Category: Volume 29 – Number 2 – January 2019

John Freeman is a Renaissance scholar with a wide range of research and teaching interests, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Thomas More’s Utopia to digital and popular culture (such as the MTV series “Catfish”). His recent publications include “Tupac’s ‘Holographic Resurrection’: Corporate Takeover or Rage against the Machinic?” (CTheory) and “Shakespeare’s Imitation Game, or: How Do You Solve a [Problem Set] Like Katherina?” (Symploke).

Brian Glavey is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and the author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde (Oxford, 2016). He is currently working on a book on relatability and the poetics of oversharing.

Andrew Kingston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. His dissertation examines figures of corruption in the history of aesthetics and the performing arts, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arnold Schoenberg, and others. He has published on Derrida and Hegel.

Michael Millner teaches English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he will serve as the Nancy Donahue Endowed Professor of the Arts beginning in 2020. He is currently working on a narrative history of the Dylan-Warhol meeting in 1965. This essay is part of a larger project investigating how recent research in cognitive science has shaped political economy. More information about his scholarship and teaching is available at michaelmillner.com.

Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (UPenn Press), and has co-edited volumes on anthropology and the arts and global downtowns. Her work explores sound, sensation, and urban infrastructures below and above ground, with research primarily in Los Angeles and Appalachia. Her forthcoming book is Atmospheric Noise: Aerial Matters in Los Angeles (Duke UP).

Steven Swarbrick is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. His research spans sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, queer theory, environmental humanities, film, and disability studies. His current book project is titled “Materialism without Matter: Environmental Poetics from Spenser to Milton.” He is working on a second book project provisionally titled “Deleuze and the Intolerable: Cinema at the End of the World.” His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Cultural Critique, JNT, and Criticism, as well as in several edited anthologies, including Queer Milton.

Mikko Tuhkanen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches African American and African-diasporic literatures, LGBTQ literatures, and literary theory. His most recent books include The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018) and The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014), co-edited with E. L. McCallum. He has published in diacritics, differences, American Literature, Cultural Critique, James Baldwin Review, and elsewhere.

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio)

A review of Watt, Calum. Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship. Legenda, 2017.

In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002), Mary Ann Doane not only maps the new technology’s historical context—masterfully analyzing cinema’s place in the constellation of such nineteenth-century discourses as thermodynamics, eugenics, statistic, and psychoanalysis—but also evokes, perhaps unwittingly, a dominant trope that has organized film theory since its beginning. This trope conveys what a psychoanalytically minded reader might call the “ambivalence” that has inflected the reception of cinema. On the one hand, the new technology was welcomed with enthusiasm for various reasons, among them its seeming ability to alleviate the cruelties of human finitude: the promise that, with the new re-presentational capacity, “death will have ceased to be absolute” (qtd. in Doane 62), that those whom we have lost will live on in lifelike simulacra. On the other hand, what Doane calls “this fascination with the technologically supported ability to inscribe time” (63) readily slipped into an anxiety about cinema’s potentially malevolent influence, often informed by the perceived kinship between film spectatorship and the histories of hypnosis and mesmerism. Commentators who made this connection—who saw in cinema dangers that would be allegorized in Robert Weise’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse—introduced a vocabulary to film theory that has remained with us ever since. Doane continues this tradition by tracking the ways in which the unease of early commentators was elicited by “the fascination” of cinema (108), the “pleasure and fascination” of film viewing (107). This infectiously recurrent word, I propose, is important: since the late nineteenth century, observers of the new art have again and again returned to contemplate, in Ackbar Abbas’s phrase, “the fascination of the cinematic” (363).

As Doane’s analysis suggests, the history of film theory is a history of fascination. Following early commentators’ routine references to what Hugo Münsterberg in 1916 called cinema’s “strange fascination” (221), critics of the culture industry in postwar Europe would frequently discern in popular culture the mechanism of ideological enthrallment, a bondage that the word “fascination,” with its long and resonant history in Western discourses, readily suggested. Theodor Adorno spoke of the “programmatic fascination” with which popular culture’s distractions snared individuals into a “bewitched reality” (“On the Fetish-Character” 276; Aesthetic Theory 227). While the Birmingham School would rethink such dynamics by reconsidering cultural contestations beyond the rigorous schemes of classical Marxism, in the film theory of the late twentieth century, particularly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, Raymond Bellour, Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey would go on to analyze spectatorial identification with the cinematic image in terms of the audience’s “imaginary” thrall—frequently, again, “fascination”—with screen images. The tradition of dissecting “the fascination of film” (Mulvey 14) has been more recently continued by Steven Shaviro, Oliver Harris, and Pansy Duncan; in ways that remain to be analyzed, Leo Bersani’s commentary on cinema, spread across his extensive oeuvre, similarly unfolds as a theory of fascination.

In Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship, Calum Watt positions Maurice Blanchot as an important and overlooked thinker in this genealogy. As Watt notes, Blanchot does not immediately come to mind as a theorist of film. His philosophical interests focus almost exclusively on literary texts; only a few oblique references in his work evince any engagement with cinema. Nevertheless, a number of filmmakers—most notably Jean-Luc Godard, to whom the book’s first chapter is devoted—have deployed Blanchot as a point of reference. The task of Blanchot and the Moving Image is to make explicit the relevance of his work to the field of cinema studies. With a thorough knowledge of Blanchot’s work and an exquisite sensitivity to the details of his stylistics, Watt does this by elaborating on the concept of “fascination,” the nodal point at which film theory and Blanchot’s philosophy meet.

Even though it is a central and recurring term in his work, “fascination” has received very little sustained attention from Blanchot’s commentators. Among scholars who have picked up the concept to any extent, Victoria Burke suggests that fascination allows Blanchot to rethink Hegelian “desire” beyond the “work” that dialectics demands: with “fascination,” we move from Hegel’s “labor of the negative” to Blanchot’s “worklessness,” the kind of paralytic receptiveness that the word suggests. Gerald Bruns, too, notes that the term in Blanchot evokes “the concept of passivity that is outside the dialectical alternatives of action and passion—a passivity that is not the mere negation of action” (Bruns 48, see also 59-61, 77). The concept, that is, offers Blanchot a potential escape from the stranglehold that dialectics has had on philosophy. Another term for this radical passivity is “essential solitude,” an idea that Blanchot, in the essay by that name, links persistently to fascination (“The Essential Solitude,” see esp. 25, 30-33). More recently, Brigitte Weingart has situated Blanchot’s evocations of “fascination” in the long history of affect theorists from Plutarch to René Descartes to Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock (Weingart 95-97), and Kevin Hart, reading Blanchotian thought in the context of twentieth-century reconfigurations of theology and mysticism, has suggested that “the sacred” elicits “fascination”: what Blanchot variously calls “il y a” or “the neuter” or “the Outside” or “the other night” “fascinates and frightens” (Hart 57, see also 152-53, 208, and passim).

To my knowledge, only Shaviro and Harris have explored the overlap of film theory and Blanchotian fascination, a connection that Watt fleshes out. In this way, Blanchot and the Moving Image should also be read as a contribution to the emergent field of—as we might call it—”Fascination Studies.” As other scholars have indicated, the concept suggests the uncanny underside of modern life; it evokes the enchantments that Enlightenment modernity, for better or worse, is supposed to have defused. The term is derived from the Latin fascināre, whose semantic range moves from “irresistibly attractive influence” and “enchantment” to the obsolete meanings of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” (OED). While modernity is often figured in terms of the eradication of such superstitions as were articulated in ancient or medieval discourses about “fascinating” influences—in terms, that is, of the world’s “disenchantment”—we are by now used to observing the persistence with which various “irrationalities” have continued to inhabit the modern mind.¹

Apart from “fascination,” the history of cinema and its theorization share with Blanchotian philosophy the central concept of “the image”—a point whose obviousness Blanchot and the Moving Image may make one embarrassed to have missed. “Films,” Watt writes, “are made of what are commonly called ‘images,’ and are sometimes said to inspire ‘fascination’” (9-10). Blanchot imbues both terms with idiosyncratic, complicated significance. For him, “the image” suggests a realm in which objects are at once constituted and undone. Taking his cues particularly from Blanchot’s essay “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” Watt writes that the image not only strips an object of its usability, but also undoes the self-certainty of the seeing subject. In the image, the world is composed and forsaken. Thus, “the image seems to involve a notion of abandonment“: to see the image we must both relinquish the thing seen and surrender ourselves as seeing (Watt 25). “Abandonment” belongs to a series of terms with which Blanchot develops the idea of an ethical passivity, central to his philosophy. The most frequently observed of such terms is that of idleness or worklessness (désœuvrement). With this concept, Blanchot suggests the undoing of what he, echoing Stéphane Mallarmé, calls the Book. The occasioning of literature in “books” or in a “work” constitutes a betrayal of literary specificity, while the literary, as something of an absorptive force, dissipates—one might say, unbinds—the book. Taking an example from Beckett, Blanchot writes that The Unnamable effects “a pure approach of the impulse from which all books come, of that original point where the work [l’œuvre] is lost, which always ruins the work, which restores the endless pointlessness [désœuvrement] in it, but with which it must also maintain a relationship that is always beginning again, under the risk of being nothing” (“‘Where now? Who now?’” 213, “‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?’” 290-91). In the texts that Watt analyzes, “the image” names precisely this unraveling; it designates “the intimate relation of the work of art with the fundament of being that is close to nothingness” (26). The wager of Blanchot and the Moving Image is that, as a technology of “the image,” cinema is permeated with the forces that Blanchot addresses in literature.

“The image” precipitates, or is met with, fascination. Like the film theory that Doane continues, Blanchot invests the term itself with a highly ambivalent resonance. As much as there are “two versions of the imaginary,” there are two forms of fascination. It seems that, for Blanchot, both the image and the Book wield the force of fascination, but in crucially different (yet not unrelated) ways. “Blanchot’s concept of the image,” Watt writes, “is … marked by a kind of muted horror” (66)—the posture that we readily recognize as the hypnotic, mortal paralysis that “fascination” has frequently indicated. But if the image paralyzes one with the unbearable nothingness beyond language and individuation, the Book similarly captures the subject in its promise of a totality that would result from the kind of Work that Hegelian dialectics glorifies. As much as Mallarmé never escaped the lure of le Livre, what Blanchot calls the Book fascinates by promising to salvage the subject into coherence, the finished work disconnected from the forces of désœuvrement.

Even as he dreams of a Work of encyclopediac coverage, Mallarmé nevertheless opts for the distractive pleasures of minor projects. Blanchot similarly suggests that any oeuvre will in turn force the artist and audience into a realm of a stranger fascination. His alternative to the seriousness of the Book is more ominous than the funny trifles Mallarmé wrote in order to escape from the Work (his fashion pieces, his Easter egg inscriptions, doggerel on outhouse walls): when the Book turns into the image, we feel “the regard of nothingness on us” (Watt 63). Watt proposes the doubleness of Blanchotian fascination by way of Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Benommenheit: “although he does not phrase it as such, there is for Blanchot something akin to two versions of fascination: on the one hand, the inauthentic absorption in idle talk … that Heidegger [or, rather, Being and Time’s first English translation] designates as fascination; and, on the other hand, the anxious experience of the abandonment of the world in the image which is for Blanchot, unlike Heidegger, still not something that can be called ‘authentic’” (30). An analogous doubleness is arguably at stake in film theory. As Doane notes, if early film promised to transcend mortality, it also, and at the same time, lured spectators with a “fascination with death,” evident in the eager consumption of early documentary footage of executions of animals and humans (Doane 164).

Watt proposes that, given the onto-ethical valence of “the image,” cinema should be understood as a site of the kind of intensity that Blanchot assigns to literature; by highlighting the concept of “the image,” Blanchot allows us to develop an account of the cinematic art as a site where being (dis)appears. Taking up this task, Watt turns to three filmmakers as representatives of the “cinema of fascination” (111): Godard, Béla Tarr, and Gaspar Noé. In each chapter, the discussion of Blanchot and the filmmaker is inflected by an engagement with another major theorist. Chapter one tracks Blanchot’s influence not only on Godard’s films—particularly Histoire(s) du cinema—but also on Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume study of cinema, in whose mapping of the emergence of “time-image” in postwar European cinema both Blanchot and Godard figure centrally. The discussion of Tarr in chapter two in turn engages the work of Jacques Rancière, who has written extensively on the Hungarian filmmaker. As is appropriate for the lingering visuals of Tarr’s “slow cinema,” the chapter addresses a recurrent concern in twentieth-century film theory: the role of montage, and particularly the long take. The central thinker with whom Watt approaches Irréversible, Noé’s controversial exemplar of New French Extremism, is Emmanuel Lévinas, Blanchot’s frequent interlocutor. The juxtaposition of Noé and Lévinas is as productive as it is provocative: the suggestion is that Noé’s film is engaged in thinking the kind of demanding ethicality that Lévinas is known for.

Moving from Godardian avant-garde to Tarr’s “slow” images to the gut-punching extremism of Noé’s films, Watt engages fully with scholarship on each filmmaker. Professing a familiarity with French-language scholarship, Watt gnaws at the monolingual hegemony of the Anglo-American academic market. One of his achievements is to bring to the English-speaking audience’s attention the work of Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, who, more than any other scholar, has explored the connections between Blanchot and film theory. At the same time, he reminds us of the importance of Raymond Bellour’s extensive body of work, only some of which has been translated into English.

In its grounding gesture of cross-fertilization, Blanchot and the Moving Image enables the expansion of both Blanchot scholarship and film theory. The book gives us a far from complete mapping of the emergent field; for example, the centrality of the concept of “fascination” to the larger history of film theory is only partially explored. In outlining the impact of Blanchot’s philosophy, the author’s references range generously from Lévinas to Derrida to Kant to Deleuze to Rancière to Agamben to unpublished dissertations, but these also have the effect of dissipating the focus on Blanchot as a thinker of cinema. Among the tasks for the book project’s final revisions might have been an effort to draw the argument into a punchier synthesis, perhaps cutting out some of the more tangential discussions and utilizing them as starting points for stand-alone articles.

The reader is indeed left waiting for such future essays, for Blanchot and the Moving Image seems like an opening salvo in a larger intellectual project, one that will track the ways in which—as one of the study’s most exciting claims has it—”cinema’s contribution to thought is fascination” (96). From the perspective that Watt gives us—the viewpoint of a retrospective clarity—we can discern that other contemporary thinkers have already begun some of this work. That is, if film actualizes the absorbed passivity that Blanchot and film theory call “fascination,” Watt is not alone in making a claim for the cinema spectator’s dangerous yet ethical enjoyment. Already in the early 1980s, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, in their analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, noted “film’s potential for a vertiginous passivity (its eagerness merely to register)” (31), calling this vertigo, precisely, a “fascination.” Their arguments concerning the sadomasochistic dynamics of Sade and Pasolini evoke the kind of undoing, not unlike Blanchotian worklessness, that Bersani has elsewhere theorized as the subject’s shattering in ébranlement. Moreover, the devastation of this undoing is inextricable from a centrifugal expansion. As Blanchot writes, désœuvrement is at once the object’s “impoverishment” and “enrichment” (“The Two Versions of the Imaginary” 256). In becoming less, the object—but also the subject—becomes more; it is potentialized as the image. We should hear in Watt’s claim that cinematic fascination produces “a shorn and passive subject” (150) echoes of Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics, increasingly, in his later work, developed in the context of film analysis. Such overlaps testify to the productivity of the problematic that Watt has initiated in his study.

Footnotes

1. Recent contributions to the study of fascination include Baumbach; Degen; Hahnemann and Weyand; Seeber; Thys; and Weingart. See also encyclopedic articles on fascination by Beth; Desprats-Péquignot; Lotter; and Türcke.

Works Cited

• Abbas, Ackbar. “Dialectic of Deception.” Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 347-63. Duke University Press Journals, doi:10.1215/08992363-11-2-347.
• Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. 1970. Edited and translated by Robert HullotKentor, U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —. “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” 1938. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, Continuum, 1982, pp. 270-99.
• Baumbach, Sibylle. Literature and Fascination. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. “Merde Alors.” October, vol. 13, Summer 1980, pp. 22-35. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3397699.
• Beth, Karl. “Faszination.” Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, edited by Eduard Hoffman-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, vol. 2, de Guyter, 1987, pp. 1263-65.
• Blanchot, Maurice. “The Essential Solitude.” The Space of Literature, edited by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1992, pp. 19-34.
• —. “‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?’” Le Livre à venir, Gallimard, 1959, pp. 286-95.
• —. The Space of Literature. 1955. Translated by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1982.
• —. “The Two Versions of the Imaginary.” The Space of Literature, edited by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1992, pp. 254-63.
• —. “‘Where now? Who now?’” The Book to Come. 1959. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford UP, 2003, pp. 210-17.
• Bruns, Gerald L. Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. 1997. Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
• Burke, Victoria I. “From Desire to Fascination: Hegel and Blanchot on Negativity.” MLN, vol. 114, no. 4, Sept. 1999, pp. 848-56. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3251365.
• Degen, Andreas. Ästhetische Faszination: Die Geschichte einer Denkfigur vor ihrem Begriff. Walter de Gruyter, 2017.
• Desprats-Péquignot, Catherine. “Fascination.” International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. 2002. Edited by Alain de Mijolla, and translated by Philip Beitchman, et al., vol. 1, Thomson Gale, 2005, pp. 555-56.
• Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Harvard UP, 2002.
• Duncan, Pansy. “Fascination: Between the Rough and the Glossy.” The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s Other, Routledge, 2015, pp. 77-107.
• Hahnemann, Andy, and Björn Weyand, editors. Faszination: Historische Konjunkturen und heuristische Tragweite eines Begriffs. Peter Lang, 2009.
• Harris, Oliver. “Film Noir Fascination: Outside History, but Historically So.” Cinema Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3-24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1225928.
• Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. U of Chicago P, 2004.
• Lotter, Konrad. “Faszination.” Lexikon der Ästhetik, edited by Wolfhart Henckmann and Konrad Lotter, C. H. Beck, 1992, pp. 60-61.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975 (1973). Visual and Other Pleasures, Macmillan, 1989, pp.14-26.
• Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. 1916. Arno Press, 1970.
• Seeber, Hans Ulrich. Literarische Faszination in England um 1900. Heidelberg: Universitätverlag, Winter, 2012.
• Shaviro, Steven. “Film Theory and Visual Fascination.” The Cinematic Body, U of Minnesota P, 1993, pp. 1-65.
• Thys, Michel. Fascinatie: Een fenomenologisch-psychoanalytische verkenning van het onmenselijke. Amsterdam: Boom, 2006.
• Türcke, Christoph. “Faszination.” Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Frigga Haug, Peter Jehle, and Wolfgang Küttler, vol. 4, Berlin Institute of Critical Theory, 1999, pp. 186-94.
• Weingart, Brigitte. “Contact at a Distance: The Topology of Fascination.” Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought, edited by Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 72-100.

Andrew Kingston (bio)

A review of Crockett, Clayton. Derrida after the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism. Fordham UP, 2017.

Clayton Crockett has written and edited multiple books on theology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary continental theory. Derrida after the End of Writing represents his first text explicitly dedicated to the work of Jacques Derrida. In this book, Crockett covers a great deal of Derrida’s later interventions in religion and politics, while also situating them in relation to several somewhat recent philosophical trends like “New Materialism,” “Speculative Realism,” and “Object-oriented Ontology.” In doing so, Crockett’s book constellates a number of important points of potential connection between Derrida and these materialist strains of continental thought, some of which dismiss deconstruction as only a theory of language. While Crockett’s premises sometimes seem to concede too much to this popular mischaracterization of Derrida’s work, his text should be commended for its attempt to open new avenues for intellectual debate at the intersections of deconstruction, theology, politics, and (new) materialisms. This book will probably appeal most to contemporary materialist thinkers who might be deconstruction-curious; conversely, it would also work well as a primer for Derrida scholars with an interest in productively engaging with new materialist philosophies.

The book opens with the contention that Derrida’s thought “remains important” and that “it cannot be relegated to the dust-bin of some late-twentieth-century linguistic idealism and subjectivist constructivism.” Crockett qualifies this statement by noting that “something changes in Derrida’s work” around the late 1980s (1); or, more precisely, “something has changed in the background or the cultural and intellectual context of how we read him.” For Crockett, this shift is especially marked in Derrida’s oeuvre by a move away from what Catherine Malabou calls a “motor scheme” of writing, and toward another scheme—toward “the machinic, teletechnology, or technoscience,” toward Malabou’s own idea of “plasticity,” and through this toward certain possible materialist readings. The book thus begins by introducing a division into Derrida’s thought, and asking “what it would mean to read Derrida beyond the scheme of writing” (2). Another, quite different iteration of Crockett’s opening gambit, then, would be that Derrida can only “remain important” or demonstrate a “continuing relevance” (2-3) today to the extent that we can overcome a supposedly outmoded schema of writing in order to show instead “how the so-called linguistic paradigm was already a material paradigm” (9). This ultimatum is more explicitly stated toward the end of the book: “The question that drives this book is whether Derrida’s philosophy has a future, and its tentative suggestion is that this answer depends on the extent to which it can be released from writing” (112). Such a claim will inevitably energize some readers and irritate others, though the book’s stated intention is to interrogate the ways that Derrida’s thought “is important and relevant beyond simple polemics (whether pro or anti)” (3).

