children

Week after week, Extreme Home Makeover dramatizes the rightness of subprime lending and massive building projects, where the homes were assets that would stabilize and immobilize minority families. Like subprime borrowers, the owners on the show are not meant to be full economic actors. Chakravatty notes that “Black and Latino/a holders of subprime loans . . . are not constructed as referents of either the relationship between persons presumed in commerce,” nor as having “the capacity that according to Karl Marx ultimately determines their value of exchange.” Subprime owners are instead identified with the house, with the thing itself: “As with other improper economic subjects, the excess value of the Black and Latino/a subprime mortgage holder refers to their ontological deficiency, or as G.W.F. Hegel describes Africa, for being a thing” (Chakravatty 33). Racial Otherness amplifies the families’ authenticity and identifies them with the thing-ness of the house. Black authority can rely on authenticity, even (or particularly) in service of hegemonic discourses exerting control over black bodies: “Black authority was and still is characterized by knowledge of vernacular (i.e. “authenticity”) and adherence to a moral code that is organized around a proprietary relationship to the black body and, by extension, its image” (Fusco 12). In that proprietary relationship, the bodies of minorities are understood to lend authenticity to the homes as hoards: as static and illiquid reserves that shore up the supreme equivalence of home. Extreme homes would not put inflationary liquidity into minority families’ hands, nor would they proffer social mobility into other neighborhoods.

While Marx explains hoarding in relation to gold—the traditional form of the precious (see endnote 6)—television shows regulating value through the home emerged in part from the close correlation of the home with the form of the precious to a qualitatively new degree. After Americans staked unprecedented portions of their financial worth on homes, the Federal Reserve shifted too. Vested with the power to create American money, the Fed has traditionally owned no assets besides gold certificates. As a “gold custodian,” it holds five thousand metric tons of gold reserves in a vault and waxes poetic in its brochures about gold’s supreme value. After the crisis, however, the Fed purchased trillions in bonds, mortgage securities, and other assets.³⁴ In an unprecedented move in 2008, it also launched the Mortgage Backed Securities Purchase Program, through which it created almost $2 trillion to buy back inflated American home mortgages. These post-crisis programs required the largest creation of money in the Federal Reserve’s history. Houses became more like gold, their fantasy value backing paper money, and mortgage-backed securities became more like fiat paper money from the Fed.

Extreme Home Makeover provoked and regulated anxiety about money’s authenticity, the idealized supreme value of home, and the threat of devaluation that lurked beneath extremely high housing prices. The final proof that Extreme homes were intended as petrified reserves—hoards to shore up value while remaining out of circulation—lays in the details of the children’s rooms. The most extreme aspects of the houses are always the mini-carousels, pirate ships, fairy castles and dirt bike tracks that embody the presumed desires of sometimes very young, very sick, or disabled children. While the living rooms and master bedrooms are almost uniformly decorated in a bland style perhaps best described as “contemporary country,” the designs for the kids are anything but. Designers elicited preferences and hobbies in pre-production interviews;³⁵ if a young boy said he liked Nascar, his bed would be a chassis. If he said bikes, the walls would be made out of spokes and tires. Producers specifically avoided asking the kids directly what they wanted in order to elicit surprise and delight at the moment of the reveal. While producers said in interviews that they did try to think about whether kids were likely to change their minds within a year or two, they nonetheless built somewhat loony features for the kids.

These children’s rooms in fact made the homes extremely hard to sell. In order to sell, homes must be unique, but not too unique. David Harvey’s discussion of monopoly rents explains that a home’s “special qualities” are crucial to its value, while at the same time “the requirement of tradability means that no item can be so unique or so special as to be entirely outside the monetary calculus” (92). A contradiction arises in the dilemma between the standardizing pressures of commercialization and marks of distinction (Harvey 92). The kids’ rooms help make a TV show about specific people instead of about the transfer of generic suburban model homes built by corporate contractors, and their extravagance makes the homes feel unique and therefore authentic. However, they also put the houses perilously close to falling outside the monetary calculus. There is a certain cruelty in reifying and freezing in time a six-year-old’s offhand remark to a stranger that he likes bikes. But as built connections to innocence and family life, the children’s rooms situate the Extreme homes above the realm of purely commercial products.³⁶ The homes were precious to the family at the time of the reveal, but the indoor pirate ship slides marks them as not commensurable on the market. Located in working class neighborhoods miles away from any comparable homes (which are key to pricing real estate), the carousels and car-body beds are at once priceless and un-priceable.

The adult rooms in the houses, meanwhile, specifically avoid styles that could have changed the perceived fundamental class status of the owners, who again were meant to remain static. While the designers worked with a new builder and a new family every week, the diversity of styles on the show never stretches to one particular style: the clean lines, expanses of glass, and emphasis on building materials characterized as “modern” or “midcentury modern.” The show invited families neither to move to better neighborhoods, nor to participate in aesthetic practices that might suggest a move to the upper class. Modern style, like the latter magazines’ readerships, is coded as white and upper-class (Leslie, Reimer); it correlates predominantly with bubble markets and upper-class white buyers (Asabere).³⁷ The aesthetic of the show was always, to use popular-culture shorthand, more geared to the ideal domesticity of Better Homes & Gardens magazine than to that of Dwell or Domino (Jones, Ives). Just as these families were not being entrusted with injections of liquid capital, so the homes stood as built improvements on ethnically and socioeconomically Other bodies that were expected to remain in their rightful place. Modern homes would have signified a different kind of intervention and transformation, an unintended invitation into whiteness and circulating value. Extreme families were unique and worthy and “contemporary country,” outside of dense urban centers. They helped to suggest that the rising prices in those urban bubble markets might spill out to other, non-modern neighborhoods and lift all boats. But class mobility would also have threatened to liquidate the hoard both as a reserve of value, and as a reserve of deserving authentic Otherness.

Hoarders, the Foreclosure Crisis, and Re-circulation

I have already alluded to Marx’s recognition of the psychological excess in the hoarding impulse, a libidinal greed born of structural need. But when there is a run on the bank or a freeze in circulation, the structural imperative must dissolve that psychology and push the hoard back into circulation. When the 2008 crash prompted a foreclosure crisis, Hoarders at once represented and regulated the act of hoarding as psychological impulse and as economic process. When the idealized supreme value of home receded and devaluation began, Hoarders pathologized the hoard and also reverted back to a white heteronormative vision of the value of home. Like Extreme Home Makeover and the bubble, the ratings success of Hoarders correlates almost exactly with the foreclosure crisis; it debuted as A&E’s “most-watched series” in 2009.³⁸ Reality television had seen a number of other cleaning shows fail on various networks. The VP of development at the production company called Hoarders a “long-developing surprise hit” (Davidson), and credited its success to “persistence in the development process.” But Hoarders took off with the first great wave of foreclosures, precisely one month after Flip This House went off the air on the same network. Beginning in late 2009 after the commercial markets froze, the number of homes falling into foreclosure in the US reached unprecedented levels. By 2012, in Stockton, California, one in 67 homes was bank-owned, and the national average was around one in every 250 houses entering foreclosure (Levy). Flip closed after six seasons, and the headlines announcing its cancellation appeared the same month as headlines announcing the end of the foreclosure crisis.³⁹

