Category: Volume 28 – Number 2 – January 2018

Lily Cho is Associate Professor in the Department of English at York University. She has published essay on vernacular photography in Interventions, Citizenship Studies, and Photography and Culture. Her current project, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens, looks at identification photography as a technology through which racialized migrants are excluded from citizenship. She is a member of the Toronto Photography Seminar.

Christian P. Haines is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He has recently finished a book titled A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons, forthcoming with Fordham University Press. His work has appeared in journals including Criticism, Genre, boundary 2, and Cultural Critique. He is co-editor of a special issue of Cultural Critique, “What Comes After the Subject?” (Spring 2017), and contributing editor for Angelaki: A Journal for the Theoretical Humanities. His current research concerns the relationship between finance capital and contemporary cultural production. Work from this project is coming out in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics and Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature (University of New England Press).

Walter Faro specializes in poetics and 20th-century American literature, exploring through practice and theory the ways in which written forms become taxonomized and historicized, while attending to the performative effects of those lasting conceptions. He is currently on leave from graduate work at Pennsylvania State University as he writes his first book, which is about his late father’s life as an assassin and international mercenary, and what it was like to be raised to kill in 21st-century America.

Akshaya Kumar is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Indore. He is finishing a monograph provisionally titled Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in the Comparative Media Crucible, which situates a low-budget media industry in the context of South Asian film and media history. He has published numerous articles on Media and Cultural studies in Social Text, Television and New Media, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Contemporary South Asia, among others. The current article is part of a work-in-progress project on the various entanglements of media, capital, and politics.

Guanglong Pang is a second year MA Candidate from the Department of Geography at York University in Toronto. His research interests are Chinese international students and international higher education. His thesis research focuses on the co-constitutive relationships between the experiences of studying abroad, the changing Chinese labor market prospects and one’s family situation in shaping students’ perceptions about their career success and future social position in the People’s Republic of China.

Isabelle Parkinson is a Teaching Fellow in the Comparative Literature Department at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on the relations between modernist literary practice and cultural, social and political institutions and on the historiography of the avant- garde. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Whose Gertrude Stein? Contemporary Poetry, Modernist Institutions and Stein’s Troublesome Legacy’ (2017), examined Stein’s place in histories of the avant-garde that find a genealogy outside the modernist ‘institution’ for late-20th- and early 21st-century experimental poetry. She is currently working on a monograph, Modernism’s Homo Sacer, which explores the biopolitics of the right to write in modernist debates about Stein’s authorship.

Thangam Ravindranathan is Associate Professor of French Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Behold an Animal. Four Exorbitant Readings (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press, 2019), Là où je ne suis pas. Récits de dévoyage (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2012), and co-author (with Antoine Traisnel) of Donner le change: L’impensé animal (Editions Hermann, 2016).

Megan Ward is Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University. She co-directs the digital collection Livingstone Online and is the author of Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (Ohio State UP, 2018).

Megan Ward (bio)
Oregon State University

A review of Whitson, Roger. Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories. Routledge, 2017.

The field of digital humanities has had a contentious relationship with the idea of the “big tent,” or a widely inclusive approach that embraces a variety of disciplines, methodologies, and theories. On one hand, pitching such a big tent seems a way toward a more diverse set of practices. On the other hand, academic expertise is sometimes defined by the very smallness of the tent. Roger Whitson’s Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities is an ambitious, interdisciplinary work that stakes out a very big tent. It ranges from nineteenth-century theories of labor and mechanical calculation to present-day steampunk novels, art, and fandom, approaching these texts from a blend of theoretical perspectives captured by the book’s subtitle: “literary retrofuturisms, media archaeologies, alternate histories.”

I suspect that – just one paragraph in – readers of this review already have an opinion about this methodological and historical range. And I think that Whitson’s book will appeal deeply to those who find this approach exciting, though I doubt that it will change skeptics’ minds. Whitson unites his disparate approaches under the term “steampunk methodology,” meaning that steampunk’s anachronistic, imaginative repurposings of Victorian culture offer a new kind of scholarly practice. Steampunk, he argues, gives us a new reading practice, one that isn’t constrained by historical period or close reading but instead gives us access to “a startlingly diverse set of narratives about the nineteenth century, themselves a consequence of the objects, cultures, signals, and interfaces used to access that history” (5). I find this to be the most exciting part of Whitson’s project. It opens up an energizing range of possibilities for studying the past in the presentist mode that has recently garnered much attention in Victorian literary studies (see, for instance, “V21 Forum”).

Whitson practices this methodology in order to create the “nineteenth-century digital humanities” of the book’s title, a back-and-forth process between Victorian studies, digital humanities, and European nineteenth-century culture. At some points, this proves to be digital humanities practiced in ways influenced by nineteenth-century culture, as when Whitson advocates for a non-human form of digital labor informed by Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. At other times, this means digital humanities practices that study the nineteenth-century, which might include a digital forum for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online about baking from Victorian recipes or Lego enthusiasts re-making Charles Babbage’s difference engine. While each instance is creative and intriguing, the concept of “nineteenth-century digital humanities” would be more compelling if it were more cohesive methodologically across the book as a whole. For instance, Whitson’s reading of the nineteenth-century origins of non-human digital labor is evocative and would be even stronger if it were better connected to the other chapters. As this chapter is bookended by a chapter on geologic time and one on steampunk fandom, it left me with a sense of great possibility for this approach but without a clear payoff.

Some readers will enjoy Whitson’s engagement with a wide range of materials, creators, and theories. For me, that is the crux of this book: it offers a methodology that depends upon historical, textual, and theoretical breadth, and that breadth challenges a more traditional approach to scholarship predicated on depth. Whitson’s method and content are deliberate and well thought through, as he sees both the fields of digital humanities and Victorian studies as unnecessarily limited by historical period and by audience. For him, steampunk is a way to undo those limitations, to open up these fields through anachronism.

This leads me to Whitson’s most provocative claim: that scholarship should look outside the academy for interlocutors, inspiration, and even education. He argues that “publics are already participating in the digital humanities” by “discussing nineteenth-century history on Twitter chats and Google Hangouts, by writing steampunk novels published electronically on Kindle or on individual blogs, and by constructing steampunk technologies displayed at hobbyist and engineering conferences” (6). I find myself hard-pressed to see this as evidence of scholarship, as the intellectual work that Whitson cites tends to be smart and earnest but does not necessarily engage with debates or technologies current in the digital humanities. I admire, however, that Whitson puts his ethos into practice in each chapter, looking to steampunk hobbysists, activists, role players, bloggers, artists, writers, and makers for theories of temporality, materiality, and identity. He interviews steampunk fans, for instance, to argue that scholars of Victorian culture can “lear[n] from the ways steampunk fans appropriate and complicate historical knowledge to make it applicable to their lives” through cosplay, performance, panel discussions, and online chat (164).

This is not to say, however, that Steampunk itself is not grounded in traditional scholarship. Whitson carefully frames his arguments within contemporary scholarship and employs concepts from media archaeology theorists such as Friedrich Kittler and Jussi Parikka. Traditional scholars of Victorian literature and culture might assume that this book isn’t for them, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Whitson grounds steampunk culture in original readings of Victorian figures such as Charles Babbage, Isabella Bird, and Friedrich Engels as well as in discussions of online platforms for Victorian studies, such as BRANCH and JVC Online. At the same time, scholars of contemporary culture will also find much to enjoy in the discussions of steampunk novels, art, activism, and digital media.

The book opens with an investigation of machines and time, offering the most cohesive, in-depth exploration of method and text. The first chapter examines temporality in many difference engines, arguing that the industrial efficiency of Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century mechanical calculator gets revised in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s famous 1990 steampunk fiction and in various Babbage engine remakes from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter Two continues to examine mechanization, first reading Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings (2015) to develop a steampunk understanding of the way that culture impacts technological development. Whitson contrasts this reading with Isabella Bird’s Chinese Pictures (1900), which, he argues, portrays China as Britain’s ghostly, pre-industrial alternative. In these two chapters, ideas, texts, and objects are in fascinating conversation across time. Whitson weaves together a remarkable breadth of texts, historical moments, and concepts, but there is still a clear thread to follow as we see the multifaceted effects of industrial time.

The middle of the book shifts focus, moving toward a more diffuse series of topics united by activism. Chapter Three begins with nineteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton’s idea that geological mechanisms extend well beyond the time of human understanding. Whitson reads China Miéville’s novel Iron Council (2004), which, he argues, uses computing as a form of human revolutionary action. The chapter concludes with steampunk paintings and repurposing to show different strategies for computing in the face of ecological change. Chapter Four, like Chapter Three, offers invigorating readings, this time in service of the question of labor in steampunk repurposing. Beginning with a reading Friedrich Engels’s theory of labor as a cybernetic blend of human and machine, Whitson moves to Neal Stephenson’s critique of labor in the 1995 neo-Victorian novel The Diamond Age. He concludes with a discussion of steampunk engineers as an alternative to the capitalist-driven Maker Movement, in their emphasis of ecologies over individual profit. The middle section exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of Whitson’s approach: the range is admirable, but sometimes it comes at the expense of sustained analysis.

The final chapter makes the most explicit case for steampunk as an anachronistic methodology by showing it already at work in steampunk fan communities. Using interviews with activists, bloggers, and fans, Whitson argues that steampunk constitutes a queer public – but one that, he emphasizes, is imperfect and subject to oppression. Given this steampunk model, the final section asks how nineteenth-century digital humanities might enable various publics to participate in Victorian scholarship. “Scholarship” here is conceived very broadly – more broadly than I’m comfortable with, but nonetheless in a way that makes sense given the chapters that have come before. For Whitson, interacting with Victorian literature and culture through hobbies, cosplay, and online discussions offers ways to enrich Victorian studies and make it relevant to a broader audience. In the face of an almost non-existent job market and declining English majors, this may be a way to make scholarly work more publicly engaging.

Finally, the epilogue picks up the thread of temporal frameworks from the beginning of the book, looking to the posthuman Victorian history evidenced in steampunk video games such as Sunless Sea and Bloodborne. Together, these chapters examine the ways that steampunk’s anachronisms and uses of technology might help us imagine different kinds of nineteenth-century studies, including rereading familiar nineteenth-century texts in light of their contemporary remaking. In this way, Whitson writes in the tradition of books such as Jay Clayton’s Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, which helped inaugurate Neo-Victorian studies. Steampunk offers a significant methodological contribution to that field.

Ultimately, I want to emphasize this book’s ambition and creativity. This is not Whitson’s first book; he also co-authored William Blake and the Digital Humanities. Nonetheless, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities is a bold venture, showing impressive range in roaming across periods, media, and theories in order to reveal complex pathways connecting the Victorian period to our own.

Works Cited

• “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 1, Autumn 2016.
• Whitson, Roger. Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories. Routledge, 2017.
• Whitson, Roger, and Jason Whittaker. William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media. Routledge, 2013.

Thangam Ravindranathan (bio)
Brown University

A review of Haraway, Donna. Manifestly Haraway, U of Minnesota P, 2016 and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke UP, 2016.

Published a few months apart, Manifestly Haraway (April 2016) and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (September 2016) together attest to the unique, undimmed pertinence of Donna Haraway’s thinking to our “strange and uncertain” times (as Barack Obama recently called them). The three-in-one volume Manifestly Haraway carries reprints of the two essential manifestos—The Cyborg Manifesto (originally published in 1985) and The Companion Species Manifesto (2003)—followed by the transcript of a conversation (“Companions in Conversation”) that took place over three days between Haraway and Cary Wolfe at her Santa Cruz home in May 2014. Absorbing if elliptical, the conversation sets itself the task of thinking together meaningfully the two epoch-making manifestos, revisiting the material-historical-political contexts and thought-worlds that shaped their particular objectives and deep continuities. The dialogue closes with Haraway gesturing toward a third manifesto in the offing—a “Chthulucene Manifesto.” This work appeared a year later under the jauntier title Staying with the Trouble, gathering essays written between 2012 and 2015 and broadly concerned with the theme of multispecies survival in the Anthropocene.

Thirty years after its first publication, The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century reads just as powerfully. As the “noninnocent” child of socialist-feminism and the Cold War-era of “command-control-communication-intelligence,” the cyborg famously refused to simply reject science and technology, or to dream of lost wholeness. It saw clearly that erstwhile forms of resistance (premised on identities or totalizing theories) were increasingly obsolete, but also that late capitalism’s military-industrial-technological and information systems had the potential to unravel the dualisms historically structuring the Western self and its practices of domination: self/other, organism/machine, mind/body, culture/nature, human/animal, male/female, reality/appearance, matter/fiction. In these conditions, Haraway memorably argued, the socialist-feminist movement needed to resist the “nothing-but-critique” impulse; rather, it needed to recognize its ironic allies in “transgressed boundaries” and “potent and taboo fusions” across gender, race, class, species, method and matter (52). As the organization of labor, market, gender, time, mobility, knowledge, communication, body, skin, and life changed substantively in the Reagan-Thatcher years, “cyborg writing” needed to be alert to the danger of naturalizing and sentimentalizing what was being lost—often inseparable from forms of oppression—and wake to the possibilities emerging from contradiction, unnaturalness and ambivalence. Without question one of the most influential, lucid, electric, thought-rebooting, anti-depressive texts of the late twentieth century, The Cyborg Manifesto described—in acidic, irrepressible prose—the ironic, even “blasphemous” form that the revolutionary struggle against the Western logos would have to assume in order to survive in the military-industrial-cybernetic age: “Perhaps, ironically,” wrote Haraway, “we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos” (52).

How not to be Man was also the concern, one could say, of The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, where “dog writing” is argued for as “a branch of feminist theory”—with Haraway adding, ever the iconoclast, “or the other way around” (95). Seeing in twenty-first-century human-canine companionship an instructive guide for “fleshly material-semiotic” co-evolution and survival, she cautions: “Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with” (98). This text, with its greater dose of biography, worldliness, vulnerability, domesticity, sharing, joy, and saliva than The Cyborg Manifesto, (knew that it) risked striking readers of the angry/melancholic twentieth-century anti-bourgeois anti-realist persuasion as less radical. But therein lay precisely the provocation (and dogs’ well-documented talent for warm-and-fuzzily fooling us): man’s best friend is also his most “ecologically opportunistic,” techno-engineered, ironic, protean, ambiguous, co-constitutive, inescapable symbiont—not to say satellite and shadow (my terms). Wolfe does not even need to go into explicit details (or “to the dogs,” as Haraway might put it). As a longtime close reader and companion thinker, his conviction gives Manifestly Haraway its framing hypothesis: however differently they “ramify” (as he likes to repeat), the two manifestos wrestle with very much the same questions. Haraway in turn agrees with his suggestion, when discussing The Companion Species Manifesto, that “the figure of the cyborg was not queer enough for the work [she] wanted to do then” (she adds: “also not intimate enough” (254-255)). To those who might want to ask her “Why did you drop your feminist, antiracist, and socialist critique in the ‘Companion Species Manifesto’?” she answers: “Well, it’s not dropped. It’s at least as acute, but it’s produced very differently. There’s a sense in which the ‘Companion Species Manifesto’ grows more out of an act of love, and the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ grows more out of an act of rage” (219) (my emphasis).

Beware ye “dog phobic[s]” and “those with their minds on higher things” (95)! What may appear, in the move from cyborg to dog and rage to love, to be a mellowing (as we too often—pessimistically? ageistically?—tend to call the evolution of things over time) is more likely the opposite. As the conversation proceeds, it becomes clear that Wolfe has been thinking hard about this and is guiding them both towards a very precise set of articulations. For him, the radical politics and irony of The Cyborg Manifesto are “sustained” in The Companion Species Manifesto, but, he ventures, “they’re retooled within a context that I would call more thoroughgoingly biopolitical,” and “that’s a very different context from command-control-communication-intelligence and the military industrial complex” (even if they may overlap) (219). Haraway responds tentatively to this reading at first (“I hope that’s true”); what is at least as true is that—even while her post-Cyborg writings devised (as Wolfe notes) an ever-richer figural and syntactic vocabulary for talking about earthly survival and bodily cohabitation (think of natureculture, becoming-with, response-ability, ongoingness, the Chthulucene, compost communities etc.)—the presence of the biopolitical as explicit frame or word has been noticeably scarce. There are interesting reasons for this (as I see it). For one, to be committed to the biopolitical as lexicon and paradigm is to follow a Foucauldian and/or Agambenian line of analysis that Haraway’s practice of resolutely eclectic, feminist (“My sisters rock!” 283), cross-disciplinary, “kitchen-sink” scholarship and “excessive citation” has always exuberantly overshot (292). For another, her authentic interest in “[h]ow to truly love our age, and also how to somehow live and die well here, with each other” (207)—a stance of “joy” in which she is closest to Isabelle Stengers—has arguably stood her at affective and rhetorical odds with the themes and verdicts of biopolitical thought, at least in its negative dimension (which, until recently, remember, was its main dimension). And then there is the fact that a note to The Cyborg Manifesto dares to declare the biopolitical age (of “medicalization and normalization”) over (“It is time to write The Death of the Clinic“), succeeded by an age of advanced multinational capitalism, networking, automation—calling precisely for cyborg politics (69). Finally, there is something of a genre gap, if one considers the rule first evoked in The Companion Species Manifesto and observed even more seriously in the works that followed: “no deviation from the animal stories themselves. Lessons have to be inextricably part of the story” (109). The resolute preference for love/joy/rage over critique, for stories over theories, for messy multiplicities over neatness is in turn of a piece with an overall poetic and ethical sensibility that runs deep. Haraway has always written against “hygienic distance” (108; “because love is always inappropriate, never proper, never clean,” 275), and to that extent against both biopolitical regimes (that identify, regulate, extract, monocultivate, optimize) and a dominant strand of biopolitical thought (which, in critiquing biopower, inevitably lends it unbearable dominance). Her unembarrassed calls to “forbidden love,” ironic alliances, “oral intercourse” with dogs (yes, literally), infections and miscegenations, “worldings,” “compost” and “humus“ (over “posthuman,” most recently) have made Haraway to much critical theory what a radical toxic-yard co-op permaculturalist is to certified organic farming. Make kin not babies! would become the credo of Staying with the Trouble. Immune systems, beyond their biopolitical operativities, are for Haraway live ecological archives—blueprints for past and future communities: “they determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom” (122).

Wolfe, undaunted, keeps bringing the biopolitical back in—taking his cue perhaps from the tireless retriever for which he can safely bet Haraway would have infinite patience (which brings us to the burning and unaddressed question at the heart of this conversation: does Wolfe have a dog? Or, to put it in Haraway speak, does a dog have Wolfe?). The bee in his bonnet is the fact that the human/dog relation, increasingly regulated and medicalized, “is in fact part of a much larger biopolitical fabric” (245), an instance of life subject to strategic, routinized power, and, as such, for analysis, a problem. Besides, shouldn’t we heed the differences between “pets” (henceforth known as companion species), “pests,” factory farm animals, zoo animals, wildlife, etc., not to say, as Wolfe has recently suggested, between bio and zoë, as this distinction divides different animals? True, in Staying with the Trouble Haraway moves from pigeons to dogs to ants as if this difference does not matter fundamentally. But on the other hand, a chapter in that book titled “Awash in Urine” (whose first version was published in 2012) is surely as dirty an engagement with the biopolitical as they come, retracing the ironic story of the synthetic hormonal drug DES (diethylstilbesterol) harvested from pregnant mare urine and prescribed to Haraway’s dog (Cayenne) for incontinence just as it had been prescribed for years to menopaused (“estrogen deficient”) women—until shown to be linked to increased incidence of breast cancer and heart disease (a cause taken up by women’s movements) and discontinued for human use. In that most personal chapter of the book, Haraway addresses both the multibillion-dollar pet pharmacare industry and the gendered cross-species predicaments produced by a “still-expanding conglobulation of interlinked research, marketing, medical and veterinary, activist, agricultural, and scholarly body-and subject-making apparatuses” (115). She even throws in the words “biopolitical” and “biocapital,” yet no diagnostician’s gloom weighs her down. Rather, she draws from this story yoking her aging self to her aging dog an upbeat lesson in “viral response-ability,” which she defines as

carrying meanings and materials across kinds in order to infect processes and practices that might yet ignite epidemics of multispecies recuperation and maybe even flourishing on terra in ordinary times and places. Call that utopia; call that inhabiting the despised places; call that touch; call that the rapidly mutating virus of hope, or the less rapidly changing commitment to staying with the trouble. (114)

She goes on to write in her signature brachylogical prose:

It is no longer news that corporations, farms, clinics, labs, homes, sciences, technologies, and multispecies lives are entangled in multiscalar, multitemporal, multimaterial worlding; but the details matter. The details link actual beings to actual response-abilities. Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise. (Staying 115)

“Caring about flourishing” appears here as the delightful, provocative other to the “biopolitical”; certainly “to flourish” is a verb conspicuously absent from the biopolitical theory “canon.” But Wolfe is keen—and has come prepared—to reclaim this decisive duality within biopolitical thought. His last book, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2013) had focused precisely on such a fundamental ambivalence within Foucault’s thinking (his “debt to Nietzsche”) and what contemporary biopolitical analyses were doing with it. As noted by commentators such as Jeff Nealon and Maurizio Lazzarato (on whose readings Wolfe relied critically), biopower in Foucault worked on bodies “not always already abjected,” (as they are in Agamben) but”enfolded via biopower in struggle and resistance” (Wolfe 32). Its power necessarily originated in something other than itself; before biopower could affect concrete objects/subjects, it had to be a relation between virtual forces, implying their virtual “freedom.” Thus the potential for something as “creative” and “aleatory” as life “to burst through” biopower’s systematic and thanatological arrangements was already inscribed within biopolitical thought—and not only as an impasse, as Roberto Esposito saw it—but “in ways more and more difficult to anticipate” (Wolfe 32-3). Wolfe’s conclusions in that book—notably his conviction that biopolitical thought has arrived at a “specific juncture” (Manifestly 253)—drive his engagement here with Haraway. For one, he is interested in thinking an “affirmative biopolitics” that would both correct the “almost hysterical condemnation and disavowal of [pre-political] embodied life” in a certain lineage of thinkers—Arendt, Agamben, Rancière, Badiou, Zizek—and avoid the pitfall of simply celebrating positive, undifferentiated life (think deep ecology of the 1970s, or Esposito today) (Wolfe 30, 59). Second, given his own longtime investments and following Nicole Shukin’s sharp analyses in Animal Capital (published in his own Minnesota UP “Posthumanities” series), he is committed to the idea that the analysis of biopower—known to operate ultimately at the level of flesh (rather than person, in which Wolfe agrees with Esposito)—logically and powerfully demands that attention be paid to animal life, yet has tended to ignore it (as its “internal limit,” to quote Shukin). For Wolfe, then, a movement against factory farming “has the potential to actually radicalize biopolitical thought beyond its usual parameters” by drawing attention to the fate of sentient, embodied life (Wolfe 51).

Spoiler alert! Wolfe easily gets Haraway to agree that she is doing a certain kind of “affirmative biopolitics,” enabled precisely by a “root feminist thinking” that has never been afraid to explore “an affirmative sense of mortal connection with other forms of life” (Manifestly 264-265). In a nice twist, she becomes the answer to Wolfe’s question of “what an affirmative biopolitics would look like.” Haraway’s other lineage here is of course ecological politics (from Val Plumwood to Thom Van Dooren)—another vexed part that Wolfe wants to reconnect to the biopolitical whole. At this point, Wolfe’s highly systematic mind (remember how he made deconstruction and systems theory converse like long-lost cousins in What is Posthumanism?) has him reevaluating feminism and ecology as analogous formations—both extraordinary legacies for thinking mortal life affirmatively and across difference, both limited awhile (until they were thankfully queered) by their tetheredness to reproductive discourses, and both badly needed today to extend, radicalize, and indeed realize the vital critical potential of biopolitical thought—which also means to rethink and sustain “life” and “politics” within it.

I put down Manifestly Haraway thinking that these two thinkers flourished in concert, precisely because they stretched and entangled and disentangled the branches, the roots, the skins, the antennae of their thought-worlds furthest. At the same time I wondered whether anything had really been said, whether any “becoming-with” had happened at all. For Haraway, in a sense, the whole palaver around biopolitics stems from an historical “misunderstanding” that develops “in a colonial institutional framework, of getting rid of the enemy and managing the subordinate. Sterilization, exclusion, extermination, transportation, so on and so forth” (248-249). Not that this framing of things was not absolutely strategic; the point is rather that this was never how the world actually worked or would continue to work. The biopolitical frame was “the misunderstanding of historical multispecies life,” an impoverished description that stood at every point to be belied by everyday ordinary associations and infections (248). This is why resistance is about (earthly) storytelling more than (unearthly) critique, and why politics is a power struggle over who gets to tell which stories. Here we also find the reason why Haraway remains a keen student of the biological sciences, where a “tectonic shift” is revealing the ways in which earthly life uncannily resembles its most radical tellings: critters are ecosystems, bounded individualism simply does not occur in nature (nor does “nature”), and cyborg/companion species writing was, quite (im)modestly, only refusing to pretend not to know this.

Because you literally can’t sterilize; the hand-sanitizer thing is a bad joke. The main point is that insofar as biopolitics is concerned, this question of ecosystem assemblages is the name of the game on Earth. Period. There is no other game. There are no individuals plus environments. There are only webbed ecosystems made of variously configured, historically dynamic contact zones. (248-250)

There is a difference at play here between the two thinkers that is not quite (or not only/wholly) the realist/materialist vs. idealist or the negative vs. affirmative divergence that may divide strands of philosophico-political thought. It is something more like the difference between two understandings of writing’s relationship to its matter. Perhaps one could call it, dramatically, old-fashionedly, the difference between the problematic and the poetic mode—where one critiques an assumed-to-be-existing world that one may reasonably fear is (i.e which nothing in principle prevents from being) uninhabitable, while the other describes a world into being, and in doing so dwells (as its very inscription, if you like) vulnerably and until the end in/with/as it. Endnote #5 of The Cyborg Manifesto had called knowingly for “language poets” (69-70), and Staying with the Trouble repeats ethnographer Marilyn Strathern’s lesson: “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” (34). Might there be a case for thinking the stakes of this problem/poem difference as it plays out in critical thinking today, and conditions the potential for our being wholly subjected to biopolitical regimes? Are we not at a juncture where poetry and philosophy can—and must—come together again? Or is it too late to dwell in and with and as the world? Whatever one may think of that question, or of Haraway’s latest recourse to humus and compost as figures for dwelling, there are few thinkers who can say about their thinking what she so exquisitely says to Wolfe: “This is not just the way I work, this is how worlding works” (Manifestly 212).

“Companions in Conversation” touches on a number of other points of interest to readers in contemporary critical theory, biopolitics, the Anthropocene, feminism and ecology. For instance, Haraway offers a more nuanced argument here than in Staying with the Trouble for her unwillingness to use the term “Anthropocene” (preferring instead “Capitalocene” or, better, “Chthulucene,” from the word for earth—and therefore life and potential—no connection to “misogynist” Lovecraft). While in that book she objects to “Anthropocene” essentially on the grounds that the best natural and social sciences (i.e. biology and philosophy) have by now thoroughly debunked bounded, neoliberal individualism—and therefore human exceptionalism—and that there is therefore no sense in reinstating yet another great phallic adventure tale with Man as its tragic hero (31, 47), in talking to Wolfe she points out that the term seems to suggest a “species act,” “an act of human nature,” whereas what is at issue is “a situated complex historical web of actions—and it could be, could have been, otherwise. But people forget that, partly because of the power of the word” (237-238; my emphasis). In this argument, Haraway is in the company of French historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, authors of The Shock of the Anthropocene, who argue methodically against the naturalizing powers of the Anthropocene narrative; not only could things have been otherwise, but at every point of history, there are records of alternative forms of knowledge, practice and community (and more sustainable conceptions of world), which certain namable agencies and interests—imperialist, capitalist, fossil fuel, agro-chemical—knowingly defeated. In another fascinating moment, Haraway expands on her debt to the sacramentalism of Catholic theology, and how it set her up to be suspicious of “the various purifications and sortings of the world”—between word and flesh, world and trope, “semiosis and fleshliness,” “mind/body, animal/human, signifier/signified, nyeh-nyeh/nyeh-nyeh” (268-269). Steepedness in Catholic/Peircian material semiotics is something Haraway significantly shares with her two close “companions in thinking,” Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour—which leads to a joke about a Catholic takeover via Paris, Brussels and Santa Cruz. As one might expect, the conversation is also remarkable—as is Staying with the Trouble—for the tributes Haraway consistently pays to her many teachers, interlocutors, co-travelers: Lynn Margulis, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Anna Tsing, Valerie Hartoum, Vinciane Despret, Vicki Hearne, Strathern, Stengers.

One must be patient with the “Conversation,” and read it for the deep lines of thought it casts out but, given its format, can examine only gesturally. There are so many places where it inevitably advances by way of shorthand allusions (especially when Wolfe is speaking), “say-no-more”-type responses, incomplete sentences or sentences started by one speaker to be completed sympathetically by the other that one sometimes wishes there were footnotes. The stage-direction-like inserts of laughing, and the reference at one point to deep breaths and some well-aged Scotch, are as incongruous as they are cute; at the very least, this is useful stuff for anyone wishing to reenact the conversation as a play. But the final verdict would have to be that this is a real conversation, and a chance to witness some high-caliber symbiogenesis (to use a Haraway word) between two particularly lucid thinkers of our times. And this was before the 2016 election, when everything still seemed possible. Who is to say? Another day (and more aged Scotch) might even have persuaded Haraway to join Wolfe’s movement against factory farming¹, and Wolfe to start writing of flourishing and joy.