Crockett seeks to accomplish this paradigm shift, from writing to a “non-reductionist materialism,” not only through appeals to science later in his text, but also through sustained discussions of the material dimensions of religion and politics. It is in these discussions of religion and politics that the book is at its strongest. By the end of his introduction, Crockett locates one potential inroad to a materialist reading of Derrida along these lines—despite Derrida’s general suspicion of materialisms, which Crockett acknowledges (3)—in the semiotic overdetermination of the word “force” in Derrida’s work. Setting up some of the central concerns of the book, he reads “force” through texts like Carl Rashke’s Force of God, Derrida’s “Force and Signification” and “Force of Law,” and finally the idea that

Energy is force, forces, and these forces make us—they are us. These energy forces are at one and the same time fully material and fully spiritual. Here is where materialism, religion, and politics, including the themes and concerns of political theology, intersect.(11)

Unfortunately, this confluence of forces is left relatively underdeveloped in the book. Even so, over its eight main chapters, Derrida after the End of Writing presents a series of provocative insights like this one, through which Derrida might be brought into a closer—if ultimately asymptotic—relation with the materialist currents that dominate contemporary continental thought today.

In the first half of the book, Crockett takes religion as “a mode for Derrida to articulate deconstruction beyond the constraints of writing in a narrow sense” (25). The text goes on to describe religion not as any isolated institution, but as a wider set of principles that have been diffused (as Max Weber described, for instance) throughout the hegemonic structures of capitalism and Western culture more generally (32). From this perspective, toward the end of Chapter 2, Crockett offers a noteworthy commentary on the character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, vis-à-vis Derrida’s reading of the play in “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” and Gil Anidjar’s Blood: A Critique of Christianity. Following Derrida, Crockett observes how Shylock and his forced conversion act as a figure of the relève (or sublation) by Christianity of that which would oppose it, whether theologically, politically, or economically; the violently sublating “ruse of mercy” described by Shakespeare’s play, and through which Shylock is made to convert to Christianity under duress, thus becomes an important “site of the link between the theological and the political, which Derrida wants to deconstruct” (Crockett 38). The book pursues this complex relationship of the theological and the political through several Derridean figures, such as “auto-immunity” (47)—or as Derrida calls it elsewhere, “auto-co-immunity” (Acts of Religion 87). But again, in terms of Crockett’s overall argument, what ties these political and religious topics together is that they “are not figures of writing; they constitute an opening to another form of conceptuality” (Crockett 47).

These early inquiries—into religion, politics, economics, and community—then lead Crockett toward an explication of what he calls (as the title of Chapter 3) a “political theology without sovereignty” in Derrida’s later thought. In other words, after showing that religion is always already political, Crockett wants also to demonstrate that the political is always already religious; but in contrast to Carl Schmitt’s idea of a political theology (i.e., the secularization of theological concepts in politics, transcendentally guaranteed by a God-like form of sovereignty), Crockett explores the possibility of a kind of political theology of the event, which unsettles the idea of sovereignty upon which Schmitt’s political theology relies. He locates this twist on political theology in Derrida’s later Blanchotian formulations of “messianicity without messianism” and “religion without religion” (50), after which he briefly begins to think through what such a non-sovereign understanding of political theology would mean for the contemporary world, by raising questions of ecology, global politics, and religious fundamentalism. Although these questions are brought up in a more or less cursory manner, they do point to the many crucial ways in which Derrida’s thought remains pertinent to this time in history, with its perpetual crises and impossible decisions.

Another aspect of this book that is worth pausing over is a discussion that takes place primarily in Chapter 5, which puts a Derridean ethics into conversation with Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects and with “Object-oriented Ontology.” In doing so, this chapter contains perhaps the text’s most compelling and original contribution to contemporary trends in continental thought. Its argument begins from Derrida’s move toward Heidegger at the end of his reading of Paul Celan in “Rams” (the subject of the book’s fourth chapter), in which Derrida problematizes Heidegger’s famous statement that “the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming” (qtd. in Crockett 67). Crockett suggests that contemporary theories of objects can offer productive ways to continue to destabilize what is specifically human in this Heideggerian idea of “world.” This would be accomplished not (only) in relation to the supposedly world-poor animal—which Derrida already often addressed and was addressed by—but in relation to the worldless stone, which is to say in relation to the worldless and inanimate object. In this regard, Crockett claims that Object-oriented Ontology provides a way to think about how the worldlessness of inanimate objects can call us into asymmetrical ethical relationships with them, precisely due to our “inability to respond adequately to them” (85), our inability to respond to a radical otherness that confronts us through their lack of world. From this orientation toward the worldless object, Crockett turns back to Derrida, and toward the possibility that an ethical relationship might arise at the moment when, in Celan’s words, “Die Welt ist fort”—from which it follows that “ich muß dich tragen:”

The World is gone. Derrida says that “as soon as I am obliged, from the instant when I am obliged to you, when I owe, when I owe it to you, owe it to myself to carry you, as soon as I speak to you and am responsible for you, or before you, there can no longer, essentially, be any world.” (85; slightly altered due to typographical error in the text)

Similarly, Crockett cites Derrida’s phrase tout autre est tout autre (which is something of a subtheme throughout the text) as another ethical injunction to be read in light of the worldless object: “If every other is every other, that does not simply mean all human others who exist in Kantian terms as rational moral beings. Derrida’s late work, in particular, has the purpose of questioning the status of the human and its relation to nonhuman others, in a way that has not always been fully acknowledged” (92). These non-human others, for Crockett, should include objects.

After this central discussion of objects, the book’s three final chapters address three contemporary thinkers whose work is indebted to Derrida: John D. Caputo, Catherine Malabou, and Karen Barad. What ties these chapters to one another and to the rest of the book is, again, the contention that each develops Derrida’s thought outside of a paradigm of writing. While Crockett’s reading of Caputo’s theology can be more easily understood in terms of the text’s earlier claims, his last two chapters rather abruptly pivot toward interpretations of Derrida in relation to the sciences—namely, neuroscience (Malabou) and theoretical physics (Barad). While these chapters are informative and interesting, they come across as more isolated from the broader arguments that Crockett sets up in the first half of his text. They certainly provide helpful discussions of further potential avenues for materialist reinterpretations of Derrida, but at the same time they tend to diminish some of the more unique contributions that Crockett himself makes (such as his readings of Derrida and political theology, or his juxtaposition of a Derridean ethics with Object-oriented Ontology). But if the reader is curious about the legacies of Derrida’s thought in Caputo, Malabou, or Barad, Crockett manages to condense a large amount of information into brief, readable overviews. There are also provocative observations about Derrida’s non-concept of différance in relation to physics at the end of the chapter on Barad.

The main body of the book more or less ends after these final surveys. In place of a conclusion, one finds an afterword, titled “The Sins of the Fathers—A Love Letter,” which is not meant to summarize the book’s argument or build upon its previous chapters; instead, the afterword is written as a highly personal and confessional piece, through which Crockett “reflects more personally on Derrida in relation to love, fatherhood, and mourning” (139). Here Crockett denounces the pervasiveness within the discipline of philosophy of what Derrida called phallogocentrism, as well as the ways in which cis male philosophers consciously or unconsciously perpetuate its patriarchal order by identifying with other male philosophers as surrogate father figures (144). To that end, Crockett cedes the end of his book to a number of female-identifying philosophers such as Malabou, Bracha Ettinger, and Catherine Keller. This is a constructive gesture, though its reliance on heterosexual familial metaphor is perhaps unnecessary. Overall, however, Crockett’s explicit recognition of sexism in philosophy (and across academia) is an extremely important intervention to continue to make—and the vulnerability with which he lays out this problem is admirable.

One issue with this book is its scope, or more precisely the relationship between its scope and its size. Among other topics, Derrida after the End of Writing addresses Derrida’s thought on both Christianity and religion in general, his deconstructions of sovereignty, and his readings of Celan and Heidegger, situating these topics alongside Caputo’s weak theology, Malabou’s notion of plasticity, Morton’s hyperobjects, Meillassoux’s theory of “correlationism,” and Barad’s engagements with theoretical physics. It does all this in 156 pages (really 138, excluding the afterword). Unavoidably, then, the text is unable to spend much time developing any one of its claims, and instead adopts a mode of writing that could be called exploratory or even manifesto-like.

Secondly, given the spatial constraints of the book, it unfortunately leaves out a number of other texts that would have contributed to or even altered its arguments. For instance, although Crockett acknowledges that Derrida “certainly kept a critical distance from materialism” (3), he does not go any further in demonstrating or giving reasons for this critical distance. The book’s engagements with the new materialisms would have been strengthened by addressing Derrida’s own complicated relation to materialisms in general (as he outlined it, for example, in Positions 62-67). Additionally, in a text that interprets Derrida in relation to materialism and later in relation to the sciences, it is strange not to see acknowledgments of other efforts (outside Malabou and Barad) to think explicitly about these relations. For example, the book might have mentioned Arkady Plotnitsky’s Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida, Claire Colebrook’s “Matter Without Bodies,” or the more recent work of Francesco Vitale on Derrida and biology, such as his 2014 essay, “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction.” The latter investigates Derrida’s 1975-76 seminar, La vie la mort, in which he analyzes the work of French biologist François Jacob alongside figures of life (and) death in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Freud. There are also more recent texts on this seminar that Crockett could not have taken into account, but that should now be considered in relation to his text, such as Vitale’s Biodeconstruction, Dawne McCance’s The Reproduction of Life Death, and the recent French publication of the seminar itself.

Finally, there remains the question of writing, its “end,” and the suspicions that such a proclamation might raise with some readers of Derrida. Such readers might dispute not only that there is an “end” of writing, but also that “writing” has a stable enough identity within Derrida’s oeuvre that it could have a beginning or end in the first place. For example, one might point out that if indeed a notion of writing can be said to be privileged in Derrida’s early work, this privilege is usually derived more from the historical and philosophical portrayal of writing as a figure of exteriority or of derivativeness, and less from a desire on Derrida’s part to view the world through the lenses of semiotics or linguistics. Further, these readers might say, Derrida often discussed writing alongside other terms that are not primarily linguistic, such as “the supplement” or “spacing;” when he does focus on writing specifically, it is not in order to make everything into a text but in order to make very specific interventions in the history of Western philosophy—for example (as in Voice and Phenomenon), to destabilize the mechanisms of “auto-affection” that produce and reinforce the supposed interior selfsameness of the phenomenological subject. If, for reasons like these, this figure of writing does not simply present what Derrida calls a “vulgar [vulgaire] concept of writing” (Of Grammatology 56), then to propose a split in his work whereby one might move beyond writing is already to pose a complex question (plurium interrogationum), according to which the inextricably contextual functions of writing in Derrida’s work would need to be first universalized and reified before this figure could be superseded by another “scheme.” Derrida’s early arguments, in other words, cannot be consolidated around a unified question of writing without removing them from the particular ways they use this figure in relation to different aspects of the Western metaphysical tradition. To suggest that Derrida’s early philosophy can be understood in terms of writing, then, is something like saying that the Odyssey can be understood in terms of sailing: yes, there is a lot of it, but that is not the whole story.

Crockett is well aware of this. Reading his text closely reveals a consistent hesitation concerning the false dilemma inherent in the idea of an after or an end of writing. For instance, he makes many statements like “[w]riting is always already material, and Derrida was never a linguistic or transcendental idealist” (6); or “we ignore the complexities of language at our peril” (9); or “most readers assume that différance is a purely linguistic phenomenon. I think this is a misunderstanding of Derrida.” Shortly after this last statement, Crockett writes: “There is no proper Derrida, but there are more interesting, relevant, and compelling iterations of Derrida’s thought” (138). In the end, the book returns to the question of relevance with which it began. This is a book concerned with relevance, written by someone who is genuinely concerned with the fate of Derrida’s thought in a now predominantly materialist episteme. But in positing an end of writing, it is also a book concerned with the relève, with the sublation of writing and of Derrida—not into an Absolute Knowledge but into a New Materialism. Like Derrida in his essay on translation, one would want to emphasize the violence intrinsic to this question of relevance. But from another, more pragmatic perspective, it is also the case—rightly or wrongly—that the possibility of so much worthwhile intellectual dialogue depends on the question of relevance, which often determines whether a reader will open one book, or another, or none at all. In the interest of furthering this dialogue, Crockett’s text offers an impressively wide-ranging and insightful look at Derrida’s engagements with religion and politics, while also outlining ways that deconstruction might be brought to bear on some of the current relevancies in continental theory. In its own way, then, it offers its reader a spoonful of materialist sugar to help the pharmakon go down.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar, Routledge, 2002.
• —. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Corrected Edition, Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1981.

Brian Glavey (bio)

A review of Tyler Bradway, Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

For better or worse, queer theory has always had, if not a bad reputation, at least a reputation for badness. Animated by a commitment to subversion and non-conformism on the one hand, and organized around bad feelings such as stigma, failure, and shame on the other, queer theory’s badness paradigm helps to explain what Heather Love calls the “puzzling centrality of queer critics in the promulgation of new reading methods” (162). When it comes to reading against the rules, queer theory has had a lot to say: its investment in bodies and affects and its refusal of disciplinary norms have lent momentum to recent versions of bad reading, attempts to resist disciplinary histories, and professional modes of interpretation. One might certainly wonder how far such innovations deviate from the norms they propose to upend. As Merve Emre writes in her study of a different sort of bad reading, “Are these practices of reading really as non-normative, as radical, or as bad as their practitioners want them to be?” (255). The question highlights a set of central tensions at play in much queer theoretical discourse, which finds itself grappling with the paradox of a discipline that normalizes the rejection of norms and professionalizes a sort of anti-professionalism. More broadly, the questions of the status of close reading and of other protocols in literary studies have been vexed ones. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan have shown that recent methodological debates have tended to conjure a particular kind of bad reader to serve as a muse for critics weary of practices that have come to seem rote or ineffectual. They note the potential oddness of this situation, asking, “How have our reading practices come to seem merely professional—meaningful only in relation to our institutional positions and professional desires?” (114).

Although the proliferation of these new modes of reading has been especially vigorous in recent years, the most generative variant of this kind of queer reading likely remains, after twenty years, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading, a work that sets out to think through what does and does not count as good reading, and to consider why pushing back against such strictures might be especially important for queer readers. However, even the anti-normative energies swirling around Sedgwick’s early and justly famous attempts to shake up disciplinary protocols have risked distillation into a rather limited spectrum of routinized interpretative techniques. For all its anti-dualist capaciousness, Sedgwick’s account of paranoid and reparative reading has in practice often led to the replication of stark oppositions, in effect adding one more fossilized binary to the Theory and Methods syllabus. Removed from the specific instances of Sedgwick’s own generative hypothesizing, reparative reading often tends to equate queer reading with a limited set of practices that do not stray very far from the graduate seminar table. Keyed to producing interpretations, in other words, it remains a matter of generating readings more than the experience of relating to a text. There is of course nothing wrong with this. To the extent, though, that such practices are queer, they are queer in a rather constricted way, giving the misguided sense that queer reading was invented by English professors. As a result, it too can seem rather far removed from the queer ways in which reading might be a powerful affective experience, the way it might turn you on, say, or even turn your stomach.

Tyler Bradway’s ambitious and brilliant Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading responds to these paradoxes with the provocative question: “What if reading is less like criticism and more like sex?” (244). The analogy is intended to be more than titillating, suggesting that queer studies would do well to recognize reading not just as a process of producing interpretations but also as a mode of relationality that is transformative and unpredictable in its own right, that engages with and changes bodies and minds to create, Bradway suggests, “immodest and unforeseen possibilities for becoming and belonging together” (244). Reading is queer long before the theorists get involved. But Bradway’s embrace of bad reading is not, as many others seem to be, a call to move away from the professional practices that have been central to the formation of queer literary studies as a disciplinary tradition. Instead, the story he tells in Queer Experimental Literature might be seen as something like a reparative attempt to understand those practices as having always existed within a broader conversation about queer politics, a conversation that works to put books and people and communities in contact with one another. To understand reparative reading practices only in relation to so-called postcritical reading is to miss the extent to which Sedgwick’s own thinking on these issues, for instance, is marked by her inheritance of a broader queer literary history concerned with hermeneutic problems shaped as much by the catastrophic losses of the AIDS crisis as by strictly theoretical concerns. “When we debate the relative value of suspicion or empathy in the abstract,” Bradway insists,

we miss the specific meanings that paranoid and reparative reading had (and has) for queer communities. But more importantly, we perpetuate a debate over good and bad modes of reading without attending to the historical relations of power that made paranoid or reparative reading queer in the first place. (xxix-xxx)

To highlight these historical relations, Bradway elaborates the concept of a “para-academic” mode of experimental writing that explicitly engages with institutionally produced forms of academic writing, but that nonetheless stands to one side of such discourse, resists its sanctioned genres, and is not recognized from within it as knowledge. Such work is in the university without being of the university. Some of Sedgwick’s writing occupies this para-academic space: Bradway suggests that Sedgwick’s turn to positive affect is best understood in relation to her own experimental literary texts—particularly the poetry/prose hybrid memoir A Dialogue on Love—and that such works provide the key to understanding reparative reading within a larger political and artistic context. An important precursor to this work, according to Bradway, is Samuel L. Delany. Although Delany’s writing—in particular The Motion of Light on Water and Times Square Red, and Times Square Blue—is block-quoted time and time again in influential queer theoretical texts, much of Delany’s literary production resists assimilation into academic discourse and indeed remains antagonistic to it. It is true that Delany’s novels and stories engage in constant conversation with critical theory. As Bradway notes, “His fiction offers a kind of ‘works cited’ that makes evident to academic publics, including the critics named in his work, that he is conversing with them, albeit in a different idiom” (57). But, like several of the authors featured in the book, at a certain point in his career Delany turned away from semiotics and toward hermeneutics, a shift that deprioritized theory in favor of an attention to the way that reading establishes forms of relationality between readers and texts. For Delany it was specifically the representational crisis occasioned by AIDS that spurred him to recognize the importance of paying attention not only to the grammar of signs and symbols but also to the manner in which readers take up and relate to texts in creative ways. The AIDS crisis, in other words, created a context in which it became urgent to ask fundamental questions about the nature of reading: what it means, what it does, what sort of social relations it might foster. For Delany, Sedgwick, and other queer experimentalists in this tradition, the question of good and bad reading was not merely academic but also a matter of life and death, a necessary struggle to find a way to survive.

The writers Bradway studies occupy different positions in the history of queer reading. William Burroughs’s midcentury experimentation, for instance, is linked to the problem of trying to imagine forms of queer political desire and collectivity prior to the emergence of a gay liberation movement, and was rendered nearly unthinkable by the homophobic currents of the period. Burroughs’s novels—subversive, obscene, even trashy—have always worn their badness on their sleeves. But Bradway explains that the nature of the kind of bad reading that such works make possible has often been misunderstood. Indeed, the terms under which Naked Lunch was able to skirt a charge of obscenity underline the paradox of queer politics at the heart of the queer experimental tradition. Ultimately, the Court found that Burroughs’s novel was acceptable because its representations of queerness were read as hallucinatory—animated by drug abuse—rather than imaginary. “The queer text,” Bradway explains, “is thus not pornographically filled with depraved sex acts. It is a text that is itself expressive of the collective agency and social imagination of queers” (3). The subversive threat posed by Burroughs’s novel is in effect defanged, its transgressions coded as a matter of pharmacology—and thus linked to a private individual’s malady—rather than expressive of something powerful and compelling in its own right. Burroughs’s aesthetic project was to resist this demarcation, precisely by imagining reading as an immersive, affectively disorienting mode that attempts to dissolve the boundary between fantasy and reality. Burroughs solicits bad reading, asking his readers to be turned on, turned around, freaked out by trashy novels, because reading is itself a kind of queer relationality that breaks out of private, subjective desires and instantiates an intersubjective collectivity.

Kathy Acker is one of the most significant perpetuators of this aspect of Burroughs’s project. Critics have tended to see Acker’s relation to her predecessor chiefly in terms of her cutup aesthetics of shock and plagiarism, missing the extent to which she is also perpetuating a queer tradition that locates an incipient sociality in the embodied experience and radically intersubjective relationality of reading. Acker famously wanted her writing to be unreadable, but Bradway insists that this unreadability should not be exclusively understood as an aggressive assault on the reader. Instead, illegibility becomes for her an invitation to experience her text as a transformational affective event. Again, the paradox of the critical success of Acker’s writing mirrors the problem of queer theory’s own institutionalization. “The irony of Acker’s proclaimed unreadability is that she was—and continues to be—manifestly readable within the now-institutionalized discourses of continental theory” (106). Acker grew increasingly frustrated by this problem, a problem that reflected and exacerbated her distaste for the commodification of the avant-garde. Art and theory both found their potential for subversion and critique absorbed by the market. Acker’s search for a solution for this situation involved not merely more shock, but rather an investment in the relational possibilities at work in the affective, embodied experience of reading.

The work of Jeanette Winterson might seem less directly subversive than Acker’s, and her relation to theory less fraught. The early reception of Winterson’s novels was shaped by the simultaneous emergence of queer theory as an academic discipline in the 1990s and the degree to which her work was seen as a model for those theoretical developments. And yet Winterson’s work has also been seen as less queer—less disruptive, less political—to the extent that it appears to couch its account of sexuality in terms of private, emotional experience. Combined with her commercial success, this investment not only in feelings but more specifically in positive feelings—love, happiness, care, and the like—has encouraged some critics to see her as an emblem of a kind of homonormativity, engaged in the transformation of homosexuality into a personal and ultimately depoliticized identity category. Bradway insists, on the contrary, that Winterson’s apparent interest in love rather than sex is part of a broader attempt to resist the affective logic of neoliberalism. Like her queer experimental predecessors, Winterson focuses on affective relations created between readers and aesthetic artifacts as the realm where new forms of queer belonging might be constituted. This “queer exuberance” is a step toward critique: “Not merely exposing the writing ‘on’ bodies,” Bradway argues, “queer fiction can also affectively write ‘with’ the bodies of its readers, exposing them to new relational possibilities” (147).