Hoarders depicts a mental disorder and its resolution through the home. Host personalities try to help people whose psychology led them to pile up objects, from newspapers and cans to clothes and furniture. On Hoarders, the sick person learns that the things she values intrinsically as part of herself are value-less. Once she realizes this, the designers’ cameras can heal by aestheticizing the exchangeable value of the house. All owners on home shows learn to re-value themselves through their homes, and Hoarders delivers the same emotional pay-off as countless other home improvement shows: in the “reveal,” the camera follows a host and an owner through a transformed space in what many critics and bloggers have called the “money shot” of lifestyle television (see Grindstaff). On Hoarders, getting rid of clutter and junk becomes the primary emotional task. The owner re-calibrates her evaluation of her things and her house, re-entering circulation as a more authentic and more exchangeable version of herself. The definition of hoarding as a psychological disorder itself relies on normative market judgments about real estate; in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, hoarding is ostensibly a “difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value,” and its symptoms include “possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromise their intended use.” In order to diagnose a hoarder, then, psychologists must evaluate the intended use of items and the boundaries between living and storage space. Hoarders can hoard cheap or expensive objects, but the psychologist—like a real estate agent—must decide whether the space in question is a closet or a living area. Rich people with ample closet space are, by definition, better able to avoid the diagnosis and the medicalization of their practices. The show’s choice to over-index white women in particular also interacted with the normative and class-based judgment built into the psychiatric definition of hoarding. In a complete content analysis of the first two seasons of the show, Samantha Redwine finds

a disproportionate representation of female and white individuals….The presentation of gender within the two seasons suggests that women are more predisposed to hoarding behavior than men; however, research states that men are more likely to display these behaviors than women.(63)

In addition,

Only three of the hoarding central characters were people of color out of the total forty-three featured hoarders. The presentation of race within the two seasons of the series suggests that white people are more prone to display hoarding behavior than [people of] any other race. (63)

If the show had been designed to represent the actual socioeconomic status of most Hoarders and the racial distribution of poverty in the United States, “there should be more minority members featured” (Redwine 63). The predominance of white and female Hoarders is, in other words, a scripted aspect of the show.

That script supports Hoarders’ need to convert the home into a liquid asset; the home as a locus of white, feminine domesticity is the conventional norm, and therefore the most marketable and most easily traded. Its emphasis on white women reflects the turn from illiquid reserves to the pressure to liquidate. Hoarders is motivated to render people and objects mobile and commensurable, and therefore to feature the conventional. Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that the market specifically situates hygiene, health, and purity in the feminine “white bourgeois body” (7). Health and trade-ability are re-identified on Hoarders with a “neutral” baseline of white bourgeois and female bodies, with all other marks of distinction and Otherness erased. In contrast, the Extreme hoard is meant to stay put; authentic ethnic minorities act as marks of distinction on reserves of value, without moving black or brown bodies into new locations. After the bubble popped, disciplining white women reflected the market’s demands for liquid reserves. Hoarders re-asserts the healthy home’s identification with white women, aligning value with white feminine domesticity as an inherently exchangeable universal norm.⁴⁰

On Hoarders, building extreme closets to store the stuff is never an option. The marks of distinction are always minor “personal touches” that could easily be rendered commensurable on the real estate market, like a row of small river rocks on a shelf in the bathroom. If Extreme Home Makeover suggests that the logic of the market would help the poor without actually turning them into rich people, Hoarders suggests that the market can heal sick homeowners without actually turning them into poor people. In an historically specific moment when foreclosed homes needed to get sold, the show provided a fantasy version of liquidating the hoard that looked systemically and personally healthy.⁴¹ In Extreme homes, ethnic Otherness helps identify the home as unique, while remaining precious and static, while Hoarders associates the home’s exchange value with newly hygienic and ostensibly neutral feminine bodies. Both shows regulate value and the value of the subject through the home.

Concluding Speculations

Before the election of a reality television star to the U.S. presidency, sociologist Jennifer de Silva documented an entire generation’s struggles and failures to meet the financial benchmarks of American adulthood. In her Coming Up Short, young people can’t pay off their student debts, get married, or buy homes. While the populist right continues to blame minorities, politicians, and global elites, the rage at the banks remains unfocused. After the 2008 bail-outs, the major financial institutions in the United States consolidated and met stricter capital requirements, but speculative financial practices continue apace and the power of the major banks remains unchecked. Small businesses and families can’t get loans. Houses remain expensive. The sentimental Extreme homes now seem dated, because most American families can’t even dream of a subprime mortgage in the exurbs. After the original Hoarders went off the air in 2013, Mother Jones reported that private equity firms and hedge funds were buying up foreclosed homes, renting them, and securitizing those rental income streams. Roughly coincident with that development, shows like Storage Wars, Auction Hunters, and Storage Hunters gained popularity (Sellers). In these shows, auctioneers sold off the contents of storage lockers and container units that owners had abandoned. These shows depicted possessions with no clear owner, not located in a house. They framed and branded the process of clearing inventory and re-circulating value in a complete absence of home ownership. But the logics that gave America the crash are still with us. Critics should therefore stay attuned to the cultural products that frame new economic narratives in the wake of the rage against progressive neoliberalism. Something will have to replace America’s appetite for watching workers get fired on The Apprentice. As temporary rentals through companies like Airbnb intensify gentrification and housing shortages, it’s worth asking what the next generation of narratives naturalizing the logic of the on-demand “gig economy” will look like. At least one reality television casting call in June of 2016 asked for gig economy workers to audition: “examples of gig worker. dog walker, Uber driver, tutor, swim instructor, home cook, Fiverr user etc [sic].”⁴² At the very least, critics can help contingent and vulnerable workers defend against any notion that they—the drivers and tutors and cooks and nomads struggling to pay off student loans—are to blame for the next inevitable crash.

Footnotes

1. See McMurria 9, or Janet Wasko who writes that the show attempted to “decouple race from its social contexts and to resituate it as one commodity among others” (399).

2. I use this term in the way that Nancy Fraser uses it in “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism.”

3. I use “iconic” advisedly, with Martijn Konings’s definition of the term in The Emotional Logic of Capitalism in mind. I rely on his insight that “What often eludes progressive commentary is not only the paradoxical way in which the malfunctioning of capitalist economy triggers emotional responses that serve to affirm and restore its key signs; but also how this iconophilia is driven by an iconoclastic spirit that levels its harsh charges of idolatry at the progressive project itself” (12).

4. I use “common sense” as Hall and O’Shea define it in Neoliberal Common Sense, as the legitimating processes that forms society as a market. When I use the term “neoliberal,” I refer specifically to the historically specific definition that Philip Mirowksi puts forward in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.

5. Marx’s hoarder acts on an obsession with the perceived transcendence of the supreme equivalent, whatever it is (usually gold). In Marxist theory, Money works in three irreconcilable ways: as a measure of exchange value (price); as a method of circulation (currency); and as an instrument of hoarding. This third role for money serves a regulatory function. Monetary troubles represent inherent disequilibriums in the circulation of commodities. Hoards, as reserves of value, help to sustain the value of the general equivalent. As Suzanne de Brunhoff explains it, when there is too much money in circulation, hoards absorb the excess. Hoarding is an “interruption in the circulation of commodities” where money becomes “petrified,” and “helps to adjust the relationship between the measure of value and the medium of circulation” (40). For the hoarder, hoarding acts out a fantasy of absolute or transcendent value embodied in the commodity. And yet, in order to right a disequilibrium and restore value, the hoarder must be able to liquidate his precious pile. Of course, real estate is fundamentally different from the commodity of gold as money on which Marx bases his theory. But during and after the 2008 crisis, I argue, the economic relationship between mortgage-backed securities and money became meaningfully close. Thus, cultural efforts to preserve homes as different from all other commodities or properties, and narratives about the transcendence of home, were fundamentally like the hoarder’s effort to preserve the money form as distinct from all other commodities.

6. This story was widespread in the right-wing press. See Skullduggery and Munro for representative examples of the narrative that blames the crisis on minorities and President Obama. I interviewed three real estate agents during the foreclosure crisis who believed that politicians had forced Fannie Mae to give loans to minorities, and who understood that view to be commonly held. See Chapter 5 of Mirowski for the focused blame on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and “the willful blurring of the line between a private firm and a political instrument.” See Mirowski and Nik-Khah for “agnotology,” the creation of doubt for political purposes.

7. I cite Gramsci here, but specifically avoid Foucault, despite my use of the term “discipline.” Agamben and Konings both articulate my concerns about Foucault’s “economistic account of economy” (Konings 29). McCarthy and others’ use of Foucault is compelling, but I agree with Mirowski that, while Foucault was prescient about many aspects of neoliberalism, he eventually came to accept the concept of the market as a powerful information processor. As Mirowski writes, for Foucault “‘market’ (always referenced as a monolithic entity) provides the boundary condition for governmentality, because it alone knows things we can never know” (98).