Footnotes

1. Readers eager for the conversation to address whether Haraway should have been less hard on Derrida in When Species Meet (whose index had featured wryly, under the entry for “Derrida,” the subheading “curiosity, failure of”) will be left unsatisfied. But the question of Haraway’s strongly stated ambivalence to Derrida is an aspect of a much larger question that, precisely because of its glaring centrality and difficulty, Manifestly Haraway both must and cannot manifestly process: what to do about meat. Haraway’s lament in When Species Meet—that Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I Am had failed in “a simple obligation of companion species” (ultimately to care what his cat was doing or thinking that morning) and thus missed “a possible introduction to other-worlding”— appeared itself to miss the real concern of Derrida’s text which was not the neglected companion cat (the latter a stagey alibi, one could say looking back, for getting to the animal question) but billions of zombie animals reared in factories every year to be killed. Wolfe’s unstated question to Haraway throughout here (which I would not put it past her to answer another day) is thus: What would it mean to practice a companion species “curiosity” not in the home but in the slaughterhouse, where it would stand to disrupt the very world order? (When Species Meet 404; 20)

Works Cited

• Haraway, Donna J. Manifestly Haraway. U of Minnesota P, 2016.
• —. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.
• Obama, Barack. Remarks at the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, 17 Jul. 2018, Johannesburg, South Africa. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/17/629862434/transcript-obamas-speech-at-the-2018-nelson-mandela-annual-lecture. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
• Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. U of Chicago P, 2012.

Christian Haines (bio)
Dartmouth College

A review of McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia UP, 2016.

In Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, Todd McGowan offers a perverse starting point for the critique of capitalism: not the injustices and inequalities produced by capital accumulation, nor the repressiveness endured by the subjects of capitalism, but rather the joy of capitalism – “why so much satisfaction accompanies capitalism and thus what constitutes its hold on those living within its structure” (18). Capitalist subjects, McGowan argues, take pleasure in capitalism, even as it deprives them of their freedom. In a certain respect, this claim recapitulates longstanding theories regarding the relationship between capitalism and pleasure, for instance, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s analysis of mass culture as an institution for generating empty pleasures, that is, pleasures that stimulate only insofar as they also rob subjects of reason and autonomy. McGowan takes this line of thought a step further, however, by insisting on the distinction between pleasure and satisfaction. “The problem,” he writes,

is not that capitalism fails to satisfy but that it doesn’t enable its subjects to recognize where their own satisfaction lies. The capitalist regime produces subjects who cling feverishly to the image of their own dissatisfaction and thus to the promise, constantly made explicit in capitalist society, of a way to escape this dissatisfaction through either the accumulation of capital or the acquisition of the commodity. (11)

Satisfaction is not always pleasurable, indeed, it can be painful, because for McGowan it has less to do with immediate gratification, or the relative ease of the Freudian pleasure principle, and more to do with freedom, with a commitment to fractured foundations of the subject, to what Jacques Lacan terms jouissance. Satisfaction revolves around loss and failure, rather than contentment and success. It is the stuff of symptoms, not psychic equilibrium. For McGowan, this disjunction between pleasure and satisfaction, promise and freedom, equilibrium and fracture, constitutes the motor of critique.

The gamble of Capitalism and Desire is to found the critique of capitalism not on futurity and pleasure but on trauma and loss. Critics of capitalism more often than not stake their positions on the promise of a better future, a future in which the barriers to pleasure have been removed. One need only think of Herbert Marcuse’s call for desublimation, Fredric Jameson’s investment in utopianism, or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s faith in the liberatory potential of the multitudes. McGowan wants to do away with this investment in futurity in favor of an acknowledgement of the inextricability between freedom and loss. The point, he makes clear, is not to pivot from pleasure to loss, as if the only solution to the problems presented by capitalism were a plunge into asceticism or an embrace of melancholy. The problem with capitalism is that it conceals the sacrifices that capitalist subjects make to it through the pleasures of consumption. The task, then, is one of interpretation, of seeing how the capitalist system structures desire in a way that necessarily overlooks the dimension of lack and loss in the reproduction of capitalism. Following in the tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis, interpretation is more than a change of perspective. It is also a change in the coordinates of desire, a restructuring of subjectivity so that the patient (in this case, the capitalist subject) can enjoy loss differently. The title of the book’s conclusion is suggestive in this respect: “Enjoy, Don’t Accumulate.”

The greatest accomplishment of McGowan’s book is to so sharply pose the question of what enjoyment untethered from capitalism might look like and to do so without relying on the tired claim that the pleasures of capitalism are not really pleasurable. One could speak of this accomplishment in terms of immanence, noting that for McGowan, the end of capitalism is not after capitalism but in its midst. One of the ways in which he frames this immanence is as an abandonment of final causality. Theorists cannot, and should not, predict or prescribe the future after capitalism, but

they can forge an approach to the world that reveals the unsustainability of the capitalist system and thereby make the alternative readily apparent. This is what transpires when we abandon the final cause that underwrites capitalist productivity [that is, the capitalist ideology of progress] and insist on the means for its own sake and not for what it will produce. … The means is a future that is already present within capitalism, and the task of the theorist – or even the task of the revolutionary – consists not in creating a new system but in identifying the implicit presence of this new system within the existing one. (174-175)

McGowan does not reject futurity as such but rather the issuance of promissory notes on the future. Put differently, he embraces futurity only insofar as it inheres in the present as the immanent potentiality for rupture. Crucially, McGowan poses this imperative towards immanence as political, rather than ethical, which is to say that he does not suggest that futurity is inherently good, that the end of capitalism secures virtue and pleasure. There is no utopian space of enjoyment, unadulterated by loss, on the other side of capitalist accumulation. McGowan’s approach is both stringently theoretical, in its insistence on formulating the abstract structures of capitalism, and remarkably pragmatic, in its recognition of the messiness of social and psychic life.

At the same time, I have reservations about the efficacy of two central methodological decisions in McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: first, the choice to model capitalist subjectivity primarily, indeed, almost exclusively, on the basis of commodity consumption; and, second, the identification of interpretation with radical political action, such that the capacity to subvert or overthrow capitalism depends on a relatively rarefied form of intellectuality. There are moments in the book when interpretation risks becoming a quest for authentic experience, so that the question of labor conditions and the problem of political organization seem almost epiphenomenal in respect to the existential drama of the subject. McGowan is so focused on what Marx calls the theological niceties of the commodity form that he forgets to descend into the hidden abode of production. McGowan does an excellent job of building on the philosophical or speculative element in Marxism, the gear in the critical machinery most associated with German Idealism (with Hegel, if not Kant), but the scientific element (the critique of political economy) and the political element (socialist and communist movements) more often than not seem like afterthoughts.

I have little interest in faulting Capitalism and Desire for sins of omission, given that there is much to admire in the book. However, the relative dearth of engagement with politics and political economy speaks to a specific relationship to Marxist theory and criticism. In its current formation, Marxist critical theory seems to consist of three relatively distinct fragments: a speculative fragment in which capitalism constitutes a transcendental structure of subjectivity; a political fragment at the heart of which is the question of what kind of historical subject will abolish capitalism (the party? the commune? the riot?); and an economic fragment that asks how the rhythm of capital accumulation – the cycle of crisis – might prepare the way for another mode of production or social system. These are points of emphasis, rather than mutually exclusive objects of thought. Much of what is interesting in Marxist scholarship has to do with the way it mediates between these emphases, the way it not only translates from one to the other but also marks the tensions, the contradictions, between them. McGowan’s analyses of the psychic life of capitalism do not lack for mediation, but McGowan tends to flatten the differences between these registers, applying the distinction between pleasure and satisfaction as a universal, explanatory formula. The messiness of social life operates at the level of the example or the anecdote, but it never quite manages to scale up to the level of the concept. The clarity of McGowan’s speculative propositions comes at the cost of bracketing the complexities of organizational practice (activism, social movements, etc.) and at the cost of leaving the history of capitalism a blur. As McGowan himself admits, his Marxism is more Hegelian than Marx’s, which, in this case, amounts to a valorization of the concept over the messiness of everyday life.

The Libidinal Deduction of Capitalism

The undeniable strength of Capitalism and Desire is the way in which it parses the theological niceties of commodity consumption. McGowan takes seriously the ritualistic element of capitalism, the way in which capitalist reproduction depends on a process of transubstantiation whereby loss and poverty become the ever-renewed promise of a better future. McGowan joins Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, and Giorgio Agamben, among others, in thinking capitalism as an economy of sacrifice, that is, as a mode of production for which the sacrifice of time, energy, and life is not merely a necessary condition but the very form of its reproduction. The capitalist version of sacrifice is a secularization of sacrifice, which is to say that it disseminates the ritual element of sacrifice so that it no longer occupies a special place in society (the sacred) but is rather coextensive with sociality as such. McGowan writes:

The migration of sacrifice from the realm of specified rituals to the everyday world of producing and consuming commodities has the effect of obscuring the act of sacrifice. Overt sacrifice troubles the equilibrium of the modern subject, but it becomes completely acceptable in the hidden form that capitalism proffers. In capitalism, subjects can enjoy sacrifice while believing that they aren’t. We can enjoy sacrifice in and through its very invisibility when it becomes secular. (92)

It would be too reductive to paraphrase McGowan as saying that capitalism is built on sacrifice. His point is more general: sacrifice is capitalism; sacrifice is the essence not only of production – one thinks of the workers at Foxconn factories, assembling products for Apple, when they are not attempting suicide – but also of circulation and consumption. In respect to circulation, one could consider all of the so-called negative externalities of the capitalist economy, not least of all climate change, which accrue in the transportation of commodities from one point of the globe to another. Is not the sacrifice of the planet the ultimate testament to the quasi-divine power of capitalism, which flirts with the apocalypse as if it were no more than a one-night stand? However, it is the sacrificial dynamics of consumption that truly draws McGowan’s attention, the way in which the consumption of the commodity betrays a promise of transcendence not unlike the Christian Eucharist. McGowan argues that the pleasure in commodity consumption exists not despite the element of sacrifice but because of it; we enjoy the loss, the suffering that accompanies our acquisitions. This pleasure in sacrifice speaks to our longing for satisfaction, for an encounter that would shake us out of our equilibrium. It transforms this negativity into a lure through which the normal and normative reproduction of society takes on the air of the forbidden. Capitalism capitalizes on the gravitational pull of negativity that is foundational to human subjectivity.

It is tempting to think the pleasure involved in sacrifice in terms of a subject-object dialectic, according to which it derives from the sense of mastery involved in consuming the suffering of another. From this perspective, one could speak of the global North and global South as economies of sacrifice: the production of geographically-distributed wealth implies the production of masters and servants, the former comfortable in their fortresses of luxury goods, the latter exposed to the violence of degraded working conditions.¹ This frame is a scaled-up version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, including the latter’s analysis of the substitution of pleasure for agency, or the dependence of the master’s enjoyment on the slave’s labor. It is an analysis implicit in the Latin American critique of development discourse, in what Cedric Robinson names the Black radical tradition, and in a number of Marxist and postcolonial theoretical practices.² McGowan does not neglect this differential distribution of pleasure, but he does shift the emphasis of critique away from geographic inequalities and towards libidinal dynamics by arguing that sacrifice belongs to the subject as much as the object, that the economy of sacrifice has as much to do with surrender as mastery, that, in short, the ritual of sacrifice inheres in the act of consumption. McGowan’s bluntest formulation of this claim is as follows:

Capitalism thrives not because we are self-interested beings looking to get ahead in any way that we can but because we are looking for new ways to sacrifice ourselves. This propensity for sacrifice stems from a recognition that no satisfaction is possible without loss. Sacrifice does not exist just at the margins of capitalist society. It is omnipresent within capitalism and provides the key to its enduring popularity as an economic system.(94)

The idea of the self-sabotaging subject is a refrain in Capitalism and Desire, because, in its Lacanian framework, self-sabotage is constitutive of the subject. There is no subject without a sacrifice that breaks the continuity between pleasure and satisfaction, that interrupts the animal instinct in the name of the signifier, jouissance, or the (death) drive. If the subject exceeds the pleasure principle, it is only because sacrifice introduces negativity into the force field of positivity. The premise, here, is transhistorical. Sacrifice is constitutive of sociality as such. Capitalism changes the configuration of the ritual, but it is the basic facticity of sacrifice that makes capitalism possible, not vice versa. Sacrifice is the ritualization of the loss that is fundamental to human existence. The “enduring popularity” of capitalism is thus an effect of the way it channels loss through sacrifice, constituting a perpetual alibi for a pleasure that is difficult for capitalist subjects to admit.

The transhistorical role of loss in Capitalism and Desire gives the book a great deal of its critical power, but it also tends to reduce social and political practice to an existential drama. On the one hand, the mobilization of a dialectic between the transhistorical and the historical pledges the book to the speculative element in Marxism, enabling McGowan not only to pierce the veil of commodity fetishism but also to answer the question, “Why capitalism?” McGowan follows in the footsteps of Slavoj Žižek, among others, in dropping the language of false consciousness in favor of a logic of disavowal. It is not that capitalist subjects do not know the sacrifices entailed by the capitalist mode of production – after so many campaigns to raise awareness of the terrible working conditions in sweatshops, how can we not know? – but rather that they do not know that they know:

The consumer’s enjoyment of the worker’s sacrifice – the enjoyment of the value given to the commodity by the worker’s sacrifice of time – occurs through an act of fetishistic disavowal. For psychoanalysis, the fetish enables the subject to disavow the necessity of loss. It is a failure of knowing that implies another level of knowledge. In other words, fetishists don’t know that they know and work to ensure that they will never know this.(97)

The epistemic discrepancy of fetishism confuses necessity with contingency. It does not naturalize capitalism, instead it assumes the sheer contingency of capitalism, offering the comfort that capitalism is merely a product of historical efforts, that the losses associated with it could easily be reversed, if only we chose to do so. In asserting the priority of loss, its role as fundament of human existence, McGowan does not dehistoricize capitalism, but he does acknowledge its cosmic scope, the manner in which it has brought the stars down to earth. The question “Why capitalism?” loses its sophomoric qualities, because the question no longer assumes a teleological framework – capitalism as destiny/destination of human life. Instead, it serves as the beginning of an inquiry that leads to the stubborn fact, as well as the sticky strangeness, of human desire. This is what one might call the libidinal deduction of capitalism, an analysis that dispenses with the poststructuralist suspicion regarding causality and metaphysics, without jettisoning critical reflexivity.

On the other hand, there is an elision of social and political complexity that is arguably constitutive of this libidinal deduction of capitalism. McGowan’s critique depends on a reduction of phenomenal existence to an exemplification of commodity consumption. The paradigm of capitalism becomes “driving the car off the lot,” that is, the experience of “anticipated satisfaction” (“The joy of shopping lies in the interaction with a seemingly infinite number of promises of future satisfaction”), followed by inevitable disappointment, as sublime promise turns into “an ordinary object that falls far short of our expectations” (226). There is a certain truth to this perspective – after all, the capitalist drive to expand beyond its own limits can certainly be formulated as a desire to consume the world. However, this view leaves little room for a consideration of the ways that capitalist conditions include emergent social formations, the way that, for instance, the social cooperation organized by capitalism can change its valences, becoming the starting point for socialism or communism. Nor does it leave much room for considering the ways capitalism restructures itself in response to crisis, that is, for considering the specific ways in which capitalist institutions transform themselves in order to clamp down on resistance or revolution. It is not so much that these concerns disappear but rather that they become almost incidental or simplistic compared to the vicissitudes of desire. I am reminded of Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger in “The Idea of Natural-History,” namely, his argument that in Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, historicity emerges at the expense of history and the pursuit of authentic historical experience, requiring the debasement of natural history.

McGowan wants to recuperate an authentic experience of satisfaction from the empty promises of capitalism. He does not confuse this authentic experience with utopia, nor does he conceive of it as a resolution of contradiction. If anything, authenticity implies trauma, disruption, the shudder of jouissance. McGowan captures it best in his discussion of love:

One can never have the love of the other because one loves what the other doesn’t itself have. Even when the other desires us, something in the other remains outside our control. To subdue fully the otherness of the other and master it would effectively eliminate the other as lovable entity. … Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love’s authenticity rather than its absence.(184)

Love articulates negativity as an event.³ It introduces a break in the promissory trade of capitalism, a rupture in the circulation of the ever-deferred sublime. It is the moment of the Hegelian Aufhebung, provided that one does not imagine the sublation of capitalist social life as the achievement of equilibrium. Love is never easy. It pulls one outside of oneself, delivers one over to that which in another is irreducible to enjoyment. It demands surrender, shatters the ego. Love transforms sacrifice into the condition of possibility of a life, but this life does not imply health or well-being. Instead, it assumes the loss at the heart of the human. Love teaches us to live with loss, not to seek cheap substitutes for it.

The Point Is to Interpret It

Capitalism and Desire is, in many respects, an existentialism. It takes as its premise a negative anthropology, or an image of human nature in which loss, rather than some positive attribute, is the defining feature. It poses radical freedom as the fundamental project of human existence. Although McGowan never quite puts it this way, psychoanalysis becomes a means of reintroducing meaning into human life, even if that meaning involves assuming negativity as the essential condition of raising oneself above animal existence. In focusing on this drama of the subject, McGowan pushes back against the vitalist turn in much recent theory and criticism. He calls into question the reparative impulse that responds to injustice by searching after the conditions for a happy life, for life without injury. McGowan goes a long way towards making the case that life without loss is not only impossible but also undesirable. At least for human subjects, there is no satisfaction without loss, only the endless pursuit of pleasures in a metonymic drift without meaning. Moreover, this insistence on the value of negativity, on negativity as the condition of possibility of a meaningful – or liberated – life, issues a counterargument to the postcritical turn elaborated by Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, among others.⁴ Postcriticism has warned of the limits and dangers of critique, arguing that the negativity of critique deprives students and scholars not only of the pleasure of aesthetic and social experiences but also of the capacity for affirmation. Critical criticism, it seems, is deadening. It fails to take objects on their own terms, forcing them to become mere vehicles for contextual factors. In contrast, McGowan suggests that nothing is more deadening than the absence of negativity, that it is a lack of interpretation – a failure to get beyond the surface, to move past description into the realm of speculation – that forecloses satisfaction. Postcriticism has its pleasures, but is it really satisfying? All of this is to say that McGowan renews the practice of ideology critique by committing to the transhistorical role of loss, as well as the shattering force of satisfaction.

Although a great deal of critical prose has been dedicated to desire, Capitalism and Desire stands out for the way in which it rigorously distinguishes satisfaction from pleasure, salvaging a genre of desire irreducible to the equilibrium of the pleasure principle. The problem, however, is that the book is not abstract enough. This might seem a strange claim, given that I’ve argued that McGowan has a habit of reducing sociality to the play of a single structural opposition (pleasure versus satisfaction), but abstraction need not imply lack of complexity. As Louis Althusser argues so forcefully, theory is practice – theoretical practice – and, as such, it possesses its own nuances, its own rich ecology.⁵ McGowan’s serial analysis of cultural objects, everyday practices, and pro-market ideologies overshadows the relative autonomy of theory. McGowan touches on the perverse complexities of Lacan’s, Hegel’s, and Kant’s theories, but he does not provide that thick description of structures found in work by Kojin Karatani, Kiarina Kordela, and Samo Tomsic, among others. I find myself wishing for more elaborate inquiries into the transcendental structures of subjectivity, into the interplay between the linguistic dimension of the unconscious and the materiality of capitalist reproduction, or into the relationship between the scene of therapy and the scene of revolution. Put differently, Capitalism and Desire puts too much weight on interpretation as such. It valorizes the experience of getting beyond pleasure, of assuming the position of the analyst, but it does not spend enough time dissecting the operative concepts of interpretation or connecting interpretation to other practices. Interpretation risks becoming an end in itself.

At the same time, McGowan’s resolute commitment to interpretation should be praised for its therapeutic value. In a historical moment – call it the Trump era, the Anthropocene, or late, late capitalism – when the dreadfulness of capitalism seems so overwhelmingly obvious, McGowan wants his readers to train their speculative muscles to look beyond the fetishistic appearances of capitalism, to ask not simply how capitalism works but also why capitalism: Why does it have such a hold on us? Why is it still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? If I describe the value of this contribution to critical thought as therapeutic, it is because it opens up a scene of analysis – a theoretical and practical milieu in which to examine and work on desire, to reconfigure libidinal economies, to insist on the non-identity between pleasure and satisfaction. Capitalism and Desire leaves its readers dissatisfied, which is to say that it allows them to realize how truly miserable capitalism is making them. That is the book’s undeniable power.

Footnotes

1. Breu suggests this analytics through the concept of avatar fetishism.

2. See, for instance, Frank, Robinson, and Lowe – there are, of course, far too many examples to list.

3. McGowan’s valorization of love, as distinguished from romance, is close to Badiou’s classification of love as a truth-event, especially in In Praise of Love. Berlant, however, offers a much-needed complication of the valorization of love against romance, in Desire/Love.

4. Two prominent examples of the postcritical turn are Best and Marcus, and Felski. For critical responses to the postcritical turn, see especially Lesjak, Rooney, and Haines.

5. I am thinking especially of the essays in For Marx as well as Althusser’s contribution to Reading Marx.

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor. “The Idea of Natural History.” Telos, vol. 60, June 1984, pp. 111-124.
• Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster, Verso, 2006.
• Althusser, Louis, et al. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, Verso, 2016.
• Badiou, Alain, with Nicholas Truong. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush, New Press, 2012.
• Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Punctum Books, 2012.
• Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” representations, vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1-21.
• Breu, Christopher. Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
• Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.
• Frank, Andre Gunder. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. Monthly Review Press, 1967.
• Haines, Christian P. “Eaten Alive, or, Why the Death of Theory is Not Antitheory.” Antitheory. Palgrave, Forthcoming.
• Karatani, Kojin. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Translated by Sabu Kohso, MIT P, 2005.
• Kordela, Kiarina. Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology. SUNY P, 2013.
• Lesjak, Carolyn. “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism, vol. 55, no. 2, Spring 2013, pp. 233-277.
• Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015.
• McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia UP, 2016.
• Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. U of North Carolina Press, 2000.
• Rooney, Ellen. “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form.” differences, vol. 21, no. 3, 2010, pp. 112-139.
• Tomsic, Samo. The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. Verso, 2015.

Akshaya Kumar (bio)
Indian Institute of Technology, Indore

Abstract

Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this essay draws upon media history in South Asia to tease out the repackaging of stardom in a changing media ecosystem, which commands the celebrity function to be more flexible and more willing to mount increasing debt upon its diversifying palette. The rise of calculable creditworthiness and sophisticated systems of prediction thus securitize media portfolios, while de-risking the business at the production end and distributing risk further downstream. The essay shows how targeted advertising comes to reign over this digital network as its preeminent language and what its consequences might be for consumer attention.

Popular cinema cannot be understood without paying sufficient attention to its publicity economy. It is through strategic publicity that territories are consolidated, economic and technological scale are adjusted, proportionate orders of celebrity are deployed, and a consistent mode of address is offered through adequate narration in genre-specific vocabulary. The key challenge for popular cinema, after all, is that of urgency. Much like the news, film publicity is geared towards drawing the widest possible attention on an immediate basis. Just as news must argue a claim to newness and offer an imaginary of “our world” meticulously updated in newsworthiness, film publicity is designed to ensure that films are watched immediately. Unlike news, though, cinema is not essentially equipped to summon the moral conscience of the citizen-subject. For the appeal to urgency, therefore, popular cinema draws upon techniques from advertising.

This essay investigates the transformation of Hindi cinema along the axis of promotional economy—an economy that relies mainly on cable and satellite television. Elsewhere, I have argued that the emergence of multiplex malls and the entry of corporate capital led to the rise of genre films, which were able to contain and diversify the risk-prone dwelling of highly performative melodramatic stardom (Kumar, “Animated Visualities”). A battle thus followed between stardom and capital to regulate their counterparts. This essay attends to another aspect of the battle between the emergent digital network and computational capital. Via this battle, we witness the emergence of media portfolios in which risk is no longer a matter of speculation, for the media ecosystem develops sophisticated tools of prediction to measure creditworthiness, which increasingly becomes the definitive essence of stardom. Stardom is the most crucial aggregator of the media ecosystem, while also housing the assembly of advertising, risk, and scale within its body. The media industries deploy stardom to test, challenge, and consolidate their portfolios, but also to recalibrate the consumer profiling that helps them to fragment, consolidate, or abandon platforms and genres. Yet, it is in advertisers’ interest to reinforce hierarchical platform distinctions, address identified demographics, and monetize the product variously at different steps along the value chain.

As late as the 1990s, Hindi cinema deployed an illiterate villager in remote north India as a test case for its mass appeal. With the rise of systems of rating, scoring, and mining (or selling metrics as big data), the masses ceased to exist as a horizon. We are therefore trying to grapple with the reconfiguration of masses into data sets—consumer demographics mined for targeted advertising. Yet, a vast percentage of users in India remain outside the terrain of computational capital. This is why consumer demographics continue to depend on a mass projection component to realise scalability into the unknown. This explains the persistence of cinema across media platforms; at the same time, television has increasingly become the preeminent platform to address the masses. This essay is centrally concerned with the way in which cinema, having recruited television as an advertising platform, has become the meta-text of media industries.

The preeminent site of redistribution in the media economy is reality television, which has a twofold structure that fuses distinct media economies. On the one hand, it stands apart from mainstream celebrity circuits and offers its variance by foregrounding the “real” celebrities: emerging singers, dancers, models, comedians, and most crucially, child prodigies. On the other hand, this bracket of “real” stars is occasionally fused with its counterpart; film stars routinely appear to deliver critical judgment and appreciation for the “real” stars. The media economy thus expands by distancing but also fetishizing film celebrities. This self-serving ambivalence is the double-faced essence of reality television, which in effect multiplies the exceptional sovereignty of film celebrity and amplifies its popular appeal by creatively negotiating other media platforms. As a result, reality television has become the promotional index of the release calendar of the film industry. Film stars bring more advertisers to reality television, even as they advertise their own films, and they also promote/advertise lesser “reality” stars. We are thereby served the thrills of negotiating the uneven promotional terrain of an increasingly networked advertising campaign.

Most of the literature on algorithmic culture, however, gets trapped in the argument that big data and algorithms are tools hijacked by corporate giants. This does not reflect sufficiently on how algorithmic cultures are rooted in control and manipulation, whether of user/voter/consumer choice with targeted advertising in the open market, or via direct surveillance and regulation of benefits. We must acknowledge the role of public policy and infrastructural history in the shaping of specific markets, considering the political-economic bearings of their aesthetic precedents. This essay focuses, via comparative media history, on two key building blocks of media portfolios: attention and prediction, both central to the constitutive prowess of computational capital. Mining and programming data remain crucial tools to regulate, return, or redirect consumer attention, as does predicting behaviours by analysing classified datasets. Because social inequality and categories of communal self-identification play a crucial role in India, class-, gender-, and language-based classification would be irreducible to the psychographic segmentation that is more relevant in the West. Therein lies the relative inability of these tools to achieve the intended purposes, which complicates the subject of this essay: this is not a mere before-and-after story of the way computational capital has reconfigured Indian media, but one of mixed returns and substantial failures.

I argue that advertising has become the essence of the digital network, to which the stars owe their relative utility as well as their increasing power over the network. The old and the new media economies continue to persist within a film industry that has recruited media platforms as its promotional infrastructure. It could be argued that the crossbreeding between the Internet and digital media has led to two key attributes of the new media ecology: indexing and metrics. Both Google and Facebook reduce our social world by indexing it—simplifying through neat classification and offering easy, legible handles to a world ridden with complexities—and appending it with activity-inviting urgencies expressed in metrics, as Benjamin Grosser explains. Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s NewsFeed algorithms are the most powerful tools: they simplify and rearrange our media sensorium while trapping our attention, predicting our behaviour, and selling that data to merchandise brands as well as to political establishments (see Mager). On the other hand, already simplified user interfaces such as Twitter and Instagram are key forums in which to position celebrity, where the burden of metrics as self-promotion has led to what might be called the follower factories of the Influence Economy (Confessore et al.).

Denson and Leyda have theorized the shift towards an aesthetic that draws upon “gaming, webcams, surveillance video, social media, and smartphones” as post-cinema (4). In Hindi cinema, this aesthetic, at best, remediates the diversity of media ecosystems, thereby garnishing the melodramatic arc. It was once deployed to upscale the promotional economy via the star as superhero, which we now look towards. At nearly one hundred and fifty crore, Ra.One (2011) was the costliest Indian film made at the time of its production. Shahrukh Khan, a major star and co-producer of the film, went into promotional overdrive, logging in tie-ups with twenty-odd brands. Sony PlayStation launched a game console, Ra.One—The Game. The film merchandising also launched about fifty products, including toys, school items, apparel, caps, and even mobile solar chargers, handycams, netbooks, and a G.One tablet. Khan launched a YouTube channel as a one-stop destination for all promotional videos and special extras for Ra.One, and used Google Plus to interact with fans (Sengupta). In addition to the ritual presence at various TV shows and newspaper interviews, Khan’s promotion made use of Near Field Communications (NFC) technology on Nokia’s new smartphones, for which Nokia set up Ra.One zones at over four hundred Nokia Priority Partner outlets and select multiplexes. Smartphone buyers would get exclusive promotional content by tapping their devices on Ra.One NFC tags (Joshi).

The film recovered its expenses before the release by selling rights for distribution, satellite television release, and music sale apart from the telecast rights for its music launch, gaming rights, and brand tie-ups. “By the time [Khan] and his team were done, not one person in India needed to watch Ra.One to contribute to its success,” Sunaina Kumar writes. However, an exhibitor in western Uttar Pradesh did not even recover half the money paid on minimum guarantee. Ra.One was not an exception in this regard; major star releases run into profits via contracts even before they are shot. As many as twenty-five revenue streams have opened in the last decade, and music rights alone are distributed across radio, cable and satellite, the web, and mobile ringtones. Even if some of the reported numbers are unreliable (Ganti), they introduce us to a media ecology increasingly built on computation and prediction.