With nuanced readings of Winterson and Sedgwick, the final two chapters of Queer Experimental Literature underscore one of Bradway’s chief accomplishments: the elaboration of a powerful argument for the political and intellectual valence of positive affects. Though these feelings may be cruel, they are not always so. Tracing with subtlety and nuance the patterns of identification and desire that run through each of his author’s works, Bradway is himself an important inheritor of Sedgwick’s queer experimental project. And yet part of what is so compelling about the book is the fact that the canon of texts to which Queer Experimental Literature attaches its interest is not an especially Sedgwickian one. Bradway concludes, for example, with a discussion of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” (2005), which depicts scenes of masturbation and bodily trauma in a fashion that famously led to a minor epidemic of faintings at public readings. The difficulties posed by such a work are not readily described by the poetics of opacity and preterition that stem from the epistemology of the closet, and many of them do not appear ready candidates for a reparative ethics of care. In its way, Bradway’s attention both to Sedgwick’s intersubjective poetics and to Acker’s embodied resistance, to Winterson’s embrace of love alongside Palahniuk’s experiment in revulsion, is central to his contribution to affect studies, a field that still tends to divvy up its feelings into the good, the bad, and the ugly. That one can—and indeed must—attend to both positive and negative affects, to their coexistence and interaction, is signaled by the fact that the queer experimental tradition has never taken sides in this way.

Queer Experimental Literature is an exciting and powerful work with important implications for both queer theory and the study of contemporary literature, offering much needed historical context for recent methodological discussions about the status of critique and form in literary studies. The recognition that reading is an embodied practice that solicits a wide and unruly range of affects—some good, some bad, most a bit of both—is by no means a recent academic discovery. On the contrary, the exploration of the political and aesthetic possibilities of this kind of reading has been central to queer writing all along. At the same time, tracing the longer history of the way that this “bad reading” has influenced the development of academic queer theory also reveals that the professional reading practices central to queer literary studies are not relics of bad faith or a bloodless exercise in paranoia. Queer reading has always relied upon a complicated choreography of affirmation and critique, of shock and discombobulation alongside the promise of new forms of belonging. Offering theoretical insights in every chapter and a fresh perspective on each of its subjects, Queer Experimental Literature is a dazzling reminder that the discipline of queer literary studies can still produce bad readers as good as Bradway.

Works Cited

• Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. “The Common Reader and the Archival Classroom: Disciplinary History for the Twenty-first Century.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 1, 2012, pp. 113-135. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2012.0005.
• Emre, Merve. Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. U of Chicago P, 2017.
• Love, Heather. “Critical Response IV: Strange Quarry.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 44, no. 1, 2017, pp. 153-163. The U of Chicago P Journals, doi:10.1086/694136.

Marina Peterson (bio)

Abstract

“Indefinite urbanism” is the aerial drawn into perceptibility through noise, glass resonating with aircraft noise and infrastructural edge spaces that remain as traces of a history of now inaudible sound. As the age of commercial air travel dawned in Southern California, those living around Los Angeles International Airport turned toward the sky as the roar of jet planes disrupted an otherwise pacific coastal climate. Attending to the (im)materiality of noise, I trace atmospheric encounters across the resonance of walls and the shifting sand of coastal dunes now home to an endangered species of butterfly.

Around Los Angeles International Airport, noise effects take shape as infrastructural edge spaces. What was once an upscale beach community touted for its ocean views and underground utilities is now an expanse of sandy dunes with patches of native shrubs and grasses or still lingering ice plant, the concrete of Playa del Rey’s streets and retaining walls haunted by what once was. To the north of the runways, dark green vines and shrubs explode in a wild mess within the confines of chain link fence. As the age of commercial air travel dawned in Southern California in the late 1950s, those living around what had been a bean field, an airfield, and a municipal airport that would become LAX began to hear the sounds of jet planes flying over their homes. Newly attuned to a resounding sky, they complained about the noise that interrupted the pacific climate of the southern California coast.

Noise brings the atmospheric into perceptibility, composing dynamic assemblages of matter-in-motion. Noise, thus, is “an opening” (Serres 56).¹ Drawing attention to the sky, noise itself withdraws. Falling away, it proliferates into a diversity of atmospheric forms that encompass both a physicality of the ephemeral and a logic of indeterminacy. A tendency, the atmospheric is ephemeral, indeterminate, vague, and indefinite.² Building on a now robust literature that attends to forces and attunements that bring the atmospheric into focus, I depart from its emphasis on air, addressing ways in which noise has been central to how we think and feel the atmospheric. “Substantiated” in sound, the atmospheric emerges in moments in which noise matters (Choy 128).

Informed by Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales’s concept of terrain vague, I use the term indefinite urbanism to attend to edge spaces of infrastructure as effects of the interplay between sounds from the sky and sensation. Indefinite urbanism is city as process, inconclusive, formless, “volumetric,” and “moving” (Gandolfo, Graham and Hewitt, Latham and McCormack). It is the porous boundary between that which is hard and that which is airy – the airport as port where ground meets air, the windowpane of a home vibrating with sound, its glass once silica like the dune sand that lifts with a gust of wind, sand no longer contained by the foundations of homes built near the sea, and now home to an endangered species of butterfly.³ This is an atmospheric city, a city of atmospheric encounters in which air, glass, neighborhoods, sand, photographs, people, ice plant, and butterflies are drawn together by noise.

In engaging the case of airport noise and its effects on urban form, I am less interested in the ways things cohere than in the ways they don’t – in the processes of making, in slippages, gaps, and exteriorities that also matter because of their otherness to the project at hand, in the ways something that is ephemeral, that does not last, is made to matter. This is a project of writing through “things” (as it were). Tracing noise and its atmospheric encounters, the writing stays close to emergent processes and forms, a mode of “thin description,” which, following Love, embraces “forms of analysis that do not traffic in speculation about interiority or depth” but offer an “exhaustive, fine-grained attention to phenomena” (404). “Glitching” as a method of investigation, analysis, and writing, I read documents and ethnographic encounters for textures and qualities of events, often against the grain of their intended logics. And while I attend to something of the specificity of an historical moment, I do not aspire to provide a totalizing account, but instead present episodes that fold into one another, unstable and perhaps indeterminate.

1. Emergent Materialities

First the holes in the homes had to be closed. The opening for milk delivery. The mail slot. Vents. Windows that opened to ocean air. Cracks that let in light and breeze, gaps around windows and doors. Aircraft noise drove people indoors, to spaces newly turned inward. Between 1967 and 1969, Wyle Laboratories conducted a home soundproofing pilot project around Los Angeles International Airport. The twenty houses were “typical of Southern California single-family homes” (Wyle 6); built of materials that might include plaster, wood, composition shingle, and Spanish tile, many featured “beamed ceilings and extensive glass areas.” These were modest, mostly one-story homes, with windows in every room and multiple exterior doors that ensured fluidity between indoors and out. The first homes designated for soundproofing, those in the trial study were near the coast. Breezes from the Pacific Ocean wafted through windows left open most of the year. The climate granted a sense of ease only newly disrupted by the departing jet plane, which roared and whined as it ascended, dropped glops of fuel on the ground, on the laundry hanging to dry, on the oranges ripening on a tree in the back yard.

During soundproofing, noise gets pushed into and away from things. When the builders seal the gaps between the window frames and the walls, they drive noise into silicone gel. When they add a turn to the ventilation duct, they send noise bouncing back where it came from. When they install a second pane of glass three inches from the existing window, they create an airspace where noise ricochets between surfaces. Concerned with the materiality of sound, acoustical engineers describe noise as a moving force, mobile and agentive. They delineate the shifting status of sound from airborne waves to material vibration as it “moves” from an airplane engine through air and into a house where it is heard in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen. There, if it is too loud, it interferes with conversation, makes it difficult to hear the television, and is “annoying” (which might, as engineers were also calculating, prompt political engagement or an expensive lawsuit).

In a climate of change, closing windows to drown out the noise of aircraft might also have made the home feel more like a fortress, protection against an atmosphere that pressed upon its inhabitants – that made the skin crawl, the heart race, annoyance percolate into an explosive condition—protection against a sense that something was bearing down and challenging, if not threatening, a precariously maintained scene of domestic bliss. Noise newly divided inside from out, the skin of the house newly figured as fortification rather than the porous membrane it had in many ways been (Pallasmaa). Yet what emerged is not so much a divide as a continuity across differently vibrating skin that extends from the skin of the body to that of the house and beyond, to the volumetric space of the noise contour and the climate itself. There is no “between” – rather, matter is continuous, air and skin entangled in various ways despite (or as part of) efforts to control, demarcate, and condition. Drawing together ear, air, and wall, noise composes an atmospheric assemblage of emergent materialities (Latham and McCormack 707).

The skin of the house is both armor for and an extension of the body’s, its permeability and porosity not limited to windows but extended across the surfaces and depth of walls and doors, window frames and thresholds. Kapchan suggests that listening to noise is “to linger in the space of discomfort long enough to resonate with the sound knowledge being transmitted” (118). In this way, skin as “symbolic boundary between the self and the world” (Benthien 1) is formed under pressure – the pressure of the indeterminacy of matter registered by quantum physics or that of the slow onslaught of an anthropogenic atmosphere that renders a relationship between body and its milieu in newly figured entanglements of risk, a human-made monster casting the possibility of existence into doubt (Barad). Skin (of an arm or a kitchen ceiling) is a horizon of pressure and permeable – entangled with air in a dynamic of force and motion, of energy and matter. It is, as Manning puts it, “leaky.”

The materiality of walls, vents, windows, and air emerges in and through encounters with noise. Cast by acoustic engineers as distinct in relation to forms of matter, sound – the matter of noise – makes materials differently durable. A “wave” in air, sound “vibrates” the matter of the wall – stucco, shingles, gypsum – emerging again on the other side as a wave. While the “sound transmission levels” of building materials can be altered, air is treated as “empty,” its materiality not addressed in relation to the movement of sound even as air is the matter of openings in the home, and in this way the most potent conduit. Air, as a form of matter moved by the energy that is sound, is absent, an absence (different from its earlier figuration as “ether” [Connor 148-172, Trower 7]). Yet with soundproofing, as with environmental noise in general, the noise that is measured and mitigated is limited to airborne sound. Sound in and of air that is nonetheless always coming into being in relation to differently resonating sound-energies that appear to the eye as wall or windowpane or that appear to the ear.

Glass, characterized in terms of its “low attenuation,” is unique in its material properties (Wyle 5). Glass resonates with sound. This is the wine glass made to sing for a child at the end of a dinner, or extended as a wine glass “orchestra,” glasses filled with different levels of water for variations in pitch. The more water, the less air, the higher the pitch (or frequency). Air between two panes of glass has a similar effect, such that a smaller airspace resonates at a higher frequency. The resonant frequency of glass is the pitch, which, if played – or sung – loudly enough, may cause it to break. The apocryphal opera singer. With windows considered “apertures of enlightenment,” glass, “to the early modern imagination,” was “an important medium of civilization, permitting enclosure yet translucence” (Comaroff and Comaroff 290). Generally considered in terms of its properties of visuality – transparency, reflection, refraction – glass is less often discussed in terms of its acoustic qualities. The resonance of glass is suggested but not articulated by Wyle reports that recommend a three-inch gap and separate installation of each pane of glass rather than a manufactured double pane window. That glass resonates “with” sound is crucial; sound is not an external agent or object, it is only and always in and of – i.e., it is immanent.

Mutable, glass is a solid that “contains in its liquid properties the trace of its previous state and the conditions of its making” (Kalas 175). It is technically an “amorphous solid,” its chemical structure that of liquid rather than a crystalline solid, atoms and molecules not organized in a definite lattice pattern. High temperatures will change its state from solid to viscous, cold will render molten silica into something (seemingly) solid. When heated to its glass transition temperature, it is said to be in its glassy state. In glass, we find what Latham and McCormack describe as the “real force of the immaterial” (704). Like concrete, another material that moves between liquid and solid, glass “is a particular aggregate organization of process and energy,” its “technicity” emerging “from the mediation of different domains,” molded through “a series of transformative operations” (Mackenzie qtd. in Latham and McCormack 705). Composed primarily of silica, glass is material cousin to sand, whose granularity is another kind of liquid solid marking indefinite, moving margins. Capable of altering the territory of nation-states (Chua, Comaroff), sand is blown by wind into dunes – mobile, migrating formations upon which homes that had been built for their ocean views were, in 1959, suddenly under the flight path of newly noisy jet aircraft.

2. De/territorializing

After they had been purchased by the airport but not yet demolished, some of the empty homes in Playa del Rey were used for soundproofing tests; vacant, they became experiments in matter. “The project’s personnel install various types of material – such as fiberboard, gypsum board, fiberglass, thin sheets of lead, a seven-inch thickness of foam – alone and in combinations in the walls, floors, and ceilings, then take careful sound level readings to determine the effectiveness. Then the material is ripped out and another kind installed” (“Soundproofing Experiment” 16). The houses were built on concrete slabs as a measure of earthquake safety – no basements, nothing to fill in other than swimming pools, which stood empty long enough for neighborhood youth to use them as skate ramps. Foundations laid on top of shifting sands stabilized the dunes momentarily with concrete, a metaphor for noise and its unstable bases in the subjective yet generalizable nature of human perception. Though even in 1968 the Chicago Tribune reported that “Already the land around these houses, which once were surrounded by green lawns, has reverted to sand dunes,” the last houses on the dunes were not purchased by the airport until 1975 (“Soundproofing Experiment” 16). Yvette Kovary’s was one of these. Two years before, on Valentine’s Day, she wrote the airport asking about the “rumor that the Airport Security Officers will be removed in April, leaving us in a very lonely and vulnerable situation.”

Kovary, who in the 1960s spearheaded neighborhood mobilization against airport noise as chairman of the citizens’ committee in Playa del Rey, shows me photos of comparable properties that were used as evidence in her lawsuit against the airport, as grounds that her home was worth more than the airport had offered. The yellow stickers “admitted as evidence” remain. She tells me that the airplane noise wasn’t so bad, that what they wanted most was to stay in their home. I listen, as the photos ground memories of a neighborhood given form and dimension, her hand arcing to outline contours in the dunes – a hill, a bluff, a street running down to the beach. She tells me of her friends and neighbors, pointing to their houses and describing their personalities. We are looking at an aerial photograph of Playa del Rey taken from just off the coast. It has the date “5 4 59” in the upper right hand corner. Worn, now, parts of its edges have torn or fallen off, revealing the board on which it is mounted. As images prompt memories of a home and neighborhood, past seeps into present, emerging in the space-time fold that opens as her finger touches a map I had read a reference to earlier that day, in transcripts of the 1960 congressional hearings on Aircraft Noise Problems held at Inglewood’s Morningside High School – the presentation of images a hidden yet potent presence in transcripts that record words but not gestures, official statements but not the informal speech by those who are there to testify. This speech is apparent only insofar as it is pointed to by senators admonishing the audience to be quiet, to be respectful. A licensed pilot sponsored for transcontinental races, Kovary had served in SPARS, a women’s unit of the Coast Guard, during World War II. During the hearings she drew on her expertise as a pilot to provide authority to her statements and to her experience: “I hold commercial multiengine flight instructor’s ratings,” she began, before introducing herself as “chairman of the citizens’ committee in Playa del Rey” (Aircraft Noise Problems 243). She says, of the photo, “I wanted to show them where we were, and what danger we were in,” telling me, fifty-six years after the hearings, “I knew exactly what they were doing.”

Fig 1. Pointing to an aerial photo of Playa del Rey. © Marina Peterson, 2016.

Yvette’s finger, pinkish and human scale against the sepia miniaturization of the landscape, touches the spot where her house had stood, still visible in the image, not, then, simply a trace on the dunes. Her house is the very last one at the top of the hill on the southern edge of the neighborhood. The runways are in the background, surrounded by expanses of open land. As she touches her house in the photo, her finger points to the south runway, its end visible just beyond a barren field. She describes how, rather than staying in the clear zone of the runway, the planes flew directly over their homes. “I could stand in my backyard and see the nose of the plane skid across the horizon,” she says, as the pilot held the plane low rather than rising in the air. She took what she described as an intentional, dangerous, and unnecessary act personally, but left possible motivation open. Her touch tends to the memory manifest in a tattered aerial photograph – a photograph made with a technology afforded by flight, captured by a photographer pointing a camera out the door of a helicopter, with its own engine roar as it circled over the airport and its margins.

This was an era of infrastructure, of eminent domain wielded in service of freeways, stadiums, and airports. Across the region, families took the city’s money and moved, or held out and fought, the stability of homes and neighborhoods only a recent achievement bolstered by postwar incentives for homeownership and subdivision development (Avila, Cuff, Nicolaides). Later, after they had moved away, former residents told the local paper that “Living there was like living in paradise.” Families would walk to the beach after dinner, their children roaming freely across the dunes and beach. “‘It was a delightful place to live, kind of like the French Riviera,’” one man told a reporter, and a retired aerospace worker and licensed pilot concurred, “‘This whole area was a super neighborhood,’ said Hoefler. … ‘You couldn’t beat it’” (Gregor A1, A8). Women stayed home with the children, who might scream in fear at the sound of an aircraft, or race to look up in awe and excitement. Some of these women formed organizations to deal with the noise of the planes and the impending encroachment of the airport on their neighborhoods, along with the potential loss of their dream homes, built on the coast, with ocean breezes if not views. They went knocking door to door, asking for signatures to take to the airport noise group or send to the city councilperson. Even as they strove to maintain the lives they knew, there was a straining against the constraints of gender, of the household, and of labor or the lack thereof. They used their husbands’ names at first, though the men were at work all day and did not hear the noise.

While residents of neighborhoods still – though not much longer – under restrictive covenants continued their battle against airport noise, Watts, directly to the east, burned with the fires of a riot stoked by the precarity of urban inequality, of structured abandonment manifest in police violence along with subpar housing and public services. It was a heat wave, and the Situationist International wrote: “The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history able to justify itself by the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heatwave” (7). An atmosphere of change shimmered in the air, in bodies, in city infrastructure. “Sous les pavés la plage,” under the paving stone the beach – a call to action, both literal and symbolic, the paving stone a weapon against the police during 1968 riots in Paris manifesting the potential of liberation, of transforming the pressures of the capitalist city and private property to a space of freedom. And while not revolutionary in these terms, the return of the dunes, the seeping up of the sand in all its indeterminacy, pushes against the stability of property.

Those who remained in Playa del Rey planted ice plant in an effort to halt the sand that, freed from its containment under concrete, drifted here and there, blowing onto streets and driveways and still cultivated yards when the wind was strong. Ice plant, Carpobrotus edulis, also known as “Hottentot fig,” with its shallow roots and creeping, rhizomatic form, takes hold quickly and spreads. Native to South Africa, it flourishes in Mediterranean climates. Needing little water, it blooms a brilliant lavender or pink flower, which, against the olive green field, provides a compelling burst of color. Its thick clusters cover the ground around beach front homes, providing greenery that stands out against the more subdued hues of dune ecosystems. A succulent, it can grow when just one of its three-sided segments meets ground, developing roots, taking hold, and generating fingers and branches that spread across the sand. Host to the El Segundo blue butterfly’s predators, it crowds out native species and makes the sandy soil of coastal dunes hospitable to other nonnative plants. Ice plant gives root to a desire for fixity and control. First introduced to Southern California in the early 1900s to stabilize soil along railway lines, ice plant continues to be planted extensively along freeways. This is a rhizome that territorializes rather than deterritorializes, spreading quickly and taking over areas that might be otherwise populated, especially if sparsely, as dunes habitats tend to be (Marder 135). To remove it, as I learned during a dunes restoration volunteer event, you start from the outside in, digging in with your fingers to feel beneath the shallow roots, pulling up each of its “arms” until they clump around their starting point, which, more deeply anchored, requires the use of a knife to dig around and into the cluster and free the thicker roots from the sand. We were warned to not leave a single segment lying on the ground.

Fig 2. Ice plant. © Marina Peterson, 2018.

Ice plant may have seemed to offer the possibility of holding onto the known, fixing the surface against otherwise unstoppable changes. In a letter dated September 1, 1973, Yvette Kovary explained to Mayor Tom Bradley that she had planted ice plant in the vacant lots across the street from her house “to keep some of the sand in place and from drifting across to fill our driveway,” but that much of the area looked terrible, like “the aftermath of a war – a war declared by the City of Los Angeles against its own residents and taxpayers.” Her anger seeps onto the page, her outrage framed with a biting cordiality, “Dear Sir, … Respectfully Yours.” “Unbelievable in this day of environmental concern,” the “once-lovely community” now has “rubble-strewn vacant lots” with “weeds up to eight feet in height, … smashed and unrepaired sidewalks, … sidewalks covered with sand (often to the roadway), … damaged or missing street signs, and … boarded-up houses.” A glimpse of an anthropogenic future, the neighborhood stands as a culmination of Smithson’s “ruins in reverse,” the “memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures” once more returned to rubble (Gordillo 54, 55).