8. While the Extreme Home Makeover “scandal” occurred after the long 1980s, I place it in the context of La Berge’s account of that period, where scandals and abstractions work “together to give finance its sense of identity and possibility.” The show was narratively involved in financial culture, and “the financial scandal provides a narrative organization” to the subprime failures. Scandal, after the fact, “isolates fixtures and figures of financial culture and provides them a manageable form in which to circulate” (15).

9. The Journal dedicated real reporting resources to the aftermath of Extreme Home Makeover, but see also Jezebel, as a representative scandal rag.

10. See Graeber 2008 for the complexity of gift-giving. The negative press was also in part a reaction to underlying cultural norms about gifts, and cultural pressure not to sell things that are received as gifts.

11. See Hannah-Jones and Harvey, Enigma 1–25.

12. Real estate interests constituted “the most generous lobby in Washington” in that they “helped create a climate in which the very possibility of government policies that might set reasonable limits on lending have been rendered unthinkable—a threat to recovery and the economy as a whole” (Katz 225).

13. Johnson stood to benefit greatly from the changes he suggested, although the discrimination he spoke of was real. The Clinton administration pushed for deregulation while pushing for more loans to low-income families as part of Clinton’s National Homeownership Strategy. Also see Weiss. It’s important to note, however, that while Johnson wrote as the head of Fannie Mae, the role that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the crisis has been exaggerated by the same right-wing narrative that blames minorities (see Mirowski Chapter 5).

14. James McMurria, Laurie Ouellette and James Hay have argued that “Good Samaritan” TV generally puts forward corporate benevolence as a panacea for social ills, as part of a neoliberal pressure towards increased self-governance in all aspects of life. I amplify such critiques, but I seek to explain the particular success of Extreme Home Makeover. The moralistic Miracle Workers, about an elite team of medical professionals for the extremely sick, premiered on ABC in 2006, for example, failed quickly. Mark Greif argues that Extreme Home Makeover introduced market norms into spaces that should have been immune to them: “the flow back of norms justified by industry into norms for inner spaces…the spaces that have nothing to do with either public life or work, and should offer safety from their demands. I am thinking of the home and the integral body, underneath the skin.” This is a representative example of what Konings call the progressive argument for “disembedding” money and the market. Like Cooper and Konings, I hope to move away from this critique of neoliberal politics that “tends to focus on its presumed inability to recognize the proper limits of the market” (Cooper 3). Extreme Home Makeover insisted on home as a place whose value on the market is related to its sanctity and independence off the market. Konings’s iconic view of money is as a sign always already “capable of speaking to our most intensely felt individual needs.” His goal is not to disembed the market, but to think more deeply about the question, “How do we in fact relate to [money] even before we raise the question of how we should think about it?” (Konings 19).

15. “In the years following HGTV’s auspicious fin-de-siècle premiere, the cable network (coupled with its website) claims to have ‘outperformed all projections’ beginning with its remarkable launch into 6.5 million homes in 44 cable markets” (Everett 161).

16. “In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, credit evaluation experienced what economic historians have termed a ‘quantitative revolution.’ Creditors turned away from subjective, qualitative, narrative forms of credit evaluation and toward objective, quantitative, data-driven models of credit scoring. They did so in part because they wanted to limit their exposure to charges of racial bias and other forms of discrimination” (McClanahan 33).

17. While ABC.com does not have a category, on its featured sponsors page, for banks and lenders, the individual websites for each build almost all feature a bank or a mortgage lender, or two or three, as sponsors.

18. A Morgan Stanley banker explained on NPR’s Planet Money that bankers based their mathematical models on the assumption that people always paid the mortgage first and housing prices always went up. As the reporter put it: “As we now know, they were using the wrong data.” “They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that the foreclosure rate is generally below 2%. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate might go to 8 or 10 or even 12%. But the problem with that is that there were all these new kinds of mortgages given out to people who never would have gotten them before. So the historical data was irrelevant. Some mortgage pools today are expected to go beyond 50% foreclosure rates.” See “Return to the Giant Pool of Money,” WBEZ This American Life and Planet Money: September 25, 2009 (radio transcript).

For a more sophisticated account of how the credit ratings agencies and other financial actors in the housing bubble used models to create a “fiction” about the market that ‘induces only an illusion of understanding,’ see Pénet and Mallard, p. 7.

19. If, as Ann Douglas writes, “sentimentalism might be defined as the political sense obfuscated or gone rancid,” then each tear-jerking episode of Extreme Home Makeover was sentimentalism extraordinaire. “Sentimentalism, unlike the modes of genuine sensibility, never exists except in tandem with failed political consciousness” (254).

20. The quotes from an unnamed casting producer, and some other information about Extreme Makeover Home Edition, come from interviews I conducted on 15 and 16 September, 2012 with production staff. Besides Anthony Dominici, these producers must remain anonymous because of the binding Non-Disclosure Agreements they signed with Endemol.

21. See Wotapka, 2011, and interview with Anthony Dominici. Also, the TV show couldn’t protect families from unforeseen medical bills, especially not when it explicitly sought families facing difficult medical problems. See The Smoking Gun’s 2006 “creepy wishlist of woe.” ABC asked for victims of hate crimes, violent home invasions, families coping with the loss of a child killed by a drunk driver, people coping with from Lou Gehrig’s disease, muscular dystrophy or Down Syndrome, a child with a congenital insensitivity to pain, and hopefully someone with Progeria, “aka little old man disease” (Smoking Gun).

22. This is my own tally, using the Journal’s numbers, and combined with numbers that producers of the show gave me.

23. Anonymous interview.

24. Reality television “relishes contradictions” such as this, “for all of its emphasis on ‘being real’, participants nonetheless perform themselves in spectacular ways; for all of the language of ordinariness, participants are consistently positioned as extraordinary” (Kavka 179).

25. Home improvement shows were exemplary of a larger trend within reality television that links access and audience participation to the authentic (Deery), and home improvement TV resembles Bourdieu’s description of real estate advertisements, which don’t feel like ads to their audiences because of the “mythopoetic” cultural investment in the symbols and words surrounding home. Home promises special access to near-sacred, intimate space (Bourdieu 24).

26. Facing shrinking television audiences and increased audience use of DVR technology to skip over commercial breaks, producers had come to depend on Reality’s relatively high profit margins and its innovations in product placement (Gutnik). Product placement contracts reached $3.7 billion in the U.S. in 2008 (Williams, 4).

27. In 2009, Endemol had two of the top ten shows, ranked by dollar amount of integrated marketing. In 2009 the company purchased a Spanish technology start-up to help retroactively and dynamically incorporate products into content online (to tailor the brand of soft drink that a character holds, dynamically, in online videos) (PR Newswire).

28. Home Depot and Lowe’s, two major home improvement businesses, both made major product placement and exclusive integration deals with Trading Spaces, the original break-out home improvement reality hit on TLC, which also starred Ty Pennington, the host of Extreme.

29. The design team on Extreme visited Sears on air; workers from Sears were featured delivering products to the home; Sears featured products from the show on their website (Elliott).

30. When a BusinessWeek blogger called Extreme Home Makeover the “best example of appropriate product placement on the air today” in 2005 (Kiley), he referred to fact that there seemed to be no audience resistance to it. The 2012 “Neighborhood Watch” episode of This American Life features a mother who cites “move that bus” as the national ideal of community involvement.

31. The pep rallies didn’t air as part of the show, but can be viewed online. See for example the rally at Grace Church in McKean Township on June 19, uploaded to YouTube on June 23, 2009.

32. Audience engagement mimics democratic practices in participatory formats like the call-in voting and text-in campaigns that determine American Idol’s winning singer, part of a “neoliberal rhetoric that erases the distinction between consumer and citizen” (Nightingale). Extreme Home Makeover created the consumer citizen subject in a peculiarly intense way.