Stardom in the Digital Present

Why is stardom an important subject for our concern? In The Cinematic Mode Jonathan Beller argues that with the coming of cinema, capitalism began to monetize attention, working out an adequate mode of address for the post-Industrial Revolution subject. Crucial to the early film economy was the management of the star portfolio owned by the studios. The collapse of the studios in the postwar film economy gave rise to full-blown stardom, in which stars would command much greater autonomy and valuation. In India, however, popular cinema emerged as a mediating institution in which the sovereign authority of the state could be popularly reinstated via male stardom. The 1950s witnessed an alignment between state power and stardom—best manifested in the socialist figurations of Raj Kapoor—though it began to relent by the late 1950s. In this period, stardom held forth for passive revolution, arguing for democratic reforms of state institutions by popular will, propelled by the heady romance of nation-building. Unsurprisingly, this heady romance stoked much fervour across the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and North and Western Africa, where Indian cinema represented a counter-hegemonic narrative that contributed to Kapoor’s international popularity. This began to change radically after the 1970s, during what Prasad calls a “moment of disaggregation” (Ideology of the Hindi), where popular culture began to be occupied by the sovereign voice of the star as an outlaw, whose popular appeal was constituted by the despairing spiral of statelessness. By the mid-1970s, the star became capable of carrying enormous capital through an expanding film industry (Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema), and would earn its political-aesthetic legitimacy by defying the state.

This expression of political disaggregation was particular to north India. In the southern film industries, stardom remained an ally to state power for much longer, amplifying its capacity to account for the popular mandate. Yet, these hegemonic and counter-hegemonic temporalities alert us to a key economy of scale via which both capital and the state have historically addressed the nation in South Asia. In most other regional contexts, where either capital or the state has been the hegemonic constellation of authority, such an explosion of star-power in popular cinema has not emerged. As Vitali has argued in Capital and Popular Cinema, the successful convergence of the interests of capital and cinema in Hollywood hit a roadblock in the 1960s, when opportunities for capital investments in foreign productions emerged via co-productions, as in the case of Italy, which allowed producers to pump the profits back into more local productions. This process unleashed new lifecycles of radical capital, which was invested in popular cinema from the 1950s to the 70s outside America (where American capital was a key constituent element). In the case of Mexico, Vitali argues that in the 1950s, radical capital was allowed to rule in cinema because the Mexican state acted as a comprador state, “encourag[ing] industrial and financial interests, Mexican and foreign, to run wild, irrespective of long-term infrastructural and social considerations” (Capital and Popular Cinema 120). In this climate, horror cinema occupied the mainstream because short-term financial speculation, irrespective of industry’s long-term interests, became the overarching priority of capital.

Therein lies the relative uniqueness of the star system and scale in South Asia. In many parts of the world, the spread of American capital since the 1950s shaped the rise of genre cinema. Contrary to this, cinema in South Asia never fully set aside the political-aesthetic relevance of state authority to command the nation, an authority represented by male stardom.¹ India’s protected economy restricted the entry of American capital, prohibiting easy genrefication even if action genres thrived in certain low-budget segments (Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema; Prasad, “Genre-Mixing”). The resistance to this formal subsumption, in Marxian terms, conceded substantial ground to real subsumption only in the late 1990s, when genres emerged as the differential economy of neoliberal capital. Genre cinema, subsumed as it is under the aesthetic diversity of capital’s self-classifying force, has struggled ever since to surrender the aesthetic sovereignty of capital to stardom, as has been crystallized in Indian cinema.²

The case of South Asia opens up curious questions about stardom in relation to capital. While stars are nothing but a manifestation of the prowess of capital-form, the value they extract from popular attention on behalf of capital is not entirely handed over. In other words, the aesthetic-political vocabulary of stardom as sovereignty-effect became so powerful that it threatened to hold the “parent” economic constellation captive. In spite of being capital-intensive, when it is re-grounded not merely in the celebrity-function but also within the imperative of political representation, stardom simultaneously defies capital, slipping out of its control.³ While the manipulation and monetization of attention are central to capital’s relationship with media and its attendant grammar built around advertising, stardom is not merely a subset of this constellation. After all, the wider orbit of attention is not a mere by-product of industrial modernity—capital only tries to out-manoeuver the power relation by investing more authority in the consumer-citizen, as the subject to be persuaded. In other permutations of the attention economy, as in Indian cinema, the star may exceed the persuasive celebrity-function subservient to capital, instead restoring more authority in its icon and commanding the political community it represents. That is why the sovereignty-effect, integral to male stardom in India, and key to translating political inflections into performative ones, remains a key feature of the attention economy without submitting to the command of capital (Kumar, “Animated Visualities”). Unleashing computational capital, as I will show, makes a more qualified and sophisticated bid for capital’s management of stardom as a reliable advertising tool.

Until around the late 1990s, film stars were concerned with the purity of encounter via theatrical exhibition. With the onset of television dramas, minor television celebrities began to emerge. Radio presenters, television actors, news anchors, and journalists occupied segregated realms, even as they served varying modalities of celebrity. Media operated in relatively autonomous habitats; one could hardly shape the logic of another. Gradually, over a period of time, these islands began to merge (see Punathambekar). Within the digital present, things are no longer the same. Film stars appear on television, the Internet, and FM channels; television soap actors dance on reality shows along with celebrities of all hues. On major religious festivals, television soap operas go into delirious celebrity worship where film stars may promote their upcoming films by dancing to songs from those films. There are also dedicated reality shows, which are mere platforms for film promotion (Comedy Nights with Kapil, Big Boss, Comedy Circus, and several dance/music reality shows). The network modality refuses to let any media platform operate autonomously. Screens scattered across the media ecosystem, however, hold their autonomous contracts with other revenue streams. This diffuses the intensity of the older filmic encounter built upon scarcity and site specificity, thereby bargaining in favour of an aggregated, but differentially monetized, film economy. The filmic too has no claim to autonomy; instead it desperately tries to harness the entire screen spectrum. What sustains this graded circulation of filmic fragments?

The big story of Indian media has been told from a more comprehensive point of view, in relation to policy, labour, technology, and infrastructure (Athique, Indian Media; Athique, Parthasarathi, and Srinivas). However, my attempt is to look for the conceptual kernel of the media reconfiguration since the 1990s, in relation to the film industry. In the post-liberalisation era, the rise of music videos (MTV and channel V), advertising industry, and satellite television (particularly ZEE and STAR) made two vital inroads: i) they put together an expanding economy of which television was the keystone and which gradually manoeuvred cinema from a competitor to an ally; and ii) even as the film industry began to cultivate television and Internet as allied platforms, these platforms continued to pose the threat of stealing away revenue via informal distribution of cable networks and pirated disks. Between 1995 and 2005, cinema continued to reassess its location and mode of address within the media ecosystem, so that it could maintain a distinction while continuing to harness its competing media platforms. This double bind shaped cinema’s entry into what Beller calls computational capital, centrally concerned with adequate feedback systems anchored by television rating points (TRPs). In the resultant media space, the film industry learned to deploy stars as detachable yet representative publicity infrastructure, which it could loan to other platforms as key advertising tools.

In the past decade, film stars have hosted game shows and chat shows on television, and film music directors and choreographers have hosted and judged song and dance competitions on reality shows. Additionally, reality television cultivated an intermedia celebrity band in which modest film and television actors, models, politicians, musicians, or quirky online celebrities would come together. It is worth noting here how the televisual economy differed historically from the film economy. Television remained a platform for public broadcasting till the early 1990s. Various filmmakers who had struggled through the 1970s and 80s to make films measured by an alternative commercial scale switched to television. Collaborating with writers and actors aspiring to work outside mainstream commercial cinema, Hindi language content for the state broadcaster Doordarshan offered a fascinating mode of address and a new imagination of the public. The gradual entry of cable television through the 1990s further graduated television and its audiences to a self-sustaining ecosystem. However, owing to the vastly informal long-tail character of the distribution economy, a very small part of the revenues was brought back to the content producers, thereby compelling cable and satellite television to generate further advertising revenues. Even as the channels continued to expand and diversify, they remained heavily dependent on advertising revenues. In fact, channels would pay a significant carrying cost to the cable operators, so as to earn a privileged location on the bouquet they offered to customers. The intense battles between multi-system operators and cable operators have been shown to establish the gradual takeover of a long-tail enterprise by large corporate capital (Naregal, “Cable communications”; Parthasarathi, Amanullah, and Koshy, “Digitalization as formalization”; Parthasarathi and Srinivas “Networks of Influence”).

It was only after 2006 that the revenues from distribution exceeded those from advertising. It remains a notable landmark in the history of television, because the advertising-driven character of satellite television could now be reconfigured, at least in theory, around the subscribers. In Industrial Dynamics and Cultural Adaptation, Athique, Parthasarathi, and Srinivas note the highly fragmented value chain of distribution and the diffusion of advertising revenues across an increasing number of channels as key factors contributing to “the commercial compulsion to force a switchover from analogue to digital distribution” (152). In spite of the increasing digitalisation and the relative rise in the distribution revenues, however, the dependence across the channel portfolios upon advertising revenues—in correspondence with TRPs—remained unchanged, and not only for the Free to Air channels. In this climate, the stars signify the celebrity universe that overwhelmingly dominates primetime entertainment television, particularly on the weekends.

Before subscription revenue became significant, television had already figured out how to sell the consumers as the product to advertisers. The splintering of the mass horizon of Hindi cinema began in the mid-1990s—the climate in which television, already invested in a targeted address to the urban middle classes, corrected its ideological balance of content and advertising so that the two appeared to be a natural fit. While cinema, owing to its huge historical and commercial investment in the “unidentifiable masses,” struggled much harder to reorient its radar towards high-value consumers available in the multiplexes since the turn of the century (Athique and Hill, The Multiplex; Kumar, “Provincialising Bollywood?” 64-65), television expanded through the 1990s as the hotbed of cross-advertising. At the forefront of this orientation was music television—particularly MTV—which was the first deployment of television as a film promotion platform. The promotional possibilities opened up by music channels went on to shape the recruitment of television as a film promotion platform and to deploy it further as the site of cross-media alliances.

The popular singing reality show Indian Idol, based on the British show Pop Idol, broke through the popularity charts in 2004, and Big Boss, based on the British show Big Brother, followed up on its success. Television revenue for one-day cricket telecasts also shot up between 2001 and 2005. Even though reality television was the preeminent site of encounter between film stardom, advertising, and television, the recipe acquired in the process travelled further inwards to soaps. The prehistory of this emergent mode of address would indeed be routed through the emergence of an urban middle class audience in the 1980s and 90s, discussed at length by Punathambekar and Sundar in “The Time of Television.” But of course, the very first instance of integrating television within cinema’s promotional economy goes back to the earliest of Indian television in the 1960s and 70s—to Chitrahar, the longest running and once the most popular television program in India, which featured songs from newly released films. In the new millennium, television was repackaged towards a juridical imaginary distributed across a variety of formal variations, a neoliberal theater of suffering, binding popular governance with entertainment, as discussed in the case of reality television by Anna McCarthy (“Reality Television”). The landmark breakthrough arrived with Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin (2003-2007), which Roy (“Jassi Jaissi”) studies in rich detail to tease out the wondrous self-discovery—or makeover, as he calls it—of Indian television. Based on a supremely successful Colombian telenovela, the series about the makeover of an ordinary middle-class girl, Jassi, perfected the techniques of product placement, marketing events, triggering social media debates and innumerable product tie-ups, such as the books Jassi’s 7 Steps to Success and My Jassi Colouring Book, both in English and Hindi, as well as mobile phone games teaching managerial skills. Roy writes,

JJKN [Jassi Jassi Koi Nahin] definitely offered the sponsoring brands a new thematic space, hitherto largely unexplored by Indian soaps, to associate with Jassi’s public image of a young, simple and intelligent woman working in a key sector of global business with strong roots in ‘tradition’… The ‘Jassi’ brand has in fact a great appeal as it proliferates over a wide range of products: Jassi games by Nokia N-Gage and Ericsson, cellphone ringtones featuring the soap’s title music, the ‘7 steps to success’ and other books mentioned earlier, music albums, Jassi dress line by the designer chain Satya Paul, the ‘Kurkure’ advertisements featuring [actress] Juhi Chawla as Jassi… [Another] important strategy was inculcating popular ingredients: hit ‘item numbers’ from Hindi films, cameo appearance of the Hindi film hero Saif Ali Khan as the character he plays in the film Hum Tum, singers from the popular show Indian Idol, the detectives from the serial CID investigating Jassi’s alleged murder by Jessica Bedi, etc. In fact JJKN took the trend of a programme’s referring to other programmes on the same channel, pioneered by Star Plus, to a new height.(38-39)

Various flash mobs and India forums, websites containing daily updates flooded with discussions on the show’s progress, added further promotional frenzy. Jassi would also meet fans through Reliance WebWorld, where viewers could advise her. As Roy reports, they could also “tune in to Red FM in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata to advise Jassi. The best messages were selected by Red FM and played out across all their stations. The lucky winners were treated to an exclusive chat with Jassi herself through video conferencing organized by Reliance WebWorld” (41). At stake was a makeover of Indian television itself, as news television simultaneously witnessed a strategic alignment of editorial, sales, and marketing teams. Reporters increasingly covered the housing boom, new car launches, the availability of easy credit, and higher education to secure advertising from banks, automobile companies, and private colleges (Kumar, “The Unbearable”). Jassi’s makeover became an intense point of convergence: it was a proxy for not merely stylistic, but substantive transition to a consumer economy saturated with products, events, feedbacks, and endorsements cutting across delivery platforms. And evidently enough, advertising became the organizing principle of this economy as it spun relentlessly around the promotional wheel. Yet a network flourishing with promotional activity is also occupied with the problem of leakages.

The Ordering and Leakages of Value and Attention

In spite of its apparent horizontality, the digital network remains a carefully ordered system, which follows the gradient along the differential of capital and time. The value of a commodity, therefore, is proportional to the urgency raised by the publicity infrastructure. Value must then be created across time and platforms, so as to harvest graded consumer attention as per demographic profiling. The promotional campaign hierarchizes anticipation by withholding information and deferring the encounter with the commodity, monetizing the delays across platforms. The leakage is therefore a constitutive problem of the network, which is significantly threatened by a possible disruption of this order, as mandated by production and distribution strategies. The pirate network, seen as the preeminent threat, is one of those systematic disruptions against this ordering of value.

With the advent of computational capital, it is the hoarders of massive data, such as Google and Facebook, that are least perturbed by any leakages for they are in the business of monetizing free services for advertising. Smaller networks of the media economy are proportionately anxious, not so much about the leakage of content as about their inability to gather data on the pirate activity and monetize it with predictive systems. It is worth noting then that the most opaque systems, which constitute what Pasquale calls “black box society,” appear to provide maximum “freedom” and cannot be bothered about leakage. Pirate media, after all, also advertise the leaked commodity so as to recruit the pirate consumer onto the digital network, but independent productions greatly suffer because they are not integrated into the mining of black box console use and cannot sell it to potential advertisers for the next commodity iteration. It is therefore the anxiety of capital to regulate and order the process of value-extraction via anticipation and advertising that gave birth to the data-intensive regime of computational capital. Beller grapples with digital culture, which is central to the network modality, by arguing that it is predicated upon computational capital—a shift from image to code, which is to be understood within the broad thrust of financialization, thus making the screen/image programmable (“Informatic Labour”; “The Programmable Image”). Drawing Media Studies outside platform fetishism, Beller urges us to understand media platforms and technologies within computational capital. This requires him to expand on Marx’s idea of the commodity, which, he argues, could be “constituted through derivative forms (in all senses of that word) of enterprise and still be treated as the commodity-form by capital. What is effectively being priced is a social relation, one summed up in the idea of risk” (“The Programmable Image”). These derivative objects are produced in the “social factory” and sold on the “attention markets.” He adds:

Financial derivatives and digital media platforms—monetized on bank and shareholder speculation facilitated by attention metrics—are among the new calculi of value. They are not as different from the speculative leap into buying early commodity-forms as we may imagine. These digital metrics, media of risk management that are also modes of extending the logistics of quantification and valuation, emerge directly from and in turn facilitate new distributed forms of commodity production in the social factory.(“The Programmable Image”)

Computational capital produces value anywhere on the network navigated by the programmable image, which means that

at any moment along the circuit from monetized capital investment to monetized profit, a value productive transaction is possible—each movement or modification generates new data…there are today many more ways not to pay for labor. The labor of production is, in short, distributed across multiple sites: e.g., hundreds of thousands of software writers, tens of millions of historically devalued (mostly female, mostly Asian) hands, billions of screens attended to by billions of operator-functionaries such as ourselves, and finally the whole media-ecology and economy of images and information.

If we follow Beller, we can see that computational capital as the driving force behind data traffic across the platforms looms large over media that thrives on i) screen data accumulation, ii) user feedback loops, and iii) risk portfolios. Within this matrix, film represents the most capital-intensive commodity-form, where risk and attention markets are the most vigilant. The differential topology of the media landscape is anchored by its gradient against the film economy. The film stars’ pre-eminence is thus predicated upon this gradient, for they must appear to descend onto other media platforms as promotional agents, even as they hedge the risk invested in their pre-eminence.

The network is thus constituted by a differential scale of celebrity, fumbling for stability within the new calculi of value anchored by attention metrics and incessant promotions. This is best represented, according to Beller, through fractals—an expanding symmetry of geometric patterns with indeterminate dimensions. In other words, as we zoom into specific portions of the media network, the apparently simple topography expands and becomes increasingly difficult to grapple with.⁴ Contemporary media economy, therefore, rests upon the vitality of what Beller calls the fractal logic of celebrity (particularly ascendant on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube), constituted by the bridge between the commodity-form and the programmable image-form of the digital network.⁵

Securitization and Credit Scoring

Ivan Ascher also theorizes financialization to understand the stage where money in itself becomes a determinant of value. He conceptualizes a portfolio society in which a new division “separates those who are free to run the race from those who are free to bet on its outcome,” those whose credibility must be calculable, from those with the power to calculate (Portfolio Society 124). In this economy driven by the mode of prediction, portfolios come with the promise that risk can be decreased by diversifying holdings. The resultant shift towards portfolios reduces singular entities to their credit scores, which score credit worthiness, thus quantifying the risk that could be mounted upon them. Predictably then, new and multiplying asymmetries are regularly introduced into the system as the diversifying imperative slips in the ideological cul-de-sac: beyond a threshold, certain portfolios become “too big to fail.”

Once credit worthiness becomes the preeminent value, the labor in media markets is expected to raise its credit score by being available as debtors who carry the risk around. As “reliable” or credible carriers of risk prediction, stars tie capital to its own future, thereby making it calculable. They allow the network to hedge its risks while they are deployed as carriers of portfolios spread across fashion, travel, food, and merchandise, apart from media. Stardom thus appears in at least two separate brackets—let us call them low and high bandwidth stardoms. What has been described above is the former, while in the case of latter, the stars cross a certain threshold so that they become “too big to fail.” This is the stage when their credit scores rise so high that their own portfolio appears to be the superset within which their film stardom is contained. Typically, all major stars who qualify for the high bandwidth co-produce their films. They do not only remain the means to hedge risks, signify credit worthiness, and allow capital to predict its future—they firmly grip the entire supply chain. High bandwidth stars buy stakes in the film by investing their own capital, and promote the entire portfolio across platforms to raise their credit worthiness. In this way, high bandwidth stars end up alongside the corporate players playing the paradoxical debt-credit game, which Ascher describes thus:

the creditor finds himself in a position not only to extract interest from his debtors, but also to borrow (and bet) more money than he has lent—as if somehow by appropriating other people’s promise-making abilities he had become more credible himself.(“Moneybags” 14)

The Marxian analytic of the alienation of labor power does not sufficiently explain this. Within Ascher’s framework, however, neoliberal celebrities have increasingly little choice but to exercise their right to make promises, thereby making their probability available to others for gambling purposes. What Ascher does not fully account for, in our case at least, is the differential within. To put it more simply, the high bandwidth stars have a formidable portfolio, while the low bandwidth stars are on the diversified portfolios of production companies, which is why the former can yet gamble on the promise-making ability riding on their own person, whereas the latter surrender their probabilities to the companies for their speculative manoeuvers. The low bandwidth stars’ credibility does not matter much, provided that the company can score the credibility of its own portfolio. After all, it owns the necessary means of prediction—a comprehensive feedback loop including box office data, TRPs, social media “likes,” comments, shares and footfalls, and pilot studies conducted in carefully sampled key cities and towns, alongside “all the computing power and elegance of modern mathematical finance” (“Moneybags” 15).

The high bandwidth star manages to exceed the trap because he also has a certain means of prediction at his disposal. Through corporate firms and strategic deals struck with television and FM channels, production and distribution companies, web-based platforms, and the numerous brands that he endorses, the multifractal habitus of the star envelops, absorbs, and processes massive quantities of data to manage his own future. The “too big to fail” star is abundantly endowed to securitize intricate patterns of his celebrity and to combat the production studios if they happen to be stepping on his interests. The case of Ra.One discussed at the beginning could be a good example here. Khan, as the biggest star at the time, produced the film entirely via Red Chillies Entertainment. Running one of the longest publicity campaigns for nine months, the film publicity was also overwhelmingly dominated by Khan. Addressing every possible media platform and buying numerous campaign tie-ups, he extended his celebrity as the glue connecting the multifractal system carefully built over months. Yet, the most expensive Indian film of the time, released on the Diwali weekend in the highest number of screens, including then-unprecedented prints in Tamil and Telugu, was a box-office disaster.

The most elaborate promotional campaign did not make the film successful, but it provided a masterplan of securitization to the industry. By definition, securitization refers to an asset-backed investment that is secured by a collection of mortgages. Khan deployed his multifractal celebrity as the clinching asset to back a mind-boggling collection of mortgage-like tie-ups. As a result, the film remained successful entirely because of its vast portfolio. The key site of the loss it incurred was the only asset backing it all—Khan’s credit score. Ever since the failure, he could not secure any project of comparable size.⁶ The media portfolio of the film made it too big to fail, but his celebrity had its wings clipped because by multiplying his portfolio with that of the film, he amplified the predictions unmatched by the results. While the battle was won in the simpler bracket of profits over production cost, the compound rationale of the prediction economy cut Khan’s celebrity to size. As Beller would put it, computational capital triggers the universal Turing machine and adjusts the new calculi of value after every transaction, thereby recalibrating the credit scores of all sorts of agents.

If we were to consider, on the other hand, relatively smaller films, often released only in multiplexes, in about one-tenth the number of screens as Ra.One, their commercial viability depends on co-productions and media partners, apart from pre-sale of rights. Here, no one asset is usually significant enough to support the securitization of the project. Instead, the project is constituted by the campaign, which acts as an adhesive across fragments, only representing a small part of various portfolios held by small to large corporations. Hansal Mehta’s films featuring Rajkummar Rao, for example, are co-produced by five-odd production companies that diversify their portfolios via the film. Even if the film does not command a portfolio, it distributes risk among several small players whose own credit score would not lean too heavily on the film.

Alternatively, consider Yash Raj Films (YRF), India’s largest media conglomerate—the leading production and distribution company in India, and one of the largest in the world. With about twenty-five subsidiaries, YRF has its own music, merchandise and fashion labels, VFX studio, home entertainment division, televisaion production company, and units handling talent management, post production, licensing, and brand partnerships. YRF also has a subsidiary called Y-films, which produces and distributes films strictly for youth and has already released five web series and four feature films. As the owner of the most comprehensive portfolio possible, YRF is introduced on its website (www.yashrajfilms.com) as if it were the industry.

YRF has a portfolio with enormous risk-appetite. Its small films routinely fail at the box-office, even though the big budget blockbusters rarely do. The impact of small films on YRF’s own credit score being negligible, they nearly operate outside the credit score economy. In effect, their failure has already been accounted for and makes little to no difference to the vast portfolio of YRF. Even for a small experimental film with heavy risk of failure otherwise, YRF is the safest possibility of patronage. But even as its portfolio aggregates platforms, demographics, genres, and technologies, it remains a studio known for big budget romantic melodramas featuring major stars—an image that the company consolidated under filmmaker Yash Chopra through the 1980s and 90s and that it variously rehashes in its new productions. Celluloid classics are pitched as advertising masterstrokes, while new productions update the aesthetic configurations as per the analytics of the target demographic.

The Platform Question

In this last section, I would like to establish the extent to which various media are shaped by the public function they serve as platforms. Owing partially to their distinct histories within the media economy, media are not only constituted by their formal and aesthetic constraints, but also continue to uphold an ideological function. Television, for example, developed in India as a broadcast medium. Its intersection with middle-class domesticity further ensured that the state was built into the imaginary it offered to law-abiding citizens. This imaginary was not substantially overwritten by the emergence of cable and satellite television in the 1990s. Notably, while all Indian films have to be passed by a Censor Board for Certification, the censorship of television is far stricter. Films certified with an “Adult” certificate, for example, cannot be screened on television. Those with a “Universal” certificate go through further censoring that is often arbitrary and severe (see Jha, “The Manual”).⁷ Television, therefore, operates on a stricter contract with the state than does cinema.

The web, on the other hand, is taken to be an island of freedom, which is the main reason web series across the spectrum often include sexuality, ribaldry, abusive language, and intoxication. The wedge between television and the web therefore determines what is fundamentally an ideological separation mandated by state censorship and the threat as well as promise of mass media. Let us consider a recent web series distributed by Amazon Prime, Inside Edge (2017). The series is ridden with layers upon layers of securitizing moves. It speculates over the portfolio of the Indian Premier League—a multifractal system including celebrity formations in cricket, media, fashion, advertising, journalism, and big business, but also rumoured to be the hotbed of drug abuse, sexual indiscretion, illegal betting, and match-fixing. Multiplying a whirlwind of attractions, the series features semi-retired and struggling film actors alongside new entrants into the media complex. The series packages its own portfolio of securities, all with modest credit scores, that draws upon well-known scandals to maintain a generative relation to reported “reality.” In effect, however, the series reaffirms the pre-eminence of cinema within the media economy, in which T20 cricket has come to hold a seasonal spot.

For about a decade now, cable and satellite television have subsidized ventures into film. Films comprise nearly twenty percent of television content across languages. The sale of cable and satellite rights, which contributes heavily to low-budget experimental films, has been undergoing correction since 2013 (Ficci-KPMG; Jha “Satellite Rights”). The viability of smaller projects would be drastically reduced and the investments in such projects may gradually shift to web-based platforms. The bloated pricing of cable and satellite rights emerged on account of new channels “launching with the aim of acquiring films to buttress content or networks getting into a sort of bidding war over who bags the biggest film or the biggest star” (Jha). As is evident, then, high bandwidth stardom is responsible for driving the overall prediction both upwards and downwards, and is also key to the platform wars between web-based and television programming.

Before we conclude, however, attention must also be paid to the preeminent platform of the celluloid economy—the single screen theater, which remains vital to the measure of the box office valuation, even though the available means of prediction fail to fully account for these theaters. Operating on ad hoc agreements with local distributors, these estimated six thousand theaters—as opposed to twenty-one hundred multiplex screens—are still immensely relevant (Deloitte). While the low-middle budget films are not released in these theaters, the blockbusters unfailingly capture a large chunk of them. Even if a significant percentage of these theaters now rely on digital distribution, the ticketing is very often on paper and footfalls are under-reported. The vast majority of single screen theaters are located in the southern states, where the array of regional cinema stars and their competitive fan clubs have a long history. Taking this into account, we encounter the limits of computational capital. Even as attention metrics gradually take over, we must not overlook the persistence of the old within the new.

Conclusion

This essay has recounted, via comparative media history, how the film industry in India reconciled with the rapid growth of satellite television, recruiting it as a promotional platform, and thus forging together a media economy in which the film star aggregates the digital network as a constitutive outside, as the weekend exception that holds together the everyday celebrity horizon of the promotional economy. While corporate capital and stardom evolved as competing agents trying to regulate their counterpart during the post-liberalization maturation of the film economy, this essay has argued that tools of prediction consolidate and support aesthetic-political modalities, while content and layouts are remediated across media networks.

Often, however, digital and web-based media are taken to be interchangeable. This is misleading to the extent that the digital takeover of old media industries has been a drive towards formal subscriptions (Parthasarathi, Amanullah, and Koshy, “Digitalization as Formalization”), whereas web-based media navigate the realm of “free” user activity, mined for targeted advertising. The wedge between subscription-and advertising-based revenue models requires closer assessment. The modest growth of Netflix and Amazon Prime alongside the rise of “independent” platforms (Hotstar, ALT Balaji, Voot, TVF, Arre) might suggest that the media industry wants to exit the promotional superhighways to develop subscription-based content. However, the battle over platforms should not distract us from the aggressively embedded advertising within the emerging content. The inability to exit the promotional superhighways marks the peculiar destiny of media in the time of computational capital, which also resonates with the destiny of billions who are trapped in the self-promotional frenzy of social media, where one wilfully deposits one’s private lifeworld into networks with porous boundaries.

The preeminent distinction between advertising and subscription-based media is that the former relishes the openness of the network whereas the latter seek a strategic isolation from it. Suspended between the two modalities, the digital network, with its embedded tactics of control and cross-advertising, remains a key site to negotiate a new deal between the private and the public. Regardless of the threat of data theft, the thrill of selling one’s privacy in controlled public-private environments—supposedly, on one’s own terms—allows the consumer a distinct resonance with the celebrity-function, itself an outcome of surrendering privacy for increased public attention. The media network, drawing its cues from the same, has increasingly become a pride parade of celebrity posturing, unwittingly intensifying the war cry of neoliberalism. Consumer attention is trapped within its deceptively shape-shifting ecosystem, where event, content, celebrity, merchandise, and “reality” are routinely camouflaged and cross-dressed.

Algorithmic cultures in the media economy enable compound, integrated, and recursive camouflaging. The consumer is offered a new deal—between subscription and promotion, between products and services—with a blurred horizon. We are thus invited to dwell in a habitus where the consumer is the only stable product. The consumer’s choices are closely computed to reinforce and amplify the predictive systems, while everything else appears to be a collage of promotional interests. The split subject could therefore only lay indirect claim to itself via a portfolio of interests. The debt-carrying capacity of the credit-scored consumer must be underscored by the aesthetic-political profiling of his/her world.

To confirm the grim future of media networks, we must revisit the case of news, because the news business has not only lost its grip over what is newsworthy—what is news or instead, what is not news—but has also become subservient to advertising. When both the credible and the incredible offer relatively equal quotients of newness, the sheer volume of labour spent in making news credible forces it down the urgency ladder. The marketability and the scalability of the incredible as news—a news-advertising hybrid unleashed by the news factories playing with attention, computation, capital, and predictions—has therefore reduced credible news to mere liveness: the event as its bare self, immediate, transparent, and pleading for attention towards its truth-claim (Kumar, “The Unbearable”). In the midst of this, what has anchored the ethical cache of news is actually the spectre of the unidentified masses, who, it seems necessary to believe, must value the analytical truth.