3. Noisy Silence

After most of the homes had been removed, entomologists from the Natural History Museum returned to the dunes, whose wildlife had been catalogued in the decades prior to residential development. In 1973, the year the Endangered Species Act is passed, the El Segundo blue is included in The Butterflies of Southern California (Emmel and Emmel). The airport offers an annual butterfly tour to employees. We drive down the now cracked pavement of the streets that once defined a neighborhood, through the rolling hills of the dunes with their spectacular view of the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance, crossing boulevards lined with palm trees and stopping at a street that would have continued west were it not now blocked from its route by sand and a chain link fence. The fence creates a barrier between the perpendicular intersection of this now unnamed street and the busy thoroughfare of Vista del Mar, on the other side of which lies Dockweiler State Beach. The biologist leading the tour sets up a small amplifier in the sand atop a ruin of a retaining wall, still standing though the house whose foundation it protected from the sand’s slow seep is gone. Dick Arnold uses the amplifier to broadcast his voice to the small group of women gathered around the coastal buckwheat plants, looking with great intensity as we try to spot a butterfly. We see one, but it is not the El Segundo blue. Wind touches the microphone, a plane whine passes over, becoming the white noise of engine sound, feedback from the small amplifier, “hooaaa,” laughter, “that’s a Metalmark right there,” he says. At last one is spotted, a male, “flittin’ around.” We talk to each other about the difficulty of capturing a butterfly with a camera, listening to our guide with half an ear. The flier we received as we boarded the bus has a very large, clear, and distinct image of a male El Segundo blue butterfly, blue wings with an orange border at the back of its rear wings. We are trying to spot something that is about one inch across, blue (male) or orange and brown wings with white spots (female), against the scrubby, gray and gray-green drought-afflicted coastal buckwheat plant. “There’s a female. See how it’s darker?” A male and female dart around each other and those gathered exclaim “awwws” at the arthropod romance.

Fig 3. Dunes. © Marina Peterson, 2017.

Audio Clip 1. Butterfly Count Feedback

The interspecies encounter of butterfly and human takes form within and beyond a physical encounter, the sighting of butterfly by human eyes a sensory encounter that proliferates into forms that are sensory (the touch of butterfly capture) and abstract (law, and its regulatory practices). There is something in this encounter of what Yusoff calls the “insensible,” meaning that which “alerts us to the work of sense in securing the bringing into relation, its configurations, and its a priori orientations,” even as it “highlights the conditions under which we make knowledge and the way in which these conditions are directed towards certain resolutions of entities, of arrangements, of matter that are already towards the coherency of an event, as phenomenon, as writing, as sense work” (224). The insensible is Bataille’s “formless,” or “nonknowledge,” a force between sense and nonsense, “between material and virtual, inhuman and human, organic and nonorganic, time and the untimely” (Yusoff 213). And though the butterfly-human encounter almost immediately moves into the sensible – law, science, notions of ecology, humanistic modes of planetary care, metaphor, the biopolitical subject of environmentality – something remains of the “strange, nonintuitive, insensible … remote from human comprehension or intelligibility” (Yusoff 225). The butterfly exceeds human knowledge of it, even as it is potentially at risk of extinction at human hands.

An orientation of care that privileges human over butterfly draws the two together in a series of encounters; yet even “the specific materiality and multiplicity of the subject” does not quite undo the preeminence of the human, does not quite yield to a sense that “the ‘human’…is not now, and never was, itself” (Wolfe 9). Rather, what is formed in these encounters is butterfly as object of human desire and care – of silence, fragility, precarity, posed against the roar of the jet. Anthropogenic charity embodied by the butterfly, and manifest in bodily encounters with plants and soil. A non-teleological form of the encounter between butterfly and human is shaped but not determined by other forms, encounters that, though not “structuring” per se, do not come out of nowhere. Something of history, of long conditioned modes of thought, endures and inscribes “meaning” into form. Metaphor and physicality draw together around the human-butterfly encounter. Care, enacted through the physicality of sight and touch, is iterated as such, hand meeting soil as volunteers plant coastal buckwheat in the dunes in order for the butterfly to live.

Inhabiting a place deemed unfit for human habitation, the butterfly undergoes complete metamorphosis on (and under) coastal buckwheat plants. Butterfly metamorphosis is Malabou’s plasticity: one form destroyed, another form emerging from the destruction. Plasticity is thus a worlding, an emergent, transformative mode of existence, “a possible line of flight” (Mawani 167). Their lifecycle spanning a year, they become butterflies between mid-June and early September, their ability to fly coinciding with the flowering of the buckwheat. Staying close to the crown of the plant amongst whose roots they have long lain in another form, the butterflies mate (Arnold 82). The females eat and lay eggs on the flowerhead – a cluster of small white and pink flowers. The eggs hatch in three to five days if not consumed by a parasitic wasp who protects the buckwheat (Raffles 69). Plants sense insects, responding chemically to caterpillars munching their leaves and releasing chemicals (whose effects are unknown) upon insect oviposition (Karban 22). Ants protect the larvae from the parasitic wasp that protects the plant. Rudi Mattoni, whose fascination with butterflies began as a child, explains the process to me, saying that the larvae are “attended by ants, which protect them from parasitoids.” These ants drink a “sweet secretion,” exuded from glands that emerge as the ant strokes the larva’s back – a seeming symbiosis of pleasure and protection in which the biopolitical subject of an endangered species is entangled in an interspecies assemblage of transformation and becoming. Ant pleasure and pupae secretion spark the imagination of biologists and butterfly aficionados. Mattoni describes the nectar as a “delicious honey solution. They get high – they love it.” And as the larvae secrete, they sing, communicating via very quiet sounds at very high frequencies, inaudible to humans, but within the realm of transducible sound (DeVries).

Others, however, shift from the titillation of ant pleasure, of peaceable communication between species, to suggest such ant-caterpillar relationships may be less equanimous. A framework of “biological market” does a different kind of work: larvae compete for the attention of fewer ants by producing more nectar, but produce less when there are many ants present. The ants, who do not need the sugary secretion, may also eat a larva that is not producing nectar, thus eliminating “the free riders from the population” (Maestripieri 214). A Science headline puts it bluntly: “Butterflies drug ants, turn them into bodyguards” (Asher). In this account, because the caterpillars need the ants but not vice versa, the caterpillars manipulate the ants with chemicals in their sweet secretion, using “nectar to drug unsuspecting ants with mind-altering chemicals.” The nectar imparts a caterpillar’s version of cruel optimism, as the ants who drink it run aggressively around the caterpillars rather than defending them from wasps and spiders. Extortion, psychological manipulation, and death tinge the desire for sweet secretion with malevolence and violence, another kind of metaphor for the transformation of dunes into neighborhoods, neighborhoods into rubble across which “invasive” species flourished, only to be removed slowly by human hands pushing sharp spades into the sand, cutting branches and roots with little knives, “restoring” an earlier ecosystem as an emblem of planetary care.

Ant-butterfly relations do not adhere to a logical intentionality, whether it’s cast in terms of a rationality of market relations or in terms of the physical pleasure of interspecies touch and intoxication. The latter, which suggests an “affective ecology shaped by pleasure, play, and experimental propositions” (Hustak and Myers 78), is nonetheless as much an anthropocentric projection as the former. And, while extortion and manipulation more readily serve a neo-Darwinian model of evolution, both accounts of the ant-butterfly dynamic draw together a physicality of sensation with an anthropocentric interpretation of its meaning – as an interspecies insect relationship folds into a human-insect entanglement. Missing are the ways in which the relationship is “a reciprocal capture,” an “‘intra-active’ phenomenon” of “creative involution,” Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation that “amplifies relations constituted through affinity” (Hustak and Myers 97). There is a possibility of formlessness presented by the butterfly-ant encounter, an insensibility that has the potential to undermine humanism by pulling “these relations into a strange territory” of pleasurable pain (Yusoff 225), of purposeless consumption of an other, of drunken ants wobbling around an oozing larva. Ant stroking caterpillar secreting sweet nectar drunk by ant protecting caterpillar is a becoming “in which the discernibility of points disappears” (Deleuze and Guattari qtd. in Hustak and Myers 97). The airport looms large. Though the butterfly may not “hear” the planes, people who spent years working on dunes restoration attribute their hearing loss to the jet noise. As another sensing species, with antennae and legs and wings that experience differences in atmospheric conditions, the butterfly too must be moved by the aerial vibration of the sound of a departing plane.

In an encounter of insect and city, noise effects shape a space of “noisy silence” (Königstein), literally and metaphorically, materially and conceptually – airplanes making their loudest, most “annoying” sound while a caterpillar sings softly to an ant. Ambiguous and ambivalent, this is a space of metamorphosis, transduction, plasticity, and becoming, with species transformation shifting human aspirations, federal protection of endangered species superseding municipal laws, butterflies trumping a golf course, an anthropocentric environmentalism at odds with itself settling into an uneasy truce about land use that, despite its seeming “emptiness,” is anything but (McDonogh 5). This is a space of indefinite urbanism, where noise from the sky transformed a then growing city, and sound is still sensed in its affective reverberations for those whose homes once stood there and by pupae waiting to become butterflies.

Tracing noise, I arrive at butterflies – delicate, winged, darting about in flight, coasting on wind currents or perching on coastal buckwheat, gently opening and closing their wings, difficult to spot and little documented, they are atmospheric. Dwelling with them, attending to qualities and matterings, to assemblages and encounters across species and forms of matter, becomes a stilled moment in the proliferation of atmospheric phenomena composed by noise. Like noise, the butterflies evade and escape immediacy, control, and management, exceeding even the domain of “noise.” Echoing Thrift, they expose “a whole new frontier of inhuman endeavor … the construction of new matterings” (22). The El Segundo blue butterflies compose a volumetric city of another scale. Not a miniature representation of human flight, theirs is a world-making venture that, like noise, draws things together and to which humans sensorially attune, turning away from planes whose “noise” interrupts speech and turning toward butterfly flight.

Footnotes

1. Insofar as noise is made, whether as sound or in its designation, it is emergent, approachable principally as an ethnographic concern. Always coming into being, noise is necessarily immanent; intrinsic, or inherent to its instantiations in human/nonhuman assemblages of machine, air, body, or building, it provides a way of exploring sound as such. Hence, unlike others, I do not posit a definition of noise (see Attali, Goodman, Hainge, Hegarty, Hendy, Keizer, Novak, Schwartz, and Thompson).

2. There is currently burgeoning attention to the atmosphere across a range of disciplines; see, for instance, Adey, Böhme’s “Acoustic Atmospheres” and “The Atmosphere of a City,” Choy, Choy and Zee, Connor, Eisenlohr, Ingold, Martin, McCormack, Sloterdijk, Spahr, and Stewart).

3. While there are numerous studies of the interior spaces of airports, few address the exterior of this infrastructural behemoth, or its relationship to its locale. Notable examples include Friedman’s “Fear of Flying,” a master’s thesis on noise at LAX (copies of which can be found in the library at LAX’s Flight Path Museum); Hailey’s Airport, with its plotline of a community protest against noise; and Schaberg’s The End of Airports, in which he describes his own experience working in all zones of the airport. Others that address the airport in relation to mobility, security, and architecture include Adey, Augé, Cwerner et al., Gordon, Law, Manaugh, and Pascoe.

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Steven Swarbrick (bio)

Abstract

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their two views, but to draw out the consequences of their entanglement. Insofar as Barad’s work conceptualizes life (and art) as a vitalizing encounter, it cannot, this essay argues, account for the queer negativity at play in environmental politics, including the politics of climate change.

Animism taken to its final conclusion … is not only a perspectivism but an “enemyism.”—Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics

To love one’s neighbor may be the cruelest of choices.—Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

In Cosmopolitics I, Isabelle Stengers identifies two forms of ecological relation: first, ecologies of practice, which enmesh the human subject in ecological networks beyond the human; and second, ecologies of capture, which resolve entanglements of self and other into discrete representational figures through different forms of commodification and objectification (36-37). Capture, for Stengers, is what happens when nature actualizes into identity, and when the problematics of practice give rise to divisions of subject/object, nature/culture, and so on. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s language of the virtual and the actual, Stengers makes clear that ecologies of practice and ecologies of capture are never fully separable: life’s networks exceed and suffuse the object captured; conversely, the object captured provides the grounds for the new. Deleuze defines this intra-activity of the virtual and the actual through the complex concept of “different/ciation,” whereby virtual differences or problematics actualize the differentiated objects of representation.¹ Importantly, for Deleuze, different/ciation does not allow us to repair objects of capture through an appeal to notions of assemblage, connectivity, consilience, or symbiosis. Rather, life as different/ciation tends to destroy the very objects that one might otherwise seek to repair. Life, according to Deleuze, is by definition non-ameliorative: ecologies of practice depend on encounters that do violence to the very worlds we wish to build and protect.²

Recent turns to the nonhuman in science studies, queer theory, and posthumanities scholarship have done considerable work to elaborate an ecology of practice that seeks to repair histories of colonial, sexist, homophobic, and environmental violence. Much of this work builds on theories of repair developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her reading of Melanie Klein, and Bruno Latour in his reading of Alan Turing.³ The turn to life in the humanities has emphasized consilience, friendship, and symbiosis. But what would a non-conciliatory relation to life look like? This is the central question posed by Leo Bersani in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Turning the anti-pornography argument on its head, Bersani questions whether sex could ever have anything to do with the redemptive values of love or community without sacrificing “the inestimable value of sex as … anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” (22). Bersani’s point is not that sex can’t be pastoralized; rather, he wonders “how a center of presumably wholesome sexuality ever produced those unsavory margins in the first place” (21). “As long as it is assumed that pornography violates the natural conjunction of sex with tenderness and love,” he writes, “pornography’s violence” will be read as “a sign of certain fantasies only marginally connected with an otherwise essentially healthy (caring, loving) form of human behavior” (21). Translated slightly, the problem of life (or sex) in the Anthropocene is not how to reverse life’s capture through an ethics of repair (loving more, caring more), but rather to understand how a presumably wholesome nature produced Descartes’s “error”—the separation between mind and world—in the first place.⁴ What is nature such that it births its own extinction?

The recent vogue for Deleuze in new materialist and posthumanist theory has spawned a variety of attempts at repackaging Deleuzian aggression under the banner of life’s endless productivity. Is the earth’s biodiversity being driven to extinction by mankind? Call in the Deleuzian “assemblage,” or the Spinozist affectus to save the day. It would seem there is no limit to the fantasy that “life” will live on in this posthuman world, a world that is, let it be said, all-too-human.⁵ The turn to life that a certain reading of Deleuze has inspired recapitulates the fantasy of the Child theorized by Lee Edelman: life, ecology, and affectus have become the dominant metaphors for our future birth. Against this form of image-capture, in which we give birth to our own image in the form of connected, ambient life, Deleuze insists on coldness and cruelty as integral to the images of life worth defending. In short, it’s not our inhumanity that concerns Deleuze, it’s that we are not inhuman enough. Recent attempts at shoehorning or pastoralizing Deleuzian ethics recapitulate precisely the thing that Deleuze consistently inveighs against: treating the image of thought as an image of philia, love or friendship.⁶ In fact, Deleuze never ceased to insist that thinking is a matter of aggression tantamount to the death drive, an aggression that redounds not only to the “object” but also to the “subject.” When I love my object, we both fall to pieces.

My goal in this paper is to invite deeper appreciation of Deleuze’s ontological aggression in relation to queer and posthumanist theory. I want to think the violence of encounter in Deleuze’s sense: to think anima (life, spirit, becoming) and animosity (violence, aggression, hate) in the same breath. In my view, there has been a steady draining away of negativity from new materialist, neo-vitalist, and object-oriented theory. Much of this work now operates under the image of life as the unquestionable object of the “good.” What I’m proposing instead is not only an injection of animus into ecological theory but also a queer ethics that runs athwart the optimism of repair.⁷

In contrast to the animism of today, the point is not to figure everything as “life” but to let live by letting go of life’s snare: to will our own lessness in the world.⁸ This is what Foucault famously called askesis, practices of the self as a mode of life. While Foucault might disagree, such “modes of life” are already at the core of a certain psychoanalytic thinking about the nature of the drive. For Lacan in particular, the drives operate according to a different temporality of becoming that is not the becoming of the present in which past and future are inflections of “our” time. The time of the drive is closer to what Deleuze calls Aion: a time of pure becoming in which there is no present, and thus no “us” to occupy the present (The Logic of Sense 184-185). The circuit of the drive short-circuits.⁹ It is not about reciprocity or the exchange of meaning. The drive is not for anything: reproduction of the self, the other, community, or love. Its being for itself, however, is its ethical potential. The drive cruises differences, full stop. If Lacan says true love breaks the other into pieces, that’s because the drive is only interested in this or that singular difference: I love the other not because of what he or she represents but because of this or that singular difference—differences that are non-exchangeable, that do not add up to meaning or a final goal. As Joan Copjec explains in Imagine There’s No Woman, in “the Lacanian phrase ‘I love in you something more than you,’” “everything depends on how one interprets the ‘something more’.… That is, the ‘is’ of the beloved is split, fractured. The beloved is always slightly different from or more than, herself. It is this more, this extra, that makes the beloved more than just an ordinary object of my attention” (43).

For my part, I want to attend to this “something more” by arguing for an environmentalism that is non-ameliorative in the Deleuzian sense. What would a posthumanist agenda look like that focuses not only on questions of liveliness and connectivity but also on violence, hostility, and phantasmatic splitting? The meaning of nature in this paper is not the redeeming nature of the pastoral; nature does not repurpose the bad in the form of the good. Nature, I argue, is pharmakological: anima (cure) and animosity (poison) in the same breath. I develop this argument with respect to Karen Barad’s and Gilles Deleuze’s dissonant naturalisms. Whereas Barad advances an ontology of repair geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. My goal in bringing their respective naturalisms together is not to reconcile their differences but to think the violence of their encounter, to ask: is there life without the optimism of repair?

The Dark Precursor

Let me begin by introducing two images. These images are by no means identical. In fact, they differ in a number of important ways, with respect to style, tone, genealogy, and politics. As images that are about the act of imaging, or appearing/not-appearing, they also overlap on the question of desire, on the material un/folding of desire, and desire’s aim. In the words of Karen Barad, we can say that the two images I will present “intra-act”: they are not individual atoms or entities that encounter each other in the void, but are a-part (cut and cut-together, in one movement) of the same intra-active web. The first image comes from Barad’s essay, “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” Barad describes her essay as an investigation into “trans rage.” It’s the nature and trajectory of that rage that I want to interrogate as a form of the ontological aggression that Deleuze identifies. Fixing on an image of lighting, Barad writes:

Lightning is a reaching toward, an arcing dis/juncture, a striking response to charged yearnings.

A dark sky. Deep darkness, without a glimmer of light to settle the eye. Out of the blue, tenuous electrical sketches scribbled with liquid light appear/disappear faster than the human eye can detect. Flashes of potential, hints of possible lines of connection alight now and again. Desire builds, as the air crackles with anticipation. Lightning bolts are born of such charged yearnings. Branching expressions of prolonged longing, barely visible filamentary gestures, disjointed tentative luminous doodlings—each faint excitation of this desiring field is a contingent and suggestive inkling of the light show yet to come. (387)

Barad teases the reader with a creationist story of emergence ex nihilo, of something coming into being “out of the blue” where before there was nothing, mere emptiness, void. Readers familiar with Barad’s theory of “agential realism” know, however, that that is not the case, or at least not entirely. The void consists of no-thing, but it is not nothing. The theory of “agential realism” that Barad develops in Meeting the Universe Halfway uses the apparatus of post-Bohrian quantum physics to show that all things, from the atom to the atmosphere, are intra-actively determined through cuts. That is, things are neither present nor absent, real nor unreal, but rather flickering relationalities of trans/matter. If Western philosophers have tended to define being according to the One, from Democritus’s falling atom to Spinoza’s single Substance, then Barad’s point of intervention is the not-One of intra-activity. The latter names “matter’s experimental nature—its propensity to test out every un/imaginable path, every im/possibility. Matter is promiscuous and inventive in its agential wanderings” (387). Because relations for Barad take priority over relata, there are no positive terms “in” nature (hello, Saussure)—in fact there is no “in” of nature at all; instead there are virtual-material entanglements of “spacetimemattering” (or nature/naturing). The electrical body that appears/disappears “out of the blue” is therefore no-thing, since the agency of appearing—what Barad calls “agential realism”—cannot be localized or “detect[ed].” The “branching” agency that we perceive as lightning has neither a to nor a from, neither a filial line of descent nor a reproductive goal (lightning does not re-produce or re-present any thing). “No continuous past from sky to ground can satisfy its wild imaginings,” Barad writes (387). Rather, lightning is a “dis/connected alliance,” a virtual “desiring field” of relational potentialities whose subtraction from the human eye makes lightning visible. In an important sense, the human eye-brain is a-part of the very phenomenon “it” perceives, one of the infinite many electrical-neuronal bodies intra-actively entangled with lightning’s “arcing dis/juncture.”