33. The home improvement shows instantiate the prize that gives purpose and meaning to a supposedly fair playing field, as opposed to dramatizing a fair and glorious meritocracy as on competition shows, like The Apprentice or Joe Schmo (Shields 105).

34. In an old “Key to the Vault” brochure, distributed at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan, the Fed writes: “people are still intrigued by the power, mystery and brilliance” associated with gold. Quoting Charles de Gaulle, it calls gold “eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence.”

35. Anonymous interviews, and Anthony Dominici interview. It’s important to note that I believe the designers, as with all of the producers, were well-intentioned.

36. These rooms also express the desires of people who are perceived as transcendentally innocent and outside of the demands of the market economy. For sentimental constructions of the child, for example, see Steedman.

37. Modern design has a complex relationship with masculinity, but simply put, midcentury modern architecture and design is coded as more masculine and tends to be introduced at the top of the market. See Leslie and Reimer.

38. Hoarders’s third season debut became the network’s most-watched season premiere in 2010 (A&E website). The man who created Flip This House also went on to create Storage Wars, another extremely popular A&E show I mention below. Collection Intervention debuted on Syfy in August of 2012. The less psychologically-minded Clean House was on Style Network from 2003–2011, but was never as popular, and Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive were widely discussed as break-out, surprise hits.

39. See Hines and HousingWire.

40. Outside of domesticity, whiteness can itself be theorized as a form of property, as Cheryl Harris famously argues, which “enshrines the status quo as a neutral baseline” (Harris 107), and as such a neutral, is inherently more liquid.

41. British critic Gareth Palmer argues that lifestyle television “essentializes class differences by vilifying those who fail to make it” (Palmer 5). But Hoarders notably never punished those who failed to liquidate and redecorate. The cameras simply cut away.

42. Backstage.com casting call, expired June 15, 2016. https://www.backstage.com/casting/gig-economy-worker-docu-series-117847/.

Works Cited

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Alexander Hirsch (bio)
University of Alaska Fairbanks

The artist Jason Lazarus collects and displays photographs deemed “too hard to keep.” This essay contrasts Lazarus’s exhibitions with Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project, which commemorates the 1963 bombing of a Baptist Church in Alabama by exhibiting photographs of present-day residents of Birmingham. What contributions do these photo projects make as responses to loss? Despite their differences, both exhibitions build miraculous connections between strangers through powerful exercises in imagination. In the end, Too Hard to Keep and the Birmingham Project represent experiments in memorial aesthetics that occupy the productive tension between empathy and critical detachment.

Since 2010, artist Jason Lazarus has been collecting and exhibiting photographs deemed by their owners “too hard to keep” (Habe-Evans). Lazarus solicits the images from anonymous strangers who mail him candid portraits, photographs of pets, landscapes, sunsets, empty rooms, and quotidian scenes. The growing archive of images contributes to what he calls a “repository of photographs, photo-objects, and digital files [that are] too painful to live with any longer” (Habe-Evans). Though apparently unintended as public art at the time they were taken, the photos are framed as such once collected, curated, and exhibited in gallery spaces. The exhibitions summon into a public domain the private pain of individuals; by doing so, they reflect a mise-en-scène of grief that builds a felicitous connection between strangers. This is a public receptacle for excessive affect, a place where we can deposit material objects charged with the aura of a feeling that is, as Lazarus writes, “too difficult to hold on to, but too meaningful to destroy” (Lavalette). Here we have an artist who resurrects and archives lost or somehow “dead” subjects and whose namesake, Lazarus, ironically recalls a biblical figure famous for coming back from the dead.

It’s a brilliant project. To start, the exhibitions invite spectators in the gallery to reflect upon the nature of their own most difficult memories by engaging those of the photos’ former owners. What especially distinguishes Too Hard to Keep (hereafter THTK) is the way it showcases painful traces of loss and brokenness that exist in a suspended space of can’t-live-with / can’t-live-without. By contrast to the recent “Right to be Forgotten” movement that has sought to establish a universal right to have the vestiges of one’s internet presence erased, THTK focuses on emblems of unbearability too valuable to erase.¹ The THTK archive is flush with photographs that index such loss. THTK also calls attention to the impasses faced by those who inhabit an aftermath where it is not only loss that is at stake, but also the loss of loss itself. Lazarus requires that the owners of photographs “truly part” with the images they donate to his project. He accepts digital copies only on condition that other digital copies be deleted: “If you’re going to part with it – part with it. Then what you’re seeing has traction. . . . It is the remnant of the decision to relinquish the image from their archive into a public archive” (Habe-Evans). In any case, the images that make up the archive are tokens of suffering and grief that must be preserved in some way, even if they are abandoned by their former owners.²

Here, I contrast THTK with Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project (hereafter Birmingham), another recent photographic exhibition (2012–2013) that experiments with mediating and responding to loss in provocative, generative ways. Birmingham commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama – a flash point for the Civil Rights Movement – and memorializes the lives of the six African-American children who died, including four girls who died in the blast, and two boys who were killed in related incidents.³ Bey photographed present-day residents of Birmingham, half of whom are the same ages as the 1963 bombing victims (eleven, thirteen, fourteen, and sixteen), and half who are the age that the victims would have been had they survived the attack (sixty-five, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, and seventy, respectively). The exhibition features the portraits side by side, as a series of diptychs juxtaposing images that picture what the victims might have looked like at the time of their deaths with what they could look like today, had their lives not been tragically lost. The result is an arresting photographic exercise that illuminates the haunting echo not only of lives lost, but of the unrealized futures erased by the bombing.

This essay reflects on the way THTK and Birmingham converts spectators in the gallery into belated witnesses, albeit in different ways. Witnessing is often described as a mode of observation whereby a bystander beholds an event and then later bears testimony to the truth of this experience. But with Lazarus’s project, spectators cannot see what precipitated loss. The photo submissions are received anonymously and without explanation; the images, when exhibited, are displayed without reference or description.⁴ The viewer cannot help but imagine what makes this wide-angle landscape too hard to keep, or what renders that polaroid portrait too painful to live with. The result is that the art nearly becomes the story that viewers tell about what happened. Spectators in the gallery recognize, of course, that the story they tell cannot possibly encompass the true history behind the images, even if some pictures invite more or less accurate educated guesses. Whatever the distance between fiction and reality, spectators’ stories reflect the irrepressible desire to craft narrative for an unsettling, perplexing photographic object.

Birmingham also makes belated witnesses out of gallery spectators, who become third person observers party to loss and harm decades after the event it occasioned. Like THTK, Birmingham presents photographs in which the truth is somehow veiled, given that the portraits exhibit images of people who are not the true subjects of the photographs. Despite this similarity, Birmingham inverts THTK. With the latter, spectators often cannot quite identify the cause of unbearable loss, and this prompts an imagining that completes the exhibition. With the former, however, spectators already know the cause of loss, which is stated in the very title of the project, even if they cannot track the effect – the lost potential that attends the unrealized future lives of the bombing victims – which they must imagine by peering at photographic surrogates. THTK and Birmingham both cultivate a memorial aesthetics that hones the presence of an absence. But where the enigmatic past is what matters for THTK, with Birmingham what matters is the unfathomable future that was, for six children, violently obliterated.

The question is, what contributions do these photo projects make as responses to loss? At a time when protests over commemorative statues memorializing Confederate officials have reached a fever pitch, and when debates over the lasting power of Emmett Till’s photographic image raise such pressing concerns over the role of art in the course of public mourning, the stakes of our responses to the question remain high.⁵ The goal of THTK and Birmingham is manifestly not to bring about forgiveness, because the images do not establish a space for victims to engage with perpetrators, let alone release agents of harm from their burden of guilt. And neither project preoccupies itself with reparative justice, vengeance, punishment, or other forms of redressing past pain by focusing on what perpetrators of loss and brokenness presently owe. Finally, though THTK and Birmingham resist the urge of forgetfulness, and by their very nature reject the cathartic release associated with amor fati, they equally eschew infinite despair and melancholic fixation. THTK urges subjects of loss neither to let go nor to remain attached to their loss, even as it provides a means by which the photographs connected to loss may themselves be lost. Rather, THTK encourages such subjects to forfeit their emblem of too-muchness to a tardy tragic chorus that may not be able to fix what has been broken, but can bear witness to the trace that remains. Birmingham too elicits a chorus of late witnesses who are confronted by the undeniable exhortation to conceive the lives of the departed, even if this remains an impossible demand for spectators who cannot see the victims, or their lost futures.