Psychographic classifications and behavioural data mining, however, break down even that last layer of doubt, which has perennially held together the foremost argument for truth-claims. The collapse of that spectre leaves every information vulnerable to computational capital and targeted advertising. Without the “protection” of the horizon of the masses, computational capital hacks the social code and reassembles it as interest-group clusters with a keen eye to their vulnerabilities, serving the truth with an “appropriate” dressing. What confronts the media after credit scoring, after the systematic disaggregation of the invaluable horizon of unidentified masses, is quite worse. Computational capital targets algorithmically what capital does via direct advertising; while both are deeply invested in multifractal stardom, the former is significantly more efficient at stripping stardom down to its celebrity-function via portfolios, predictive systems, and the differential interiority of the network.

Footnotes

1. While it is possible to see action cinema as the dominant genre in India, such classification reveals far too little. In Hindi Action Cinema, Vitali, for example, establishes the debt of Italian Peplums in the popular Hindi films featuring wrestler Dara Singh. While these are wrestling films that highlight muscularity and strength, such features were mounted upon a popular genre template in Madras-based film production: folklore films, often narrating the return of the abandoned but rightful heir of the throne via the popular will of the masses. Action films across the spectrum tend to be far more contemporary in their styling, and yet it would be misleading to overlook that they are re-grounded in a “local” aesthetic configuration.

2. This essay focuses on male stardom in Indian film industries, reflecting its primacy. While female stars tend to have significantly shorter lifecycles and are entrusted with substantially less advertorial attention, several of them enjoy similar privileges across the network.

3. The most eccentric of stardom’s achievement has been discussed by Prasad in Cine-Politics, a historical-theoretical investigation of how certain stars of the early post-independence era went on to acquire enormous political surplus in southern Indian states, with two of them even remaining chief ministers of the respective states over multiple terms.

4. An aspiring model on Instagram could, for example, appear in full control of the libidinal economy of the platform. Apparel brands and budding fashion designers would rent her body for advertising, for she appears “untainted” by celebrity. However, someone else affording the same “lifestyle” could flaunt it without any career aspiration, appearing within the same (fractal) pattern of celebrity-advertising-fashion-corporeality. The indeterminate dimensionality and expanding symmetry of fractals within the network thus become almost recognizable, but not quite.

5. Playback singers for film songs, like Ankit Tiwari and Neha Bhasin, whose corporeality had been hidden, now run YouTube channels to reclaim their celebrity. They can feature in their music videos and collaborate with fashion designers, actors, and choreographers, seeking offers for live concerts and other events.

6. In a move to offset such damage, when actor Salman Khan’s Tubelight (2017) did not deliver on market predictions, he returned the distributors’ money (60 crores). Tamil star Rajinikanth did the same after the relative failure of Lingaa (2014). The small distributor, without any means to hedge his risks, is thus compensated as a goodwill gesture. Khan thus restored trust in his own creditworthiness by going against the logic of financialization.

7. It is not uncommon for parents in small-town India to forbid their children to watch films in theaters, but then to allow them to watch the same films on television later. While there are other parameters at stake, the practice does indicate a differential social contract with media platforms.

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Isabelle Parkinson (bio)
Queen Mary, University of London

Abstract

This article analyzes the failure of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) to fulfil the critical action it claims to achieve through curation. Deploying Agamben’s concept of the apparatus, the article looks beyond the editors’ claim that curation enables an avant-garde resistance to the canonizing force of the anthology form, using data visualizations to render visible Against Expression‘s covert enactment of the canonization it claims to avoid. In doing so, the article also questions the potential for curatorial practices to represent any real challenge to the status quo, given curation’s current function as a primary apparatus of the market.

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing appeared in 2011, when the mode had gained international prominence as an influential strand of “innovative” or “avant-garde” literary production.¹ Situated alongside other contemporary publications such as Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius (2010), and Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing (2011), Against Expression consolidates the arguments for the significance of conceptual writing as a literary category. For the editors, however—in keeping with their characterization of conceptual writing as avant-garde and so resistant to the dominant culture and cultural domination—Against Expression is also an attempt to problematize the anthology form by deploying détournement strategies of appropriation and repurposing.² In their wide-ranging discussion of the American anthology tradition, Joe Lockard and Jillian Sandell describe the kind of anthologizing that Against Expression seeks to challenge:

By spatializing and historicizing bodies of knowledge into meaningful categories, anthologies consolidate new or existing canons of literature. The organization of materials in anthologies often implies a telos of development, and the anthology comes to embody a collective bildungsroman. (242)

The editors of Against Expression want to resist the canonizing, teleological function that ratifies a dominant narrative, instead presenting their work as an act of curation analogous to the literary practices of conceptual writing that reframe, decontextualize, or juxtapose existing cultural artefacts to generate a new set of meanings. This mode of meaning-making operates through action in and on the cultural sphere, mutely revealing rather than directly articulating a critique of dominant cultural, social, and political forms. Meaning is generated in the knowledge of this process; thus, Against Expression offers a dismantled version of the anthology as a practice of curation that lays bare its own processes to reveal itself as critical action.

Rather than succeeding in this endeavour to resist canonization, however, Against Expression in fact activates it, as demonstrated by the publication of a number of subsequent anthologies. In 2013, Norton produced a new edition of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, which represents just the kind of canonizing, developmental mode Dworkin and Goldsmith claim to problematize and includes twenty-two of the authors represented in Against Expression (Dworkin and Goldsmith among them and prominently featured in the preface and introduction). In 2012, Les Figues Press published I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (edited by Caroline Bergvall), a direct response to Against Expression‘s version of conceptual writing. In 2015, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America came out from the University of Alabama Press (edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey). In the same year, Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK was published by Reality Street (edited by Emily Critchley). What I Say is the second volume of “the anthology project that began with Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone,” and Out of Everywhere 2 is a follow-up to the 1996 publication of the same name (edited by Maggie O’Sullivan). Although they don’t respond directly to Dworkin and Goldsmith’s anthology, these two publications reflect anxiety about the potential marginalization of some writers in Against Expression‘s endorsement of a distinct form of innovative poetry. On the whole, the succession of “revisionist” anthologies evinces a conviction that Against Expression reproduces one of the most significant outcomes of canonization: the exclusion of women and minority writers. This wave of anthologizing therefore begs the question: why has Against Expression produced an effect in the cultural sphere that so roundly contradicts its intention?

To answer this question, some theorization of the formal and editorial possibilities of the anthology is necessary, and I want to use Agamben’s notion of the apparatus as a way of conceptualizing a genre that remains undertheorized.³ In “What is an Apparatus?,” his 2006 gloss on Michel Foucault’s “decisive technical term,” Agamben characterizes the apparatus (dispositif) as a “network” established between elements in “a heterogeneous set” that includes “discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on,” and “appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge” (3). In Agamben’s development, Foucault’s original “heterogeneous set” is broadened to include “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (14). From this broader starting point, Agamben’s discussion extends Foucault’s theory by drawing on Heidegger’s concept of installation: the “gathering together of the (in)stallation [Stellen] that (in)stalls man, this is to say, challenges him to expose the real in the mode of ordering [Bestellen]” (qtd. in Agamben 12). Agamben defines “installation” as the function of the apparatus. In his formulation, installation is the result of the meeting of the “two great classes”: “beings” and “apparatuses.” For Agamben, “living beings are incessantly captured” in the apparatus, and the engagement—the installation—of living beings in the apparatus creates the “third class, subjects” (14). Thus, subjectivity is defined as a process of constant installation, the capture and recapture of the living being in the apparatus as it moves from one form of engagement to another. As well as broadening its scope, Agamben also makes the definition of “apparatus” narrower and more specific. His example of the mobile phone indicates that he uses the term to denote individual instantiations (that is, apparatuses rather than “the apparatus”), junctions at the intersection of a number of vectors that install the subject as one nodal point in the network. This development of Foucault enables the analysis of an object in terms of its function as apparatus, and provides a framework for discussing the forms and processes of the subject’s installation in the system it intersects.

The literary anthology is a significant object of analysis on Agamben’s terms because it operates at the intersection of knowledge and power and across multiple vectors: as discourse, as institution, and as a method of distribution that circumscribes, validates and manages an area of knowledge. Agamben’s ideas are especially germane to Against Expression because the practice of conceptual writing is itself one of denaturalizing, a laying bare of the apparatus. One of the primary functions of the conceptual work is to expose the ways in which knowledge and power intersect in the construction of the subject.⁴ Dworkin and Goldsmith’s desire to confront the anthology as such is consistent with the defining mode of the conceptual writing they anthologize and define as the contemporary manifestation of the avant-garde. Indeed, this practice (of revealing the processes of subjectification) forms the basis of their assertion that the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century avant-garde has been subdued or repressed by the hegemony of the mainstream lyric that naturalizes the subjectivity (in Agamben’s terms) constructed in the capture of the “living being” in the apparatus.⁵ Because of the overarching emphasis on mode, the conceptual writing movement can claim a resurgent avant-garde position. For Dworkin and Goldsmith, its function is to lay bare both its place in the “network” of Agamben’s apparatus, and the field of literary production as such in relation to the broader cultural and socio-economic landscape. Conceptual writing is avant-garde because it ruptures the existing paradigm by drawing attention to it, thereby breaking the unspoken rule of collusion: the “forgetting” of the truth of its constructedness that enables a writer to produce work within the apparatus. This forgetting is concisely characterized by Dworkin’s description of the typical contemporary work of literature as “the hundred-thousandth lyric published this decade in which a plainspoken persona realizes a small profundity about suburban bourgeois life” (xxxix). In Dworkin’s caricature, the very act of writing upholds and obscures those social and cultural constructions challenged by the avant-garde. The lyric form in particular is highly problematic for conceptual writing because it presupposes a sincere subject position and an authentic voice that expresses something genuinely felt (hence, the anthology is “against expression”).⁶ Dworkin’s ironic alliteration emphasizes the qualities of this position: “plainspoken,” “persona,” “profundity.” His critique of contemporary literary production is also a critique of the institutionalized position it occupies, reflects, and perpetuates, indicated by the reference to “suburban bourgeois life”: a representation of its passive assimilation into the bourgeois worldview and its attendant institutions. The relevance to Agamben’s apparatus is apparent: the naturalization of the subject position as such is the function of the contemporary literature Dworkin critiques. In this paradigm, the work of conceptual writing is to denaturalize the subject and reveal the methods of its construction. To keep faith with this defining practice, and to resist the dissolution of the reader into a state of unexamined and docile subjectification, Against Expression must also therefore draw attention to its own construction and constructedness.

Dworkin and Goldsmith attempt this denaturalization by characterizing Against Expression as an act of curation, a self-reflexive practice that enables a critical engagement with its material. Curation has arguably become the primary cultural practice of the twenty-first century, moving beyond the cultural sphere to represent one of the main modes of social life—from the curatorial turn in journalism through social media to education.⁷ As art historian Terry Smith argues, “curating is everywhere being extended, encompassing every kind of organising of any body of images or set of actions” (17). In tracing the development of curation as a cultural practice in visual and especially in conceptual art, Paul O’Neill’s The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) starts with the historical avant-garde (for example, Dada, Surrealism and constructivism) and ends in the 2010s, when “discursive, pedagogical and dialogical approaches to exhibition production are becoming more prevalent.” For O’Neill, curation can be “used as a means of contesting the critical and aesthetic autonomy of art and the mediation of aesthetic value”; he picks out as exemplary those acts of curation where “the curatorial framework and its structural contestations are made more manifest” (129). Against Expression follows this understanding of the role of curation in contesting and making more manifest the relations of power and knowledge. Dworkin’s introductory essay on “The Fate of Echo” recognizes that “the paratext always suggests a perspective from which to read,” and explicitly takes hold of the paratextual element of the apparatus to present it as the embodiment of a self-conscious argument (xxiv). He is also concerned that, in resistance to the reifying potential of the anthology, Against Expression does not represent a definitive statement or a canon. He presents the anthology as an extension of the online UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing, whose “curatorial premise” is to “look beyond received histories and commonplace affiliations” (xxiv). This claim aligns Against Expression‘s curatorial practice with the utopian practices of the 1960s, when “curators were beginning to make visible the mediating component within the formation, production and dissemination of an exhibition” (O’Neill, “Curatorial Turn” 13). Dworkin’s critique of “received histories and commonplace affiliations” also resonates with O’Neill’s characterization of the shift in curatorial practice in the 1990s, when the “ascendancy of the curatorial gesture … also began to establish curating as a potential nexus for discussion, critique and debate” (13-14). Like these art curators, Goldsmith and Dworkin speak critically from within the “institution”⁸—the universities of Pennsylvania (Goldsmith) and Utah (Dworkin)—and Against Expression likewise claims a critical position on established canons at close range, temporarily assembling a series of texts to offer a consciously-constructed argument for literary affiliation that challenges established literary and art histories. The claim to an overt composition and the foregrounding of the act of curation appears to get around the problem of the anthology’s authority by treating it explicitly as a temporary assemblage that is in itself a part of the emergence of the category. Dworkin characterizes his own activity as “assembling the present collection” (xli). As he says,

This anthology documents the explosion of publications since the turn of the millennium under the sign of the conceptual … to offer a snapshot of an instant in the midst of an energetic reformation, just before the mills of critical assessment and canonical formation have had a chance to complete their first revolutions.(xliv)

In other words, the anthology seeks to recognize the category without fixing it, without contributing to its authorization. Dworkin’s diction—”snapshot,” “instant,” “midst,” “energetic”—indicates that the anthology is not definitive, but is rather an immediate, temporary sketch of a phenomenon as it moves. In order to differentiate itself from the authorizing or textbook anthology, Against Expression also defines itself against the activity of canonization in the contrasting image of the “mills”: weighty, destructive and inexorable machines that process the original practices through the culture industry’s discourses and institutions.

Ironically (and tellingly), the canonizing function of the anthology that Dworkin and Goldsmith wish to resist is enacted in the 2013 Norton Postmodern American Poetry, in which they both appear. Editor Paul Hoover denies the possibility that conceptual writing can or should represent a challenge to the continuum of literary history, asserting that “For all the triumphal claims of conceptualism, no one is drowned but Icarus and the ship of history sails calmly on” (lvi). He follows this up with a reminder that “History determined that Rae Armantrout, an experimental lyric poet and close observer of human experience, won the Pulitzer Prize for 2010” (lvi). Hoover’s inclusion of Dworkin, Goldsmith, Place and Fitterman’s work in an anthology that repudiates both conceptual writing’s rejection of the lyric form and its resistance to institutionalized literary histories is problematic, particularly given conceptual writing’s attention to modes of production and distribution as its defining concern. As Place and Fitterman put it, in conceptual writing practices, the “primary focus moves from production to post-production. This may involve a shift from the material of production to the mode of production, or the production of a mode” (Notes on Conceptualisms, 16). The anthology as such is very much a “mode of production” that, in ratifying a version of literature, is also “the production of a mode” that Against Expression wants to both expose and counter. The explicit function of the Norton Postmodern American Poetry is to canonize, periodize, and legitimate what Hoover calls “the ‘other tradition’” (xxviii). This function is unequivocally articulated in the preface and introduction. Hoover celebrates the achievement of the first edition of Postmodern American Poetry (1994) in “canonizing new practices such as language poetry and honouring the avant-garde in general”; establishes a historical model that eternalizes and assimilates innovation by declaring “as happens with every generation, the new wins the day and the broader writing culture is altered by its theories and practices”; and asserts the criterion of newness as the primary measure of value in claiming that “in 1994 the newest poetics was that of language poetry. Today the new is represented by conceptual poetry, Newlipo, cyberpoetry including Flarf, and the postlanguage lyric” (xxxvii). Hoover places this canon of the “other tradition” in the context of a historiography of supersession and so justifies the new edition as an extension of the original’s historical parameters. In this way, the logic of the avant-garde is assimilated to the model of the canonizing anthology. Moreover, his triumphant conclusion that “the book was a great success in its first trade season and became the classroom standard for teachers and students” presents problems for conceptual writing in particular, invested as it is in the production contexts of texts as the site of critical intervention (xxviii). The easy assimilation of “trade” and “the classroom standard” into the discourse of avant-garde cultural production appears to signal the failure of the avant-garde to challenge the status quo. Hoover resolves this contradiction by accepting institutional validation as a criterion of value for the avant-garde. Against Expression tackles it by using a practice of curation that enables Goldsmith and Dworkin to keep faith with the resistant project of conceptual writing without capitulating to the discourses it critiques.⁹

Against Expression deploys a number of paratextual devices to carry out its critique. First, it repurposes a common feature of the anthology: the headnote. Rather than introducing the author and offering a potted history of their life, work, and activity on the literary scene, the headnotes in Against Expression present an argument for the work’s inclusion. The traditional form of the headnote overwritten by Against Expression can be seen in Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry, in keeping with its function as a periodizing, canonizing anthology. Hoover’s headnotes are written in full, formal sentences, and are generally structured to formulate a literary-historical biographical narrative. The entry for Charles Bernstein—who is also included in Against Expression—begins by noting his date of birth, where he was born, that he attended Harvard University, and that he “studied with the philosopher Stanley Cavell,” offering a biographical precis that emphasizes his relationships with an important institution and an important man. Hoover’s assertion that Bernstein was “The leading theorist of language poetry” reflects the discourse of hierarchy that is a common feature of the headnotes in this anthology (517). The final paragraph details his involvement in establishment production contexts and his working relationships with other editors and academics, consolidating the emphasis on institutional legitimisation and moving Bernstein from his role in a radical poetry movement to his position in academia, following a narrative of development. The headnote for Bernstein in Against Expression operates very differently. Formally, the style is much looser and more irregular, as in this very long and unwieldy sentence, an asyndetic list jammed with information and riddled with parenthetical asides:

In addition to the Inkblot Record, “I and The” also recalls less procedural works based on restricted or specialist vocabularies: Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems (composed in the semaphore of the maritime International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations); Aaron Kunin’s translation of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” into the 170 words of Kunin’s own private sign language (“You Won’t Remember This,” The Mauberly Poems [New York:/ubu Editions, 2004]); Jackson Mac Low’s The Pronouns and CK Ogden’s translation of Joyce (both of which confine themselves to the 850 words of BASIC English) and – perhaps closest to Bernstein’s poem – Laura Elrick’s “First Words” (sKincerity [San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2003]) and Kit Robinson’s Dolch Stanzas (San Francisco: This Press, 1976).(88)

Rather than offering any sense of development, either literary-historical or biographical, the sentence moves across time in a dynamic engagement with a swathe of texts connected only by the argument of the sentence that gathers them. Moreover, the lack of attention to historical context is reflected in the fact that half of the texts mentioned are undated. Instead, Bernstein’s works are described by referring to conceptual writing’s varied and historically disparate practices and precedents, and the selected examples suggest how these practices might be drawn together—that is, as a working hypothesis rather than a definitive statement. The use of listing and parentheses enhances the feeling that the anthology is a temporary assembly of comparable practices. These techniques are employed in all the headnotes, implying that the selections in the anthology are not fixed, definitive, or authoritative. In this way, Against Expression seeks to resist the hegemonic relations of power and knowledge represented by both the canon and the academy, the two institutions implicated in Dworkin’s wish to evade “canonical formation” and “critical assessment.”

The “curatorial premise” borne out in the headnotes also shapes the other prominent paratextual devices deployed to counteract institutionalizing forms or processes. First, the anthology is organized by author in alphabetical order. As well as echoing the many examples of conceptual writing that use the alphabet to order material or as a constraint, this creates a levelling effect because it randomizes the sequence in which the authors appear.¹⁰ Second, there is no indication in the contents page of publication dates, nor does the page say when the authors were—or are—writing. The absence of any indication of their chronological relationship becomes an overt declaration of resistance to ideas of development or periodization, so the contents page looks like a refusal to offer a genealogical account of the category. In the baldest interpretation, it embodies a refusal to engage with literary history at all, providing instead a decontextualized field of works connected only by their relevance to the category of “conceptual writing.” In addition, so many writers are included, and so many more are mentioned in the headnotes, that the impression is of a levelling inclusiveness determined only by a general category. This is an equalizing field constructed—or deconstructed—out of a flattening of both history and hierarchy.

Despite its disruptive techniques, however, the failure of Against Expression to trouble relations of power and knowledge is revealed in the success of its canonization, as reflected in its editors’ inclusion in the Norton and by the production of those subsequent anthologies that so quickly read it as another example of cultural domination and exclusion. The reasons it fails have to do both with the inescapabilty of specific aspects in the mode of anthologizing, and with the fragility of the political commitment offered by the practice of curation. Dworkin’s desire to present a seemingly immediate, temporary, and authentic record of “tendencies” suggests that, in this anthology, the material is not mediated in the same way as in an authorizing anthology. In fact, this presentation serves to underplay the activity of selection and combination necessary to produce any anthology. It points to a significant aporia in Against Expression as a whole, one that is marked perhaps most distinctly in the unresolved contradiction in the claims that it is both a “snapshot” and an “argument.” The anthology represents an uneasy and compromised adoption of the curatorial mode O’Neill celebrates, evident in the tension between the apparently objective documentation of the “snapshot of emerging tendencies” and the declaration of a subjective project to construct a category that actively “reframes” literary history. Against Expression is unable to keep faith with the demystification it promises, withdrawing it at the moment of articulation in convoluted expressions of the editor’s agency. Rather than foregrounding and laying bare their choices and their implications, the paratextual elements of this anthology obscure those choices and the role they play in installing the reading subject in the network of meanings they embody.

Using methods of data visualization, we can examine the other, less overt paratextual features that mediate the reader’s engagement with the writers and the texts in the anthology and construct a representation of conceptual writing as a movement. Visualization allows us to trace the vectors and networks in the apparatus that are not in plain sight, but play a significant role in regulating the reader’s agency. These elements are arguably more significant in the “installation” of the living being precisely because they are hidden; they do not work at the conscious level and so deny the reader the autonomy that seems to be offered in the foregrounding of Against Expression‘s intervention in knowledge production. Beginning with the question of canonization, a dataset can be gathered from the paratextual apparatus—the introductory essays and the headnotes—in order to trace how contemporary writers are networked into the category of avant-garde poetics. I focus on the patterns created by the frequency, placing, and juxtaposition of author names, unavailable on a single reading but emerging gradually over repeated and variable engagements with the text. In the reader’s experience of Against Expression, the patterns of repetition and combination of author names encourage the reader to “know” that some writers are influential, significant, or connected. The more names an author is associated with, the more likely the reading subject is to perceive them as a prominent influence, nodal point, or typical practice (given that the headnotes reference “like” practices). A canon certainly does materialize when the data is visualized as the totality of underlying patterns of influence and hierarchy created in the headnotes and essays. Attending to the patterns of affiliation (who is named, in relation to whom, and how often), we can plot these relations as a network of names (see Fig.1).¹¹

Fig 1.
The network of names in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Shapes represent the author’s gender: circles = male, triangles = female. Colours are randomized.

The visualization follows the flattening of history that the anthology achieves when it decides not to date the authors, instead presenting us with the system of associations created by the references to those authors throughout the text. In the map, arrows “out” denote the names associated with those writers in their own headnotes, and arrows “in” denote references made to them in the headnotes of other writers.¹² The way these names are selected and combined through cross-reference and association reflects a process of reciprocal identification: Dworkin and Goldsmith draw conceptual writing into the category of the avant-garde by constructing a network of mutual validation. The twenty-first-century writers are therefore legitimized in this underlying network both through their connections with earlier writers and in their associations with each other. Some figures are prominent, and some are more marginal. Stephane Mallarmé, Andy Warhol and John Cage, and 80s Language poets Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman—with lots of arrows “in”—are given greater prominence as central influences often recognized in other writers’ headnotes. These figures generate their own distinct yet connected “spheres” of influence. Contemporary writers Nathan Austin and K. Silem Mohammad—with many arrows “out”—have other writers drawn more tightly into clusters around them, which presents them as conduits or networking figures. The network plot follows the explicit remit of the anthology, making a case for the status of conceptual writing by connecting it to the poetry of the earlier iterations of the avant-garde. What becomes visible is the active construction of a literary field where authors are placed in relation to each other in an imaginary atemporal space of positions. While Gertrude Stein occupies a position of influence parallel to Marcel Duchamp’s, the most populous coterie on the network is made up of predominantly male writers. Moreover, thirteen of the thirty women in the anthology appear in this network as outliers. Not only are women underrepresented in the anthology (just thirty out of 111, or 27.9%); they are also marginalized within its network of validations. The names in the cluster assert the extant male canon of avant-garde art and literature (Warhol, Cage, Bernstein, MacLow) while drawing into their orbit the new writers that Goldsmith and Dworkin ratify as their legitimate inheritors (such as Austin, Mohammad, and Bök). This hierarchy of influence and connection radically revises the “levelling” enacted in the contents page (which was designed to resist the processes of canonization and exclusion), instead reasserting those processes through other paratextual means.

Second, by reinstating the chronology that the Anthology avoids, we can show how this new avant-garde attaches itself to a traditional reading of literary periods. In visualizing the data from the introductory essays and headnotes as a graph with a timeline as the x axis, a pattern appears (Fig. 2).

Fig 2.
Number of references to and from authors in Against Expression: The Anthology of Conceptual Writing, graphed over time.

Looking at the spread of works included as examples of conceptual writing over ten-year blocks from 1900 to 2010, we see that the anthology expresses an underlying periodization in the clusters of associations around moments in a chronology. With clusters of works through the 1910s and 20s, in the 1960s, and again in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, this chronology reinstates the boundaries of modernism, pop art, and postmodernism. Its examples of conceptual writing, therefore, gather around literary moments already considered significant in the genealogy of the avant-garde. In this way, the anthology asserts an already well-established narrative of an interrupted or resurgent avant-garde, and presents a literary genealogy in order to establish the legitimacy of the movement.¹³ Its construction also reveals that, while the literary history of conceptual writing manifests as fluctuation or interruption, the general trajectory is that of growth. The sense of a bourgeoning movement is implied because, with each example of “resurgence,” the number of works increases, indicating an increase in the number of writers engaged in conceptual writing over time. In the contemporary resurgence, the number of writers occupying the same position is so great that it appears on the graph as a tangled knot of names. Despite its interrupted trajectory, the anthology therefore provides a developmental model of evolutionary proliferation. This underlying formation naturalizes its construction through a pattern of precedent and heredity, an evolutionary model of proliferation in which a successful “species” multiplies over time.¹⁴

The deployment of names also shows how the hidden paratext creates an underlying genealogy. On the same chart, the y axis indicates the number of times an author is mentioned in the anthology as a whole (Fig. 2). The higher the point, the greater the number of references to the author in the anthology. Thus Andy Warhol and John Cage are the highest points on the chart, having ten and nine mentions respectively. The size of the point on the chart reflects the number of other authors referred to in that author’s headnote.¹⁵ The number of times an author is mentioned (their level on the y axis) indicates the level of influence they exert, and the relative size of the points indicates their role as a conduit or connector of like practices, a drawing in rather than a handing down. A closer look at the twenty-first-century corner of the chart reveals a proliferation of connecting figures (Fig. 3).

Fig 3.
Twenty-first-century positions on the field.

This part of the chart, with its greater number of larger, “fraternal” points—for example K. Silem Mohammad, whose headnote mentions nine other authors—shows that the anthology ratifies conceptual writing by connecting its twenty-first-century writers to each other and to the other authors in the literary genealogy it constructs. Most of the recent figures are situated low in the field, reflecting the fact that many of them are mentioned only once or twice in the anthology as a whole. However, two figures emerge from this scrum, distinguished by height and size, so both are mentioned more than other contemporary writers and are connected to more of them: in the field laid bare, the editors of the anthology, Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, dominate their contemporary scene.

Dworkin and Goldsmith’s construction and ratification of a primarily male canon is challenged in the 2012 anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. In her introduction, Laynie Browne defines this anthology as a response to conceptual writing’s fast-moving consolidation, expressing a fear that women will be “written out of the project.” Noting that “it is often at the stage of anthologizing that numbers start to shift so that women are not adequately represented,” her characterization of the typical situation of women in literary movements is entirely apposite to the representation of conceptual writing in Against Expression. Moreover, in reflecting and refracting the language used in Against Expression‘s prefaces—with “take shape,” “crystallize” and “documented” echoing Dworkin’s purpose to “document” the “energetic reformation”—her anthology offers a direct challenge to its potential hegemony (14). Browne argues that the “lack of representation of women is in some sense invisible until we come to moments where codification starts to happen. To many then, this writing women out of the canon is invisible until after the fact” (15). This description of the processes of canonization applies to Against Expression, whose latent structures begin to codify a version of conceptual writing that sends women writers into the background. Caroline Bergvall’s introduction to I’ll Drown My Book connects the problem of canonization to conceptual art’s inability to problematize the author function. For Bergvall, “the all-important business of stripping the artist’s social identity, or even denuding artistic persona itself, investigating the artist’s ‘authorial function’” has “proved largely beyond the frame.” Instead, in Bergvall’s view, “the artistic persona found itself neither intercepted nor sabotaged by conceptual methodologies” and “Conceptual Art turned quickly into a small coterie of largely given, largely male, largely white art stars” (19). The relationship between the author function and canonization is relevant to the paratextual choices in Against Expression. Because the authors’ names are stripped of other determination, the author function is foregrounded in favor of, for example, the historical, geographical, generic or political contexts of the text’s production. The proliferation of references to and the connectedness of Warhol or Bernstein, as visualized in the network plot (Fig. 1), consolidate their significance purely in terms of the author function: in Foucault’s original iteration, “the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (“What is an Author?” 119). In this respect, Against Expression fears the proliferation of meaning outside the institutions it claims to be “looking beyond,” as we can see in the centre-periphery model revealed in the network plot.