Allow me to turn now to a second image, this time from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. He writes:

what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated. Likewise, every system contains its dark precursor which ensures the communication of peripheral series. … The question is to know in any given case how the precursor fulfills this role. (119)

The “dark precursor” goes by many names in Deleuze’s oeuvre: the virtual “sense-event” in The Logic of Sense; “expression” in his writings on Spinoza; “becoming” in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia diptych (with Félix Guattari); and “plane of immanence” in What is Philosophy? (also with Guattari). It is no wonder, too, since the “dark precursor” names the disparate itself: “We call this dark precursor, this difference in itself or difference in the second degree which relates heterogeneous systems and even completely disparate things, the disparate” (Difference 120). As such, it is a disguised relation, a mask or prosopon for virtual becomings. The dark precursor is difference in-itself, the “there is” of difference, without identity or resemblance; yet it is also the engine (Deleuze calls it the “differenciator“) of identity and resemblance. The dark precursor is always intagliated, meaning that it reverses itself with every fold, every repetition of difference; it disappears in the after-image, forever eluding capture. If, following Bergson, all matter is light-image-movement, or “luminosity,” then the dark precursor is the negative, non-representational underside of every image of capture. Against the “natural perception” of phenomenology, which presumes a human observer as one of its conditions, Deleuze asserts that “the eye is in things, in luminous images in themselves. ‘Photography, [writes Bergson] if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all the points of space’” (Cinema 1 60). In other words, there are not individual perceivers (human or otherwise) who perceive secondarily; there is perception.¹⁰ The thunderbolts that “explode between different intensities” do so not by adding to an imageless void, but, on the contrary, by subtracting the infinite many possibilities for imaging that is light-matter-energy. The human eye’s power to perceive is just one of the many infinite powers afforded by this inhuman perception.

To risk an analogy, the “dark precursor” names the same chimerical, sub-representational reality that Barad calls “agential realism.” Barad’s theory of agential cuts is therefore akin to Deleuze’s idea of difference in-itself. Quantum intra-action, according to Barad, is not an agent or invisible hand but an impersonal/imperceptible apparatus of cutting together/apart the many differences that organic perception takes for granted: differences of self/other, male/female, human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate, and so on. In terms that are at once foreign to Barad’s theory of quantum entanglement and yet necessarily a-part of it, we can say that intra-action determines nature as not-One, as Lacan says of Being in On Feminine Sexuality. If Being for Lacan is not-One, that is because ontology in psychoanalysis is already sexed, already riven from the start; moreover, the object of desire is not a whole object (though fantasy persuades us otherwise) but a partial object or partial drives. This is Barad’s central point. She asks: “why should we understand parts as individually constructed building blocks or disconnected pieces of one or another forms of original wholeness? After all, to be a part is not to be absolutely apart but to be constituted and threaded through with the entanglements of part-ing” (406). Barad adds: “if ‘parts,’ by definition, arise from divisions or cuts, it does not necessarily follow that cuts sever or break things off, either spatially or temporally … a patchwork would not be a sewing together of individual bits and pieces but a phenomenon that always already holds together, whose pattern of differentiating-entangling may not be recognized but is indeed remembered” (“Transmaterialities” 406).

Barad’s other name for intra-action is “virtuality,” and here we see another point of overlap with Deleuze. Both theorists aim to think difference in-itself in a manner that does not reduce difference to identity, resemblance, or opposition. The lightning bolt is neither present nor absent in their examples, but an after-image of virtual differences on the move. “Virtual particles are not present (and not absent), but they are material. In fact, most of what matter is,” Barad writes, immediately suspending the “is”-ness of her statement, “is virtual” (“Transmaterialities” 395). Here “virtual” should be understood in both cases as the power to differ. Virtual cuts occur within phenomena, meaning that the not-One of being applies to all beings regardless of scale; if “I” am cut together/apart with “you,” that cut is internal to who “I am” and not external. We are all Frankensteinian monsters, Barad argues, “a patchwork, a suturing of disparate parts.”

Queer Impossibility

Barad’s insistence on the intra-actions of disparate parts, though similar in ways to Deleuze’s, is ultimately quite different with respect to ethics. I want now to draw out the consequences of thinking the dis/juncture of Barad’s and Deleuze’s respective ontologies.

For Barad, ethics runs through nature, such that ethics is first philosophy. Although Barad, like Deleuze, elaborates a detailed and complex theory of difference qua “agential realism,” the consequences of her argument take us in a far different direction towards an ethics of the “other” and “justice-to-come.” In other words, it is not the violence or indifference of the agential cut that interests Barad, but rather the responsibility to others (human and nonhuman) that follows from it.

In this respect, Slavoj Žižek is right to draw a parallel between Barad and Kant.¹¹ Agential cuts in Barad’s theory are conditions in the Kantian sense: “subject” and “object” do not encounter each other as external beings but as folds of the same entangled reality. The cut that makes a difference (material and semiotic) for Barad is a not-too-distant echo of Kant’s transcendental conditions, only in Barad’s hands the apparatus of the cut is disseminated throughout the universe so that the human subject is no longer an a priori requirement of being or appearing. In contrast to a thinker like Quentin Meillassoux, who tries to break the “correlationist” circle by absolutizing mathematics, or Alain Badiou, who absolutizes the human subject, Barad fractalizes correlationism so that the human subject no longer occupies the sole position of thinker, knower, or agent.¹² This is less a break from Kant than a radicalization of the Kantian conditions of meaning.

In keeping with this Kantian tradition, there is the practical side to Barad’s theory of entanglement. If all being/appearing/knowing is intra-actively entangled, so that material cuts do not occur between beings but mark the quantum in/separability of existences within nature, then, as Barad puts it, ethics and mattering (in both senses of the verb) are one and the same. There is an infinite call to ethics and response-ability in Barad’s queer naturalism. “I” am responsible to the myriad others with/from which I’m cut together/apart. Again, this puts Barad squarely within the post-Kantian tradition: ethics is an infinite task of response-ability to the other, human and nonhuman. Because the ethical act is not pre-determined but time-sensitive, as in Kant (the categorical imperative does not tell you how to act in all cases but only that you should act in favor of the Good), ethics is a labor of infinite care: “An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future,” Barad writes in “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” “There can never be absolute redemption, but spacetimematter can be productively reconfigured, reworking im/possibilities in the process” (47). Barad’s cuts that make a difference are therefore already pre-signed within the order of meaning: cuts that make a difference are meaning-making in that they inscribe relations of sense and obligation within nature through nature.

Deleuze’s ethics could not be more different. Despite his shared interest in a theory of difference not subordinate to identity and resemblance, the “dark precursor” is hostile to relations of survival, care, hospitality, and preservation. Difference as the power to relate for Deleuze is not for that reason a power to ensure that such relations will be meaningful or beneficial. Difference is the power of nonsense, of what is intolerable to thought. This, in short, is the sadistic side of difference. It is metonymic; in other words, it destroys the promise of meaning and metaphor by negating meaning’s foundational act of the cut—the cut that blocks the metonymic slippage of difference that is the dark precursor’s sole drive. Before nature’s metonymic force makes sense through a stabilizing cut—the thunderbolt in Deleuze’s example—it performs the cruelty of nonsense, a nonsense that insists on the actual in the empty form of a violent but disavowed repetition. Thought for Deleuze emerges only—and for that matter very rarely—in confrontation with this nonsense: cuts that do not “add up” (as in Barad) but “crack up.”¹³ Every cut is an irrational cut according to Deleuze, a power of the false.¹⁴ Only some cuts take on a habitual pattern: the habit of saying “I,” for example.¹⁵ The world is not geared toward meaning; it is not the best possible world (Leibniz). On the contrary, the world is a chaosmos. The task of thought according to Deleuze is to think the agency of cutting outside our usual habits of meaning. Only then can the new (or difference) emerge. To think the new, or difference in-itself, regardless of its damage to our images of the “good”: that, for Deleuze, is the only ethics worth speaking of.

Thus we can say that Deleuze takes up the “other” side of the post-Kantian tradition, the one theorized by Lacan and radicalized by the so-called “antisocial” queer theory of Bersani and Edelman. In Lacan’s reading of Kant, every object of the “good” is produced by cuts—that is, from calculations. Lacan delights in the apparent absurdity of Kant’s “innocent subterfuge, that … everyone, every man of good sense, will say no” to that which does harm (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 189). This calculation, Lacan points out, always leaves a remainder. My “good” cannot be explained by your good, and so on. There is something excessive to ethics and to the “reality principle” that is its customary support. That is why Kant concludes that ethics must be purely formal, or else it is “pathological,” driven by egoism and self-interest. In Lacan’s analysis, ethics becomes synonymous with the form of desire as empty repetition, which has no “object.” Desire desires to desire, tout court.

Ethics for Lacan is thus brought to its pure state by Sade, who shows that an ethics that takes the object of the “good” as impossible (as something to be indifferent to, even hostile toward), as an object of desire in the Lacanian sense, is the purest form of ethics. The point is not that ethics is ultimately egoistic or pleasure driven. On the contrary, the point Lacan makes is that the ethical act has no object besides repetition; it is beyond the “good” defined by pleasure—an ethics, that is, of the impossible. This is the argument of “Kant with Sade,” in which Lacan determines that ethics is founded on something excessive, a gap within our field of meaning, or an excess of sense or nonsense in Deleuze’s philosophy. To suture that excess or that gap with an ultimate good (think the Child in Edelman’s No Future) is the worst kind of ethical breach in that it denies that ethics is a matter of breaching, of driving holes in meaning.

This, I would like to suggest, is the problem with Barad’s reparative ethics; it is much too seemly. Insofar as it tries to repair the cuts between self and other by including every “other” within the same intra-active web of meaning, it cannot not enact a violence that would seek to cover over a breached nature. In the queer naturalism of Lacan and Deleuze, by contrast, ethics does not seek to paste over these cuts but to multiply them—to formalize the gap between desire and its object. This is what Bersani calls an “ecological ethics,” which is no longer about “our” desire but about the endless montage, or the ceaseless metonymy of the drive qua death drive. The point is not so much to labor under the subject-other structure, but to escape it—the ego and the law—by subtracting oneself, one’s image, from every ethical act. To go beyond the pleasure principle, in short, towards an ethics of the real.

This is not where Barad takes us. Instead, the infinite task of ethics for Barad means response-ability to the other. In this sense, post-Kantianism in Barad travels the path away from Lacan-Deleuze towards Levinas-Derrida. For Derrida, too, ethics or “justice-to-come” is geared towards relations of différance, in which there is no “outside” to speak of. For Derrida, as for Levinas and Barad, ethics is first philosophy because the “other” is never outside the web of meaning: every “outside” constitutes an “inside,” and every “other” is my neighbor. Being in the world thus constitutes an infinite obligation or debt. Consequently, the gap that makes a difference (material and semiotic) in Barad’s ethics is not the same gap we find between object and aim in Lacan; on the contrary, the former represses the latter. Difference in Barad’s account is ultimately sutured by meaning, life, bettering, world-making (i.e. the future). As soon as the cut is made, life’s excess, indeterminacy, and jouissance are resolved in the image-horizon of intra-action. To bend Joan Copjec’s argument against historicism in a different direction, we can say that the reality of desire in Barad’s agential realism is “realtight, that is no longer self-external” (Read My Desire 14). As Copjec makes clear: “To say that desire must be taken literally is to say simultaneously that desire must be articulated, that we must refrain from imagining something that would not be registered on the single surface of speech”—on this point, Barad and Deleuze would no doubt agree—”and that desire is inarticulable” (14). Both/and: a single surface of sense, and an inarticulable never-to-be-articulated nonsense. Because Barad is committed to remembering and re-articulating the social through an ever-expanding web of inclusion, she denies the inarticulable its voice, its power to make nature stutter. All of nature is oriented ethically towards its objects because every object is considered our neighbor and friend.

We should recall what Freud says about loving one’s neighbor. In Lacan’s reading, “Freud was literally horrified by the idea of love for one’s neighbor” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 185-186). If “Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one’s neighbor,” this is because, as Lacan argues, “we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor. … And what is more of a neighbor to me than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t dare go near?” (186). The biblical imperative to “love thy neighbor,” in Lacan’s translation, verges on the “pathological” love that Kant warned against. When I love my neighbors, “I imagine their difficulties and their sufferings in the mirror of my own.” This, for Lacan, is the greatest evil. He states clearly: “My egoism is quite content with a certain altruism, altruism of the kind that is situated on the level of the useful. And it even becomes the pretext by means of which I can avoid taking up the problem of the evil I desire, and that my neighbor desires also” (187). A love that reflects my own image, that is, the image of myself that I would like to be, enacts a cruelty of conformity that passes for altruism. “It is,” Lacan observes, “a fact of experience that what I want is the good of others in the image of my own. That doesn’t cost much. What I want is the good of others provided that it remain in the image of my own” (187).

If Freud retreats in horror, then, it is because such a translation of “love thy neighbor” empties the self of its own self-image as loving and sociable. What is left is the empty repetition of a duty akin to Kant’s formal ethics. Lacan’s point is not that cruelty can be avoided; his paradoxical assertion that “to love one’s neighbor may be the cruelest of choices” makes clear his belief that no act of good will is free from a certain evil. The point, rather, and this is the guiding thread of “Kant with Sade,” is that true love embraces the emptiness of the image, and thereby becomes godly. The ground of God’s power, his freedom, according to Lacan, “resides in the capacity to advance into emptiness.” God created man in his own image, ex nihilo. Although “there are beautiful images—and goodness only knows that religious images always correspond by definition to reigning canons of beauty—one doesn’t notice that they are always hollow images” (196). Indeed, “man, too, as image is interesting for the hollow the image leaves empty—by reason of the fact that one doesn’t see in the image, beyond the capture of the image, the emptiness of God to be discovered” (196). The radical evil that horrified Freud, when set free beyond the confines of self-preservation or self-capture, becomes a radical ethics of self-dismissal in Lacan: “When one approaches the central emptiness, which up to now has been the form in which access to jouissance has presented itself to us, my neighbor’s body breaks into pieces” (202).¹⁶

Life without Optimism

Readers of Barad and the new materialisms have in large part focused on the intra-action between entities to posit a queer ethics of repair. Reparative approaches imagine life as made of assemblages, flows, interconnections, and networks. This language accords with Barad’s idea of entanglement. However, this same language displaces or indeed represses the violence of the cutting agency. More precisely, reparative approaches that champion interconnection avoid the fact that every act of reparation involves a cut: between an ethics of care on the one hand, and hostility on the other. Lacan’s insistence on an ethics of the Real, one that maintains the violence of its encounters, emphasizes the cut that contaminates every future, every image of repair. For important structural reasons, Lacan insists: we damage what we repair.¹⁷ This is why Deleuze has so little to say about ethics. At the core of Deleuze’s ontology there is neither the subject-other structure nor its philosophical avatars: love of one’s neighbor, the friend, or the face. For Deleuze, before there is ethics there is difference—the “there is” of difference; or rather, ethics is nothing more than the thought of this difference qua rupture: the question is not, how do “I” respect the other’s difference, but rather, how do “I,” with respect to life’s indifference to every difference, become another?¹⁸

This indifference to difference is another name for what Deleuze calls the “dark precursor.” As pure difference, it escapes representation while also conditioning representation. As repetition, it is both the seat of pleasure (Eros) and the highest affirmation of a difference that shatters (Thanatos). Deleuze’s commitment to thinking the genesis of our conditions of thought means that his philosophy resists placing its focus on the forms of the conditioned, above all the “other” as condition of the “self.” Deleuze insists that philosophy’s greatest mistake was to equate thought with philia. Such an image of thought hinges on a fundamental deception: that the other is our friend, neighbor, and companion. If there is one staple of Deleuze’s philosophy that grounds the rest, it is this: thought only thinks when it encounters the cruelty of what is not-thought, the violence, that is, of the multiple, the disparate. Deleuze writes:

There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure difference which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed. … The notion of a problem, which we see linked to that of difference, also seems to nurture the sentiments of the beautiful soul: only problems and questions matter. … Nevertheless, we believe that when these problems attain their proper degree of positivity, and when difference becomes the object of a corresponding affirmation, they release a power of aggression and selection which destroys the beautiful soul by depriving it of its very identity and breaking its good will. The problematic and the differential determine struggles or destructions … every thought becomes an aggression. (Difference and Repetition xx)

This difference with respect to difference has important consequences for ethics, particularly queer and new materialist ethics, where questions of ontology are now at the foreground.¹⁹ On Deleuze’s account, ethics is both creative and destructive, and not simply by turn. The ethical does not simply occasion aggression; insofar as ethics approximates the event, the clash of forces that Deleuze calls the dark precursor, ethics becomes an enemy of the beautiful soul and synonymous with violence. Deleuze’s queer naturalism is thus inherently pharmakological: cure and harm in the same movement. This is not to say that Barad’s ontoethics is utopian by any stretch. Barad makes clear that her queer naturalism does not aim to ignore power, hierarchy, or violence, and asserts that “agential realism” (the intra-action of all things) is directly concerned with cuts that matter. And yet, much of what Barad proposes with respect to cuts that matter amounts to making good on bad cuts (i.e. repairing bad connections, forging new alliances, and constructing better, more sustainable life-worlds).

For Deleuze, ethics is impossible (and Deleuze always championed the Lacanian notion that we should aim for the impossible, which is the drive’s only aim) since nature is indifferent to our images of the “good” (the drive has no object). For Barad, by contrast, an ethics of repair is what nature does. In a telling example that will allow us to circle back to the electrical bodies with which we began, Barad writes of “the brainless and eyeless creature called the brittlestar, an invertebrate cousin of the starfish, sea urchin, and sea cucumber,” who “has a skeletal system that also functions as a visual system” (Meeting the Universe Halfway 369). With “approximately ten thousand spherically domed calcite crystals covering the five limbs and central body of the brittlestar,” these “microlenses” made of crystal “collect and focus light directly onto … the brittlestar’s diffuse nerve system” (370). Consequently, “these photosensitive brittlestars are able to navigate around obstacles, flee from predators, and detect shadows”; Barad notes the “ingenuity of the brittlestar’s bodily know-how” (373). She reads the brittlestar’s intra-active know-how in the same manner that she reads the flash of lightning, as a call to queer companionship with the rest of the cosmos:

The brittlestar is not a creature that thinks much of epistemological lenses or geometrical optics of reflection: the brittlestar does not have a lens serving as the line of separation, the mediator between the mind of the knowing subject and the materiality of the outside world. Brittlestars don’t have eyes; they are eyes. It is not merely the case that the brittlestar’s visual system is embodied; its very being is a visualizing apparatus. The brittlestar is a living, breathing, metamorphosing optical system. For a brittlestar being and knowing, materiality and intelligibility, substance and form, entail one another. … There is no res cogitans agonizing about the postulated gap (of its own making) between itself and res extensa. There is no optics of mediation, no noumena-phenomena distinction, no question of representation. (375)

Of course, any time Descartes’s mind-body dualism is trotted out for a beating, a statement on ethics is sure to follow. Barad adds:

Subjectivity is not a matter of individuality but a relation of responsibility to the other. … There is no getting away from ethics—mattering is an integral part of the ontology of the world in its dynamic presencing. Not even a moment exists on its own. … If we hold on to the belief that the world is made of individual entities, it is hard to see how even our best, most well-intentioned calculations for right action can avoid tearing holes in the delicate tissue structure of entanglements that the lifeblood of the world runs through. (391-396)

Let’s begin with the brittlestar: it’s the perfect example of Barad’s thesis that “matter and meaning cannot be dissociated” because “mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance” (3). The brittlestar does not know or cognitively reflect its world from a standpoint exterior to matter; rather matter and meaning “entail one another” as components of the same intra-active event. To echo Deleuze, we can say that the brittlestar does not “have” eyes with which to see; the brittlestar’s eyes are directly in things—the brittlestar “is” light-matter-movement. Barad is quick to separate “having” from “being” (“Brittlestars don’t have eyes; they are eyes”). “Having” connotes property, whereas Barad’s point is that nature is entirely improper; nature rebuffs Cartesian dualism and the possessive ideology it supports. This is the meaning of intra-action: that all things intrude into everything else. I want to suggest that this is where Barad’s argument about matter and meaning runs aground. The world of the brittlestar, insofar as it is a world of meaning and not pure chaos, is a world that has been cut to the brittlestar’s own image. The “body know-how” that Barad celebrates is an example of what Jakob von Uexküll would call the animal’s Umwelt, the signifying practices that enable the brittlestar to make sense of its environment and thus to “have” a world (139-161). Nietzsche summarized this phenomenon—nature’s narcissism—quite well: “if we could communicate with the mosquito,” he writes, “then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” 42). Far from imagining the nonhuman as uniquely attuned to nature, Nietzsche suggests that nature is narcissistic “all the way down,” and that human exceptionalism is not so exceptional after all (in fact, it is the trait of narcissism to imagine that we alone are narcissistic). The link between being and knowing, or matter and meaning, is, in Barad’s example of the brittlestar, another instance of Leibniz’s “best possible world” hypothesis, in which the monad, being compossible with its world, harmonizes with its surroundings. The difference here is that instead of God selecting the best possible world in which matter and meaning cohere, Barad introduces “agential realism” as the secular version of the monad.

Deleuze, following the early Heidegger, argues that the opposite is true: it is only the destruction of the world imagined as the “best possible world” that forces life to think. In Cinema 2, Deleuze insists on the “incompossibility” of worlds and the absence of the link between matter and meaning in modernist cinema. In Anti-Oedipus, he and Guattari write about the desiring-machine’s world-making assemblages, akin to the Umwelt of the brittlestar, in terms consonant with Barad’s language of mattering: the desiring-machines are “a producing/product identity” (7). But Deleuze and Guattari do not stop there: they also write that “from a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. … Desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all. … [Everything] becomes unbearable to the body without organs” (7-9). Nature, according to Deleuze and Guattari, does not “entail” that matter and meaning stick together, as Barad argues. Nature, they suggest, is indeed most vital when it short-circuits, when it no longer works. Like the hysteric, nature feels it has holes in its body, holes that do not add up but carve up life’s images.