What follows is split into three sections. In the first, I review some of the archetypal images from the THTK archive, focusing in particular on the way they encourage an audience of strangers to envision the lives of others in a manner that establishes grounds for the emergence of an uncanny affinity. To look at Lazarus’s THTK images is to view something deeply personal about the lives of the photos’ former owners, and this immanent contact brings about an intimacy that takes shape around a shared imaginable that synchronizes being in meaningful ways. But this intimate contact is betrayed by the fact that viewers cannot perceive what the intimacy is all about because its determining source remains crucially hidden for spectators. In the second section, I review a number of images from the Birmingham exhibition. Bey’s photographs bring the world of the victims into the space of the spectator, thus forging a more immediate contact between the two.⁶ And yet, the photos feature images of models who are analogues for victims, the true images of whom remain undisclosed, thus witnesses behold a world that is ultimately beyond their ken. In the end, I argue, both photo projects represent photographic experiments that occupy the productive tension between empathic unsettlement and critical detachment. Remarkably, THTK manages to induce intimacy by preventing the mutual understanding required for conventional empathy; Birmingham engenders intimacy by obstructing our view of victims and their fugitive futures. Whatever their important differences, both art projects draw on and make use of distance, the expanse dividing and separating people, as a necessary condition of possibility for ethical engagement. As such, THTK and Birmingham cultivate a memorial aesthetics that builds miraculous connections between strangers through powerful exercises in imagination, the operative idiom for reckoning with afterness.⁷

1

“Where the painter constructs,” Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, “the photographer discloses” (135). In part, this distinction between artistic construction and disclosure relies on the assumption that where a painting visually includes the intentions of the artist, in a photograph one sees what is to be seen whatever the photographer’s intentions. Kendall Walton underscores this point when he writes that “Photographs are counterfactually dependent on the photographed scene even if the beliefs (and other intentional attitudes) of the photographer are fixed” (264). This is why, Walton argues, photographs can serve as evidence when paintings cannot.⁸ Following this logic, Walter Benn Michaels points out that

I can hardly, say, accuse you of stealing my wallet and then offer as proof a little watercolor I’ve just made of you sneaking into my room. The watercolor would count more as a repetition of the accusation than as evidence of its truth, precisely because the referent — your entering my room — would be optional rather than necessary. . . . The photograph necessarily shows what was in front of the camera; the painting shows what was in front of the canvas only optionally — and the option is the painter’s. (12)

The argument has been taken for granted in photography theory for decades. But with THTK, though the photographs serve as evidence, it is not evidence that reveals truth. In addition to documenting an event, the pictures also gesture toward its unbearable impact. Roland Barthes famously argued that a photograph is “in no way a presence . . . its reality is that of the having-been-there” (44). With THTK, by contrast, spectators bear explicit witness to their own having not been there. Indeed, from the perspective of the archive, what precipitates loss remains concealed. What counts is that the photograph is the relic of a memory that is too hard to keep.

One of the photos from the archive (Fig. 1), in black and white, shows a crowd of a dozen or so friends posing for a group shot. They are in a park at night, or perhaps they are camping. Most are smiling, though not everyone appears to be ready to pose for the shot. In the back row, one man is sitting on another man’s shoulders, dragging on a cigarette. In the foreground a dog is climbing into a woman’s lap. Judging from the haircuts and attire, the image may have been taken in the early 1970s which, remarkably, means the former owner must have held onto the photograph for at least forty years. Everything in the photograph appears unremarkable but for the lower righthand corner, where one of the persons originally pictured has had their shape crassly cut out with a razor. The effect is disquieting. In an effort to censor a portion of the photograph, it appears the photo’s former owner has attempted to purge the image of someone, presumably the source of some wounding. But, tragically, as with all cases of censorship, the eye is drawn to what is repressed. Hardly spirited away, the entire photograph is about the erasure and, by extension, about the person who is no longer there but whose trace continues to haunt the image as the presence of an absence.

Fig. 1. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

Another photo (Fig. 2) pictures the imprint of a woman lying in bed. She is wrapped up, smothered in a white patterned duvet. Concealed beneath the cover, she appears ghost-like, and this metaphor underscores her spectral position as someone connected to a too-hard-to-keep memory that must be jettisoned, if also distributed and shared. The image faintly recalls Rene Magritte’s “The Lovers” (1928), a painting that famously portrays the frustrated desires of two lovers entangled, both veiled by a cloak of pale fabric. Asked once about the meaning of the painting, Magritte replied, in a surrealist mood, that “It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable” (87). Of course, in the case of the image from THTK, even if the details concerning the source of loss remain unknowable for spectators, we understand that the photo must mean something to someone, because the former owner has surrendered it to an archive that indexes vital sources of undeadness. In this sense one could argue that Lazarus’s phrasing of “too hard to keep, but too meaningful to destroy,” might be somewhat misleading. The “but” is too quick. It might be that some of these pictures are too meaningful to destroy precisely because they are too hard to keep. One must jettison the relic of a memory if it symbolizes a source of grief that is overwhelming enough; but precisely because that grief is so overwhelming one must take care not to obliterate its artifact, for doing so may threaten a site of vivified meaning. As one critic recently put it, “A photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be” (Silverman 3–4).

Fig. 2. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

Not all of the THTK photographs demonstrate instances of loss that are exclusively centered on people. One image (Fig. 3) frames a dark and ominous sky viewed through a car’s front window shield. A storm appears to be gathering, and leaves are blowing about a dirt road lined with trees that are swaying in the gale. In the distance, across a field, one can almost make out the silhouette of a residence. On either side of the road we see an old chain-link fence guarding a lawn, which has been faintly tire-marked by vehicles trailing an ad hoc driveway. The scene is charged with the dragging undertow of an unnerving feeling. Peering out from the vehicle’s interior underscores a sense of shelter: the car as haven from the storm. And yet this feeling of safety is belied by the disturbing knowledge that this place is somehow the enigmatic sign of a memory deemed too hard to keep.

Fig. 3. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

There is another photograph (Fig. 4) that speaks to the ways in which places can be vested with what Raymond Williams once called a “structure of feeling,” actively-felt meanings and changes of presence that exert palpable pressures, even if they cannot be defined or otherwise easily classified (132–133). The image is of an old hatchback, parked underground in a garage. A beam of light is streaming through a clearing above a ramp that leads outside, casting the dark concrete bunker into relief. The light carries the faint green hue of flora from outside, illuminating streaks marring the walls and contrasting the cool concrete with warm light, death with life. As with the photograph of the gathering storm, one cannot help but sense the loneliness, dread, and yearning that coalesce as the photo’s gestalt.

Fig. 4. Jason Lazarus, THTK (2010-Present). Used by permission.