And what of the claim for the practice of curation as distinct from the traditional anthology? By comparison, the looser assembly, the overt insistence on impermanence, and the self-reflexive approach do seem to offer a more active readerly participation, or at least a chance for readers to “intervene in their own processes of subjectification,” as Agamben puts it (24). The resistance to chronological ordering in the contents page foregrounds the active choice of the anthologist, rather than imposing a history. The large number of names suggests inclusiveness rather than a defined and narrow genealogy. The inclusion of Warhol, Cage and other practitioners previously identified more as artists than writers troubles the category of the literary text. Indeed, the insistence on writing as a much looser category seems to resist the institutions of “author” and “literature,” disrupting the scholarly disciplines that “separate” and “capture” human activity (17). The very refusal to deal in other categories foregrounds the emphasis on the central category of conceptual writing, and, in making one big claim, Against Expression draws attention to its own “mode of ordering” and lays bare its function in controlling knowledge. But if “the apparatus itself is the network that is established between … elements,” then Against Expression is an apparatus that draws together a network of forces in order to assert and authorize its legitimacy (2-3). It brings together discourses (of the avant-garde; of conceptual art; of evolutionary development) and institutions (the canon; the literary period; the literary genealogy; the author function) to control the reader’s engagement with knowledge and construct the reading subject. This is significant in light of the disproportionate number of white male writers represented in Against Expression as a whole, and is expressed most notably in the way these authors dominate the patterns of significance and legitimization revealed in the data analysis. The reader is installed in her identification with “important” writers whose legitimacy is conferred through the insistent repetition of their names and associations with each other: the well-worn processes of a long history of hegemony. By deploying a narrative of curation that obfuscates its canonizing role, Against Expression enacts the subjectification of the reader of the hidden paratext as Agamben defines it in his discussion of the processes of installation. With only a limited and partial understanding of the way the text operates, the reader is not afforded the agency the Anthology seems to offer. Much like the apparatuses that Agamben critiques, the experience appears to be one of self-determination because the reader is made to feel like she is “in the know” and so in control of her own reading choices. As my analysis reveals, however, like the “user” of the mobile phone in Agamben’s example, the reader is the passive recipient of a system in which her choices are delimited and controlled by silent instructions that bypass conscious recognition. The subjectification that occurs here is, therefore, in the predominant contemporary form of the apparatus: the “reader” is in fact locked into what turns out to be a regulatory project by the very illusion that she is in control.

This illusion also marks and sustains the contemporary activity of curation as practiced beyond the art world. Kate Fowle, a director of Independent Curators International, says of contemporary curation: “as the curatorial imperative gains momentum around the world, its form is mutating and becoming untethered from its modern precedent” (9). This can also be said of the way curation has entered the broader cultural sphere, becoming integrated into social, economic and political life and increasingly taking more discrete and specialized forms. “Untethered” from its precedent in visual art, curation has “mutated” to become the primary practice of the market, constructing marketized identities on Facebook and Instagram and curating content as an aspect of “social selling,” hooking the logic of capital into the intimacies of social life. As the Scoop.it Content Marketing Blog asserts, “The very best curation done via social selling is a way for salespeople to demonstrate their value and uniqueness. They have an exceptionally effective—and human—way to build trust and to prompt feedback. Both of which are at the core of building a relationship … and making a sale” (Neely). Feeding into the curated identities of sales “prospects” through content curation is therefore a way of “leveraging your social network” and represents the marketization of “human” relationships and “trust” (Brevet). Curation is thus the primary contemporary exemplar of the apparatus Agamben critiques. Once denoting a practice of institutional preservation and conservation, it became a self-reflexive art practice that seemed to enable institutional critique, but is now a method to capture and construct subjectivity as a collection of temporarily congealed surfaces. The temporary nature of these forms of curation reflects precisely the continuous process of installation and reinstallation that makes subjectivity a negative state. As Agamben argues, “processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification seem to become reciprocally indifferent, and so they do not give rise to the recomposition of a new subject, except in larval or, as it were, in spectral form. In the nontruth of the subject, its own truth is no longer at stake” (21). The mechanism of curation enacts an infinitely unfinished process of reassembly that sustains a yearning for subjecthood and a belief in the subject as a product of consumer preferences ratified in the assemblages of other consumers.

The role of the anthology in perpetuating and stabilizing an exclusionary canon also plays into contemporary fears about the erosion of the canon and anxieties about the “preservation” of literary studies in the rapidly-changing globalized higher education marketplace. In his 2012 The Global Future of English Studies, James English’s survey of tertiary English programmes across the US, Europe, China, South Africa and Australia, finds that “there is less divergence than we might imagine from the canon of classic British and American works,” and that “the place of this canonical literary study within the baccalaureate degree program as a whole … is surprisingly uniform throughout the world” (117). For English, “the newer, more ‘foreign’ programs emerging with globalization are if anything more committed to the familiar canon of Great Authors than are the established programs of the Anglophone sphere.” As a result, “rather than pulling the discipline apart, the process of global massification is affirming its cohesion around a common core.” English’s discussion reflects the way that this very valid anxiety might paradoxically work against a pluralistic, self-reflexive model of literary studies. The security of the “cohesion” around the “core” of “Great Authors” here stands in for the preservation of English literary studies as such (174). English later recognizes the potential for universities outside the US and Europe to shift the balance of the centre-periphery model, concluding that “it is time for us at the presumptive centre of things to begin paying more attention to the forms our discipline is taking at these sites of rapid expansion” (191). In the context of the global education marketplace, however, the anxieties rather than the subtle conclusions of English’s study will probably form the leading edge. The mass marketing of English studies may well end up seriously compromising its main achievement in the last forty years: the recovery and/or appreciation of writers not previously considered to be “Great Authors,” including women writers, minority writers, writers of popular fiction and, ironically, the authors of world literature in English. Thus, both the “massification” and marketization of English studies and the desire for homogeneity generated by the fears it prompts are very pressing reasons to be wary of the canonizing anthology.

The desire to assuage panic about the future of English literary studies has also recently merged with optimism about “curation” as a way of preserving the value of the discipline. In her introduction to the 2016 special edition of New Literary History, Recomposing the Humanities—with Bruno Latour, Rita Felski argues for a new emphasis on curatorship, one that echoes in interesting ways the argument set out in Against Expression. Felski asks, “To what extent are humanists engaged in practices of making as well as unmaking, composing as well as questioning, creating as well as subverting? … In this spirit, I advance four possible terms—curating, conveying, criticizing, composing” (216). She argues for curation as a practice of making, one grounded in the need to preserve but aware of the responsibility of those choices, imagining the humanities “as a series of actions, practices, and interventions” rather than the result of the functioning and countering of a range of rigid institutions (217). I would argue that this is a problematic solution, given the current function of curation as the primary apparatus of the market. In the global commercialization of higher education (HE), curation and massification are brought together in troubling ways. For example, Pearson—”the world’s learning company”—is a powerful, extensive, and expanding provider for English-medium HE institutions across the globe. One major innovation in their format is “Pearson Collections,” a site that enables “educators” to “Engage Students with Custom Content” and “Create a Collection for Your Course” with an “easy-to-use curation tools” in order to “choose the chapters you want from any Pearson product.” Accompanied by signifiers of agency (“you have your own way of teaching”) and freedom (“you can freely mix and match”), the site deploys the narrative of curation as a creative practice that liberates the individual from regulatory structures and gives them control over the system, enabling them to survey the apparatus and operate beyond its dictates.¹⁶ The model of curation is the model of the globalized higher education market: the curation of commodities in an archive of products limited by economies of scale.

Like Pearson’s decoy of “custom content” curation, curation in Against Expression too becomes a decoy, presenting a convincing surface structure to displace the underlying apparatus of its value system. This parallel demonstrates the hazardous position of the avant-garde vis-à-vis the dominant culture: the avant-garde is capitalism’s critic and its coeval. To be worth the hazard, it must maintain a delicate relation of immanent critique. This function and its attendant constraints are clearly manifested in the method of detournement that forms the basis of conceptual writing practices, a methodology developed out of the necessity to refuse an external standpoint from which to articulate its challenge. The discourse of curation presented in Against Expression, however, claims to offer just such a position, speaking from a critical space outside the institutions it critiques. The dangerous “naivety” (in Agamben’s sense) in this positing of a blameless utopian space from which to speak is perilous for the avant-garde project to denaturalize discourse and expose its function in the network of power and knowledge.

Footnotes

1. Dworkin offers a short history of Conceptual Writing’s reputation in his “An Overview / Chronology of Conceptual Writing” for the Harriet Blog.

2. For an extended definition of détournement, see Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement” in Ken Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology.

3. See, for example, Jeffrey Di Leo: “while anthologies are a pervasive and dominant part of academic culture, they have not been given sustained analysis by cultural theorists” (6). Against Expression itself clearly contributes to the theorization of anthologies, which has developed since 2004, yet “most American anthology and canon revision has focused on author and text selections but little on the anthology editorial apparatus” (Aull 38).

4. One expression of this function can be found in Notes on Conceptualisms in the notion of the “sobject,” the subject-as-object of modernity, the “properly melancholic contemporary entity” that “exists in a procedural loop” exposed by conceptual writing’s “radical reframing of the world” (38-9). See also Fitterman on repurposing: “[the] use of repurposed source materials or identities isn’t meant to replace a more direct investment in identity but, rather, to complicate any of our positions by addressing how our subjectivities are shaped, compromised, or borrowed” (1).

5. See below. See also, for example, Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism, 3-7.

6. The way the term “lyric” has been deployed in definitions and defences of conceptual writing has been heavily contested. Judith Goldman, for example, has argued that this version of the lyric is a “straw man” invoked by the editors, as detailed in her article “Re-thinking ‘Non-retinal Literature.’” Goldman shows that this statement about the lyric draws heavily on the Language poetry manifestos of the early 1980s without acknowledging them. For more on this debate, see also Marjorie Perloff, “Towards A Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context.” What interests me here is the use Dworkin makes of the lyric (and everything he takes it to represent) to position conceptual writing as a practice.

7. See for example Eliot Van Buskirk’s “Overwhelmed? Welcome the Age of Curation”; Anita Howarth’s “Exploring a Curatorial Turn in Journalism”; David Balzer’s Curationism; Xuan Zhao et al., “The Many Faces of Facebook,” and Claudia W. Ruitenberg, “Toward a Curatorial Turn in Education.” Perhaps the most telling expression of twenty-first-century curation is the explosion of internet “content curation” tools, used in particular in branding and marketing. Advice on how to use content curation tools now proliferates on the web. See Rohit Bhargava’s “The 5 Models of Content Curation”; Patrick Armitage’s “10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs”; and Ross Hudgens’s “The 3 Most Effective (And Overlooked) Content Curation Strategies.”

8. Note also that Against Expression comes out of a prestigious university press.

9. Although Against Expression is also published in an “institutional” context, it claims a form of immanent critique with typically “conceptual” emphasis on the mode of production. Hoover expresses no such intention.

10. Examples in Against Expression include Rory Macbeth’s The Bible (alphabetised), Dan Farrell’s Inkblot Record, and Louis Aragon’s poem “suicide.”

11. All graphs are produced in collaboration with Amy Macdougall, Medical Statistics, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College University of London.

12. The algorithm that determines the layout of the nodes is called “Fruchterman Reingold,” and is an instance of “Force directed graph drawing.” Nodes are conceptualized as objects in space. Typically, spring-like attractive forces based on Hooke’s law are used to attract pairs of endpoints of the graph’s edges (the nodes) towards each other, while repulsive forces like those of electrically charged particles are simultaneously used to separate all pairs of nodes. If two nodes are linked (in this case, if an author’s headnote references another author), it is as if they are joined by a spring. The strength of the spring is greater if they have referenced each other. Nodes therefore attract one other (if they are linked via “springs”) and repel each other via imagined electro-magnetic force. The algorithm simulates a physical system using these predefined attraction/repulsions, and finds a state of equilibrium. This is how the positions of the nodes are defined. The eventual positions depend on their (random) starting points, which is why there is no unique solution.

13. For example, Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism.

14. In order to provide a picture of as much of the data as possible on a single chart, in Figure 1, Mallarme (1874) and Diderot (1796), the two earlier authors, are not included. Moreover, because they are single representatives of their own moments, they appear more as rogue elements, originals rather than originators, and so not drawn into a literary genealogy as precursors in the same way as Stein and Duchamp, who are located as signifiers of the “avant-garde” phase of modernism.

15. Stein’s name is in the introductory essays rather than in a headnote (because her work is itself is not included in the anthology), so it appears here in a form which reflects that. Each author included in the introductory essays is given two extra “points” to reflect the “fraternal” connection and significance this affords them in relation to all the other authors in the introductions. Stein, Pound and Duchamp are all mentioned in the introductory essays. Neither Stein nor Pound features in the anthology itself, so they do not have headnotes, and although an excerpt from Duchamp’s “notes” is included, no other author is mentioned in his headnote. The names of these three writers, therefore, appear in the same size. This reflects the fact that they are all included in the introductions but are not directly linked with other authors through their own headnotes.

Works Cited

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• Armitage, Patrick. “10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs.” Hubspot, 11 May 2017, blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-curation-tools. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018. Aull, Laura. “Gender in the American Anthology Apparatus: A Linguistic Analysis.” Advances in Literary Study, vol. 2, no.1, 2014, pp. 38-45.
• Balzer, David. Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else. Pluto P, 2015.
• Bergvall, Caroline, editor. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Les Figues P, 2012.
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• —and Kenneth Goldsmith, editors. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Northwestern UP, 2011.
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• Felski, Rita. “Introduction.” New Literary History vol. 47, nos. 2 and 3, 2016, pp. 215-229. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2016.0010.
• Fitterman, Robert, “When Subjectivity Finds Another Subject: Subjectivity in Quotational Writing Practices.” RobertFitterman.com, www.robertfitterman.com/newworks/when_subjectivity.pdf. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 101-120.
• Fowle, Kate. “ICI Perspectives in Curating.” Thinking Contemporary Curating, edited by Terry Smith, Independent Curators International, 2012, pp. 7-13.
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• —. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
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Walter Faro (bio)
Pennsylvania State University

Abstract

This essay is a case study of the author’s late father and his processes of coming to know himself through a relationship with Agent Orange, a deadly and untraceable chemical. In performatively demonstrating the agential forces of nonhuman others at work, the essay troubles idiomatic written forms in order to navigate the personal and professional sites of Agent Orange’s emergences in this man’s life, which were confined neither to the hospital nor the home, the social nor the material, health nor sickness, and which blurred the lines between any such binaries. In the end, a way forward, even in death, is conceptualized through the paradigm of a social-material world.

The horrors of the Vietnam War are well documented, as are the ripples of trauma and chemical infection that continue to radiate from it. Agent Orange was the primary chemical deployed by the US in acts of chemical warfare against the Vietnamese people between 1961 and 1971. According to McHugh, it “contain[s] a type of dioxin labeled TCDD (2, 3, 7, 8-tetrachloro-dibenzo-para-dioxin), which is the most toxic human-made substance” (194). Not only was this deadly DNA-reconfiguring chemical blanketed over the land for over a decade, but vast amounts of it were abandoned in storehouses and military bases, allowing it to continue to leak into the ecosystem (Dwernychuk 117). The Vietnamese people remain devastated by the existence of Agent Orange and its severe effects, as the President’s Cancer Panel clearly indicates in its 2008/2009 report, which notes that “approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities and a half million children born with birth defects” (78). Far more consideration and care are needed for those whose death resulted from ingesting the chemical, including children who died and children who were born with birth defects, and the lasting impact of Agent Orange use on following generations. American soldiers like my father were also doused with these chemicals, and were similarly assured that they were harmless to humans.

When the US sought to destroy Vietnamese crops and defoliate their jungles in a strategic act of chemical warfare, they crucially ignored the fact that the environment is a dynamic field of human and nonhuman material. This became most clear to my father and to his unit (First Cavalry Division: Company A, Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry) when they would get together after the war and discuss the fact that their shins tended to boil up mysteriously with scabs in the summertime. Their shins: the area most directly exposed to the crops and grasslands.

On the north-side beaches of Lake Michigan, in the oddly hot Chicago sun, I watched my dad pick at scabs on his tan, hairy forearms. Mistaking his pocked skin for the effects of sunburn I ran across the sand to our towels and coated my body with a thick second coat of sunscreen. The poorly blended white paste didn’t contrast much with the fair Scandinavian skin I had inherited from my mother, but my father couldn’t help but notice my spontaneous and frantic basting. Guiltily, I explained that I didn’t want to end up with skin like his. This prompted him to tell me about his postwar shins and how those leg scabs had slowly, over the years, started to surface everywhere on his body. Contact with his old unit substantiated the suspicion that his case was not anomalous.

The scabs serve as an inscription of my father’s relation to the Vietnamese environment, but they also can be seen to foreshadow Agent Orange’s more radical action. This process began when my father was the victim of dental malpractice: an oral surgeon forgot to remove the plastic wrappings on a set of dental implants inserted into my father’s mouth. The dentist then recommended my father to a postoperative inspector whom he had bribed to sign off on the procedure. This led to a horrific infection that spread rapidly throughout his body. I was two years old when this process began, and over the next nine years, my father would experience the removal of his gallbladder and the majority of his pancreas, a handful of strokes, more than one cardiac arrest, and a litany of kidney and liver issues. In just one particularly complicated year he suffered forty-two emergency room visits.

Sickness is that which prevents us from doing what we want to do, but it in no way stops us from doing, from existing as a force in the world. As rivers flow, dance, evaporate, and congeal, so does all else exist in constant movement: the ungrounded ground that constitutes existence in space/time. Now, this does not mean that threads of some abyssal sinew afflict our every atom, rendering us meaningless, unintelligible, and endlessly restrained. On the contrary, the process of knowing that we can only ever intra-act in the past (in the sense that we can never say now in the Now), or imagine as future possibility, assures us of the vast wealth of meaning in the present. As all actors become (humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans) we can only reflect and make cuts, as Karen Barad calls them, in the oceans of experience flowing through us (816). Those cuts are both a part of our acting and of our decisions, and also a part of affect. Some component of the world makes itself intelligible to be cut in the first place. This is performativity in the most colloquial sense of the word: it is a dance. Just as dancing is constituted by conscious choices and forces of unintelligible agency (gravity, momentum, energy), so are our processes of becoming and knowing. We take a step, we move, we swing within an excess of forces.

I seek to analyze Agent Orange’s agential role in my father’s ongoing process of becoming. In the process, it should be clear that Agent Orange is a moving actor of his biology. More precisely, Agent Orange’s material-discursive practices were enmeshed in every strand of my father’s identificatory practices. This is not merely because of its biological entanglement with his cells, or because it potentially altered his very DNA, but because Agent Orange consistently eluded doctors’, friends’, and family’s efforts to isolate it as merely biological. Reports on Agent Orange before and after the Vietnam War frequently denied that the chemical had had any conclusive negative effects on the human body. Because of these reports, medical treatment has had no choice but to exclude its effects as a possibility (“Health Effects”). Despite the fact that far more recent analyses have significantly contested those initial reports, we are not, especially in the current US political climate, likely to see the US government significantly undertake further reconciliatory processes for the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese people and environment that are still struggling to recover.¹ This is evidenced by the reaction of Congress in 2010 to the President’s Cancer Panel Report, which substantiated proof of Vietnamese suffering from Agent Orange. Well over ten billion dollars were given to US Veterans Affairs while a fraction of a percentage of that was given to the Vietnamese.²

My ambition is not to expound upon scientific research to prove the harmful effects of Agent Orange, but instead, to take up my father’s life as a case study of its material-discursive agency. Because the aforementioned studies contemporary to Agent Orange’s initial deployment claimed to be inconclusive, the duration of my father’s existence was marked by a relationship with a phantom: a DNA-altering agent within his body, the potential of which still remains largely unknown. In order to conduct this analysis, I tell the story of my father using Stacy Alaimo’s term “trans-corporeality.” With a chemical as mysteriously devastating as Agent Orange, there is no better way to parse its acting than to understand my father’s “human corporeality as trans-corporeality” (238). As Alaimo describes, trans-corporeality refers to the human as “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world [where] the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (238). Furthermore, the structure (or lack of structure) of Agent Orange’s emergences in my father’s life is trans-corporeal: it was confined neither to the hospital nor to the home, the social nor the material, health nor sickness, and, in fact, it blurred the lines between any such binaries. As Alaimo states, “movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (238). Therefore, the structure of my writing will be as entangled in the personal and professional, the narrative and theoretical, as is the object of my study.

The multiplicity of systems of any being coordinate with one another in constant movement, and in a biological body like the human, the circulatory system coordinates with the respiratory, which coordinates with the reproductive, and so on. A being such as my own takes place in consequence of the coordination of my father’s systems (and my mother’s), which are all constituted in DNA altered by Agent Orange. Thus, Walter Sr. coordinates Walter Jr. Luckily for me, I was spared from the horrific birth defects that have plagued Vietnam since the onslaught of Agent Orange took root in nature. That chemical lurched, docile in my father’s body until just after my second birthday, when it emerged at the prompting of a gum infection and opened the floodgates for all other agents to hollow my father out. It was enmeshed in his acting sicknesses while remaining both invisible (as under-researched) and intelligible (as having effects in his body and in Vietnam simultaneously). The doctors were forced to ignore Agent Orange even while my father’s material-discursive voice screamed: “that chemical ‘in Vietnam’ destroying uncountable beings is also inside me!” How am I to do a trans-corporeal reading of Agent Orange without looking at my father’s body, and furthermore, without assuming that I am soaking in this chemical that could have affected me the way it has so many others? How else can we read a chemical that is certainly material, but whose effects are completely interminable?

In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett provides a reading of Adorno’s concept of nonidentity, which she describes as matter that is always elusive, that defies humans’ ability to conceptualize it, and that acts upon us nonetheless (14). It is through her reading of the initial impulses of Adorno’s concept that she proposes the importance of the cultivation of a “capacity of naiveté,” which is a repudiation of the human capacity to conceptualize matter, to think ourselves separate from it without first thinking ourselves a part of it: “both to receive and to participate in the shape given to that which is received” (17). For Bennett, this process enlivens the world, making it livelier and more poetically stimulating: endlessly fascinating. As my father’s case shows, an endless “fascination” and inability to conceptualize is often the only option. It is this fascination, which I would argue is more of a frustration in this case, that allows me to provide a reading of Agent Orange at all. Indeed, it ought not always be the case that we remain fascinated with matter, but that we examine the ways in which the matter has become fascinated with us. Remaining in suspension, or as Bennett says, remaining “naïve,” is the purgatory imposed upon all those who have come in contact with Agent Orange.

As my dad wrestled with the elusive toxin in his body that was both doing nothing at all and that was also inhibiting doctors, restricting his hormones, affecting his mood, as well as destroying the Vietnamese ecosystem—killing children, animals, plants, and insects—the rest of the people in his life attempted to get to know him. As his son, I had to learn what it meant to be one hundred percent disabled from PTSD: to announce my presence before every interaction with my father, never to sneak up on my father, never to wake my father, never to threaten my father, never to overwhelm my father. On more than one occasion the intelligibility of my body disappeared when my small hand surprised my dad: he would spring into action and, with his hand around my throat, have me dangling in the air. The milliseconds of those experiences taught me that I was not constant; that the world as it was intelligible to me was not as it was for him.

I remember my dad’s eyes as they changed from vacant to seeking and how he would bring me into his arms and ask me to forgive him, reminding me to be more careful for my own sake. It was simple as a child to understand that the person I knew to be my dad was a small part of the forces materializing as him and bringing forth his performance.

My father considered himself many things: an international mercenary, a martial artist, an assassin, a loving father, a husband. Manifest in all of those mystical titles was the founding force of his identification as a Vietnam veteran. When he first voluntarily enlisted in the US Army in 1968 he was physically too short, at five feet four inches, to enter the forces, but his height was altered on the physical examination paperwork (which required soldiers to be five feet six or above) because the Army needed more men to navigate the tight Vietnamese tunnel systems. Then, despite having been trained in heavy artillery during boot camp, he was sent into the dark holes of the Vietnamese jungle to deal with close combat and booby traps. My father was only nineteen years old at the time, but the Vietnamese who guarded the tunnels were often far younger. Because of that, my father killed an untold number of children in over 270 firefights as a solider in the Vietnam War. These atrocities were always described to me as part of a chain of command, as an order that took the form of an explicit threat: “kill or be killed.” The commands that interpolated him as a soldier were, in his mind, still actively speaking in all of his practices.

When I was growing up I often imagined that Agent Orange was some evil spy: a literal agent. I wondered as a child what Agent Orange might sound like if it spoke. I wondered if my dad was always sick because it was giving him commands and reminding him that he was a soldier. It turns out that this is exactly what was happening. Agent Orange was always speaking: in his body, with his singing, through his movements, and in his sleep.

Some people sleep with their eyes open. Usually, this is thought to be a characteristic of hardened veterans or people who have somehow trained themselves to sleep this way, and although I cannot speak to that process, my father certainly did sleep occasionally with his eyes wide open. What was more anomalous, though, was that my father could not speak Vietnamese while he was awake, but there were times while he slept when Vietnamese language came out of his mouth. This language further alluded to the dynamism of agencies within which he was enmeshed: the voices that scream in Vietnam, that screamed before and that are yet to scream, that cannot be contained. They erupted from my father, and he did not control that emergence. They are phenomena. My father is connected to Vietnam in that he took actions there that continue to act, to have effects there; Agent Orange is acting in a field of matter, and it does not discriminate. Within that field, I, my father, other western soldiers, Vietnamese people, and all beings it has intra-acted with (other humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans) are entangled. That entanglement is quantum, so my father is just as likely to be screaming out the voices from a moment somewhere within his memories as he is to be screaming in synchrony with those in Vietnam across, but not separated by, space-time. Barad explains such an entanglement this way: “Entanglements are not the interconnectedness of things or events separated in space and time. Entanglements are enfoldings of spacetimematterings” (139). In this way, Agent Orange is intralingual: it translates only unto itself and it adapts.³ Agent Orange does not need a human natural language to act, but it is nonetheless material-discursively co-constitutive through my father’s processes of becoming. It is speaking in my father’s body, and in whatever ways my father speaks, so does it (although certainly not alone).

The first time I watched my father speaking Vietnamese in his sleep, I was perhaps the most scared I have ever been. I worried for him. I worried what wars were being waged inside (in/with) his body as he slept. Something in him, I knew, was not sleeping. I had woken up in the middle of the night. A dream had just been coming over me: I was standing on the branch of a tree peeing into the setting sun. Realizing with a flash of lucidity that this might mean I had wet the bed again, I frantically sprung from sleep and scraped my hands over the sheets in the dark, trying to feel for wetness. Thankfully nothing. Suddenly though, a voice became audible to me.

The long hallway outside my room was lit by a single nightlight, and looking down it I saw the familiar shifting lights that meant Dad was either still awake watching TV or had fallen asleep doing so. After some tiptoeing in the dark I found myself standing over him.

His eyes are wide, shifting all around, and sometimes he’s mumbling, sometimes barking the language into the empty room. Light rises and falls, illuminating him at random, the screen reflecting off of his wet gaze.

Is he looking at me? Not at me exactly, but through me, like a stranger. He’s speaking the whole time. His face is tense, and his raspy voice growls the way it does after he’s been trying to cough up tar. I’m not supposed to wake him up. He said never to wake him up. The television lights reflecting off his eyes seem to be flashing faster. His speech is getting more urgent, and now he’s repeating the same phrase over and over again, louder. Looking at me more. The unrecognizing stare disappears in shadow, then reappears with the whites of his eyes full, his stare aflame.

"Dad…"
Approaching the couch, I touch his foot lightly and say again, "Dad?"
No change in him. Incoherent. I take a step closer.
"Hey, Dad."
I grab his shoulder. "Dad!"

His eyes snap to me. His hands are on me. Screaming, staring into my eyes, he pins me down. His eyes are black. I couldn’t understand a word.

In this moment, I had no concept of what Vietnamese sounded like when spoken. For at least the next few days I believed that one particular question I had asked myself had been answered: what might Agent Orange sound like if it spoke? Quite literally it seemed that inside my father was a social world he could not understand and could never hope to be conscious of. In order to expand my notion of Agent Orange’s intralinguality, I take up Vicki Kirby’s call to “interpret ‘there is no outside of language’ as ‘there is no outside of Nature’” (229). Agent Orange proves that even an artificial, human-made chemical operates outside of human abilities to capture, measure, limit, and understand it. It is performative; it has effects of its own. This artificial chemical has become in/with all things it has encountered. It communes amidst all other cells in the plants, earth, insects, animals, and humans it has encountered. The internal processes taking place in such a case bring me to one of Kirby’s most difficult questions: “why is it so difficult to concede that nature already makes logical alignments that enable it to refer productively to itself, to organize itself so that it can be understood … by itself?” (232). If we take language in the performative sense as not primarily referential but as having effects, then when we observe intra-action on any level, or agency in any capacity, we can conclude that what is taking place is something social. This is what I take Kirby’s interpretative leap to offer. The process through which the material negotiates the introduction of Agent Orange to its biology is a social one, where effects take place and changes continue to happen. Agent Orange does not become unified with the beings it communes with: it does not translate itself to become one with another cell, and yet it remains within the social structure of cells and changes take place. Kirby makes this point: “When we posit a natural object, a plant, for example, we don’t assume that it is unified and undifferentiated: on the contrary, this one thing is internally divided from itself, a communicating network of cellular mediations and chemical parsings” (232).

Alaimo’s work helps us to think about Agent Orange in relation to other illnesses that are also elusive, trans-corporeal, and implicated in a world of political and ethical concerns. What makes the mystery of this artificial chemical similar to chronic illnesses, such as the autoimmune diseases that Alaimo mentions, is that they both continue to resist the possibility of a “crystalline understanding,” regardless of any dynamic research conducted, precisely because “there are (how many?) forces continually intra-acting?” (250). Furthermore, Alaimo’s conception of “toxic bodies,” which points to the present reality where seemingly nothing on Earth is not already contaminated in some way, extends our lack of any totalizing knowledge limitlessly. Not only are the boundaries of beings blurred in the constant motion of materialization in space-time, but in those lines of flight other strands of being are threaded-in. It is not then that these beings (chemicals, toxins, or literally anything in the world) are being written into identity as if they can be thoroughly traced and read, but instead they are speaking all the time. Intra-acting reveals the toxic body as material-discursively loud with the social world of becoming. This does refer to a oneness, but to that of a tremendous crowd. Together, Kirby and Alaimo’s work reveals that currently, only the performative concept of language is able to factor into the material-discursivity of identification, where certain voices are heard over others and notions of identity become intelligible amidst the loudness of our being in/with the world.