This is what is intolerable to Barad’s ethics of entanglement, not that nature is open to infinite re-articulation/re-signification, as liberal humanism posits, but that nature contains inarticulable never-to-be-articulated fragments of animus in its very structure. For Barad, an ethics of entanglement means that we can “avoid tearing holes in the delicate tissue structure of entanglements,” that we can have our animist cake and eat it too. But notice what happens when Barad separates her ethics from all that it is “not”: “There is no res cogitans … no optics of mediation, no noumena-phenomena distinction, no question of representation.” Like the “no” of Freud’s essay on “Negation,” Barad herself tears “holes in the delicate tissue structure of entanglements” with every exclusion of life’s negativity; she repeats nature’s sadistic cut and thus gives voice to that which works against meaning and thriving: nature’s death drive. Put differently, Barad’s ethics of the other registers the “malignant jouissance” from which Freud retreated in understandable horror due to the thought of loving the neighbor as oneself. To be clear, my claim is not that Barad’s reparative ethics falls short of loving more or including more. My claim is that every act of world-making entails an aggressive cut. The difficulty of what I’m calling “nature’s queer negativity” lies in the fact that an ethics of repair is never external to aggression; repair and aggression are “intagliated,” as Deleuze says.

Barad’s redemptive posthumanism imagines a future in which we, having learned from our destructive error, rediscover that we are not violent and destructive life but rather interwoven parts of a much greater whole. This image of interconnected life then provides the stopgap we need in order not to encounter life’s contingency, its many seams and tears. Take the idea of climate: climate change at once collectivizes the human species in a common tragedy, a commons, that is, of precariousness and fragility; life, we know, is at risk, and not just at the level of the individual or population: planetary life is under the threat of extinction. At the same time, though, we encounter this problem as redeemable: the human species can now imagine a posthuman future in which “we,” having learned from our apparent error, can live on knowing ourselves to be at one with the web of life. Climate change thus becomes an alibi for our survival and future.

But life is not a meaningful totality that explains away the damage we have done to the planet. Even the very positing of life as a repaired or reparative whole neglects the fact that this figuration depends on splitting life from nonlife, vitality from its negation. Life, however, is expressed not only in vital or organic forms. Sinthomosexual, in Edelman’s vocabulary, stands for this unlivable and inhuman exit from the world of the living. It stands as an impasse to our survival because it makes legible a world in which “we” no longer exist, the world of the body-without-organs (Deleuze and Guattari), the drives (Lacan), and jouissance (Edelman). From the vantage of the sinthome, or symptom, we can envision an inhuman world in which life does not triumph after all, in which the post-apocalyptic or tragic does not bring about some final closure to our disappearance, but produces more and more explosive differences: differences of time, movement, and perception—in short, other worlds. Edelman writes:

As the template of a given subject’s distinctive access to jouissance, defining the condition of which the subject is always a symptom of sorts itself, the sinthome, in its refusal of meaning, procures the determining relation to enjoyment by which the subject finds itself driven beyond the logic of fantasy or desire. It operates, for Lacan, as the knot that holds the subject together, that ties or binds the subject to its constitutive libidinal career, and assures that no subject, try as it may, can ever “get over” itself—”get over,” that is, the fixation of the drive that determines its jouissance. (No Future 35-36)

The ecological subject cannot simply “get over” its relation to the sinthome, this nonmeaning or animus lodged in the side of sense and sustainability, because it is this destructive enjoyment of the partial drive, this unlivable passage beyond the world of sense and sensibility, that sustains (while laying waste to) the futural fantasy that we call “life.” The sinthome is what the posthuman haplessly trips over on its way to “getting over” the human. But there is another option besides this posthuman Aufheben or preservation-through-translation: the sinthome or drive, as symptom of a violent exclusion in favor of symbolic meaning, points to a life without us, without human meaning. Rather than intone the posthumanist call for flowing, meaningful life, which opts for the symbolic’s dependence on the smooth exchange of signifiers, the drive abandons all hope of survival in favor of the non-translatability, which is to say, the non-futurity, of enjoyment.

Instead of translating the symptom or threat of our extinction into an alibi for the future, can we imagine a future without us? Instead of becoming posthuman, which, as is now commonly said, we have always already been, can we, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “become-imperceptible”? Becoming-imperceptible would not mean redeeming our lost humanity, either in the humanist or posthumanist sense, but would mean experimenting with inhuman temporalities—the inhuman being not simply that which we would like to become, but that which is already not us: the inhumanity at the heart of life. Freud has already shown that beyond the bounded pleasure of the organism, there exists a world that cannot simply be let in without destroying the apparatus of the self. Whereas various neo-vitalisms today would have us reconnect with life as a way of putting off the deadening effects of sameness, Deleuze and Guattari remind us that life is not only vitalistic but also explosive: the return to life does not—cannot—mean a return to organic wholeness, because life just is this power of creative destruction. The way out of the deadening effects of sameness is not the unity of the organism, Deleuze and Guattari argue; indeed, the instrumental organism is still too close to the lived. The way out would not be more life, but the unlivable.

Sinthomo-Environmentalism

Allow me to introduce a new ecologism, a word without future, to our critical vocabularies: sinthomo-environmentalism. No doubt it’s a mouthful, this strange neologism of the sinthome (symptom) and environment. And yet, in it, I wager (echoing Marianne Moore’s contempt for poetry), we find something beyond “all this fiddle” over life’s sustainability.

Like the sinthomosexual in Edelman’s queer account in “Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social,” sinthomo-environmentalism stands for that which, in the drive towards life, undoes the temporality of life “ever after” by confronting life with its own persistent repetition of, its libidinal investment in, the nonidentity qua sinthome of the drives—what Freud calls the death drive. To be clear, the death drive does not simply negate life, it is not opposed to the living; rather, as Lacan argues, every drive, including the so-called “life instinct,” is virtually a death drive, insofar as the drive towards “life” circles endlessly around a void (Lacan’s objet a) that is, in fact, the drive’s sole aim and career, its access to jouissance. As Edelman explains, “sinthomosexuality makes visible the occluded presence of the sinthome at the core of the very politics intended to exclude it. … In such a context,” which is every context, “sinthomosexuality would speak to the repudiated specificity of what doesn’t and can’t transcend itself. So repudiated, however, it enables the specification, over and against it, of what only thereby is able to appear as political universality” (472). Because of its refusal to translate a stubborn particularity into universality (such as the collective “good,” or the good of life), “the sinthomosexual … gets denounced [by the Right and Left alike] for affirming a jouissance indulgently fixed on the self, while those who merit recognition as good, as communally minded, as properly social, address the suffering of the other. … It remains the case that libidinal investment in the suffering of the other, regardless of whether its dividends come though preventing or producing that suffering, is also an investment tied to a specific knot of jouissance” (emphasis mine 475). Far from confronting life from without, then, the death drive names that impossible negativity, the dehiscence or gap around which life ceaselessly turns, making every object of desire (be it community, love, or care of the other) a partial object. From the standpoint of the sinthome, the question is not, nor has it ever been, how to reconcile life beyond its antagonisms, but rather how to relinquish the will to find ourselves beyond antagonism, since the image of life as a loving, caring, auto-poetic whole is precisely that which lives on—that which sustains itself by means of—its repudiation of the sinthome.

Sinthomo-environmentalism thus materializes as the hopelessly queer figure that society repudiates. As the extimate remainder, however, of life’s disavowed investment in negativity, this figure stands in stark contrast to the ecocidal subject and the posthumanist subject alike. What both of these subjects have in common (despite their significant differences) is a shared stake in the fantasy of life after negativity. For the capitalist subject, this means a life of unfettered accumulation without loss; for the posthumanist subject, this means cultivating a relationship of care with the environment without violence or destruction. Despite the important differences between these two positions, it does not suffice to say, with Naomi Klein, that what we are confronted with today is the opposition of Capitalism and the Environment. For beyond this real antagonism, which I have no intention of dismissing, there remains a deeper antagonism still, which structures both positions: that deeper antagonism is what I call sinthomo-environmentalism, nature’s queer negativity, which fits neither the capitalist’s image of life as endless accumulation nor the posthumanist’s image of life as endlessly adaptive network of living beings. Neither image can admit nature’s negativity because both adhere to the pastoral fantasy of life without negativity—which does not prevent either position from enjoying a sadistic relation to negativity by repudiating and therefore making visible what is, in Bersani’s words, “the inestimable value of sex as … anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.”

Let us consider an example of sinthomo-environmentalism. Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement is, among other things, a compelling analysis of the uncanniness of the sinthome as it manifests as climate change. Ghosh writes:

There is an additional element of the uncanny in events triggered by climate change. … This is that the freakish weather events today, despite their radically nonhuman nature, are nonetheless animated by cumulative human actions. In that sense the events set in motion by global warming have a more intimate connection with humans than did the climatic phenomena of the past—this is because we have all contributed in some measure, great or small, to their making. They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms. (32)

Climate change, according to Ghosh, materializes the uncanny temporality of the symptom in that “it” (nature’s “unthinkable shapes and forms”) returns in the form of a self-made disaster. To say that climate change is “self-made” is not to ignore the fact of structural inequality, nor that the parts of humanity hit hardest by climate change are those who have done the least to unleash the present calamity. As Ghosh notes, “those at the margins of [Western modernity] are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us; it is they who confront most directly what Thoreau called ‘vast, Titanic, inhuman nature’” (63). What strikes me as most compelling about Ghosh’s analysis is its universalizing gesture, which he relates to the universalizing ambitions of the English novel. According to Ghosh,

Here, then, is another form of resistance, a scalar one, that the Anthropocene presents to the techniques that are most closely identified with the novel: its essence consist of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel—forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space. (63)

For Ghosh, it is the impossibility of representing climate change, of filling the “gaps” within our cognitive maps, that may (if we’re lucky) trigger a negative universalism across “time and space.” Ghosh’s conclusion echoes that of Dipesh Chakrabarty in “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” only Ghosh’s negative universalism is (at least on the surface) primarily aesthetic, linked as it is to the production of the novel and to the aesthetic theory that, since the Enlightenment, has sought to define the role of art as a propaedeutic supplement to humanity. The question becomes, for Ghosh, a Kantian one: is there a redemptive image of life to be derived from the arts, one that might save our image of humanity at precisely the moment when “our” image is most threatened, as in the experience of the sublime?

Although not always framed with respect to the arts, this question, which treats the disaster as contingent, and thus surmountable, echoes throughout literature on environmental destruction, which looks for the cause of our symptom in an easily identifiable structure. This problem is articulated in the Marxist notion of social antagonism. As Žižek describes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, “This traditional notion implies two interconnected features: (1) there exists a certain fundamental antagonism possessing an ontological priority to ‘mediate’ all other antagonisms, determining their place and their specific weight (class antagonism, economic exploitation); (2) historical development brings about, if not a necessity, at least an ‘objective possibility’ of solving this fundamental antagonism and, in this way, mediating all other antagonisms” (xxvi). Within this tradition, capital becomes the master-signifier mediating all other antagonisms. Thus it is no surprise that both world-systems theorists such as Jason W. Moore and popular writers such as Naomi Klein identify capitalism as the underlying antagonism driving climate chaos. While this is true at one level, it remains a humanist alibi: in the reigning analyses of climate change, capital plays an exculpatory role. Klein, for instance, states that we are faced with an option: the survival of the planet, or the survival of capitalism. Of course, this is a fate accompli since the survival of the latter depends on the former. The stakes are clear: capitalism is at war with the Earth. Klein, among others, frames this choice as an “occasion” to band together and reimagine a more loving, nurturing humanity. In short, there is a “good” humanity to which we may return, one imagined to live in a more sustainable relation with the environment, and there is a “bad” humanity defined by a rapacious and destructive “Capitalocene.”²⁰

It is this image of “life” as essentially loving and caring that sinthomo-environmentalism contests. Bersani is perhaps the most valuable thinker here. Against the alibi of safe sex, Bersani suggests that what is most valuable about sex is its anti-loving, anti-communal nature. Faced with the threat of extinction, of AIDS, Bersani champions anal sex as a way of realizing a radical form of self-undoing that is internal to social life but rarely tolerated. “It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition” (25). In his conclusion, sex negativity becomes a way of letting go of life and signals a queer politics of extinction. Bersani writes, “If the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared—differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized that potential. … It may, finally, be in the gay man’s rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him” (29-30).

To be clear, neither Bersani nor I am advocating for ecocidal destruction either at the level of the body or of the environment. To advocate for such violence would be to turn a nonproductive jouissance into yet another project of the self, and to ignore, moreover, the constitutive partiality of the drives, which, contrary to all self-idealizations, never totalize in the image of a unified self-will. What I am suggesting is that the pastoralizing project animating the return to “life” and “nature” repeats “a murderous judgment” against the nonidentity of nature—a nonidentity or queer negativity that, ironically, “could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence,” particularly so in a time of suicidal resource extraction and will to power.

This last point brings us to the central thesis of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which both proponents and critics of Deleuze’s capitalism books tend to ignore: that capitalism is, despite our protestations, not an accident that happens to life, but rather a certain trajectory of life. As Claire Colebrook puts it: “Deleuze will not see capitalism (or any other supposed ‘evil’) as an accident that befalls life and that one might simply step outside of: if it is possible for the world to be reduced to equivalent, uniform, objectified and manageable matter … then this is because there is a tendency in life towards organization, as well as a counter-tendency towards dis-organization” (Deleuze 34). This is not to say, as apologists of capitalism do, that human nature is essentially greedy or self-interested. Rather, it is to say that there is no essential (human) nature. While some theorists point to indigeneity as an example of better, more sustainable life-worlds, this does nothing to change the fact that life, as Deleuze and Guattari posit it, isn’t a self-sustaining, harmoniously balanced whole, but rather the abyssal site of radically deviational partial drives (i.e. “desiring-machines”). These “desiring-machines” are not an alternative to capitalism, a repressed “outside,” since these same machines are responsible for the “great acceleration” of the past century. The political challenge, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is not to redeem life by setting free the supposedly productive, vital, and self-organizing forces of life (such a misreading underlies the “new materialist” interpretation of Deleuze, which can be found, for instance, in Hardt and Negri’s idea of the “multitude,” or Jane Bennett’s notion of “thing-power”), but rather to release desire to its primary and circuitous occupation of self-negation. Why? For starters, it is getting harder and harder, as Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues, to separate “life” from “nonlife,” or bios from geos. The will to reanimate life, human or otherwise, may be impossible because of climate change; more problematic still, the will to life, or animacy, and the concepts underwriting it (affect, event, emergence) prolong, in Povinelli’s words, the very “geontological” division between “life” and “nonlife” that is fueling the Anthropocene condition.

Paradoxical as it may seem, then, the loss of self-image procured by the death drive’s obstinate negativity could, from the vantage of the sinthome, be a more exact definition of what “going native” (a phrase used by Bruno Latour in his paean to the movie Avatar) (“An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto” 471-472) might mean with respect to indigeneity, since it is the unrelenting force of the death drive, figured as the unmovable “rock” of the Real, that makes “nonlife” a problem both for the established powers, which only see “nonlife” in the aspect of its utility for social and economic reproduction (think, for example, of Standing Rock) and for the “cosmopolitics” of thinkers like Latour and others, who wish to see in the indigenous, the animal, and the nonhuman an alibi for the rapaciousness of the Western anthropos—an alibi, moreover, figured in the guise of life’s sustainability. What this alibi forestalls is the real question: whether the Western anthropos, as a massification built on the degradation of indigenous environments, is something worth saving in the first place? To this question, Latour’s subaltern cannot speak. And yet it is the paradoxical agency of the sinthome not to speak, not to accede to the demands of social meaning and recognition, but rather to undo the anthropos from within—without alibi. At a moment when those on the margins of temporal modernity are turned to in order to flesh out the face of humanity’s future birth, sinthomo-environmentalism echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s call to “escape the face” of humanity, to “become-imperceptible,” which the sinthome literalizes as “the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal” (Bersani 30). Becoming-imperceptible is not escapism, nor is it a privilege of the few. At a moment when capital merges with biopolitics to create living-dead zones of precarity where disappearance is an all-too-real threat, sinthomo-environmentalism refuses the pastoralizing project by drawing on the already-dead politics of the drive as access to a jouissance that breaks asunder the “sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that accounts for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements” (Bersani 30). Far from consigning the precarious to imperceptibility, “becoming-imperceptible” as Deleuze and Guattari conceive of it would mean practicing self-loss as a riposte to Western “man’s” ruthless and destructive power-grab. My claim is that only a politics of self-loss as outlined here, through the lens of Deleuze and queer theory, presents a true alternative to the worldwide ecocide that demands of every sinthomosexual as a condition of political recognition the following choice: your desire or your life.

But if the queer drives that are the seat of what I call sinthomo-environmentalism are indeed world-destroying; if indeed they have no aim other than to return to the scene of a crime that is the subject’s jouissance, and so circle endlessly around a void that is, from the psychoanalytic perspective of this essay, the constant and irrepressible negation of identity, meaning, and telos, then it is above all fitting that this essay should return to the space from whence it came: to the dehiscence between two images. Consider again the image of what Barad calls “trans rage.” Barad introduces the reader to many figures of queer entanglement, including the atom, the lightning bolt, and of course, the brittlestar. But the figure that gives her ethical argument the most trouble is Frankenstein’s monster, which, as Barad writes, figures lightning’s re-animating potential. Frankenstein’s monster gives the lie to nature’s coherence, showing nature to be “a patchwork, a suturing of disparate parts” (“Transmaterialitites” 393). The monster does not stand outside nature but rather figures nature as metaphor, a whole containing many different parts. Barad’s political-ethical move here is to position the monster within nature. His flesh is not a crime against nature’s seemliness; his disparate anatomy exemplifies nature’s queer intra-active web.

Mary Shelley, by contrast, shows us the enjoyment the monster takes in destroying nature’s patchwork. She thus offers a second image as sinthome to the former. After being cruelly abandoned by his family of “protectors,” the “beloved cottagers,” and losing faith in the “views of social life,” which had allowed him temporarily “to deprecate the vices of mankind” and “to desire to become an actor in [that] busy scene” (107), Shelley’s monster, “like the arch fiend” (111), Milton’s Satan, unleashes a radical negativity aimed at every image of the “good.” Reversing the spark that gave him life, Shelley’s monster lets loose “a rage of anger” and sets fire to everything he loves. The result: he makes a heaven of hell and learns to enjoy “the ruin” (111):

When I reflected that they had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger; and, unable to injure any thing human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects. As night advanced, I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage; and, after having destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced impatience until the moon had sunk to commence my operations. … The blast tore along like a mighty avalanche, and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits, that burst all bounds of reason and reflection. (Shelley 113)

Let us recall here what Bersani says about the redemptive value of pastoral: it sacrifices all that is “anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.” Barad’s inclusion of the monster within nature does something similar: by avoiding this moment of “trans rage,” Barad’s renaturalization of the monster figures nature as a site of redemption, but only by sacrificing everything that does not animate a redemptive image of life. The monster becomes, once again, an image of homo sacer, an inclusive-exclusion of anima (the life we want) and animosity (the life that is intolerable to our images of the good). The bitter pill that Shelley’s monster wants us to swallow, however, is that nature is not only self-actualizing, re-animating life, but also violent, sadistic undoing. The question is not how to redeem crimes against nature, but what is nature such that it produces its own outside, its own violent and explosive force? Put differently, what is nature such that it produces its own abortion?

Ironically, the monster’s “views of social life” take on a deadening form insofar as life is made to repeat, taking on ever more predictable, seamless patterns of behavior, the image of ourselves that we hope one day to achieve. Just as organic voice depends on the machine of language to extend its vitality, and, in doing so, extinguishes that vitality in a form external to the anima or breath of life, so “life itself” tends toward automation, a desire to act in “the busy scene” called “life” in the pursuit of being, finally, fully alive. The monster’s fantasy of familial identity serves to project an image of “protection,” of survival and sustainability, into the future as metaphor, as a presence or figure to be realized, to come. But it is the unredeemable “rage of anger,” the ego-shattering violence that “burst all bounds of reason and reflection,” that gives the monster his enjoyment in the end. Burning down the house is, to echo the Talking Heads, equivalent to getting what one’s after in the aftermath of love and community. As the song lyrics say: “Hey baby, what do you expect? Gonna burst into flames.”

Conclusion: The Metastability of the Earth; or, What You Will

My goal in this essay has not been to endorse an uncritical or unsympathetic nihilism. Truth be told, whether I (a white, Leftist, privileged academic) endorse nihilism or not does nothing to change the current suicidal pact between humanity and the planet; nor does it change the fact that, as Earth-Systems scientist Will Steffen points out, the idea of a conciliatory relation with the plant, what he calls “Stabilized Earth,” may very well already be out of reach. “Even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C rise in temperature is met,” Steffen writes, “we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway,” in which “biogeophysical feedbacks in the Earth System could become the dominant processes controlling the system’s trajectory” (3). This does not bode well for human survival. In fact, such an image of Earth as a radically forking disequilibrium of forces bars any conception of the “good life” hitherto imagined by humans as the Earth itself now teeters on the edge towards that inhospitable desert of the real long ago forecast by Freud as life’s inevitable return to inanimate geos (nonlife). In other words, we might already be past the point of reconciliation with the Earth System, which is forking in the direction of forces inhospitable to human existence. What’s more, we’re learning that the very idea of a “Stabilized Earth,” one that would be existentially for us, is only a temporary abstraction of metastability in an otherwise volatile and anarchic series of feedbacks. The “Stabilized Earth,” though it is a necessary object of desire, and all the more so as it eludes capture, is and remains a fantasy object (objet a for the climate change era), one that drives climate change deniers and activists alike. So while my point is not to deny the importance of reparative projects aimed at stabilizing the Earth—far from it—I do wish to underscore the need for a counter-project of sinthomo-environmentalism. For a simple reason: if there was ever a time to think seriously about the evolutionary masochism of the drives, about their ego-shattering intensities and uncontrollable feedbacks, which are linked etiologically to the feedbacks of the Earth and which distain the pastoral fantasy of metastability, being aberrant energy systems themselves, now is the time.