As gallery visitors viewing THTK, spectators are cast as witnesses who cannot be sworn because they cannot offer testimony of an event that remains crucially out of view. Peering into the photographs on display means coming to terms with the fact that although the spectators know the photographs are tokens of unbearability, more often than not, they cannot understand why. Rather than focus on delivering an empirically accurate portrayal of what they observe, spectators in the gallery are instead acutely aware that their testimony will be largely invented. The emphasis lies with the fantasy of what might have been, and with the stories that spectators tell about this imaginable past. Great art, Theodor Adorno once wrote, depicts something that we do not and cannot know. In light of THTK, he might have added that, in part, what makes such art resonant is that its audience must try, and generatively fail, to come to terms with it through storytelling. As such, THTK can be understood in terms of what Charles Altieri has recently argued regarding the goal of art generally:

Rather than describe or represent phenomena, the primary task of art is to ‘realize’ states of being by eliciting what power these states can offer for the sensibilities that engage them. So making must take priority over interpreting, and the concern for what can be willed as engaged inspiration for conditions of making replaces the concern for how willing might be justified by knowing. The primary question for art . . . becomes not whether a statement is true but whether the energies of its making can be exemplary and can specify domains where particular stances become valuable for what they bring to the world.(20)

For Altieri, in other words, the “primary task” of art is not to explain the truth of something, or otherwise decant experience through representation. Rather, its objective is to evoke meaningful “states of being” that are tied to the energetics of its making. Following this line of thought, we might say that the primary objective of Lazarus’s curated photographs is to elicit powerful states of being. One cannot tell what happened in that place on that stormy day, or otherwise explain why the woman wrapped in a blanket represents a source of intensely felt loss. The focus is placed instead on the values these images conjure up, and what dispositions of imagination they make possible. In part, the meaningful dispositions summoned up by the images stems from the uncanny bond they facilitate between former owners and spectators in the gallery. Though a closeness forms between the two, former owners and gallery visitors never actually meet; they remain strangers for one another, and what brings the spectators to the former owners remains nonetheless distancing.

Conventional models of intimacy tend to stress the vital role played by recognition, reciprocity, empathy, shared space, contact, or promising as vehicles by which intimacy is sacralized. In this sense, intimacy is often articulated either as a coming to know and affirm who the other authentically is, or as a form of giving and getting, where what is exchanged is equitably distributed. With THTK, however, there is not enough mutual understanding for recognition to take place. And the intimacy generated by the photographs is not facilitated by reciprocal exchange either, because former owners surrender the photographs without receiving anything directly in return from spectators. Similarly, the intimacy marshaled by THTK is not a product of promising. Where promises guarantee what will be, spectators of THTK come to embrace another grammatical mood associated with what might have happened. In this way, ironically, spectators end up promising not to promise, because they occupy a register of attention, encounter, and relation that prevents them from being able to accurately predict the past. The intimacy struck in the THTK gallery is not the outcome of empathy either, if empathy can be defined as a tenderness toward the suffering of the other when one recognizes that one has personally experienced this pain before. Empathy nurtures a shared horizon of understanding that is ultimately embedded in a personal memory.⁹ With THTK, however, spectators cannot develop empathy for the photograph owners, because it is unclear what their loss represents, or from where it derives. Though they may feel compassion in a generic way, it is uncertain whether viewers in the gallery can connect empathically with former owners. Part of what makes THTK so effective is that a touchstone of intimacy is established precisely by this frustrating inability to empathize.¹⁰ A bond of intimate alliance takes shape around an animating condition of sudden unsettlement. Because they are unable to describe a source of loss for victims, spectators are released from the pressure to bear testimony to it. Instead, they are placed in a position where, because they cannot know, they must imagine. In imagining, spectators foster a connection with former owners by virtue of what is meaningfully possible even if — or precisely because — it is likely not true. As such, with THTK, it is not inherent likenesses that establish a precondition for intimacy. As with other forms of relationality, this one coheres around a public object — in this case, a photograph — but that object is not like a social contract or birthright, concepts that both name what is guaranteed for members of a group. Instead, this affinity is brought about by what is ultimately uncertain, and it is exercised through an invitation to envision who the other is, and imagine what has happened to them.¹¹

2

Until they yielded their pictures to THTK, the former owners likely never intended them to be displayed in public. The photographs that make up Birmingham were, however, always intended as public art. They are exquisitely polished, expertly crafted artifacts. This difference in intention changes the effect. In the THTK gallery, spectators and former owners experience an intimate (albeit asymmetrical) bond, not only because of the sympathy viewers may feel for all victims of suffering, but also because of the candid quality of the photographs. Precisely because we were never meant to see these representations of loss – they contain what Walter Benjamin once called the spark of “contingency” or accident (510) – spectators may be tempted to feel that they are somehow more “authentic.”¹² The photos are raw, unfiltered, and candid, and spectators thus trust them more. The Birmingham images are different. They are carefully cultivated, focused, and professionally edited. There is intentionality behind these images, so that when spectators view the pictures they identify as an expected audience. Recognizing this fact potentially threatens trust between the photographer and the viewer, because the viewer knows the images are deliberately staged to solicit a specific response, which engenders the paranoid feeling that one is being manipulated. This distrust is elevated by the fact that, in the galleries, viewers cannot see the victims who are promised as the true subjects of the photographic memorial. Despite this distrust – or rather perhaps because of it – Birmingham appeals to a complex form of affinity. Because spectators view portraits of models who are substitutes for the true subjects of the photos, they must think analogically about the victims of the bombing. Doing so prompts viewers to imagine who the victims actually were, given that their images are conspicuously absent from the gallery. Whereas THTK establishes touchstones of intimacy by providing windows into worlds of loss that spectators were never meant to behold, Birmingham galvanizes affinity through carefully staged images of models playing victims.¹³

In contrast to THTK, which focuses on animating perplexity around the question of what happened, Birmingham connects spectators in the gallery to what has been lost but assumes they will understand what transpired in the past. The victims of the 1963 Birmingham bombing – Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, along with Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson, who lost their lives as a result of the violence that followed the bombing – are memorialized by Bey’s sixteen photographic diptychs. Like THTK’s, Birmingham’s objective is not to bring about forgiveness or stoke abiding resentments, but Birmingham departs from THTK because the victims of loss have died, and so cannot dedicate a mysterious icon of loss to a public archive. The victims are gone, and with them their lost futures. By definition, these futures remain open to a contingent field of endless possibility – anything might have happened for these children, but this potentiality has been cut off by the bombing’s destructive, violent force. Bey’s photographs memorialize the loss brought about by the bombings, but do so indirectly, because the photos picture people who are not accurately reflect the victims. This itself might be read as violent, because those who were erased by the bombing are made absent again by images that exclude their appearance. In this case, however, Bey uses the technique of erasure to draw attention to what is so profoundly tragic about violence.

In “Mary Parker and Caela Cowan” (2014), two 40” × 64” pigment prints mounted on dibond sit side by side. The images are rendered in stark black and white, referencing both the thematic racial undertow and a connection to the historical time frame of the 1960s. On the left sits Mary Parker, who appears to be around sixty-two years old, the age the twelve-year old victims of the Birmingham bombing would have been had they survived. She is leaning comfortably over a pew, five rows from the back of a church. Her face is in focus, and her gaze, framed by a pair of spectacles, is fixed squarely on the camera. As Bey explains, “part of the process in The Birmingham Project involved constructing the circumstances by and through which his sitters could reassert their rights to the gaze” (Platt 15). For Bey, even if they cannot reclaim total agency, part of the goal of memorialization is to empower victims such that they too can look, and look back at those who see them. The irony, of course, is that the images do not feature portraits of victims, but rather substitute models playing victims. On the right hangs a portrait of Caela Cowan, a twelve-year old surrogate for Collins or McNair, perhaps. Cowan is seated in roughly the same position, and in what appears to be the same church as Parker. Though her gaze is also trained on the camera, the expression on her face is more imposing, perhaps more accusing. Her gaze is sharper than Parker’s, which is more resigned by contrast. One notices also that where Parker is posed in three-quarter view, a casual posture, Cowan sits square to the camera, shoulders hunched, engaged. Compositionally, both Parker and Cowan encounter the viewer directly, but Cowan’s body language introduces greater tension.

The same tension can be found in “Braxton McKinney and Lavon Thomas” (2014). The diptych features McKinney — who represents Virgil Ware, perhaps, or Johnny Robinson — on the left, and Thomas on the right. Where McKinney’s right arm is draped over the pew, Thomas’s left dips in front, giving the impression that the two are mirror reflections of one another. As with “Mary Parker and Caela Cowan,” the younger model’s facial expression conveys scorn, even as the older model’s gaze suggests something more tender. This tension is key to the mode of memorialization that Bey’s photo project presents, which aims not only to stimulate remembrance of a past event, but also to attune viewers to the particularity of the victims of that event, and to their irreplaceable value.