At the electricity of affect the effects of an always-already flowing epistemological waterfall are pouring, and when your eye flits or your finger connects, the entirety of reception is swept up. There is no still water. To think that any intra-action will yield “the One, the flourish of stars which perhaps comprise the unattackable body of Truth,” as Édouard Glissant so elegantly puts it, is to resign oneself to narcissism (7). You lay down in a field of grass and stare up at the stars and marvel, but you receive nothing of your own volition. Certainly less when you try to ascribe language, either in thought or in action, to what you receive. There is no force that will stop the waterfall’s cascade from beneath, where you are, but that which you cannot do is less important here than what is possible; you may try the most difficult of tasks: to stop all forces from cluttering the electricity bringing forth you in/with the world. You may, as Maurice Blanchot says, attempt to be where “only being speaks—which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being” (27).

Truly, my father was rendered passive in the inability to recognize an enemy to fight in order to progress. He quite literally died by allowing the chemicals to decide, once and for all, whether he would continue to exist. He rendered himself passive to the agencies upon which he could never impose silence. A bullet would not find the agent, but maybe another agent might.

One day my father overdosed with a gun in his hand. Peaceful at last, I wasn’t sure if dying this way meant he was fighting to live or fighting to die: a soldier to the end. Here, expression and intention revealed their co-execution. They coordinated one another’s function and decapitated one another in the process. I will never know if my father was selfish. Whether he wanted to tell his wife and son: “If you find me dead, know I was trying to fight it,” or whether it was: “know that I would have taken myself out one way or another.” In expressing intent or intending to express, both falter amidst the possibility of otherwise. But my father was, in fact, not going to be dead as long as Agent Orange was enmeshed within his ongoing being. Agent Orange survives six feet underground. It would continue to vehiculate its contamination through its ongoing decomposition of my father’s body. Maybe it would make it into your plants and into your bodies. Maybe my father would go with it and be with you as well: immortalized as a vast cellular network raining down on all the world. Maybe my father contemplated this first, because as my mother and I read his will for the final time it instructed his cremation. As if all the drugs, surgeries, radiation, and guns in the world had proved that Agent Orange could not be killed, now he wanted to turn it all to ash. Today my father’s body is perched in an urn on my desk, but could there be a malevolent orange genie trapped inside? Of course not. It haunts his legacy; it haunts my name. It still kills, steals, and destroys. It is still a devil unseen and unbelievable. But it is not only that. I hate that this part of my father survives, and yet that is why I write about him: to ensure it is not the only part and to show that nothing is singular.

Even the overdose is entangled in years of attempts to kill the pain of sicknesses and surgeries. Not only was every treatment my father received ultimately unsuccessful due to some mysterious force at work, but he also developed quick immunities and allergies to pain killers. Hydrocodone, Vicodin, OxyContin—you name it, he could not take it. Codeine specifically caused my father to have a heart attack almost immediately upon its first prescription. The only pain medication that his body seemed to cooperate with was morphine, which is not intended to be used for years on end due to its highly addictive properties. Once more, doctors searched for an alternative method of relief that could float my father through his own dissection, and once more they were baffled by their inability to do so. Eventually, there were no doctors who would continue my father’s morphine prescription, and he was left to cope with pain unmedicated. Marinating in the biological warfare for which his body became the stage was too much for him to handle without any weapons to fight back. This led him to use illegal narcotics instead and, well, you know the rest. Self-prescription lasted five weeks.

The language that refused to recognize the Vietnamese people by calling them “the enemy” refused to recognize the dynamic field of matter called “the environment,” and refused to acknowledge the actions of their own soldiers (“them” being the organizing militant forces of the US government) by calling those soldiers “the forces, the troops, the ARMY.” This follows the constitutive gaze of the West. However, once the soldiers returned home, neoliberal discourse instituted once more a recognition of individuality: the responsibility to fend for yourself. This ironic paradox claimed my father first as an included part of one body (a static field of bodies: the military) and next as a severed limb. Furthermore, my father’s attempts to map a private, individual singularity as severed from the acting body of the military became increasingly more difficult amidst the ongoing war beneath (and on the surface of) his skin. As Alaimo explains, “if one cannot presume to master one’s own body, which has ‘its’ own forces, many of which can never fully be comprehended, even with the help of medical knowledge and technologies, one cannot presume to master the rest of the world, which is forever intra-acting in inconceivably complex ways” (250).

What Agent Orange ultimately did—through his isolation from the body that ushered forth his violence in Vietnam—was orient him amidst a cultural network: a shared community of suffering in/with Vietnam. He could not negotiate his inclusion within this space while also knowing that he was enlisted by the oppressive forces that had created it in the first place, while also knowing that he had chopped through crops with a machete and cut through humans with knifes and bullets. He could not forgive himself, grant himself entry into that space, but his quantum-entanglement with it evacuated such a choice nonetheless. Treatment for PTSD and treatment for bodily sickness became inseparable. As Kirby puts it, “the logic of causal separation and the presumption that there are different moments in time, different places in space, and a very real difference between thought and material reality” simply does not hold (220). Further, she argues, “to suggest that one affects the other in a way that renders them inseparable doesn’t confound the nature of their difference (respective identities) so much as it emphasizes that these differences are joined, or connected in some way” (222).

I know that while my father was alive there was no way he would ever have been able to step foot on Vietnamese soil again, despite his connection to it. I wish that he had, though. I wish that he had pursued the community that he could never avoid. Whether he was castigated and exiled or embraced and forgiven, allowing the possibility of that process to take place in an intelligible way for once may have unmoored him from negotiating it endlessly with “himself.” A nature-culture like that established by Agent Orange, which forcefully inaugurates a community around the entanglements of humans and nonhumans, provides the possibility of a space for toxic bodies to advocate rejuvenation in/with an ever-materializing world. My father’s identity is not unlike all others: “it” is scattered amongst, and entangled in/with spacetimemattering. However, trying to make “connection and commitments,” as Barad calls them, within those nature-culture entanglements would likely have been generative for him (150).

It is not about “him” in the end. It took Agent Orange assassinating my father, over the course of decades, invisibly and for all the world to see, for me to think through the entanglements of humans and nonhumans. We can be sure that the Vietnamese people will never forget such material-discursive agencies for similar reasons. Surely, as Alaimo concludes, “(toxic bodies) encourage us to imagine ourselves in constant interchange with the ‘environment,’ and, paradoxically perhaps, to imagine an epistemological space that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge” (262). Yet we might also observe that be-ing and coming-to-know are in the constant intra-play of self-forgetting. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad calls this an “ethico-onto-epistem-ology,” which she describes as “an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being—since each intra-action matters—(where) the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again” (185). I have attempted to discuss this earlier through metaphor, but Barad’s description is more efficient. Such a complicated proposal is not just an option, but perhaps is merely the case, as Barad’s work exemplifies.

As humans, we may come to know ourselves performatively through our effects, and through the always-already reciprocal effects of the intra-active world. This overwhelmingly causes us to critically engage with every step we take within the performative dance of spacetimemattering, but also frees us of this overwhelming pressure by registering the ways in which the nonhuman world engages with us. What does the nonhuman world tell us about ourselves? About our actions? How are we oppressing so many (humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans) by forcing them to have this awareness? How do we come to obfuscate our awareness of our intra-active materialization in/with all beings? Largely, I would argue, by believing we can stop time, space, or matter.

My father, to be both mystical and honest, still lives in spacetimematter. Even ash does not simply cease to exist but moves, fluctuates with temperature and gravity. I can see it; it is in front of me, intra-acting with me now. It is with ash that I write. The conception of performativity I have articulated here, where the agential intra-activity of all beings both frustrates and fascinates, enlivens and destroys, refuses the notion that death is the end, and instead affirms the liveliness of the world. I cannot put an end to the agential orange I hate, which haunts me and so many others, but if I did this text would not exist; I would not exist. I also cannot put an end to my father. If dioxin was never invented in the first place and never proliferated, then, of course, that would be wonderful. But time-traveling impulses are only ever wrestled with in a quantum entanglement that situates us in the future’s execution of the past: the present that never is. In this way, I may have never known my father, and he may have never come to know himself, but I sure do love getting to know him.

Footnotes

1. For recent scientific work conducted, see Ngo, et al. and Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, et al., Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2004 (and subsequent updates). For a more thorough understanding of Vietnam’s ongoing struggle with Agent Orange, see McHugh’s work on the Aluoi Valley in “More than Skin Deep: Situated Communities and Agent Orange in the Aluoi Valley, Vietnam.”

2. See Nguyen and Hughes, “The Forgotten Victims of Agent Orange.”

3. Intralingual is the process by which a language is translated, sometimes radically, within the confines of itself in order to adapt to different circumstances. This is not the same as interlingual, which refers to multilingual ability. Agent Orange does not speak natural languages like Vietnamese or English—that would be absurd—but it is nonetheless enmeshed in the material-discursive practices of speaking. On the differences between intra and interlingual, see Zethsen.

Works Cited

• Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 237-64.
• Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.
• Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 121-158. JSTOR, doi:10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0121.
• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
• Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1982.
• Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides, et al. Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2004, The National Academies Press, 2005. National Academy of Science, doi.org/10.17226/11242.
• Westing, Arthur H. “Vietnam Now.” Nature, vol. 298, no. 5870, 1982, pp. 114. Nature Publishing Group, http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1038/298114d0
• Dwernychuk, L. Wayne, et al. “Dioxin Reservoirs in Southern Vietnam—A Legacy of Agent Orange.” Chemosphere, vol. 47, no. 2, 2002, pp. 117–137. Elsevier, doi:10.1016/S0045-6535(01)00300-9.
• Glissant, Édouard. Poetic Intention. Translated by Nathalie Stephens and Anne Malena, Nightboat, 2010.
• Hayes, Mary. The Health Effects of Herbicide 2, 4, 5-T: A Report. American Council on Science and Health, 1981.
• Kirby, Vicki. “Natural Convers(at)Ions: Or, what if Culture was really Nature All Along?” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 237-64.
• McHugh, Nancy Arden. “More than Skin Deep: Situated Communities and Agent Orange in the Aluoi Valley, Vietnam.” Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, edited by Heidi E. Grasswick, Springer, 2011, pp. 183-203.
• Ngo, Anh, et al. “Association Between Agent Orange and Birth Defects: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 35, no. 5, 2006, pp. 1220–1230. Oxford University Press Journals Current, doi:10.1093/ije/dyl038.
• Nguyen, Viet Thanh, and Richard Hughes. “The Forgotten Victims of Agent Orange.” The New York Times, 16 Sept. 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/agent-orange-vietnam-effects.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2018.
• The President’s Cancer Panel, “Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now?” National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, Apr. 2010. deainfo.nci.nih.gov/advisory/pcp/annualreports/pcp08-09rpt/pcp_report_08-09_508.pdf.
• Zethsen, Karen. “Intralingual Translation: An Attempt at Description.” Meta, vol. 54, no. 4, 2009, pp. 795–812. Erudit, doi:10.7202/038904ar.

Guanglong Pang (bio)
约克大学(York University)

摘要

本文针对暗房技术人员，尤其是被种族化了的暗房技术人员进行思考并展开了有关摄影历史化和理论化的争论。通过对暗房技术人员关键作用的分析来挑战把摄影发展视为仅仅是机械或技术过程的观点。图像制作的过程代表着一段过渡时刻，其照亮了摄影图像总体上的不稳定性，尤其是那些带有种族和侨民色彩的照片。种族化和侨民化的身份是在不断的过渡，分裂和分散的过程中被构造出来。本文聚焦中国人的摄影印刷工艺，探讨了影响摄影技术和工艺的文化历史。本文继而从一个发展过程的角度来理解摄影，揭示了摄影生产和侨民群体构造之间的强大链接。

文本(Text)

改色

改色是我父亲在大多数白天和夜晚所做的事情。这是他继文革时期从古拉格集中营逃出来后在香港等待加拿大入境文件审批期间所学到的技能。这也是他继上世纪70年代在白马市(Whitehorse)所经营的中餐馆香格里拉 (Shangri La) 生意倒闭后一直做的事情。他十分擅长这种暗房工作(我是这样听说的)，并且他很幸运地在阿尔伯塔省政府的视听部门找到过一份暗房技术员的工作。他在那里工作的时间超过了十五年， 然而历经省政府策划的一次大规模裁员以及数码摄影的兴起这两大灾难之后（至少对于我们来说是灾难），他永久失去了工作。尽管如此，多年以来，那是他的日常工作。晚上的时候我叔叔会打电话叫我爸爸去他的地方改色。我的叔叔在加拿大阿尔伯塔省埃德蒙顿经营一家小杂货店，而在店面的后面就有一个专业的摄影工作室。摄影工作室对于叔叔来说不仅是生意，更是一份激情。他主要拍摄的是家庭和婚礼照片。他几乎总是忙于这项工作。无论何时何况，人们总是找他拍照。我的阿姨和我的表姐弟们顶着门面经营杂货店。几乎每天晚饭后我爸爸都会接到叔叔的电话叫他去暗房那里帮忙处理和印刷照片。我哥哥和我经常一起去商店玩耍或者帮忙，直到我爸爸工作完毕。人们告诉我，爸爸他在暗房里很有天赋。

这项工作是我日常生活的一部分。我虽然不被允许进入暗房，但我知道那是一个很特殊，很神奇，并充满了工艺和艺术色彩的地方。这是我家庭生活中必不可少的一部分。黛博拉·威利斯(Deborah Willis)主张”摄影为传记”，解释了她对”视觉化记忆”以及对描述黑人生活此类批判性工作的独特见解(22)。关于种族和摄影的思考使我联想到了这段私密的历史，它让我能够永远感受到暗房的魔力，以及改色过程作为摄影的一环完整而分 散的特点 。 暗房又是摄影的一部分。用威利斯的话说，传记可以表现出暗房工作是一个复杂体，也是一个被种族化的、关系到侨民群体的争论点。

本文将对暗房进行理论阐述。在此过程中，本文把暗房视为一个生成空间，借此理解种族和摄影之间的关系。暗房不仅很大程度上在当代的摄影文化批评中缺席，而且它也是一个被常态化了的”白色”空间。仪器、化学品和纸张都是依据白色为参照物校准的。 “世纪中叶的电影是由白人技术人员设计，并根据白色皮肤进行优化的” (彼得斯Peters 65)。当时电影对色彩的敏感性和处理标准导致深色皮肤的受镜者在阴影或深色背景的图像中被扭曲或者隐形。思瑞塔·麦克法登（Syreeta McFadden）讲述了黑人摄影师如何”教会摄像机”看到黑色皮肤:

通过经验，我们适应了电影技术——模拟技术和数字技术——而这些技术并没有适应我们。我们通过确保被拍摄物体在光照下处于良好的位置来弥补胶片乳液固有的缺陷;我们购买更加昂贵的镜头来允许更大的光圈范围，确保我们在拍摄期间能够最大化的引入光照;我们购买速度更快的专业级胶片，或者使用仅限于在室内荧光灯或者钨丝灯条件下拍摄的特殊胶片。我们接受了白人摄影指导员的糟糕建议，让我们在牙齿和皮肤上添加凡士林，或者使用与我们的肤色不匹配的光敏化妆品。

有时，这些约束会生产出美丽的作品。例如罗伊·迪卡瑞瓦 (Roy DeCarava),

这是一位对胶片和种族光学的不足作出回应的摄影师。他在他的照片中占据低色调范围，且不用曝光或显影来补偿。《纽约时报》评论家维姬·戈德堡（Vicki Goldberg）形容迪卡瑞瓦的照片为柔和而阴郁，”令人困惑的黑色，弥漫着沉静” (肯尼迪Kennedy)。科尔（Cole）曾说过:”相反于试图点亮黑色，迪卡瑞瓦违背了人们的期望，选择让黑色愈发黑暗。黑色既不是空白的，也不是空虚的。事 实上，它充满了智慧的光泽，只要耐心观察，它就会光芒四射 (Known and Strange 147).(彼得斯Peters 65-66)

迪卡瑞瓦凭借着在影像设置中对黑人的偏见制作了一系列些美丽的图片。直到20世纪70年代末，柯达才推出了一款名为”黄金Max”的胶卷，它提高了对深色色调的感光性。

长期以来，黑人摄影师一直在努力解决摄影和种族之间的矛盾。身为艺术家和作家的米歇尔·皮尔森克拉克（Michèle Pearson Clarke）在可可褐（Coco Fusco）关于摄影分化种族的著名言论的影响下观察到，”摄影…从没怎么记录过黑色世界的现实，相反却构建了一种我们想要观察黑色的方式 (2)。因为种族歧视深深地嵌入在摄影实践的历史中，克拉克认为我们很难能够以正确的方式来观察黑色：

这种故意编造黑人形象的档案已经存在了175年。这对于对任何当代摄影师来说都是一个巨大的障碍。当我看到任何一张拍摄黑色躯体的照片时，或者想象任何人看到我自己的照片时，我会深刻地意识到这种档案的存在，它就像一个厚厚的滤镜，模糊和复杂化了视野。(3)

克拉克和可可褐想必记得肖恩·米歇尔·史密斯（Shawn Michelle Smith）曾在论述中揭示摄影行业、生物种族主义和优生学交织产生的遗产，以及一种相应而生的”新型视觉真理的社会层次结构 (史密斯Smith 4)。对于克拉克来说, 正是黑人摄影师的工作实践, 特别是蒂娜·劳森（Deana Lawson）、大武·贝（Dawoud Bey）、玛拉·格林（Myra Greene）、鲁托娅·卢比·法力茨（LaToya Ruby Frazier）、 和吉拉尼·摩根（Jalani Morgan） 这些从业者在使用大画幅胶片时的拍摄选择, 使我们在审视摄影时得以移除那掩盖种族歧视的”厚滤镜”。尽管摄影技术的历史如此，一些最具创新和煽动性的当代黑 人摄影师选择了以类比的形式来实践，并产生了克拉克所称的类比摄影的”情感决心”。简言之，这种”情感决心”便是”体现黑人具在的亲密感和情感现实的那种细微情感的摩擦 ，因为我们所感不一, 所见不一” (6)。 克拉克对于类比摄影实践的坚决主张不仅点明了影像的触感，也指出了思考摄影全过程的必要性。

我想以克拉克的呼吁为基础来考虑暗房技术人员的工作，特别是暗房技师作为一类侨民和种族化主体的可能性和能动性。当我们明确暗房技师(不同于摄影师)在摄影图像的制作中起到的关键作用时，会对摄影产生什么新的见解? 当我们把技师视为一种种族化的人物，理解他们在摄影作品中融入的各自的历史和技术时，又会发生什么? 在暗房安全灯深红色的辉光下独自作业的技术人员们鲜少被当代摄影理论的文献所提及，然而直到最近的数码摄影时代，没有暗房的工作都不会有照片的产生。即使随着数码摄影的兴起，正如克拉克对于当代黑人摄影师的类比实践的调查所表明，许多种族化的摄影师们最著名的照片仍然采用了湿法，或者说是暗房技术，包括相片，固定，显影，放大，和浸泡图像。暗房里的流程十分重要，在思考种族和摄影时尤甚。

暗房物质性

以暗房技术人员的形象和工艺来将暗房工作理论化，这使摄影师和被摄影对象之间的二元关系发生动摇。更重要的是，对暗房作业的思考可以跨越多个文化源并揭示暗房技术的同质化趋势。即使技术人员使用同样的放大镜、打印机、纸张和液体，他们在不同的地方使用它们的方式也不同。与柯达和依尔福不同的是，暗房作业对我爸爸而言是改色，结合了完全不同的知识和工艺的过程。尽管洗相片的过程对摄影来说是不可或缺的，但它们很大程度上仍未被理论化。

我对暗房过程的理论研究是以摄影批判中的唯物主义转向为指导并进行延伸的。这种唯物主义的转向产生于蒂娜·卡布特（Tina Campt）与英国黑人摄影大师英格丽·波拉德（Ingrid Pollard）就摄影底片问题的对话中：”摄影作品有一种有形性，一种当它们以印刷形式呈现时常常被我们所忽略的物质性，而底片使我们记起这种物质性” (128)。伊丽莎白·爱德华兹（Elizabeth Edwards）和贾尼斯·哈特（Janice Hart）观察到，”一张照片是三维的，而不是二维的图像” (1)。尽管这个观察看起来很明显，

通常的趋势是，照片被理解为一种将图像和物体重叠却偏重于前者的视觉行为 。因此，照片脱离了它们的物理属性，继而脱离了常被掩饰为中性 的物质性的功能背景。(爱德华兹与哈特2)

麦金农试图超越这一模糊的概念，他问道：”如果我们把摄影作为一种物质本体论事件来考虑，我们的讨论如何才能超越长期以来奠定摄影评论的既定的主客体性呢?” (150)。麦金农的问题打破了长久以来与摄影的本体论方法有关的非物质性。安德烈·贝金（Andre Bazin）在其1958年的标志性散文《摄影图像的本体论》(The Ontology of the photographic Image)中除去了对图像制作有着必要性的物质过程的中介作用。不同的是，贝金细心考虑了照片与其对象之间的内在联系，以及照片消除表现障碍的力量:

在客观世界的复杂结构中，我自身能力是无法决定照片的内容是潮湿人行道的反射还是一个孩子的姿态。只有无感情镜头，能够把它的对象从所有审视它的方式中剥离出来，最后把它以圣女般纯洁的姿态呈现予我和我的所爱。(贝金 8)

贝金这种哀歌歌颂了照相机捕捉物体的客观和客观力量，有力地标志着一种远离麦金农式物质性思想的转变 。对于贝金来说,” 照片和物体本身都有一个共同的存在，就像指纹一 样” (8), 而对于麦金农来说，指纹需要关注墨水的粘稠度,更确切的说, 需要关注照片超乎印迹的存在。

这一转变将摄影批评的范围扩大到摄影者和被拍摄者之外，正如艾瑞拉·阿祖莱（Ariella Azoulay）所建议的那样，照片已经成为一种事件(15)。麦金农将阿祖莱对摄影事件的看法扩展到摄影的生产材料中:

从唯物主义者的角度去思考摄影便是承认那些参与拍摄或者制作照片的机构。拍照使得某些物质条件被提取和交换，这些物质条件使图像得以形成。不论是考虑到构造摄影设备本身所采集和合并成的元素材料,例如银、铝、钢或石油,还是按快门捕捉瞬间时眼,手,身体,和远程自动化操作的协调工作,图像只有在所有因素都具备且共同作业的情况下才方可生成。因此，图像凭借许多渠道，包括光学和其他途径来展开它的作业和随后的处理。(153-54)

麦金农不仅关注拍摄的过程也注重图像制作的过程。他坚持唯物主义观点中关注于媒介的可能性，

人类摄影师不是图像的唯一制作者。在整个摄影事件中所有参与制作过程的物体都在相互作用。照片呈现的仅仅是在整个复杂的拍摄过程中黑匣子里所记录的一小部分。(154)

麦金农的观点主要集中在图像捕捉的设备和相关的技术材料上，好比”摄像机的装置上记录着全球分工和财富分流，使其在技术人文主义的外表下得到认可…那些负责采集相机制作所需原材料和在遥远的配件组装车间工作的人们是相机主体的一种延伸和远程机构” (155)。唯物主义，在这里被定义为”专注于制作所用的原材料的一种观点，例如生产的过程和相应的权力关系、组装零件的工人和其他一切能够使摄影事件成为可能的隐秘的复 杂互动”。这种观点有助于我们发现摄影制作过程中所用到的媒介 (麦金农 150)。虽然这种唯物主义转向使人们能够超越摄影者和被摄影者之间的关系理解与摄影相关的媒介，但是它所关注的焦点仍旧遮蔽了暗房里的工作过程。

这种对于暗房过程的排斥和令人好奇的不可见性在卡加·西尔弗曼（Kaja Silverman）看来可谓是”化学摄影的工业化”并且这种”视觉摄影”在1888年达到了顶峰，也就是乔治·伊斯曼（George Eastman）开始制造干燥、透明、灵活的胶卷并发布了第一台柯达相机”的时候 (82)。这款相机的广告语是”你只需按下按钮，剩下的就交给我们了” (qtd in 西尔弗曼, 82)，相机在出厂时里面就已经装了一百张底片。顾客们现在成为了自己的摄影师，只需要简单的按下相机快门，然后”把相机连胶卷一起送回伊士曼（Eastman），这样就可以处理底片，打印和装裱了。随后照片的成片随着重新装好的照相机一同被返还到客人的手里” (西尔弗曼 82)。柯达相机大受欢迎，它使暗房的工作变得隐形并削弱了暗房在摄影图像制作中的媒介作用。被简化为工厂组装的技术过程之后，暗房工作不再作为一种工艺、艺术和媒介的现场运作。

通过将摄影减少到三个预先设定的步骤，乔治·伊士曼（George Eastman）用柯达系统代替了”自然之铅笔pencil of nature”。这把摄影师从”照片制作的化学步骤过程”中释放出来，同时也封闭了摄影的液态智慧。最后,通过在工厂的印刷和洗片, 伊士曼创造了一种幻觉，那就是客人们认为他们从邮件中收到的的照片与他们当时与相机一同寄出去的底片完全为等价物,也就是说摄影的指导原则变成了”千篇一律”。(西尔弗曼83)

柯达系统并没有用心的去关注湿法过程的特性和不稳定性，而是选择了消除摄影的差异，这样一来，就抑制了摄影所具有的挥发性(而非机械性复制)的记忆功能。

将暗房的物质性作为摄影场景的中心，是为了重新激活杰夫·沃（Jeff Wall）所认定的摄影的”液态智慧” (109)。这种智慧使麦金农的理论种所提倡的摄影和记忆之间的关系得到更深刻的重新评估。与理查德·特尔缔幔（Richard Terdiman）所说的”材料记忆”，(35)相呼应的是，麦金农认为，对摄影图像的思考可以使我们想起它产生的物质过程:

从唯物主义的角度来看，记忆超越了图像的图形表面并深深地嵌入到了设备和材料的核心中。在合成图像的表面来对某个物体进行怀旧是一种否定其组件记忆的行为，同时否定了那些捕捉了事件现场并超越那一抽象瞬间的记忆。(155)

在由 原材料开采和殖民主义的各类力量(矿业开采、器械组装的物理过程)塑造成为物理对象的相机，以及 你拿在手里或是在墙上看到的照片之间，存在着杰夫·沃所说的一种古老的知识形式:

水的古老和液体的化学物质以一种重要的方式将摄影与过去、与时间联系起来。在这里，我把水叫做”仿古主义”，意思是它体现了一种记忆的痕迹——尤其古老的生产过程——洗涤、漂白、溶解等等，这些都与工艺的起源有关……从这个意义上说，摄影中水的回声唤起了它的史前历史。(沃 109)

这种液体智慧的物质记忆持续并在继续产生着回响。正如沃观察到的那样，它是摄影图像制作技术工作、悠久记忆过程痕迹和生产之间的联系。在数字化时代到来之前，水和生产绝大多数摄影作品所必需的化学浴使摄影回归到了一个只出现在溶液中的物质性过程。贝金的本体论中的”无表情的镜头”不仅剥去了摄影对象的”精神尘埃和尘垢”，同时也淡化了湿法本身的液态智能。沉浸，沐浴，并最终固定在多重成分的复杂溶液中，照片的物质性携带着已遭冲刷过的过程的痕迹。

对摄影的思考要在印刷过程这种极其不稳定和不固定的时刻来进行。在它被印出来之前，照片实际上就已经在在暗房的黑色液体中进化。在安全灯红色和栗色的光束中可能正在发生很多事情。许多决定已经在此刻做出。每一个决定都会改变图像。每一幅作品都将携带着技术人员无形的痕迹。他们不断调整光线、染色和对比，以追求最终效果的图像——但这也绝不是最终的效果，因为还有另一道印刷工艺有待完成。在这种不定性和永恒的校准中，暗房是一个转瞬即逝，充满可能性和物质媒介的地方。

湿法程以及颜色观察的负面历史

尽管这篇文章致力于寻找暗房过程作为媒介的可能性，特别是对于种族化和离散的侨民主体，但我也深刻地意识到摄影是如何被用于服务殖民主义和种族主义的。正如摄影学者和实践者所展示的，彩色摄影，尤其是显色印刷过程，已经成为歧视和暴力的工具。具体来说，在彩色摄影方面，洛娜·罗斯（Lorna Roth）关于色彩平衡的工作和柯达彩色摄影的过程直接触及了c-print过程中种族主义的核心。罗斯进行了广泛的研究，特别是她对柯达公司用来指导暗房技术人员和摄影师色彩调和过程中所谓的”雪莉卡Shirley cards”的研究。她的研究表明，显色打印过程充斥着种族编码，因为它使白色具有规范性，并能模糊黑色。正如罗斯解释的那样，”雪莉卡”就是

以一个穿着色彩艳丽高对比度服装的”白人”妇女为准的标准参照卡作为测量和校准照片印刷中皮肤色调的基础。继第一种试色卡模型之后这种浅肤色女性标准被摄影行业男用户们称为”雪莉”，并被公认为自北美模拟摄影实验室20世纪初以来最理想的皮肤标准。这种标准至今仍旧代表着主流。(112)

罗斯指出了几个促使乳剂发生变化的关键因素。在20世纪50年代，学校的照片开始有规律地把黑人和白人孩子放在一起拍成一张照片。只要孩子们被单独拍照，不同肤色可以通过”补偿照明”和”通过经验学所到的技术来调整”， 来容纳不同肤色。但在集体照中”这些技术并不能解决摄影中偏向”白人”皮肤的问题…最终的相片显示了白人孩子脸上的细节,但抹去了深色皮肤孩子们脸上的轮廓和细节，仅剩他们的眼睛和牙齿” (119)。罗斯极力证明这种不平衡是在持续的种族歧视和性别歧视的历史下生产出的技术和材料，比如说 “对薄膜乳剂化学的改进从来都不是物理或化学的专有问题，而是文化选择的结果” (118)。