Contra Barad, who, like Ghosh, turns to the novel (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) to capture a redemptive image of life, Deleuze (in line with Shelley) rejects the ecological alibi and even quarrels with the notion that art redeems (furthers and promotes) life. For Deleuze, art, whether it’s the paintings of Francis Bacon or a bird’s refrain, is at its best an art of self-subtraction, is already inhuman all the way down, such that “the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 164). Nature’s queer negativity, then, does not simply befall Mother Earth, though it does take on historically specific (and uncanny) forms—”fossil capitalism” being the most pressing of those forms.²¹ And yet it would be a mistake to conflate the history of capitalism with the negativity or nihil that Deleuze calls the “dark precursor,” since the former is but a derived negativity borrowed from the latter, on the condition that it transform the latter—a baseless negativity—into a planned weapon of destruction (i.e., Capital). In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari are quite clear: “We know very well where lack—and its subjective correlative—come from.”

Lack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. … It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy. (Anti-Oedipus 28)

“Nothing but”: whenever desire is mistaken as “nothing but” the desire for object X, what is lost? Desire, precisely. The market is supposed to satisfy our desires, but all the while it creates “vacuoles” to which desiring subjects feel they owe (in both senses of the word) their life. What Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) philosophy argues could not be more different: against the zero-sum game of fantasy, real desire takes satisfaction in the sweet nothings, the partial satisfactions, which the ordinary object yields. Against the logic of “nothing but,” there’s a revised relation to “nothing” that is, in truth, desire’s sole career: not to derive satisfaction through the object, on the other side of the object—that is the ruse of capitalism; but to take satisfaction in the this-ness of the object, which is desirable because it fails to fully satisfy, because it is utterly impersonal—not an object of self-fulfillment, but of self-emptying. Desire, in this case, is a radical production ex nihilo, not in the Romantic sense of the artist-creator, but in the queer sense of repeating the “nothing” and the self-loss this entails as desire’s true aim.

From Deleuze’s “dark precursor” to Frankenstein’s monster, this essay has tried to unfold nature’s queer negativity in figures that do just that: they make “us grasp, [are] supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable” (Deleuze, Cinema 2 18). To the question: is there life without the optimism of repair? Deleuze’s answer would no doubt be yes, but only insofar as “life” is conceived otherwise in relation to this “something” more (the intolerable, the unbearable, the queer), which insists in nature and which is Deleuze’s own way of repeating Lacan’s formulation on love in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you” (268). The trial of reading the “inexplicable” (that which does not unfold itself) in desire is, for Lacan, the truest act of love: not because it confirms the drive towards meaning, but rather because it “sees” in the object both the “something more” that “mutilates” meaning and, in the immortal words of Joy Division, the “something more” that “tear[s] us”—our image—”apart.”

Footnotes

1. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes: “Whereas differentiation determines the virtual content of the Idea as problem, differenciation expresses the actualization of this virtual and the constitution of solutions” (209).

2. See Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Gut Feminism for a related analysis of the “intrinsic hostility” of feminist politics (176). My thinking builds on the non-ameliorative biology theorized in Wilson’s book.

3. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You”; and Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.”

4. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

5. There are exceptions to this trend. For recent work on Deleuzian negativity, see Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 and Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2; Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze; and Hannah Stark, “Discord, Monstrosity, and Violence.”

6. See Deleuze’s chapter on “The Image of Thought” in Difference and Repetition, 129.

7. To this end, I draw inspiration from the recent revival of negativity in queer and feminist scholarship. See in particular Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable; and Wilson, Gut Feminism.

8. This mode of self-loss is what Bersani, at the end of “Sociability and Cruising,” calls “ecological ethics.” See Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays, 62.

9. See Lacan’s chapter “The Deconstruction of the Drive” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

10. See Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed: “There is not [according to Deleuze] a mind or life and then the perception of images, for life is imaging, a plane of relations that take the form of ‘perceptions’ precisely because something ‘is‘ only its responses” (5).

11. See Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 906-940.

12. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency; and Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.

13. On this point, see Deleuze’s reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Crack-Up in The Logic of Sense, 154-161.

14. On “The Powers of the False,” see Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image: “We no longer have a chronological time which can be overturned by movements which are contingently abnormal; we have a chronic non-chronological time which produces movements necessarily ‘abnormal,’ essentially ‘false’” (129).

15. On the nature of “habit,” see Deleuze’s reading of Hume in Empiricism and Subjectivity: “We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’ Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the self” (x).

16. This point brings us into contact with the ethical implications of the theory of the drive as explicated by Lacan-Deleuze: the drive perverts its aim. This is one of the theses set out in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, which Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal desiring-machines raise to the level of a cosmology. The drives are supposed to move towards desexualized sociability, according to Freud’s argument. Only then can they renounce their partial objects (breast, voice, feces, and gaze, among others) and enter into social-symbolic exchange—the exchange of women in the case of marriage, signs in the case of language, and money in the case of capital. This is the law of the symbolic as Lacan conceives of it; it’s based on the exogamy law outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. However, the rub is this: not only do the drives not give up their lost objects, they are radically indifferent to every substitute. Never satisfied with any old object, they break their attachment, circling again and again around the gaps in the subject’s field of desire. The drives are inherently incestuous, criminal, and non-relational: Lacan offers the image of a mouth sewn shut to illustrate the idea that what the drive wants has nothing to do with intersubjective communication but only the auto-eroticism of the mouth (Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 179). The death drive is this formal circling or repetition without end. It has no interest in constituted forms of relationality. It is only interested in what might be called the nonrelation within relation. And because this nonrelation is the negative of the self and of every constituted form of relationality, it has no proper object. As Lacan argues, every sexual object is a partial object, and every drive is a partial drive. Neither object nor drive reference a higher meaning or totality. The death drive “is” the properly transcendental condition of any self or relation of selves.

17. Of course, for Lacan, the structural im/possibility of repair stems from the interference of the sign-structure. The signifier cuts into the body, carving up its libidinal investments. That is, the sign, as stand-in of the drive, both re-presents and represses the drive’s metonymic movement, just as the sign represses the metonymic slippage of the signifier. Deleuze, by contrast, does not require this interference from without. For Deleuze, as for Barad, nature is already self-cutting. Whereas Lacan believes that you need a subject of the signifier in order to make sense, both Barad and Deleuze argue that matter is already sense-making. The bird divides its territory through song; in doing so, it makes sense of its milieu.

18. See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 309, 312.

19. For a representative account, see Dana Luciano’s and Mel Y. Chen’s “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?”

20. On the terminological displacements surrounding the Anthropocene, see Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore.

21. See Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming.

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John Freeman (bio)

Abstract

This essay argues E. E. Cummings’s “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” (1935) anticipates the contemporary practice of experimental writing known as codework. Encoding through typographical means the action sequence of the grasshopper’s leap, Cummings transformed his mechanical typewriter into the equivalent of a hardware device supplied with the necessary software for running the poem as a program. The three permutations of “grasshopper”—”r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” “PPEGORHRASS,” and “gRrEaPsPhOs”—reflect a block cipher method of encryption, each one comprising a subkey governing the operations of its surrounding textual arrangement. Like the punch cards driving Jacquard’s loom and Babbage’s Analytical Engine, these subkeys weave for us a digital grasshopper.

We may say most aptly, that the AnalyticalEngine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.—Ada Lovelace

Strangely enough, the poet who once asked, “How numb can an unworld get?” and answered, “number,” also bequeathed to us the world’s first fully operational digital poem. Enacting its subject (the grasshopper), Cummings’s poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”¹ makes a leap from the analog to the digital (and back again). The possibility of such a leap is only partly entertained by Rita Raley in her essay “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework.” She does so in discussing codework, a mingling of natural language and pseudocode that creates “a text-object or text-event that emphasizes its own programming, mechanism, and materiality.” Turning her attention to Cummings and other typewriter experimentalists of his time, she asks us to picture them “upgrading their medium and exchanging their typewriter keys for the units of programming languages.” The result, she claims, “would in part resemble the contemporary mode of experimental writing and net.art called ‘codework.’” Prematurely abandoning her comparison, however, she maintains that the difference between “e. e. cummings’s ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’ and a net.wurked text … is the difference between the typewriter and the computer, the difference of what the medium allows.” On further inspection, however, Cummings’s poem, digitally expressed, anticipates the operations of the code work in ways that might very well cause Raley to acknowledge its status as a code poem.

While it is true that the lack of an appropriate medium imposes definite constraints on technological as well as aesthetic innovation, we have only to consider Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine in combination with Joseph Marie Jacquard’s punch-card-automated loom to verify that such constraints can be overcome while working with the materials and concepts at hand. A refinement of his Difference Engine (a design for a mechanical computer), the Analytical Engine was conceived as a general purpose computer capable of conditional branching (executing different instruction sequences in response to new data) and equipped with memory. Fascinated by the Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron, worked closely with Babbage on the project. In fact, she was commissioned by him to translate a speech he had given to Luigi Menabrea, the future prime minister of Italy, who had been so impressed with Babbage’s presentation he had transcribed it. Lovelace’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage” (1843) far exceeded expectations for either a sketch or a translation, as she contributed a great deal of her own analysis and insight to the manuscript. Aware of the punch cards that Jacquard employed to govern the operations of his looms, she proposed employing them to direct the operations of the Engine, thus expanding its capabilities from solving mathematical problems to performing other feats of “composition,” as set forth in the following prescient speculation: “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent” (Lovelace 694). She foresaw the concept of Band-in-a-Box a century-and-a-half before its time.

With her penchant for “poetical science” (Chiaverini 426), Lovelace is portrayed by James Essinger as a boundary-breaking thinker who operated in a “thought … domain of the intellectual prehistory of the computer” (Ada’s Algorithm 172). Indeed, her notion of using Jacquard’s punch cards to conduct the mathematical operations of Babbage’s engine shows that existing technologies and mechanical operations can help define and be put to the service of envisioned ones. (Lacking the necessary funding, the Analytical Engine was never built in Babbage’s lifetime. In ten years, however, researchers in England hope to build a working model based on his sketches.) In discussing the handling and storing of these punch cards, Essinger signals their connection to modern practices: “Weavers would keep these chains [of cards] in a storeroom whose function was very much the same as that of the library—or we might say software library—which Babbage was proposing to create” (Jacquard’s Web 91). Citing a passage from Lovelace’s description of the Analytical Engine, in which she clearly anticipates “the fundamental difference” between computer software and data, Essinger observes: “This passage could almost be an extract from a modern computer manual, but written by a Victorian” (Jacquard’s Web 122). In similar fashion, “r-p-” (1935) anticipates digital poems, demonstrating that “what’s past is prologue” to the future. In setting out to encode through typographical means the action sequence of the grasshopper’s leap, Cummings transformed his mechanical typewriter into the equivalent of a hardware device supplied with the necessary software for running the poem as a program.

1. Punc[h]tuating the Analog/Digital Interface

At first blush, Raley’s definition of codework would seem to mark an unbridgeable divide between Cummings’s production and those of the codeworkers, whom she describes as employing the idiolect of the computer to create “the contemporary mode of experimental writing and net.art called ‘codework.’” Nonetheless, Cummings, like Lovelace and Babbage, practiced his own brand of “poetical science,” fashioning, bricoleur-style, his own idiolect, and serendipitously anticipating the coding functions of the computer through his typewriter experiments. For example, the code poet Mez expressly strives “2 spout punctu[rez]ationz reappropri.[s]ated in2 sentence schematics.” We find similar “puncturings,” “reappropriations,” and twisted, entangled syntactical arrangements in this poem and elsewhere in Cummings’s œuvre (as in these opening lines, performatively reenacting this time the onset of a cat’s leap: “(im)c-a-t(mo/b,i;l:e”). As Aaron Moe observes, “the word ‘c-a-t fall[s] into the word immobile, thereby breaking the immobility in half in order to declare I’m mobile” (114). In similar fashion, the poet sets his grasshopper in motion.

Cummings engages in what Raley describes as the “art of the code, in which the code used to produce the work seems to infiltrate the surface, the former domain only of natural languages and numeric elements.” Here, Cummings uses “calculated dislocation”—misplaced, displaced, disorienting grammatical markers—to indicate the encoding, governing elements on the surface of the text (Friedman 109). Breaking up words into smaller units, he subverts orthography in favor of an aesthetics of “cacography.” Like Mez, he aims to “disturb, disorient, and defamiliarize, to shift ‘the units of information and communication from the usual and expected to the cryptic’” (Raley). As Geoffrey Leech informs us, constructions that would be dismissed by linguists as “unmotivated deviation—a linguistic ‘mistake’”—are foregrounded here. Norms of language become a background while “features which are prominent because of their abnormality are placed in focus” (30). Leech points out how this process of defamiliarization results in “impeding normal processing” (4). Impeded as well, readers must work out for themselves what new decoding procedures must be followed in interpreting the poem.

There is a somewhat prescient correlation between Cummings’s use of punctuation and its current functions in computer coding. Perhaps this is not so prescient after all, since the typewriter experimentalist and the programmer work from keyboards with largely similar arrangements of letters, numbers, and symbols. As programming developed, it could take advantage of punctuation marks, which, as Roi Tartakovsky observes, possess a fixed institutional character as defined by handbooks while also being “amenable to appropriation, to exploitation, and to projection.” Their quality of being “void of semantic content” means they can be repurposed. The unconventional punctuation frequently used by Cummings causes a similar recoding to occur. Indeed, by dislocating punctuation marks from their traditional moorings, he casts them adrift, opening a space for new usages. Infiltrating the domain of natural language, this redeployment of grammatical signs bears comparison to script prompts (for example, quotation marks to wrap the string, parentheses to mark functions, the period to designate a file name (.exe), and the semicolon to indicate the end of a statement [as in “.grasshopper;”]). To riff on Mez, such retronyms “punc[h]tuate” through natural language, infiltrating it with new meanings, new encodings. Re-programming language, Cummings fortuitously at times lights upon usages yet to be determined, a brand of retrofuturism in the making.

This infiltration marks “r-p-” as a prime example of the reverse remediation process that N. Katherine Hayles defines as “the simulation of medium-specific effects in another medium” (73). Indeed, the poem emulates many of the qualities she specifies as characteristic of electronic hypertexts. To the extent that it resists the traditional coding procedures by which we read a text, it evidences a supra-analogical dimension, what Hayles describes as “deeper coding levels” beneath “the flat surface of the page” (76). Raley’s description of Mez’s use of brackets and periods to split words “into multiple components” could equally be applied to Cummings’s own stylistic practices. This feature aligns Cummings’s work with one of Hayles’s categories for the electronic hypertext: “Generated through Fragmentation and Recombination.” Situated in the analogical/digital divide, Cummings’s poem favors the digital register, in which “the fragmentation is deeper, more pervasive, and more extreme than with the alphanumeric characters of print.” Where the fragmentation of the hypertext “takes place on levels inaccessible to most users,” however, a poem like “r-p-” foregrounds it (Hayles 77). Readers not only perceive the fragmentation and recombination at play, they must also negotiate these features, qualifying “r-p-” for another of Hayles’s electronic hypertextual features: navigability. The poet’s experimentation with linguistic codes anticipates code poets’ own disruptive procedures and contributes to the defamiliarization effect of reading Cummings’s poem. Readers are forced to decode the poem’s non-analogical elements, to locate and make sense of the unconventional program running its operations. The reverse remediation accomplished here anticipates the “Cyborg Reading Practices” that Hayles will outline more than a half-century later (74).

Upon closer inspection, “r-p-” surpasses Mez’s codework and other inoperable forms of code poetry by satisfying the criterion that code poetry purists insist upon: that such works be executable. In “The Poetry of Executable Code,” Roopika Risam distinguishes “between code that is operational and has depth and code that is isolated on the surface of a text.” As we shall see, “r-p-” displays the operationality and “depth” qualities that Risam requires of codeworks. Raley’s discussion of code poet Graham Harwood’s transcription of William Blake’s “London” (1791) is instructive in illustrating more clearly the distinction between operational and surface code poetry. In the original, the speaker walks the city streets, lamenting:

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

Harwood’s poem “London.pl” is titled as a file name and employs Perl code. Its rendering is described by Raley:

Aside from the comments, it contains a definition 
of what in Perl is called an "anonymous array," i.e. 
a variable storing several values at once, called 
"@SocialClass," a database (or, in programmer's 
lingo: "nested hashtable") "%DeadChildrenIndex",
and two sub-programs ("subroutines") 
"CryOfEveryMan" and "Get_VitalLungCapacity".

Noting that Harwood translates Blake’s poem into “symbolic machinery,” Raley cites the following passage, written in source code, as a “macabre” reprogramming process of the original:

# Find and calculate the gross lung-capacity of the children

# screaming from 1792 to the present

# calculate the air displacement needed to represent the public

# scream

# set PublicAddressSystem instance and transmit the output.

# to do this we approximate that there are 7452520 or so faces

# that live in the charter'd streets of London.

# Found near where the charter'd Thames does flow.

Drawing upon imagined databases and numerical “tabulations” of despair, the command prompts drive home the narrator’s distraught observations. Although it incorporates snippets of Blake’s poem (“charter’d streets” and “charter’d Thames does flow”), Harwood’s program functions more as an outside commentary or supplement to the original. It represents a brand of codework Raley describes as one “that incorporates static, non-functional elements of code into the surface, or ‘Interface text.’” While suggesting imagined databanks the poem might draw upon and sub-programs it might run, it does not offer—text-editor style—any sense of how the original poem was encoded or any indication of the program that governs its operations.

2. “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” by the Numbers

Exploring how “r-p-” is coded and transmitted—or digitized, a computational approach—reveals a good deal about the poem as an operating system. If we imagine for a moment the poem’s appearance on a computer screen, we can apply Espen Aarseth’s concept of the scripton to the surface level image we encounter. His coinage “texton” references the underlying code that reflects and governs its operations. As Hayles informs us, “In a digital computer, texton can refer to voltages, strings of binary code, or programming code, depending on who the ‘reader’ is taken to be” (81). Assigning numerical values to the word “grasshopper” can help us to chart its digital permutations in the course of the poem and will reveal its encoded functions as we approach the binary level.² The letters in the word “grasshopper” can be represented in the following numerical fashion (see fig. 1):

Fig 1. The word “grasshopper” realized numerically.

Cummings’s poem operates like an analog-to-digital converter, employing discrete or continuous values to represent information, most notably by “sampling” single letters or blocks of letters from its subject’s name, encrypting them, and then “transmitting” them, as represented by the three scrambled forms expressing that name: r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, PPEGORHRASS, and gRrEaPsPhOs.

Aligning “grasshopper” with “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” we can arrive at a digital conversion of the poem’s first word (see fig. 2):

Fig 2. Digital conversion of “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r.”

My colleague and mathematician Jeffrey Boats solved the problem of which numbers to assign to the two “r’s” by pointing out that “grasshopper” contains double consonants and blends (e.g. pp, ss, and gr). The first “r” (following “g”) should therefore be assigned a “2” and the final letter “r” an “11.” He further pointed out that the three forms can be expressed by a table of permutations, as the rendering of “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” in the example above. Transposing the number values of the bottom column with the corresponding numbers above them (1 to 11, 2 to 8, and so forth) renders the scrambled term. Reversing the direction of transpositions (11 to 1, 8 to 2, and so forth) renders “grasshopper.”

________

While Michael Webster sees “a marked degree of symmetry” in the above permutation’s placement of an “r” at each end and an “e” in the center (“Prosody” 134), “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” poses the most difficulty of the three arrangements for readers in their initial encounter with the poem. Cummings’s obfuscation of natural language in scrambling the “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” signal has its modern-day equivalent in obfuscation coding, the deliberate use of source or machine code to confuse or lead astray those attempting to use it. For Nicholas Montfort, “All obfuscations … explore the play in programming, the free space that is available to programmers” (197). There is an aesthetic pleasure, Montfort maintains, in exploring “the gap between human meaning and program semantics” (193). Webster expresses a similar assessment: “These visual, linguistic, and mathematical calculations and playings on/with the poem inevitably result in an intense engagement with a living and moving poem” (“Prosody” 138). There is little doubt that the midsection of the poem affords readers a great deal of free play as they try to gather in and make sense of the scattered elements swarming around there.

In Montfort’s appreciation of this practice of willful deception, he writes that “it throws light on the nature of all source code, which is human-read and machine-interpreted, and can remind critics to look for different dimensions of meaning and multiple encodings in all sorts of programs” (198). In this regard, we can reverse-remediate Florian Cramer’s question: “Can notions of text which were developed without electronic texts in mind be applied to digital code, and how does literature come into play here?” We can now ask how the digital code of electronic texts might illuminate the operations of a [hyper]analogical text. Indeed, with “r-p-” we are dealing with what Raley might describe as “an algorithmic poem, which changes the system in a materially visible way.” Crossing over the analog/digital divide, Cummings deserves to be featured in an anthology of twenty-first century code poets.