A third pair of photographs, “Taylor Falls and Deborah Hackworth” (2012), displays models seated in another area of the church. A mural, or perhaps an ornate spread, adorns the backdrop. Though out of focus, the pattern of the backcloth on each side of the diptych coalesces above the shoulder of each model; swirling, climbing, reaching, almost touching at either side of the model, serving as a bridge across time, connecting the younger and the older iteration of each surrogate. Rather than leaning in over the pew, which simultaneously positions them as encroaching upon yet also barricaded against the viewer, the models in this photograph are sitting upright. Notably, the models are seated in chairs whose rigid armature recalls prison bars, though it is unclear whether the furniture’s cage symbolically protects or confines (or both).

By substituting the actual victims with images of proxy residents of Birmingham, Bey underscores the irreducibility of the individuals who were killed, and also draws attention to the utter disposability suffered by all victims of terrorist violence. What distinguishes terrorism, some scholars have argued, is that it includes the deliberate killing of innocent people, where the substitution of one victim for another does not significantly alter the objective of violence.¹⁴ Anyone will do, so long as the victim happens to fit generically into a broad identity category targeted for attack. In this way, terrorism violates what many deontologists refer to as the immutable, intrinsic value of individuals. By photographing proxy models, Bey highlights the way the Birmingham bombing reduced its victims to mere use-value, and simultaneously affirms how deeply brutalizing this was for them. By selecting surrogate models to pose as if they were the victims of the bombing, Bey uses displacement to establish the victims’ value, inducing intimacy with them. This is ironic, of course, given that intimacy is often understood as a quintessential function of proximity. Yet with Birmingham, as with THTK, intimacy is foregrounded through sundering. In the case of Birmingham, this is achieved through distancing, and the severing expanse interpolated between who is here (the models), and who should be (the victims).

The images we view in the Birmingham collection are gathering places for the ghosts of the past, and also the ghosts of the victims’ futures, and in this way the photos convoke haunting. They are all the more haunting by virtue of the fact that these photographs feature phantasmagorias that serve as analogies. For the photography critic Kaja Silverman, all photographs are ultimately structures of analogy: “Photography is . . . an ontological calling card: it helps us to see that each of us is a node in a vast constellation of analogies” (11). We are “each of us” connected to one another through a vast interlocking similitude composed of relationships that we cannot extricate ourselves from: “analogy runs through everything that is like a shuttle through a loom” (Silverman 11). Coming to terms with this ontological fact is both relieving, in that the burden of solitude is leavened, but also threatening, in that our autonomy, agency, and primacy are radically called into question by our mutual reliance. “Photography,” Silverman argues, “is the vehicle through which these profoundly enabling but unwelcome relationships are revealed to us, and through which we learn to think analogically. It is able to disclose the world, show us that it is structured by analogy, and help us to assume our place within it because it, too, is analogical” (11). Such analogies do not collapse one into the other, or otherwise reduce difference to sameness; rather, they point both to similarity and difference: “Similarity is the connector, what holds two things together, and difference is what prevents them from being collapsed into one” (11). Through analogical thinking, for Silverman, we enter into a more responsible relationality with one another because we recognize the undercurrent of reciprocal entanglement that frames our being-together in the world.

Birmingham invites spectators in the gallery to conceive the world in these analogical terms. Precisely because the models are not actual victims, spectators must engage the fact that they are viably who the victims could have been, but were not. The adults in the images represent what the victims could, but would not, have looked like. And in the very moment that they realize that these images do not truthfully reflect what the victims would have looked like, spectators must ask themselves who these victims might have become. The viewer is, in this sense, hailed by the distance between virtual and actual, between could have and would have. The effect is powerful. Unlike THTK, where the question to which viewers must imagine a response is what happened?, Birmingham’s question is who might these victims have become had they survived? Where the former induces intimacy by virtue of the frustrating inability to empathize, the latter attunes the viewer to a counter-factual: what might have happened had these bombs not destroyed these particular lives?

3

In the opening essay of On Photography, dedicated to the theme of the ethical response elicited by photographs of suffering, Susan Sontag describes the personal experience of being twelve years old and opening a book of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau photographs: “Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously.” What in particular left Sontag so grieved was the feeling of moral inadequacy: “They were only photographs – of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve” (19–20). In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag would later describe this as the “unappeasable past,” indicative of the suffering we come to recognize only too late that results in a disabling sense of bearing an insufficient response. In his well-known essay “The Uses of Photography,” and later in “The Photographs of Agony,” John Berger echoes this sentiment. Reviewing images of the Vietnam War that were circulating in mass media at the time, Berger argues that pictures of suffering produce the dislocating feeling of being both sympathetic to another’s pain but simultaneously lacking the agency to alleviate it. As Deborah Nelson puts it in her reading of Berger,

What the viewer experiences, then, from the shock of the photographs (we are ‘seized’ and ‘engulfed’ by suffering) is yet another shock, the shock of her own moral failure, which overrides – even suppresses – the suffering and violence depicted in the photograph. This produces, [Berger] says, either despair or a compensatory penance, like donation to a charity, but it does not produce political will. (109)

In Berger’s terms, witnessing can become a form of moral trauma when agency is “vacated, incomplete, or incommensurate with the viewer’s moral dilemma” (qtd. in Nelson 109). This places the viewer in a position of losing their faculty for responsiveness and its attendant agency. Embedded within such photographs is an invitation to act, even if this appeal remains an impossible demand because — by virtue of their tragic moral irrelevance — there is nothing viewers can possibly do in response.¹⁵

Remarkably, THTK bypasses such concerns. Though viewers of THTK may experience the pains of sympathy, and may also feel unable to respond to a condition of loss because they cannot know its origin or content, the sense of moral inadequacy is proportionately eroded. One may feel traumatized by one’s own lack of agency when viewing images of war or genocide because one recognizes the genre of suffering but cannot respond. But with THTK what precisely is lost, and what suffering was caused by this loss, remains clandestine. As a result, viewers are not subject to the same unassumable responsibility because they cannot even know what it would mean to issue an adequate response.¹⁶ To be in the THTK gallery is to inhabit a world of ambiguous causes, while entering the Birmingham gallery means engaging with inscrutable effects. In Birmingham, spectators are confronted by an undeniable imperative to conceive the lives of the departed. This indeed remains an unassumable responsibility for spectators who, after all, cannot engage directly with the victims or their unrealized futures. For Bey, this is precisely the point. Knowing they are bound by an epistemic limit –that they will never know for certain what the lost lives of the victims of the bombing would have been like – spectators are solicited to imagine. Far from losing their faculty for responsiveness, spectators regain agency through the exercise of imagining the other. Though they may not be able to retrieve their lost futures, spectators can reckon with what might have been, and in so doing honor the irreplaceable value such futures held for the children who died.¹⁷

Together, THTK and Birmingham make for unusual memorial rituals. Conventional memorials often attempt to make the parallactic shift of mourning possible by converting loss into an object. By rendering it a thing – a stone tablet, perhaps, or a commemorative statue – such memorials symbolize the desire for the past to truly become past.¹⁸ As experimental interventions in memorial aesthetics, both THTK and Birmingham resist this fundamental goal. In each case, what is lost is not foregrounded as a stabilized, inert object. We know not what has been lost, in the case of THTK, only that the effect of this loss is agonizing enough that its representative symbol – the picture – must itself become lost, and shared with a group of strangers. With Birmingham, we can only fathom what the consequences of loss entail, because we cannot know what the lives of those who died would have been. Rather than condense the loss into a thing, the loss is cast to the ethereal register of the imaginable. Imagination is the faculty that allows us to think the possibility of something beyond the epistemological distinction between true and false; it is the capacity to create forms or figures that are not always already given in the order of concepts.¹⁹ THTK and Birmingham appeal to this faculty to imagine as a source of rethinking what memorial aesthetics can do.