即使雪莉卡不存在，专业摄影师也早就意识到了彩色胶卷里的这种偏见。1977年，让-吕克·戈达尔（Jean-Luc Godard）在莫桑比克旅行期间拒绝使用柯达胶卷，并宣称该胶卷是”种族主义” (欧图尔O ‘Toole 373)。艺术家亚当·布鲁伯格（Adam Broomberg）和奥利佛·查纳利（Oliver Chanarin）继承了戈达尔的观点并设计了一幅在昏暗光线下所拍摄的一匹黑马细节的作品。这是一场记录了他们曾在加蓬的一次旅行中以雪莉卡和柯达胶卷为原型拍摄摄影展。此摄影展强调图像物质性的重要性以及常常被图像制作过程所忽略掉的种族歧视的历史 。摄影展的标题来源于”柯达高管曾试图委婉地暗示他们的新彩色胶卷能够更好地代表各种肤色时使用的一个表达语” (欧图尔 373),

尤其是布鲁伯格和查纳利的作品提醒了我们宝丽莱（Polaroid） ID-2相机所呈现的种族主义，该相机被刻意修改以便能够发出额外的光束来照亮黑人的特征(欧图尔379, 摩根 525)。为了控制和管制南非黑人的行动，南非种族隔离政府曾使用这种照相机来制作银行存折中的身份证照片。为了能够快速的拍摄身份照，ID-2有一个按钮，可以发射额外的光束来捕捉深色皮肤被拍摄者的特征(欧图尔378)。在宝丽莱和南非的种族隔离之 间的联系被揭发后，宝丽莱的工人到处张贴传单，宣称”宝丽莱在60秒内囚禁黑人” (摩根 524)。这些抗议最终导致宝丽莱公司在1977年从南非撤出，同时揭露了彩色摄影过程中种族主义的复杂性(摩根 546)。

在南非的背景下，彩色摄影携带着其独特的道德性。詹妮弗·拜加尔阁（Jennifer Bajorek）对大卫·戈德布拉特（David Goldblatt）和理查德·莫斯（Richard Mosse）彩色摄影的讨论揭示了彩色摄影如何附有一种复杂的道德的、或是拜加尔阁所说的”超道德”的维度。戈德布拉特在种族隔离时期拒绝拍摄彩色照片且直到种族隔离后才开始拍摄彩色照片。但拜加尔阁克警告说，不要轻易将颜色与种族隔离结束时的”甜蜜”联系起来:

每个人都喜欢图像美学品质与其主题和摄影体之间恰当的对应关系。然而，对于戈德布拉特的彩色作品来说这样的关系是错误的。关于戈德布拉特后种族隔离时期作品的那些见解混淆了色彩的”甜美”与种族隔离结束的”甜美”。他们没有涉及到它最有趣的理性难题，然而我敢说，这与它对民主本质的深刻反思有关。(拜加尔阁 226)

拜加尔阁延伸了他的反思，并最终提出，

色彩……既不属于道德话语，也不属于政治话语。我们应该问的问题不是颜色是否太甜或太诱人, 不是颜色是否让我们选择被动地接受政治信息或是成为言语 “艰难的现实” 的政治角色；我们真正要问的是颜色是如何能够让我们以不同的方式来想象这些现实, 或者来问新的问题? 什么时候，在什么地方，在什么图像中，颜色允许我们提问、思考、看到并做出一些新的事情?(234)

拜加尔阁的问题矛头不仅指向观察颜色的经验，也指向生产颜色的经验。对生产颜色这一问题的思考就是针对印刷过程和暗房工作的思考。

在暗房里，摄影图像的处理开启了交互、缩减和平衡。为了生产出美丽的彩色印品，暗房技术人员(有时是但不一定是摄影师本人)必须通过红、黄、蓝交融的互动达到色彩的平衡，然后慢慢地缩减它们(通常是红色和黄色)，直到图像展现为正确或者真实的颜色。

颜色修正和暗房作业的替代方式

充分理解暗房技术人员和显影人员是有潜在涵义的，原因在于他们在被从摄影师群体中被分离出来的同时又与摄影环境相结合。有时，摄影师会自己制作照片。但多数情况并不如此。暗房技术人员的工作通常是不被看见的。这种工作进行而且必须进行在没有人见证的地方。这种工艺似乎缺乏摄影师所能够运用的所有权，但它仍以复杂的决策、工艺和艺术性著称。与他们的头衔有出入的事，暗房技师的工作绝不仅仅是技术层面的。暗房工作并不是单纯的一种以不变的方式来大批量自动印刷的过程。

就像摄影师一样，暗房技术员必须熟练运用一系列的设备和材料。比方说放大机。打印机。相关的化学物质和纸张。以及相关引用和索引。这些大多都被雪莉卡取代了。当然我也相信雪莉卡是必不可少的，但我从没在我父亲的暗房里见过。他告诉我他从来没有用过雪莉卡。他是在上世纪60年代末在香港接受的培训。在从被囚禁了5年的古拉格集中营里逃出来之前他在另一个古拉格集中营关押过2年。随后他被一个人收养为教子。收养他的这位恩人曾在香港中环行医。即使这么多年过去了，我父亲仍然记得每一个细节。他就睡在办公室。他告诉我，医务室里有着这么一个小的暗房，因为医生们认为自己照x光片这样更效率也更节约成本来。就是在那里，我父亲学会了如何处理和打印相片。他着迷于在暗房里调和图像的方式。

就像摄影师一样，暗房技术员必须熟练运用一系列的设备和材料。比方说放大机。打印机。相关的化学物质和纸张。以及相关引用和索引。这些大多都被雪莉卡取代了。当然我也相信雪莉卡是必不可少的，但我从没在我父亲的暗房里见过。他告诉我他从来没有用过雪莉卡。他是在上世纪60年代末在香港接受的培训。在从被囚禁了5年的古拉格集中营里逃出来之前他在另一个古拉格集中营关押过2年。随后他被一个人收养为教子。收养他的这位恩人曾在香港中环行医。即使这么多年过去了，我父亲仍然记得每一个细节。他就睡在办公室。他告诉我，医务室里有着这么一个小的暗房，因为医生们认为自己照x光片这样更效率也更节约成本来。就是在那里，我父亲学会了如何处理和打印相片。他着迷于在暗房里调和图像的方式。

如果对我父亲当时在暗房里做的转换工作进行思考的话，那么思考一下中国和北美摄影实践的区别是很有帮助的。过去和现在的中国摄影都不同于欧洲和北美的摄影。伍美华(Roberta Wue)和吴宏等评论家写了大量关于中国摄影历史和传统独特之处的文章，并概述了其与祖先肖像和山水画的密切关系。尽管如此，吴宏还是告诫人们不要陷入简单的二元主义。即东西方对于摄影的概念本质上是不同的，而不是一种更复杂的差异和相互衔接的组合。对东西方美学分歧的怀疑是有道理的。

与此同时，中国的肖像摄影有着悠久而有力的传统，这种传统的确影响了摄影在中国的兴起，其方式与国外的摄影不同。正如顾伊所指出的，”虽然我们可能会淡化强调’中国特色’，其只是殖民焦虑的一种反映，但在很多华工的照片中，都可以看出文体差异的痕迹” (122)。在意识到中国摄影的独特性的情况下，顾伊试图深度探究摄影在中国的不同名字，它们的演变，以及这些名字对于探索一种可以被确定为中国特色的摄影，而非陷入二元主义。

通过她的调查，顾伊使人们注意到中国绘画和摄影之间的亲密关系。”在中文中，摄影的第一个名字——英香、潇湘、小照——都是肖像画的前身” (顾伊 121)。中国与摄影的接触需要被理解为是一个更广泛及复杂的视觉实践中的一部分，在这个过程中，绘画和摄影不是完全对立的，而是同步的。

如果说中国摄影中存在着反自然主义的特征，那么它们既不是中国摄影媒介的专一性所表现出来的理解上的欠缺，也不是对媒介专一性的自觉抵制。最初用于摄影的名字都是肖像绘画的先存词，这一事实凸显了中国的一个历史时刻，摄影属于一个快速变化和不断扩大的视觉实践领域，被方便地称为”绘画”。(122)

顾伊的介入打破了中国视觉实践中摄影与绘画的界限。她对中文摄影术语的研究引起了人们对北美和欧洲背景之外产生摄影传统给予特殊的关注。

暗房在中文里就是所谓的改色,同时揭示了我父亲带到暗房里技能的特殊性。改，作为第一个字符是一个动词，意为修正、修改、改进或改造。色，第二个字符是一个名词，意思是色彩 、色调，但也存在着对形体、身体上美的渴望。这一措辞类似于英语国家对同一技术的术语完全不同的表达：湿法 (wet process) 或冲洗照片 (developing the photograph)。事实上是在汉语而不是英语中，改色一词透露了更深层次的差异。这是化学摄影工业化以外出现的术语。正如西尔弗曼观察到的，”我们通过媒介来概念化的大多数术语都是为我们自己而制造的，就像我们的设备和材料一样” (70)。改色开辟了一个不同的概念。在摄影产业化需求之外循环的改色提供了另一种液态智力路线的照片。

改色是暗房工作的一个明显文字术语。当如此之多的摄影实践术语是由隐喻和类比所主宰(底片制作和拍摄影片)，改色确切的描述了为了能够制作正相所需的底片方面的工作流程。作为一个术语，改色表明所谓的”拍摄”需要大量的进一步作业才能印刷为一个 完整的图像。此外，它假设照片是在经过修正过程后才算完成的。也就是说，相片总是需要修正的。直到相片经历了一个平衡和修改的过程后它才算是完成的，正确的，或真实的。

摄影充满了发展、变化和进步的语言。摄影有一种内在的未完成的本质，以至于它的进化似乎与它的使用者的进化构成联对:

摄影图像不是一种表征或索引，而是一种类比，而且其发展过程中所用的流体媒介也是一种类比。这个过程不是在我们决定它应该开始的时候开始，也不是在我们命令它结束的时候结束。摄影是和我们一起发展的，是对我们的回应。它具有历史上可读的形式，当我们放弃它们的储蓄能力时，它就会转移到别处去。这些形式最早的痕迹是针孔相机，这种相机是被”发现”而不是被发明的。它先演变成光学相机暗箱，接着重生为化学摄影，随后迁移到文学和绘画中并最终以数字形式继续存在。直到我们结束它才会结束。(西尔弗曼 12)

西尔弗曼很快转向了隐喻，但她小心翼翼地避免过度主张发展是一个线性过程。正如莎拉·卡夫曼（Sara Kofman）所警告的那样，摄影中转向隐喻的转折需对任何过于线性的发展语言保持警惕。

卡夫曼拒绝使用线性方法来理解底片转换成正片的过程。在描述弗洛伊德对摄影隐喻的使用时，卡夫曼指出，尽管他声称自己是科学的，但”弗洛伊德的文本仍然未能避免与神学和形而上学对立的传统体系:无意识/意识、黑暗/光明、消极/积极” (26)。这些对立似乎会以从无意识到意识的过程，以及从消极到积极的过程而最终导致线性。”积极的形象还是消极的双重都暗示着’结尾的东西已经在开头了’” (卡夫曼 26-7)。如果有人 遵循这一思路，那么暗房的工作就无关紧要了：”相片制作的过程并不会增加什么；它只能使黑暗变成光明” (27)。对于这种错误的解读，卡夫曼认为，

从底片到正片的过渡既不是必要的，也不是辩证的。这种进程有可能永远不会发生。压抑是创新过程中的一些无法挽回的残余，一种永远无法获得意识的东西。死亡驱力作为一种广义的经济学原理，防止我们把弗洛伊德的否定与黑格尔（Hegel）的否定混为一谈。更重要的是，当有一条通向意识的道路时，它并不依赖于逻辑标准，而是依赖于一种涉及非拨号力量之间冲突的选择。最后，从底片到正片的转变是不去意识到一个已经存在的意义，光，或一个原因本身的真理……通向光明之路的过程不是理论的，而是实践的：分析治疗。与马克思所言相近，只有力量平衡的转变才能带来清晰。从黑暗到光明，并不是要重新发现已经存在的意义，而是要构建一个从未存在过的意义。重复是有限度的，就像完整的意思从来没有出现过那样。重复即是创新。(27-28, 我的着重点)

在这段非凡的思考中，卡夫曼追溯了一条从类比和隐喻到实践的道路。她坚持暗房过程的积极和深刻的创造性作用。从底片到正片的过程不仅仅是倒置和印迹的机械过程。它充满了冲突。它不是线性的。这是一个需要平衡的过程。更重要的是，图像的真相并不只是简单地等待一个技术或机械过程来使其完整或可见。相反，它一直在建设中。每一个印刷即是重复的也是原创的。重复即是创新。

要是能够坚持每次重复的原创性，要求注意每一幅摄影作品的差异，我们就能在每一幅作品底片的痕迹中找到一种看待摄影种族歧视的方式，这也就是所谓的以底片来生产影像的过程。每一次重复，每一次印刷，都是不同的表达。正如堪陪特（Campt）所理解的，摄影底片

让我们正视摄影自身的局限性同时使我们正确认识到摄影是为了简化对种族和侨民身份认同和隶属关系上所采用的一道工具。凭借着图像上可见的痕迹以及对视觉索引的分辨和联系能力，我们过于依赖图像自身的能力来判断那些关于种族和侨民不言而喻的假设…照相底片的物质性提醒我们，即使种族的差异能够在摄影印刷后清楚地呈现出来，这种视觉性是技术、材料、文化在反复塑造和修复过程后的产物。在这期间，图像的化学物质和技术物质——照相底片——必须抹除种族，以便使其以可辨认的形式重新出现。(128)

如果每张照片都是一个先让种族消失再以一种稳定而固定的形式使其重新出现的例子，那么停留在每一张重印上的差异就可以显现出照片从负面走向正面的可能性。它为种族化的再现创造了一个很大程度上看不见的空间：那些没有存从白人规范和惯例制作照片的非白人的暗房技师的工作 。

卡夫曼坚持每一张照片的原创性的观点，打破了任何把照相印刷缩减为机械复制的理念。卡夫曼让我们看到暗房过程不仅仅是技术上的，而是从根本上具有创造性的。卡夫曼的分析纠正并平衡了摄影的隐蔽性，正是基于这种隐蔽性贝金可以考虑摄影的本体论，从而消除了对暗房的思考。卡夫曼则将暗房过程隐喻化，借鉴弗洛伊德对相机的隐喻使用。她的论点清楚地表明了暗房的工作不是一种机械过程。

在暗房里，父亲改正了颜色。但他做的远远不止这些。他也对图像进行了修改和改进。他重新塑造了图像。他这样做并不仅仅是因为颜色，而是因为理解了颜色也是它自己的形式，拥有它自己的躯体。颜色自身即是美，是对于美的渴望。

在暗房里，父亲改正了颜色。但他做的远远不止这些。他也对图像进行了修改和改进。他重新塑造了图像。他这样做并不仅仅是因为颜色，而是因为理解了颜色也是它自己的形式，拥有它自己的躯体。颜色自身即是美，是对于美的渴望。 工作最终又是平衡的。更重要的是所有的色彩作品都有一个共同的基础，因为每种颜色都是三种基本颜色的混合：洋红色、青色和黄色。

暗房技术员在操作时处理并看到照片最不稳定的状态。在制作期间，印刷品是非常脆弱的。它易受到光和热的影响。它必须经过一次又一次的洗涤才能达到它的最终状态。它的形成层是裸露的，是开放式的操作，其中包含破坏，过渡和变化。

尽管拜加尔阁，罗斯和欧图尔完全准确地解释了彩色印刷的过程过分依赖白色是一种排斥其他种族的视觉规范，我希望这次对于暗房物质的初步探索能够打开对湿法技术媒介性的理解。与所有技术一样，这种技术也是容易被操纵的。这是一个技术过程，但从根本上说，是一个关于多种技术的过程。就像我父亲所做的那样，他通过一系列潜在的方式校正颜色，寻找美。

结论: 安全灯下的预期光谱和液态智能

我想以我父亲的自肖像来作结 (图片. 1).

图片 1.
曹家迪(Richard Cho);的自肖像

在这张照片里，颜色完全浸透了画框。我的父亲在奔放的蓝色、黄色和紫色的共同作用下显得格外突出。这种色彩的魅力与他为这幅画摆出的悠闲姿势形成了鲜明的对比。他拄着胳膊肘。他在吸烟。他的目光集中转向画面左边。仅仅透过这幅自画像，你是不会知道这是一个刚从被囚禁多年的古拉格集中营逃脱、每日曾在那里饱受饥饿、受尽各种各样意想 不到的剥夺和折磨的人的自肖像。我父亲很为这幅画骄傲。他声称发明了制作这张图片的过程。他告诉我，他是在暗房里随便试着玩儿的，在显像过程的不同阶段过度曝光照片。这张照片告诉了我一些在国家迫害的创伤中幸存下来的事情。它告诉我，在黑暗中，一个人仍然可以找到方法，用如此多的光亮填充整个画框，以至于甚至阴影都完全充满了色彩。它告诉我，父亲是如何看待自己在那些恐怖事件之后的自己的，这是一整个过程中的一小部分，在一个黑暗的房间里发生的事情可以超越相片框架的束缚。

值得强调的是摄影的显影是一个过程。它是发展的过程，因此是易犯错误和可被修复的。把暗房认作为摄影活动的一个重要地点来仔细品味就是关注照片最脆弱之处，即是它已经存在但还没有成形的时候。关于显像过程的物质性的探讨也将我们引导到非物质性——照片可以成为别样之物，而不是它即将成型之物。它是一个预期的光谱。显像中的照片不被过去的事物所困扰，而是被它可能即将变成的事物所困扰。

困扰 (Haunting) 是”关于未来的争辩” (戈登Gordon 3)，它关注的不是过去，而是被限制和放弃的可能性。赫伯特·马尔库塞（Herbert Marcuse）写道”我们被历史的选择所困扰” (戈登5)。在这种困扰下, 艾弗里·戈登（Avery Gordon）在出版近十年后重新反思她在Ghostly Matters中的作品成果, 戈登这次把目光转向于社会和政治维度的困扰来改进她的思想，具体来说就是监禁。在监狱生活的余波中，以及那种令人陶醉的自由感只是一种一线希望般的可能性。我父亲的自肖像是从一场对未来的争夺中浮现出来。这幅自画像捕捉并固定了摄影发展变化的瞬间，使其他未来的想法变得清晰可见。如果更多的洋红色被用于图像当中结果会是什么呢？如果他下巴上的那条蓝色部分在变成那种蓝色之前就已经固定了，结果又会如何？这幅自肖像的色彩不受中性和规范性的平衡模式和 指数化准确性的束缚，它充满了过分的固定成分，即使只是暂时的，也被允许从它们最熟悉的那些地方解放出来。

要使这幅图像成型，技术人员必须对相片进行多次浸泡和曝光。如果还有人怀疑我父亲液态智慧的独特性，那么让我和你们分享一下他制作这个图像的个人步骤。过程如下(图片. 2):

图片 2.

在他制作自肖像将近50年后为我写下了这些指示。指示中没有雪莉卡。他现在已经是一个老人了，但他仍然记得如何重新构造出这幅肖像，而且是用生动而精确的细节。我选择不翻译他的个人步骤。他的方法的不同，这些步骤和他所经历过的生活之间联系的深度比 过程本身的技术性更重要。这些步骤告诉我，一次浸泡不够，在开发过程的不同阶段，底片必须通过多个过滤器曝光。

我还没有写过他从古拉格逃脱的事。这不是我要讲的故事。我不知道这是不是一个可以流传下去的故事。但看看这些步骤，我现在可以看到，这种特殊的摄影发展之路是他自己的故事。他穿过下水道，然后游到澳门重新获得自由。他穿过黑暗的海水并多次潜入水中。每一次重复即是创新。

这幅自肖像描绘了过去的种种可能性，而这些可能性将不再停留在过去。戈登”使用了困惑这个词来形容那些奇异而重复的情况。这些情况是当你熟悉的家庭变得陌生时，当你的轴承在世界失去方向时，是当你已经完成的事情又从新开始时，是当你清楚的认知了某件事情时” (2)。在每一个颜色和色调转变的边缘，这幅自肖像都是暗房技术的一个典范也是失去平衡和控制的一个实验。考虑到这种消逝，就会预想到视野之外徘徊的灵魂。在古拉格集中营里，若干年过去了都没有明确的结局。除了一遍又一遍地凝视着时刻困扰现在的那种艰难莫测的未来，我们无法看到过去被剥夺了什么。

我父亲的自肖像揭示了一种对与自我的革新和重新塑造，而这种变革和重新塑造正是我所期望的。它预见了这样一种即在监禁、酷刑和迫害之后，仍然可以过上正常生活的想法。它预见并机智地驳斥了暗房仅仅是一个技术和机械复制的地方的观点。它关注着卡夫曼对重复即是原创的理解。更重要的是，它把重复设想为预期。这幅自肖像以一种引人注目的方式展现了暗房过程的不稳定性，从而使得这种重复过程充分的展现了它的原创性。看看左上角的栗色和紫色的漩涡。看看左下方和右上方蓝绿色、黄色和橙色和乳白色的爆发。这张照片捕捉到了摄影液态智慧的内在动力和不可预测性。这幅自肖像事先就已明晰自己已经不能再被复制了。在它的化学漩涡和彩色破裂中，自肖像展现了一种液体智 慧的景象，这种智慧阻碍了全部的可再现性。这个图像是奇异的。更重要的是，即使用底片来重印它，也需要认识到每一次印刷的区别。其生产的化学条件不能完全复制。这就是重点。

这一知识已深入到每一张模拟照片中。把照片看作是机械复制的对象所掩盖的真相就是每一次重复都是有区别的重复。这种差异影响着摄影的再现性。它的预期光谱显示了暗房的物质性。

这种预期光谱是一种媒介形式且最有力地出现在侨民的形成过程中。侨民并不是凭空出现的，但他们所出现的”某个地方”总是令人担忧又极具复杂性。同样，照片(即使是数码照片，就像安娜·帕赛克（Anna Pasek）在故障美学和后液体智慧中分析出的结构一样)也不是凭空出现的。他们存有自身的发展过程。他们进入这个世界的过程和海外的侨民们一样复杂。每一个侨民身份的形成都是对更古老、更原始形态的重复，同时也是完全而必然的原始形态。侨民的流落他乡就是不断地挣扎于各种形式的重复，而这些重复也总是新的。侨民社区是对起源和家乡概念上不完美的重新塑造，这些想法总是存在于其他地方，但总是在当下重新构建。这一改造预期了它自己的原创性。它事先知道，丢失或遗留的东西是无法复制或重新制造的。

对摄影发展工作的思考需要专注于照片最不稳定的时刻，即它在不固定的和过渡的时候。这种时刻说明了摄影图像总体上的不稳定性，同时也点明了摄影对于种族和侨民的敏感性。种族化和侨民身份总是在分裂和分散的过程中被构建出来。他们永远处于不固定的危险之中，且总是处于过渡状态。把摄影作为一种发展过程的角度来揣摩需要在这些不稳定的脆弱之中生存。

鸣谢：这篇文章首先要要归功于我在”重塑家庭摄影(Reframing Family Photography)”学术座谈会议上的同事: 妮可·弗利特伍德(Nicole Fleetwood);, 萨拜娜·加狄胡可(Sabina Gadihoke)巴克瑞斯·摩尼(Bakirathi Mani)和利雷·瑞福德(Leigh Raiford)。如果没有与他们早期的对话，以及随后与米歇尔·皮尔森·克拉克(Michèle Pearson Clarke)与加布里埃尔·莫泽(Gabrielle Moser)的对话，我根本不会写出这篇文章。感谢家庭摄像机网络使这些对话成为可能。我事先知道这篇文章将由Eyal Amiran精心编辑，这才让我有了想出版它的想法。同时，也感谢三位匿名同行评论员的严谨和细心。莎拉·罗珍伯格(Sara Rozenberg)在最后一刻提供了不可或缺的研究援助。非常感谢后现代文化(Postmodern Culture)愿意用中文发表这篇文章，同时也非常感谢庞广龙(Guanglong Pang)出色的翻译。我对曹家迪(Richard)以及梁燕群(Gwen Cho)感激不尽，他们在把一个世界留在背后的同时为我创造了一个新的世界。

Lily Cho (bio)
York University

Abstract

This essay argues for the need to historicize and theorize race in photography by attending to the interventions of darkroom technicians, especially those who are themselves racialized. Understanding the crucial role of the darkroom technician challenges the idea that photographic development is merely a mechanical or technical process. The photograph in development represents a moment of transition that illuminates the instabilities of photographic images in general, and those that attend to race and diaspora in particular. Racialized and diasporic identities are constructed out of and despite ongoing processes of transition, fragmentation, and dispersal. This essay focuses on Chinese approaches to photographic development, exploring the cultural histories that inform the technique and craft. Engaging with photography as a process of development uncovers a powerful connection to the construction of diasporic communities.

改色

改色 (gaisè), to correct color: this was what my father did most days and most nights. This was the skill he learned in Hong Kong after escaping from a gulag during the Cultural Revolution, while waiting for his papers so he could emigrate to Canada. This was what he did after the failure of the Shangri La, a Chinese restaurant he ran in Whitehorse in the 1970s. He was gifted at this darkroom work (so I am told) and caught a lucky break when he got a job as a darkroom technician with the audio-visual department of the Government of Alberta, where he worked for over fifteen years. He lost his job and became permanently unemployed during the twin calamities (in my household at least) that were the massive job cuts engineered by the provincial government of the time, and the rise of digital photography. But for many years it was his day job, and at night my uncle would call and ask him to come over to his place to 改色, to correct color. My uncle owned a small grocery store in Edmonton, Alberta, with a professional photography studio in the back. The studio was both a business and a passion for my uncle, who mostly did family photographs and weddings. No matter their circumstances, people still wanted their pictures taken. He was almost always busy with this work, and my aunt and my cousins ran the grocery store out front. Almost every night after dinner, my dad would get a call and head over to my uncle’s darkroom to help process and print photographs. My brother and I often went along and played or helped out in the store until my dad was done. I was not permitted into the darkroom, but I knew it was a special, magical place of craft and artistry. This work was a part of the daily rhythm of my life, and an essential part of my family life and livelihood. Deborah Willis argues for “photography as biography” in her demand for the critical work of “visualizing memory” and portraying black lives (22). Thinking about race and photography has brought me to this private history of perpetual proximity to the magic of the darkroom, and to the specific work of color correction as an integral yet disaggregated part of the process. In Willis’s terms, biography can reveal how the darkroom is itself a site of complexity and contestation for racialized and diasporic communities.

This essay theorizes the darkroom. In doing so, it attends closely to the darkroom as a generative space for understanding the relationship between race and photography. Not only has the darkroom been largely absent from contemporary cultural criticism on photography; it has also been a space of normativized whiteness. Its equipment, chemicals, and paper are calibrated for representations of white subjects: “Mid-century film was engineered by white technicians and optimized for white skin” (Peters 65). Film sensitivity and color processing standards resulted in images that left dark-skinned subjects distorted or rendered them invisible in images with shadows or dark backgrounds. Black photographers have long grappled with the problematic intersection of photography and race. Syreeta McFadden describes how they had to “teach the camera” to see black skin:

Through experience we adapted to film technology—analog and digital—that hadn’t adapted to us. We circumvented the inherent flaws of film emulsion by ensuring that our subjects were well placed in light; invested more in costly lenses that permitted a wider variety of aperture ranges so we could imbue our work with all the light we could; we purchased professional-grade films at faster speeds, or specialty films with emulsions designed for shooting conditions strictly indoor under fluorescent or tungsten light. We accepted poor advice from white photo instructors to add Vaseline to teeth and skin or apply photosensitive makeup that barely matched our skin’s undertones.

Sometimes this constraint produces beautiful work. For example, Clorinde Peters describes how Roy DeCarava “responded to the inadequacies in film and the optics of race by occupying the low tonal range in his photographs, rather than compensating with exposure or development. DeCarava’s images are tender and somber” (65). New York Times critic Vicki Goldberg describes them as “bafflingly dark, suffused with stillness.” Teju Cole writes that “[i]nstead of trying to brighten blackness, [DeCarava] went against expectation and darkened it further. What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full of wise light, which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories” (147). DeCarava made beautiful images out of the bias against black subjects embedded in the available film technology; it wasn’t until the late 1970s that Kodak introduced Gold Max film, which improved the emulsion sensitivities for darker tones. Parallel to Coco Fusco’s much-cited discussion of how photography produces race, artist and writer Michèle Pearson Clarke observes that “photography… did not so much record the reality of Blackness as signify and construct a way of seeing it” (2). Clarke understands the profound difficulty of seeing Blackness given the histories of racism embedded in photographic practice:

This ongoing archive of willfully fabricated Black representation is now 175 years old, and represents a formidable obstacle to any contemporary photographer. When I look at any image of a Black body, or I imagine anyone looking at one of my own images, I am profoundly aware of the presence of this archive, operating as a kind of thick filter, obscuring and complicating the view. (3)

Clarke and Fusco have in mind Shawn Michelle Smith’s work, which uncovers the intertwining legacies of photography, biological racialism, and eugenics that established “social hierarchies anchored in new visual truths” (Smith 4). For Clarke, attending to the formal practices of Black photographers—in particular the choice of practitioners like Deana Lawson, Dawoud Bey, Myra Greene, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jalani Morgan to shoot in medium and large format film—offers one way to remove the “thick filter” that obscures race in photography. Some of the most innovative and provocative contemporary black photographers choose to work with analogue photography despite its history, producing what Clarke calls “affective grit,” the “friction produced by its granular textures [which] conveys the embodied intimacies and emotional realities of Black people, because we feel differently, we see differently” (6). Clarke’s insistence on the importance of analogue photographic practice points not only to the haptics of these images, but also the need to think through photographic processes themselves.