What can these exhibitions do for those who reckon with loss? The prospects for redemption might be limited for those who forfeit their emblem of too-muchness to an audience that cannot, after all, erase or repair damaged life, when the traceful ruins of that life are all that remain. Similarly, reconciliation is refused by Birmingham; no decathexis or moving on is conditioned by its aesthetic. The victims are gone, and with them their stolen futures. And yet the evocative effect tendered by these photographic memorials for those who behold them is undeniable. To be in the gallery spaces is to feel interrupted from the point of view of a reflexive past horizon. The audience clamors to grasp what they cannot understand about what they see, about what could have been or might still be. With THTK, a demos of witnesses gathers around a site of loss, but this assembly of late witnesses is not embedded in a sustained fidelity to melancholic attachment, because the event remains mysterious for spectators. Rather, these witnesses are attuned to the world of possibilities opened up by imagining what others’ pain might entail.²⁰ With Birmingham the loss, again, is not shared. Even if the source of loss is known, its impact remains fugitive, so long as these photographs enable the epiphanic flash of imagination.

Footnotes

1. It also recalls the current “decluttering movement,” which encourages the discarding of objects deemed to be excessive or otherwise overcrowding. If the decluttering movement embraces a Spartan minimalism characterized by divestment, THTK emphasizes what cannot be destroyed even if, or precisely because, it must be abandoned.

2. I do not claim that all of the photographs are connected to loss in the same way, nor do I assume that losses are homogenous across the photographic archive, as shall be seen. Rather, my comments are directed toward the general effect brought to bear by the project as a whole. In this sense, I follow Roland Barthes in focusing especially on what photographs disclose and how they might impact viewers, rather than on the intent of the artist. See Camera Lucida (26–27).

3. The girls were Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. The boys were Virgil Wesley, 13, who was shot by a white teenager, and Johnny Robinson, who was shot by poice.

4. Sometimes, if the former owners of the photographs indicate that they would prefer it, the images are kept in their envelopes when they are displayed, such that they are exhibited but remain concealed.

5. On the Confederate monument protests, see Okeowo. On the controversy over Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting, “Open Casket,” which appropriates the photograph of the murdered Emmett Till, see Bergere.

6. For more on the argument that the photograph, for the viewer, brings the world close in general, see in particular Andre Bazin; see also Gregg Horowitz’s response to Bazin (142–143).

7. I hardly have space here to explore in detail the vast history of mourning rituals generally, or the vast literature that attends this theme. Much of my conclusion below focuses on what practices of mourning are meant to engage generally. For more critical theory concerning the politics of mourning practices, see for instance, Eng and Kazanjian; and Hirsch and McIvor. Most photography that focuses on loss tends to fall into the genre of “late photography,” “after the-fact photography,” or “aftermath photography.” Aftermath photography has its roots in Roger Fenton’s images of the Crimean War, in Alain Resnais’ 1955 film, Night and Fog; and later, in Joel Meyerowitz’s images of Ground Zero, and Luc Delahaye’s, Paul Seawright’s, Lyndell Brow’s, and Charles Green’s photographs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Capturing the aftermath of war, terrorism, and other forms of human suffering, these images serve as what David Campany articulates as “the trace of the trace of the event” (185–186). For more on how I distance THTK and Birmingham from Campany’s critique of afterness photography, see below.

8. For the classic argument along these lines, see especially Scruton. This argument — that photography cannot be representational art — has sparked a historical debate that continues to this day. See, for example, Alward, Elkins, and Phillips.

9. For more on the way I am using “empathy” here, see for instance Dominick LaCapra, who argues against empathy as “overidentification” (102–103); and Lauren Berlant (641–642), who makes reference to “empty empathy.”

10. I borrow the phrase “touchstone of intimacy” from Stanley Cavell. For Cavell, the phrase refers to the effect some Symbolist poetry has on its readers. A touchstone of intimacy forms between “kindred spirits” when a shared sentiment is voiced, one that stokes the glow of fellow feeling, even if this sentiment is difficult to understand or represent. See Cavell (81).

11. As with what Barthes calls the “third meaning,” the connections forged by such touchstones of intimacy are “immanent, obtuse, and erratic, in contrast to the obvious meaning of semantic message and symbolic signification.” For more on this in connection to a theory of the affects, see Stewart. For the connection to photography, see also Brown and Phu.

12. I do not mean to exaggerate the notion that all human trust is born of authenticity, the product of accident. Clearly, one ought not always trust what appears by accident. Instead, I am arguing that part of the intimacy brought to bear by the images that make up the THTK archive derives from the fact that spectators expect that they were not meant to see what the photographs disclose. Thus, spectators suspect that what they behold in the photos is highly personal to former owners. This matters because, as I argue, the candid quality of the photographs contributes to the intimacy effect.

13. Though, in the case of THTK, it is possible that the photos were taken with the intention of sharing a scene of loss with someone else, perhaps even a future self. Whatever the case may be, the archive aestheticizes the epistemic distance between what appears to be the case, and what actually is.

On the question of galvanizing affinity, Elain Scarry is instructive. Scarry argues that “The human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small.” Thus, she calls for new modes of prompting “generous imaginings” of other persons that go beyond parochial subjectivism: “The problem with discussions of ‘the other’ is that they characteristically emphasize generous imaginings, and thus allow the fate of another person to be contingent on the generosity and wisdom of the imaginer. But solutions ought not to give one group the power to regulate the welfare of another group in this way” (106).

14. The classic iteration of this argument can be seen in Walzer (238).

15. This can be contrasted with what Peter Singer famously argues in his influential essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” namely that spatial distance between subjects ought not to excuse the failure to satisfy moral responsibilities between them. If I can alleviate the suffering of another I ought to, even if I do not personally know the other for whom I am accountable, and even if they may live on the other side of the planet. In point of contrast, on my argument, THTK and Birmingham draw on and make use of distance as an enabling condition for ethical responsiveness. For a related argument that develops my line of thought in a different direction, see John Paul Ricco, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes.

16. Thus, in this sense, I would argue that the THTK photographs index not only the loss of loss itself (for the former owners of photographs), but also the loss of the loss of agency (for the viewers).

17. While acknowledging the uses of the contemporary aftermath photograph as a form of commemoration, many critics have questioned the ethics of the genre and its relation to the event it memorializes. One complaint is that such art creates too large a distance between the viewer and the atrocities it traces. See, for example, James. In failing to produce a confrontation with the brutality of the events that are the focus of aftermath photography, James argues that these images render the event “dangerously unreal, strangely theatrical, detached, inhuman” (15). Others like Campany argue that “There is a sense in which the late photograph, in all its silence, can easily flatter the ideological paralysis of those who haze at it without the social or political will to make sense of its circumstance” (192). For more on these debates, see Veronica Tello, Counter-memorial Aesthetics.

18. For a comprehensive review of this history of memorialization see, for instance, Harrison.

19. In “The Discovery of the Imagination,” Cornelius Castoriadis argues that imagination is “radical” in that it establishes new figures of the thinkable: “These figures would bring particulars into relation with each other but be different from the hypotheses or models of speculative theory, which seeks to form and produce knowledge of a complete object.” If Castoriadis is right, writes Linda Zerilli, “such figures are at the very heart of reflection, which is ‘the effort to break closure,’ that is, the domain of the instituted society in which we exist as subjects constituted by rules, norms, and laws” (63).

20. Another way of putting this would be to argue that THTK evokes the subjunctive mood, and substitutes it for the indicative, in its appeal to our sense of pathos. As a grammatical mood, the subjunctive is irrealis, that is, it evokes various states of unreality such as wish, opinion, possibility, hope, future potential actions, etc. (that which might be, but which is not yet factual). The indicative, by contrast, is a realis mood, in that it stresses statements of fact. Birmingham, by contrast, displaces the indicative by the conditional (“If they had lived, then…”) in its appeal to our sense of ethos.

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