I want to build on Clarke’s call by considering the work of the darkroom technician and, in particular, their potential agency as a diasporic and racialized subject. What happens when we understand the darkroom technician as separate from the photographer, but playing a crucial role in the making of a photographic image? And what happens when we think about that technician as a racialized figure who might bring their own histories and techniques to bear in photographic production? Working alone in the deep red glow of the darkroom safelight, the technician has not occupied much of the discussion in contemporary photography theory. Yet until the recent era of digital photography, there would be no photographs without the work of the darkroom. Even with the rise of digital photography, many of the most celebrated images by racialized photographers have remained aligned with the wet process: the darkroom technologies of film, fixative, developers, enlargers, and images in solution (as Clarke’s survey of contemporary Black photographers who choose analogue reminds us). What happens in the darkroom matters. And it matters particularly for thinking about race and photography.

Darkroom materiality

Theorizing darkroom work through the figure and craft of the darkroom technician destabilizes the binary between the photographer and the photographic subject. More, understanding that the work of the darkroom can manifest across multiple cultural registers opens up the homogenizing tendencies of its techne; even when technicians used the same enlargers, printers, papers, and fluids, they used them differently in different places. To think of the darkroom process as my father did, as 改色, is to put in place radically different circuits of knowledge, craft, and practice than those dominated by Kodak and Ilford. Even though developing processes are integral to photography, they remain curiously under-theorized. My theorizing of the darkroom process is guided by, and extends, the materialist turn in photography criticism. This materialist turn emerges in Tina Campt’s conversation with the Black British photographer Ingrid Pollard on the subject of photographic negatives: “photographic images have a tangibility, a materiality that we often lose sight of when we engage them only in print form, and negatives remind us of this materiality” (128). As Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart observe, “a photograph is a three-dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image” (1). While this observation seems obvious,

[t]he prevailing tendency is that photographs are apprehended in one visual act, absorbing image and object together, yet privileging the former. Photographs thus become detached from their physical properties and consequently from the functional context of a materiality that is glossed merely as a neutral support for images. (Edwards and Hart 2)

Attempting to push beyond this glossing, Lee Mackinnon asks, “How might consideration of photography as a material ontological event allow us to go beyond the well-established subject-object positions that have long underpinned photographic critique?” (150). Mackinnon’s question disrupts a longstanding immateriality connected to ontological approaches to photography. In his formative 1958 essay on “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin removes the intermediary role of any material processes necessary for the production of the image. Instead, he dwells on the intrinsic relation between the photograph and its object, and the power of the photograph to remove barriers to representation:

It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflexion of a damp sidewalk, there a gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, … [is] to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. (8)

This elegiac ode to the impassive and objective power of the camera to capture its object powerfully signposts the turn away from precisely the kinds of material considerations to which Mackinnon returns. For Bazin, “[t]he photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint” (8); for Mackinnon, the fingerprint demands attention to the viscosity of the ink and, more pertinently, to the ways in which the photograph is much more than an imprint.

In this turn to enlarging photographic criticism beyond the photographer and the photographed, the photograph has become an event, as Ariella Azoulay suggests (15). Mackinnon expands Azoulay’s approach into the materials of production:

To think as a materialist is to acknowledge the agencies that participate in the act of making, or taking, a photograph. Taking a photograph indicates the extraction and exchange of certain material conditions that allow the image to come into being. Whether considering the constitutive material elements of devices that are mined, extracted, or otherwise amalgamated, such as silver, aluminum, steel or oil, or the shutter at the moment of its capture in conjunction with eye, hand, body, or remote automated operative, the image is made only in respect of all that has been taken in order to make it possible. The image thus begins its journey through numerous channels, optical and otherwise, that proceed to process it. (153-54)

In attending to the processes of making the photograph, Mackinnon asks us to consider the agential possibilities of a materialist approach in which

the human photographer is no longer the sole agency that authors the image. Agency lends itself to all features of the photographic event as they interact, and the photographic image is a narrow section through the complex black box of such an event. (154)

Mackinnon focuses primarily on the materials that make up the black box of the camera itself: the “apparatus of the camera bears the inscription of global divisions of labour and wealth, sanctioned behind a veneer of techno-humanism… Those who mine its raw materials, those who fit its components in remote sweatshops are the camera’s extended functionaries and its remote body” (155). For Mackinnon, materialism—defined as “a decision to focus upon the materials of engagement, such as the processes of production and their subsequent power relations, the workers who build components, and the otherwise black-boxed complexity of interactions that make the photographic event possible”—makes agency visible (150).

While this turn to materialism enables an understanding of agency that extends well beyond the relationship between the photographer and the photographed, its focus still occludes darkroom processes. This occlusion, the curious invisibility of the darkroom’s processes, can be located in what Kaja Silverman tracks as “the industrialization of chemical photography” and the “ocularization” of photography, which “reached its zenith in 1888, when George Eastman began manufacturing dry, transparent, flexible, photographic film and released the first Kodak camera” (82). Marketed under the slogan “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest,” the camera arrived with the film already loaded for one hundred exposures (82). The customer, now also the photographer, simply used the camera and then “sent it back to Eastman with the film still in it so that the negatives could be processed, printed, and mounted. The camera was reloaded, and returned to the owner with the prints” (82). Wildly popular, the Kodak camera made darkroom work invisible and diminished its role as an agent in the production of the photographic image. Reduced to a factory-assembled technical process, the work of the darkroom ceases to operate as a site of craft, artistry, and agency:

by reducing photography to three predefined steps, George Eastman substituted the Kodak system for the “pencil of nature.” By releasing photographers from “the chemical steps of the process,” he also sealed off photography’s liquid intelligence. Finally, by printing as well as developing the negative at the factory, Eastman created the illusion that the photographs that arrived in the mail were the exact positive equivalents of the negatives that were in the camera when it was shipped off – that the governing principle of photography is “sameness.” (Silverman 83)

Rather than celebrating the idiosyncrasies and instabilities fundamental to the wet process, the Kodak system flattened photography’s differences. In so doing, it suppressed the possibilities of photography as a site of volatile – rather than mechanically reproduced – memory.

In contrast, to embrace the materiality of the darkroom as central to the photographic process is to reactivate what Jeff Wall identifies as photography’s “liquid intelligence” (109). This intelligence allows an even more profound revaluation of the relationship between photography and memory that Mackinnon’s materialism demands. Echoing what Richard Terdiman calls “materials memory” (35) in reference to the persistence of the knowledge of social processes embedded into the construction of objects, Mackinnon asks that considerations of the photographic image recall the material processes of its production:

In materialist terms, memory extends beyond the pictorial surface of the image and is embedded in the core of devices and materials. To invest the surface of its resultant image with the nostalgia of the subject is an act that negates the memory held in these components, or the memory of those who were present at the event of capture and who experienced the extended context of that moment beyond the instant of its abstraction. (155)

Between all the forces of extraction and colonialism (the mining of materials, the physical processes of assembly) that come with the production of the camera as a physical object and the photographic image that you hold in your hand or see framed on a wall, there is a passage through what Jeff Wall identifies as a form of archaic knowledge:

This archaism of water, of liquid chemicals, connects photography to the past, to time, in an important way. By calling water an ‘archaism’ here I mean that it embodies a memory-trace of very ancient production-processes – of washing, bleaching, dissolving, and so on, which are connected to the origin of techne… In this sense, the echo of water in photography evokes its prehistory. (109)

The materials memory of this liquid intelligence also persists and reverberates. As Wall observes, it connects the technological work of producing the photographic image to older processes of memory and to production. Water—and the chemical baths necessary for the production of most photographic images prior to the era of digitization—calls the photograph back to the materiality of a process that emerges only, and precisely, in solution. It is not only the “impassive lens” of Bazin’s ontology that strips the photographic object of “spiritual dust and grime,” but also the liquid intelligence of the wet process itself. Immersed, bathed, and finally fixed in the complexity of multiple solutions, the materiality of the photograph carries the traces of processes that have been rinsed away. The print process therefore demands thinking about photography at a crucially unstable and unfixed moment. Before it is printed, in the black waters of the darkroom, the photograph is literally in development. Much can happen here, in the red glow and maroon shadows of the safelight. Many decisions are made, and each one will alter the image. Each print will carry the invisible traces of the technician who adjusts light, color, and contrast in pursuit of what will be a final image (but never truly so, because another print can always be made). In this uncertain and perpetual calibration, the darkroom is a place of fleeting possibility and material agency.

Wet process and the negative histories of seeing color

Despite my commitment to locating the agential possibilities of the darkroom process, especially for racialized and diasporic subjects, I am keenly aware of the ways in which photography has served colonialism and racism. As the work of photography scholars and practitioners shows, color photography has been an instrument of discrimination and violence. Lorna Roth’s work on color balance and the Kodachrome process gets to the heart of the racism in the chromogenic print process. Roth’s extensive research shows that the process is racially coded in that it makes whiteness normative and works to obscure blackness. Roth focuses on the so-called “Shirley cards” used by Kodak to instruct darkroom technicians and photographers on color balance and process. The “Shirley card” is a

norm reference card showing a “Caucasian” woman wearing a colourful, high-contrast dress [and] is used as a basis for measuring and calibrating the skin tones on the photograph being printed. The light skin tones of these women – named “Shirley” by male industry users after the name of the first colour test-strip-card model – have been the recognized skin ideal standard for most North American analogue photo labs since the early part of the twentieth century and they continue to function as the dominant norm. (112)

Roth identifies several factors that forced a change in the emulsions. In the 1950s, school photographs began to depict black and white children together. Different skin tones could be accommodated through “compensatory lighting” and “technical adjustments learned through experience” as long as the children were photographed individually, but in a group portrait, “these techniques could not resolve the problem of the film bias in favour of ‘Caucasian’ skin… the picture results showed details on the white children’s faces, but erased the contours and particularities of the faces of children with darker skin, except for the whites of their eyes and teeth” (119). As Roth is at pains to show, this imbalance is the result of a sustained history of racial and gender biases that contributed to the development of the technical materials, such that “refinements to the chemistry of film emulsions have never been issues of physics or chemistry exclusively, but have been the result of cultural choices as well” (118).

Even without Shirley cards, professional photographers had long been aware of this bias in color film. Jean-Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film during a 1977 trip to Mozambique and declared the film to be “racist” (O’Toole 373). The artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin pick up Godard’s statement in To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, a 2012 photographic exhibition based on Shirley cards and dead Kodak film stock used on a trip to Gabon that produced only one successful image. The title is taken from “an expression used by Kodak executives to euphemistically allude to the ability of their new color film stocks to better represent a wide range of skin tones” (O’Toole 373), and the exhibition insists on the materiality of the image and the history of racism over which so much image-making had glossed. In particular, Broomberg and Chanarin’s work refers to, and recalls, the racism of Polaroid’s ID-2 camera, which had been deliberately modified to produce an extra burst of light to illuminate the features of black people (O’Toole 379, Morgan 525). the South African apartheid government used this camera to produce identification photographs for passbooks that controlled and regulated the movements of black South Africans. After discovering the connection between Polaroid and apartheid in South Africa, workers at Polaroid posted flyers that declared “Polaroid Imprisons Black People in 60 Seconds”—the time it took to produce the image (Morgan 524). These protests ultimately lead to Polaroid’s withdrawal from South Africa in 1977, revealing the complexity of the racism of color film processes (Morgan 546).

In the South African context, color photography carries its particular morality. Jennifer Bajorek’s discussion of the color photography of David Goldblatt and Richard Mosse reveals its complex moral dimension—what Bajorek calls an “extra-moral” dimension. Goldblatt refused to photograph in color during apartheid, and only began to shoot in color post-apartheid. But Bajorek cautions against making easy connections between color and the “sweetness” of the end of apartheid:

Everyone likes a felicitous correspondence between the aesthetic qualities of an image and its theme or subject matter. Such a correspondence is, however, in the case of Goldblatt’s colour work, false. Interpretations of Goldblatt’s post-apartheid work that confuse the “sweetness” of colour with that of the end of apartheid fail to engage with its most interesting interpretive challenges, which are, I would venture, connected with its probing reflection on the nature of democracy. (Bajorek 226)

Bajorek goes on to offer just such a probing reflection, ultimately suggesting that

Colour, it turns out, belongs neither to a moral nor to a political discourse. The questions we should be asking are not whether colour is too sweet or too seductive, or whether it distracts us from passively receiving a political message, or from engaging as political actors with “hard realities,” but whether and when it allows us to visualise these realities differently or to ask new questions about them? When and where, in what images, does colour allow us to ask, to think, to see or to do something new? (234)

Bajorek’s questions point not only to the experience of seeing color, but also to its production. To think about producing color is to think about the print process and the work of the darkroom. In the darkroom, the processing of the photographic image turns on interaction, subtraction, and balance. To make beautiful color prints, the darkroom technician (who is sometimes, but certainly not always, the photographer) must balance the colors by creating an interaction between the three main colors (magenta, yellow, and cyan), and then slowly subtracting them (usually magenta and yellow) until the image colors are correct or true.

Correcting color and alternative modes of darkroom production

There are implications for understanding the darkroom technician both as potentially disaggregated from the photographer, and as integral to the photographic situation. Sometimes photographers develop their own images, but often they do not. The darkroom technician’s work is usually invisible; it happens where there is no witness. While it seems to lack the panache of the auteurship wielded by the photographer, this work too is marked by complex decision-making, craft, and artistry. Despite the job title, the darkroom technician’s work is never merely technical, not simply an automated process of churning out contact sheets and printing images through a prescribed formula. Like the photographer, the darkroom technician must master an array of equipment and substances. The enlarger. The printer. The chemicals and the paper. And the norm references or indexes. It matters where and in what context a photography technician learns their craft; like photography itself, photographic development processes are not neutral.

Much has been made of the Shirley cards, and I’m sure they were essential, but I never saw one in my father’s darkrooms. He tells me he never used them. My father’s route to acquiring darkroom skills occurred outside of commercial photography or amateur darkrooms across North America, where tools such as the Shirley cards were standard practice. He was trained in Hong Kong in the late 1960s. After escaping from a gulag where he had been imprisoned for five years, and a different gulag before that for two years, he was given shelter by a man who adopted him as a godson. This benefactor had a medical practice in the central district of Hong Kong. Even all these years later, my father still remembers every detail. He slept in the office. He tells me that a small darkroom had been installed in the medical office because it was more efficient and less expensive for the doctor to develop his own x-ray images than to send them out. There my father learned how to process and print, and he was captivated by the way an image could be manipulated in the darkroom. Where the makeshift darkroom in the medical office in Hong Kong offered a preliminary space of learning and shelter, he honed his skills in the semi-professional darkroom in the basement of a grocery store in Edmonton. His diasporic route was marked first by seven years in the dark room of Chinese state persecution before an escape to a literal darkroom shelter in a British colonial protectorate, and then by yet another darkroom in the refuge of a small city in a British settler colonial country. His darkroom skills had to be translated across these cultures and geographies.

In attending to the translation work that my father had to do in the darkroom, it is helpful to consider the differences between photographic practices in China and those in North America. Photography in China was and is not the same as photography in Europe and North America. Critics such as Roberta Wue and Wu Hung have written extensively about the distinctness of photographic history and tradition in China, outlining its close relationship to ancestor portraits and landscape paintings. Still, Wu Hung cautions against falling into easy binarisms that characterize eastern and western conceptions of photography as intrinsically different rather than as a more complex combination of difference and mutual articulation. The skepticism over any kind of intrinsic east-west aesthetic divide is warranted, but at the same time, it is absolutely the case the Chinese portraiture has a long and robust tradition that influenced the rise of photography in China in ways that differ from the emergence of photography elsewhere. As Yi Gu posits, “While we may downplay the emphasis on ‘Chinese peculiarity’ as a mere reflection of colonial anxiety, traces of stylistic distinction were manifested in a good many photographs of Chinese sitters” (122). Gu recognizes the specificity of Chinese photography without falling into binarism through a rigorous investigation of the Chinese names for photography, their evolution, and the way they illuminate an approach to photography that could be identified as specifically Chinese. Gu draws attention to the intimate relationship between painting and photography in China: “The first names for photography in Chinese – yingxiang, xiaoxiang, xiaozhao—were all preexisting terms for portrait painting” (Gu 121). China’s encounter with photography needs to be understood as part of a broader complex of visual practices in which painting and photography are synchronous rather than diametrically opposed:

If there are antinaturalistic traits in Chinese photography, they neither indicate a lack of understanding by Chinese photography’s media specificity nor demonstrate a conscious resistance to it. The fact that the names first used for photography were all preexisting words for portrait painting highlights a historical moment in China when photography belonged to a rapidly changing and expanding field of visual practice that was conveniently dubbed “painting.” (122)

Gu’s interventions break down the divide between photography and painting in Chinese visual practices. Her examination of the Chinese terms for photography calls attention to the specificity of photographic traditions outside of North American and European contexts.

Similarly, the Chinese term for darkroom process, 改色, reveals the specificity of the skills that my father brought to the darkroom. The first character, 改, is a verb that means to correct, alter, improve, or remodel. The second character, 色, is a noun that means color, tint, or hue, but also form, body, beauty, and the desire for beauty. This phrasing differs radically from Anglophone terminology for the same work: wet process, or developing the photograph. Further, 改色 is terminology that emerged outside of the industrialization of chemical photography. As Silverman observes, “Most of the terms through which we conceptualize the medium were manufactured for us, just like our equipment and material” (70), but 改色 opens up a different conception. Circulating outside of the imperatives of the industrialization of photography, 改色 offers an alternative route to the liquid intelligence of the photograph. 改色 is notably literal as a term for the work of the darkroom. When so much of the terminology for photographic practice is dominated by metaphor and analogy (developing the negative, shooting the film), 改色 describes exactly the work that must be done in order for the negative to be printed as a positive image. As a term, 改色 understands that the film that has been “shot” requires a great deal of further work before it can be printed as a finished image. It also assumes that the photograph is only finished after this process of correction. That is, the film is always already in need of correction; it is not simply finished, correct, or true until it has undergone this process of balance and modification.

The language of development, of the fluidity and change and progress, pervades photography. There is an inherently unfinished nature to photography such that its evolution seems twinned with that of its users:

Not only is the photographic image an analogy, rather than a representation or an index, but analogy is also the fluid in which it develops. This process does not begin when we decide that it should, or end when we command it to. Photography develops, rather, with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, and when we divest them of their saving power, generally inputting them to ourselves, it goes elsewhere. The earliest of these forms was the pinhole camera, which was more “found” than invented. It morphed into the optical camera obscura, was reborn as chemical photography, migrated into literature and painting, and lives on in a digital form. It will not end until we do. (Silverman 12)

Silverman moves quickly to metaphor, but she is careful not to insist on the necessity of understanding the idea of development as a linear process. As Sara Kofman warns, the turn to metaphor in photography demands a wariness of any language of development that is too linear. She refuses a linear approach by which a photographic negative is transformed into a positive, printed image. Writing of the use of the photographic metaphor in Freud, Kofman notes that, despite its claim to science, “Freud’s text nevertheless fails to avoid the traditional system of mythical and metaphysical oppositions: unconscious/conscious, dark/light, negative/positive” (26). These oppositions imply linearity by marking the passage from unconscious to conscious, and from negative to positive, where “[t]he positive image, the double of the negative, implies that ‘what is at the end is already there in the beginning’” (Kofman 26-7). If we were to follow this line of thinking, then the work of the darkroom would become irrelevant: “Development adds nothing; it only enables the darkness to be made into light” (27). Against this reading, Kofman argues that

the passage from negative to positive is neither necessary nor dialectical. It is possible that the development will never take place. Repression is originary, and there is always an irretrievable residue, something which will never have access to consciousness. The death drive, as a generalized economic principle, prevents us from confusing the negative in Freud with that in Hegel. What is more, when there is a passage into consciousness, it depends not on logical criteria, but on a selection involving conflicts between nondialectizable forces. Finally, to pass from negative to positive is not to become conscious of a preexisting meaning, light, or truth of a reason diverted from itself… The passage to light takes place through a procedure which is not theoretical but practical: the analytic cure. As with Marx, only a transformation of the balance of forces leads to clarity. To pass from darkness to light is not, then, to rediscover a meaning already there, it is to construct a meaning which has never existed as such. There are limits to repetition inasmuch as full meaning has never been present. Repetition is originary. (27-28, my emphasis)

In this extraordinary meditation, Kofman traces a path from analogy and metaphor to practice. She insists on the active and deeply creative role of the darkroom process. The passage from negative to positive is not merely a mechanical process of inversion and imprinting. It is full of conflict. It is not linear. It is a procedure and a process that demands balance. More, the truth of the image is not simply already there waiting for a technical or mechanical process to make it complete or visible. Rather, it is always under construction. Each print is a repetition that is also original. Repetition is originary. In attending to the passage of the negative into a positive print as a process that is not simple inversion, Kofman’s analysis corrects and balances the occularization of the photograph whereby Bazin could contemplate an ontology of photography that eliminated the darkroom from consideration.

To insist upon the originality of each repetition, to demand attending to the difference in each photographic print, enables a way of seeing race in photography that embraces the trace of the negative in each image, and thus the process of producing an image out of that negative. Each repetition, each print, is an articulation of difference. As Campt understands, photographic negatives

confront us with both the limits of the photograph and our desire for it to simplify the work of racial and diasporic identification and affiliation by doing it for us. We rely all too often on images to confirm our unspoken assumption about race and diaspora through their capacity to materialize the visible traces and visual indexes of difference and affiliation… the materiality of the photographic negative reminds us that even when race seems clearly visible in a photographic print, its visuality is the creation of technical, material, and cultural processes of conjuring and fixing, where the very chemical and technological matter of the image – the photographic negative – must disappear race in order to make it reappear in recognizable form. (128)

If each print is an instance of making race disappear only to make it reappear in a stable and fixed form, dwelling in the difference of each reprint, each repetition, can make visible the potentiality of the photograph’s passage from negative to positive. It opens up a generative space for racialized representation that has been largely invisible: the work of darkroom technicians who are not white, and who do not print and produce photographs according to norms and conventions of whiteness.

In the darkroom, my father corrected color. But he did much more than that. He altered and improved on the image. He remodeled it. And he didn’t do so only in terms of color, but by understanding that color is also its own form, a body of its own. It is beauty and the desire for beauty. He did this work through a process of interaction, subtraction, and balance. That is, the darkroom technician understands that there is no image without interaction; that color emerges, paradoxically, from the removal of color; and that this work is ultimately one of balance. What is more, all color work shares a common ground in that every color is a mix of the three foundational ones: magenta, cyan, and yellow. The darkroom technician handles and sees the photograph in its most unfixed and unstable state. In mid-process, the print is terribly fragile. It is vulnerable to light and heat. It must be bathed again and again in order to emerge in its final state. The layers of its formation are laid bare and are open for manipulation, destruction, transition, and change. Although Roth, Bajorek, and O’Toole are absolutely right to point to the ways in which the color print process fails racialized peoples in its reliance upon the visuality of whiteness as a norm, I hope that this preliminary exploration of darkroom materiality opens up the possibility of a more agential understanding of the wet process. This technology, like all technologies, is open to manipulation. It is a technical process, but one that is fundamentally about a multiplicity of techniques. To correct color, as my father did, is to deploy a range of formal possibilities in the search for beauty.

Conclusion: anticipatory spectrality and liquid intelligence in the safelight

I would like to close by looking at a self-portrait of my father (Fig. 1).

Fig 1.
Self-portrait by Richard Cho. Used by permission.

In this photograph, the colors completely saturate the frame. My father is lit up in bold washes of blue and yellow and violet. The electricity of the color contrasts with the leisurely pose he has adopted for this portrait. He leans on an elbow. He is smoking. His gaze is turned away, off to the left of the frame. You wouldn’t know that this a self-portrait of a man who has just escaped from years of imprisonment in a gulag where starvation, deprivations of all sorts, and torture were the horrifically regular facts of daily life. This image tells me something about surviving the trauma of state persecution. It tells me that, in darkness, one can still find ways to fill a frame with so much light such that even the shadows are completely charged with color. It tells me that how he saw himself in the aftermath of that horror was part of a process where the things that happen in a darkroom can transcend the captivity of the frame.

My father is very proud of this print. He claims to have invented the process for making this image. He tells me he did it by playing around in the darkroom, by over-exposing the photograph at different points in the development process. To arrive at this image, the technician must undertake several submersions and exposures. If there are still doubts about the otherness of my father’s liquid intelligence, let me share with you his own instructions for how to make this image. His process (Fig. 2):

Fig 2.
My father’s instructions.

He wrote these instructions for me nearly fifty years after he made the image. There is no Shirley card here. He is now an old man, but he remembers in vivid and exacting detail how to make that portrait again. I have chosen not to translate his instructions. The difference of his approach, the depth of the connection between these instructions and the life he led, matter more than the technicalities of the process itself. These instructions tell me that one submersion is not enough, that the film must be exposed through multiple filters at different stages in the development process. Looking at these instructions now, I can see that his particular route to photographic development is its own story of the self. I have not yet written of his escape from the gulag. It is not my story to tell. I do not know if it is my story to pass on. He escaped through sewage tunnels and then swam to freedom in Macao. He passed through dark waters and multiple submersions. Every repetition is originary.

Photographic print processes are processes of development, and are thus fallible and alterable. To pay serious attention to the darkroom as a crucial site of the event of photography is to attend to the instances where the photograph is at its most vulnerable, already in existence but not yet formed. It is to understand that the materiality of the process also draws us to the immaterial – the instances where the photograph could be something else, something other than what it will be. It is anticipatorily spectral. The photograph in development is not haunted by what was, but rather by what could be. Haunting is this “contest over the future” (Gordon 3). It is not about the past, but rather about possibilities curtailed and foregone: “We’re haunted, as Herbert Marcuse wrote, by the ‘historic alternatives’ that could have been’” (Gordon 5). In this take on haunting, Avery Gordon reconsiders the work she accomplished in Ghostly Matters. Nearly a decade after its publication, Gordon refines her thinking to insist on the social and political dimensions of haunting, specifically that of incarceration. In the aftermath of imprisonment and the heady experience of a freedom that was only ever a glimmer of possibility, the spectrality of my father’s self-portrait emerges out of a contesting of futures that could have been. Capturing and fixing a moment of photographic development in flux, this self-portrait makes visible the idea of other futures. What if more magenta had been allowed here? What if the blue along his jaw line had been fixed before it became that particular shade of blue? In its embrace of color untethered from the neutral and normative modes of balance and indexical accuracy, this self-portrait is charged with the excesses of fixatives that have been, if only for a moment, allowed to be unfixed from their usual places. It animates possibilities of pasts that will not remain in the past. Gordon “used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind field comes into view” (2). On the edge of each shift in color and tone, this self-portrait is at once exemplary of his technical mastery of darkroom technique, and an experiment in allowing for the loss of balance and control. Allowing for this loss anticipates the ghosts that hover just beyond the field of view. There is no way to see the dispossession of a past marked by years in a gulag with no clear end in sight, other than to look again and again at the contested futures that haunt the present.

My father’s self-portrait reveals a reformation and re-making of the self that anticipates so much. It anticipates the idea of a life that can be made in the aftermath of imprisonment, torture, and persecution. It anticipates and beautifully refutes the idea that the darkroom is merely a place of technical and mechanical reproduction. It anticipates Kofman’s understanding that repetition is originary. More than that, it posits that repetition is anticipatory. This repetition, this portrait produced in a way that so spectacularly visualizes the instability of the darkroom process, anticipates its originality. Look at the swirl of maroon and purple in the top left corner. Look at the opalescent bursts of turquoise, yellow, and orange in the bottom left and top right. This photograph captures the innate dynamism and unpredictability at the heart of photography’s liquid intelligence. This self-portrait knows in advance that it cannot be made again. In its chemical swirls and chromatic ruptures, the self-portrait makes a spectacle of the knowledge of the liquid intelligence that stymies total reproducibility. This image is singular. More than that, even reprinting it from a negative demands a recognition of the difference of each print. The chemical conditions of its production cannot be perfectly reproduced. That is the point.

But this knowledge is embedded in every analogue photograph. To think of the photograph as an object of mechanical reproduction risks occluding how every repetition is a repetition with a difference. This difference haunts photography’s reproducibility. Its anticipatory spectrality makes manifest the darkroom’s materiality. This anticipatory spectrality is a form of agency that emerges most powerfully in diasporic formations. Diasporas do not emerge from nowhere, but the somewheres of their emergence are fraught and complex. Similarly, photographs do not emerge from nowhere (not even digital photographs, as Anna Pasek’s unpacking of glitch aesthetics and post-liquid intelligence uncovers); they are developed. They come into the world through a process as fraught and complex as diaspora. Each diasporic formation is both a repetition of an older, earlier form, and also utterly and necessarily original. To be in diaspora is to grapple perpetually with forms of repetition that are also always new. Diasporic communities are imperfect re-formations of ideas of origin and home that are always elsewhere, but are perpetually re-made in the present. This remaking anticipates its own originality. It knows in advance that what is lost or left behind cannot be copied or made again. Attending to the work of developing photographs calls for a focus on one of the moments when the photograph is most unstable, when it is unfixed and in transition. Such a moment illuminates the particular instabilities of photographic images in general, but also photography that is attentive to race and diaspora specifically. Racialized and diasporic identities that are constructed out of and despite processes of fragmentation and dispersal are always in process. They are perpetually at risk of becoming unfixed and always in transition. Understanding photography as a process of development demands inhabiting the vulnerabilities of these instabilities.

Acknowledgments

This essay owes its first debt to my fellow panelists at the “Reframing Family Photography” conference: Nicole Fleetwood, Sabina Gadihoke, Bakirathi Mani, and Leigh Raiford. Without these early conversations, and the ones that followed with Michèle Pearson Clarke and Gabrielle Moser, I would not have written this essay at all. Many thanks to the Family Camera Network for making these conversations possible. Knowing that this essay would be in the very fine editorial care of Eyal Amiran made it possible for me to imagine publishing it. Thanks, also, to the three anonymous peer reviewers for their rigour and care. Sara Rozenberg offered indispensable research assistance at the eleventh hour. Huge thanks to Postmodern Culture for their willingness to publish this essay in Chinese and to Guanglong Pang for this beautiful translation. Thank you to Richard and Gwen Cho who left behind one world to make a new one for me.

Works Cited

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