The conversion of letters to numbers reveals the programmatic coding operations behind the three expressions, which constitute a digitized refrain for the poem. (These numbers could in turn be expressed by the ones and zeros of machine code, but since I want to communicate with humans and not machines, it is more expedient to keep them in this format.) The progression of the three forms leading up to “grasshopper” can be likened to an analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog transmission and reception process. Of course, since the “grasshopper” signal is not sequentially transmitted and reconstructed until the end of the poem, its analog elements have already been encoded as “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r.” when readers first encounter the poem. As we shall see, this scrambled construction and its digital equivalent (11 8 7 9 6 10 4 5 3 1 2) represent an extremely low sampling rate.

Each manifestation of “grasshopper” constitutes a new stage in an analog-to-digital conversion process. The ensuing forms, “PPEGORHRASS” and “gRrEaPsPhOs,” are products of an increasingly accurate sampling rate. The appearance of “grasshopper” at the end of the poem signals that the digitizing process, having been reversed in the course of the poem, has reconstituted the encrypted analog “message” for reception by the readers.

As the analog-to-digital conversion progresses from the low-sample “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” we find a more orderly arrangement in the next manifestation (see Fig. 4).

Fig 3. Table of Permutations for PPEGORHASS.

In the above permutation, there are formations consisting of three- and four-letter block constructions, PPE (8, 9, 10) and RASS (2, 3, 4, 5). These motion more to the final formulation: G RASS H O PPE R.

Fig 4. Formatting of PPEGORHASS showing block formations.

As a further sign of increasing orderliness, we can even see a path toward a more complete reconstruction by “cross-switching” the 1 and 11 within the inner part of the two blocks and moving the 7 and 6 to the outer part in a square-dance fashion (see fig. 4). A third operation, reversing the two columns and shifting to lower-case format, would result in “grasshopper.” In his handwritten draft, Cummings originally played with the notion of including either “andwro ngwayr ound” or “wrongwayroundfully” in this section of the poem. It must have occurred to him, however, that the letters (as demonstrated by the digitalization) were already doing the work of directing the operations of the poem for him. Expressing what Wendy Hui Kyong Chun describes as “the logic of what lies beneath,” the code here does not need added commentary (20). Indeed, in Andrew Galloway’s formulation, “Code is the only language that is executable… Code is the first language that actually does what it says” (165-66). The point of the poem is not something locked away in a safe: Combinatorial, the action of spinning the tumbler is the “tumbler” itself. Inscape digitalized. As in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet: kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame and, now, grasshoppers spin to the dictates of a digital prosody.

In JavaScript, these operations of reversal and transposition would be encoded as alerts and function calls. Of course, implementing the final function call in the second or third string of code would end the poem prematurely, contrary to the author’s playful intentions. Digitally, nonetheless, they represent the mental operations the observer must perform to make sense of what is being perceived: the poem’s gestalt. “Codework,” Raley informs us, “is a kind of object in that it puts on displays for the user-viewer, whose reactions and responses it then incorporates within its field of performance.” Noting that the brain is an information processing system and arguing that thinking itself is a form of computing, computationalists would be greatly interested in the poem’s construction of a grasshopper, inscape and all, through a cognitive process expressible in digital terms. Tracing “the core ideas of present day computationalism” to the seventeenth century, Matthias Scheutz establishes the deep historical roots of the notion of a mental calculator:

the notion of computation was intrinsically connected to the operations performed by mechanical calculators, on the one hand, and to cognitive processes using representations (such as calculating and reasoning), on the other. It was this link that eventually gave rise to the hypothesis that mind might be mechanizable. (5)

Somewhat counterintuitively, compiling the poem into a format approaching object code allows us to trace and “assemble” its patterning and execution more clearly, even though the assembly language of the computer is generally more comprehensible to the machine than to the human reader. Raley’s contention that “codework makes exterior the interior workings of the computer” finds a corollary in what “r-p-” accomplishes on the page. Function brings code to a level of near visibility that compares favorably to code poetry’s own.

The relatively orderly syntactic construction occurring between r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r and PPEGORHRASS continues in a different ordering format as we move from PPEGORHRASS to gRrEaPsPhOs. The progress towards an analog or plain text reconstruction is now expressed by odd and even integers, respectively increasing and decreasing almost entirely by increments of two:

Fig 5. Conversions for gRrEaPsPhOs.

As with PPEGORHASS, a bit of cross-switching at the pivot point makes the pattern even more orderly:

1 3 5 7     9 11     10 8 6 4 2

In his discussion of successful code works as “generative media,” Geoff Cox notes that in such productions “data is actually changed as the code runs” (Cox, McLean, Ward 7). Cox cites one poem in particular, in which “the ‘++’ and ‘- -‘ symbols are used to increment and decrement numbers” (7). A successful code work in its own right, Cummings’s poem, which consists of a playful rearrangement of letters on the surface, reflects an underlying generative matrix directing its operations.

This interweaving, along with the shuttling back and forth of numbers, recalls the movements of the Jacquard loom, whose mode of weaving threads into floral and leaf designs Lovelace felt bore a strong resemblance to the Analytical Engine’s own “weaving” of algebraical functions. Posing this analogy, Lovelace explained that the Engine required both “a scientific and emotive perception” for its “brilliance” to be fully understood: “We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves” (Lovelace 696). In a bold proclamation concerning her analogy between the operations of the Analytical Engine and those of a loom, Essinger asserts that, “A strong case could be made that this sentence is the most visionary sentence written during the entire nineteenth century” (Ada’s Algorithm 169). Providing “a conceptual gateway” (Ada’s Algorithm 141), her poetic analogy involving a weaving process offers a practical application for visualizing what is going on in the poem’s computations. Thus, we find that the numerical expressions behind each encoding of the letters of “grasshopper” resemble the programming indicators of a loom-like operation. The hyphenation of “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” suggests the weaver’s plain stitch pattern:

Fig 6. Plain stitch pattern

The weaving analogy extends to PPEGORHRASS, which commands a shuttling motion, with its 8, 9, 10 and 2, 3, 4, 5 encodings mediated by the “cross-stitching” commands of its middle column (1, 11, 7, 6) and their final reversal. The under-and-over weaving pattern of the loom can be compared to the interlaced coding pattern of gRrEaPsPhOs, with the direction reversing at the cross-stitch point (11 9).

1 3 5 7     11 9     10 8 6 4 2

1 3 5 7     9 11     2 4 6 8 10

1 3 5 7 9 11

2 4 6 8 10

The integrating of odd- and even-numbered patterns in the last two rows is comparable to the lock-stitch function of weaving. Two threads, an upper and lower, are entwined or locked together in passing through the holes in a fabric.

Fig 7. Lock-Stitch Pattern of gRrEaPsPhOs. Elkagye. CC BY-SA 4.0. 11 Aug. 2011. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.

A dynamic similar to the bobbin’s threading action is at work in the poem’s own weaving of letters. The final formation of “grasshopper,” digitally expressed by these odd and even integers, completes this entwining, locking process, once again illustrating the aptness of Lovelace’s comparison. The interlacing of “thinner” lower-case letters with “thicker” upper-case letters supplies a richer texture here as well. The semicolon at the end of “,grasshopper;” not only closes off the poem as a statement (in computer parlance) but also binds or “casts off” (in knitting parlance) the pattern of the poem. Cummings is enamored of this threading operation, a form of hyperbaton, or making a phrase or sentence discontinuous by inserting words into it. We can see this in the nineteenth poem of 95 Poems (1958):

Un(bee)mo

vi

n(in)g

are(th

e)you(o

nly)

asl(rose)eep

Here, two separate threads, comprising the sentences “Unmoving are you asleep” and “bee in the only rose,” are interwoven in fashioning the poem. Most readers have to unravel the two threads first to make sense of the poem’s dual statements and then re-encounter them in their original format. This process runs counter to what William Butler Yeats observed of the poet/reader relationship when he notes, “A line will take us hours maybe;/But if it does not seem a moment’s thought/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught” (“Adam’s Curse,” ll. 4-6). Early in his first draft of the poem, Cummings tried out an even more complex form of hyperbaton: “The up(now)gath(grass)eringhim(hop)self into(per)a.” Recognizing how his final version follows a coding pattern represented in this instance by PPEGORHASS and its digital format makes the stitching together a bit more manageable.

The three scrambled forms of “grasshopper” function on the order of a symmetric-key encryption in which a secret key is applied to information to change its content. The key can be composed of a number, word, or string of letters. The method of encoding can be as simple as shifting each letter by a number of places in the alphabet, the strategy employed to various degrees in “r-p-.” The permutations of “grasshopper” reflect a block cipher method of encryption first set forth by Claude Shannon. Also known as an iterated product cipher, “it carr[ies] out encryption in multiple rounds, each of which uses a different subkey derived from the original key” (Mathur 12). In their numerical equivalents, they can be

classified as iterated block ciphers which means that they transform fixed-size blocks of plaintext into identical size blocks of ciphertext, via the repeated application of an invertible transformation known as the round function, with each iteration referred to as a round. (Mathur 13)

At first glance, “r-p-” might strike readers as a random arrangement of letters, the sort that Shannon investigated in The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Through the probable sequencing order of natural language, Shannon demonstrated how a random selection of symbols could be processed from a zero-order approximation of a message through six stages to a final second-order word approximation (Shannon 13-14). Here, he helps his readers visualize a series of processes involving communication over a discrete noiseless channel, as found in teletypes and telegraphy. He employs these categories to illustrate the process of transformation.

Occupying the place of the title, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” is more random than the other two subkeys, as it seems to signal a stochastic procedure in which the distribution patterns of the three forms and their surrounding text can be analyzed but their final expression may not be resolved at the end of analysis. The term constitutes a floating value as well, Max Nänny observing that the poem’s restless, agitated eleven letters

behave like grasshoppers in a bait box, wildly hop[ping] around in the poem, leaping lines, landing in the middle of a word (l. 5) or a sentence (l. 12). Even the title of the poem, I suggest, has hopped from its proper place to line 7 (‘The’) and line 14 (“,grasshopper;’), thus disguising the fact that the poem contains the fourteen lines of a sonnet. (134)

The handwritten draft of the poem partly bears out this assertion. In the draft, the one variation (“rporhessagr”) and final expression of “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” follow the segment “upnowgath / PPEGORHRASS / eringt(o.” With such a placement, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” Cummings’s final selection, was initially linked to (and, therefore, the missing subject of) the two articles (“aThe):”) that preceded it in the draft. What the draft reveals, however, is that the final expression hopped backwards from its original place in line 7 to occupy the place of the yet-to-be-determined title, left blank in the first draft. Linked to the indefinite article “a,” the final expression aptly reflects the very generalized notion of a grasshopper offered at the beginning of the poem. The definite article “The” directs our attention, in deictic fashion, to the ending (“.grasshopper;”). Capitalized, it would more properly stand as the title than does its lower-case expression. Like the last piece completing a jigsaw puzzle, the “The” directs our attention to the ending term “,grasshopper;” as the whole composition is drawn into focus.

Cummings may have moved this subkey from the middle to the top to serve not only as a title but as a more properly enigmatic expression of the poem’s subject matter and as a strategy of obfuscation. In contrast with the final form (expression) of the poem, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” is the logical starting point for the digital-to-analog conversion performed here. Governing the most unreadable, unpronounceable elements of the poem, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” more randomly digitized, is closer in nature to a machine-language expression. It is more properly placed and can be considered as the determining, but missing, value for the middle section of the poem (beginning with line 7), which seemingly has no apparent governing subkey.

Appearing in the second and subsequent drafts and serving as the title in the poem’s published form, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” is re-scrambled into PPEGHORASS and gRrEaPsPhOs; however, traces of it remain in the poem’s midsection, allowing it to serve as a subkey for “governing” the wildly chaotic movement of the section it underwrites. There is a partial alignment and expression of the first four letters in the bottom portion of the poem (G-r-a-S) and a fragment of some of the key letters in the top half “(o-p-e”):

Fig 8. Fragmentary reconstruction of “r–p–o–p–h–e–s–s–a–g-r

In relation to Shannon’s six categories of approximations to English, the term “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” falls somewhere between the first category, zero-order approximation (“symbols independent and equiprobable”), and the second category, first-order approximation (“symbols independent but with frequencies of English text”: e.g., “pop” and “sag”) (13).³ Citing observations from Moe and Etienne Terblanche (“Plotting” 134), Webster associates “pop” with the grasshopper’s explosive leap and “sag” with the effect of the insect’s landing on the grass (“Plotting” 134). These formations (p-o-p [8-7-9] and s-a-g [5-3-1]) are more descriptive of the actions of the grasshopper itself rather than serving as steps on the way to its orthographic reconstitution.

Unlike other poems in Cummings’s oeuvre, where randomization is never resolved, PPEGORHRASS marks the transition from Shannon’s fifth category to his sixth: from first- to second-order word approximations, or the appearance of word units. The phrase “who/a)s w(e loo)k” more properly fits category six, as the parentheses breaking up the word units distinguish it from full-fledged natural language. The subkey points to a more orderly pattern forming, with the block RASS approximating the word unit [G]RASS, a requirement of the first-order approximation. The blocks “upnowgath / PPEGORHRASS / eringint(o-” revert to category five, with recognizable but elided or separated word units.

Like the block units in PPE GORH RASS, the units in “[up][now][gath…ering][int(o]” must be shuffled around to comprise a more syntactically correct sentence: [now][gath…ering][up][int(o] or: [gath…ering][up][now][int(o]. With the same number of letters as the subkey “PPEGORHRASS,” the phrase “gathering up” mirrors the manner in which blocks comprising that subkey must be moved around reconstructed in order to reconstitute the name.

Finally, gRrEaPsPhOs falls roughly into the sixth category due to the “word transition probability” suggested by the lower-case formation, “g-x-r-x-a-x-s-x-h-x-s,” where “grass” is a highly probable construction. The digital expressions behind PPEGORHRASS and gRrEaPsPhOs reveal their apparent randomness as just that: apparent. They are functions of a programming script, the “software” through which the digital grasshopper is run.

Each round or iteration of the block cipher not only encodes the term “grasshopper” but also provides a governing subkey for the surrounding textual arrangement: “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” reflects the chaotic, asyntactical arrangement of its surrounding text. The syntax of the text surrounding PPEGORHASS reflects the relatively ordinal arrangement of the two blocks (PPE and RASS: 8, 9, 10 and 2, 3, 4, 5) comprising respectively the end and the beginning of the word. The mid part of the construction (GORH), with its out-of-sequence ordering (1, 7, 11, 9), defines the break in “gath…ering.” The ambiguous phrasing in the text surrounding PPEGORHRASS is also reflected in the digital expression (8, 9, 10 and 2, 3, 4, 5) outside the middle column. The adverb “now” can either modify the act of the observer (“who // ,a)s w(e loo)k/upnowgath”) or the action of the grasshopper (“upnowgath…eringint(o-“). An open question: Is one or the other placement “wrongwayroundfully” turned? A more regular syntactical arrangement would have “up” on the other side of PPEGORHRASS: “gathering up into.” The arrangements of the three digitally expressed columns index and govern the “word breakage” and asyntactical arrangement of the surrounding text. In doing so, they are the equivalent of function calls.

The third term or subkey, gRrEaPsPhOs, performs a similar function on the surrounding text. Its interweaving of the lower-case and upper-case letters of “grasshopper” programs the similarly constructed “rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly” closely following it and reflecting (as does “rIvInG”) the subkey’s arrangement:

Indeed, the series of operations articulated earlier can be employed between the penultimate and last lines to describe the sorting process by which “gRrEaPsPhOs” becomes stated as “grasshopper;.” By inverting 11 and 9, we arrive at

1 3 5 7     9 11     10 8 6 4 2

thereby transforming the subkey to

.gRrEaPsPsOh;

Separating out the letters, we arrive at

g r a s s R E P P O h

Reversing the order of letters in the second column, changing the capital letters to lower-case, and supplying thereby some missing steps, we arrive at

.grasshopper;

Ensconced between a period and a semicolon, “.grasshopper;” is programmed and framed as a statement through grammatical markers to rest in place, literally and digitally, at this point.

We can apply the same program of separating (unraveling), sorting, and reversing functions—through which “gRrEaPsPhOh” was decrypted and transformed into “grasshopper”—to the phrase “rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly” as well:

rea rran gi ngly (be) (com) (e)

(be) (com) (e) rea rran gi ngly

become rearrangingly

,grasshopper;

Like the codepoems it suggests, “r-p-” is, in Risam’s formulation, “variably accessible and inaccessible to readers, a function of their readers’ knowledge of programming languages and facility with poetry.” Of course, the range of “programming languages” available to readers trying to negotiate this poem was only in the process of being formulated and established when “r-p-” was first published. Readers had to parse and make sense of Cummings’s novel idiolect on their own. Like the language of the codepoem, this idiolect offers its own “visual aesthetics of … code on the page” as well as multiple “possibilities for interpretation […which] are fragmentary, requiring negotiation on these many fronts to appreciate and understand” (Risam). As an early manifestation and inadvertent anticipation of codepoetry, “r-p-” establishes the unconventional reading/decoding process of the format to come. 3. Perhaps, but…

One of this article’s two insightful reviewers took issue with the admittedly bold claim that “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” is a software program for running an executable file designated as grasshopper.exe. S/he remarked: “Not fully convinced that it is a software program. Can it be run on any other text?” As it turns out, yes, it can. In the same collection, No Thanks (1935), Cummings pro-grams Poem #48 (“Float”) to run in a similar fashion to “r-p-.” An examination of its first three lines illustrates the table of permutations guiding its operations.

His tribute to “the aristocrat of tap,” Paul Draper, begins with a verbal reenactment of his floating style:

floatfloafloflf

lloloa

tatoatf loat fl oat

Analyzing its arrangement, we compile the first three lines into a linear, digital format:

floatfloafloflf lloloa tatoatf loat fl oat

123451234123121 223234 5453451 2345 12 345

Parsing it by number blocks reveals some order among its otherwise seemingly arbitrary arrangements:

float     floa     flo     fl     f     lloloa     t     at     oat     loat     fl     oat

12345     1234     123     12     1     223234     5     45     345     2345     12     345

Avoiding for the moment the trickier issue of the sequence lloloa (223234), we can see that the poem’s “floating point” blocks of letters can be rejoined to form the original term, “float;” thus, the block numbered 1234 (floa) can be completed by joining it to 5 (t), twelve spaces across; the block numbered 123 (flo) by 4 and 5 (a t) thirteen and fourteen spaces across, and so on, as schematized below:

Fig 9. “Floating” Arrangements

With the formation lloloa (223234), we seem to have an arbitrary, “left-over” block of letters and numbers but, as the grid below demonstrates, the single f in the first chart does double duty in connecting l, lo, and loa to the blocks completing them (t at oat). (No doubt coincidentally, f recalls the f symbol representing a function.) This second set of blocks, used to complete the formations in the first grid, are re-employed in reverse order to complete the f lloloa formation:

[float     floa     flo     fl]     f     lloloa     t     at     oat     [loat     fl     oat]

[12345     1234     123     12    ]     1     223234     5     45     345     [2345     12     345]

Fig 10. f [unction] + lloloa + t at oat

A reversal similar to that noted in the discussion of PPEGHOHRASS occurs here as well. The t-at-oat-loat sequence completing the blocks in the first grid is now expressed in reverse order as loat-oat-at-t in the second grid. Like the grasshopper, Draper has pirouetted in the air: physically, alphabetically, and digitally. These numbers choreograph the tap dance steps described here. Bob Grunman describes a partial effect accomplished in this numerical encoding: “dropping the ‘f’ from ‘float’ in a series of repeating instances of ‘float,’ suggest[s] that the floating dancer floats away from himself” (84). The numeric play also “mathematizes” the turns and reverses of the performance. Compiling these first three lines into a digital format reveals not only the program in which they were stored but also the order of operations governing how the five letters were to be rearranged, digitally choreographed, and executed. Considered by itself alone, the digital format presented here would not make much sense to a human “reader,” being just as opaque as the binary coding of machine language directing the operations of a computer. Aligning it with the letters of “float,” an analogue expression, however, moves the format closer to the concept of pseudocode. It brings into clearer focus the algorithmic activity or instructions for the operations creating the syncopated “tap dancing” performed by the letter formations in these lines.

In further defense of my position that Cummings has fashioned a programmable code here, I called in an expert witness, programmer Steve Vogelaar, who was tasked with examining the above schema for “float” and determining its relevancy to programming code. For the more technically proficient, refer below to his encoding of “float.”⁴ In plain prose, he finds:

The poet’s disassembly and reassembly of the keyword “float” lends itself to programming code very efficiently. The code that would parse the first two lines works very well with standard “LOOP” programming using an incremental or decremental counting system. These “LOOPS” concatenate the keyword to itself, either adding an incrementing number of characters or adding a decremented number of characters each time until the loop ends, depending on the type of “LOOP” and the character parameters of each loop.

The third line’s first word is also coded easily with another “LOOP.” The last three words (“loat”, “fl” and “oat”) being singular and not concatenated pieces of the keyword, can easily be broken apart and output in pieces using another coding tool that allows us to use “character counts” and their numerical position within the word to pick and choose the parts we need.

By using “LOOPS,” character counting, and placement principles, it is possible to recreate the permutations of the keyword output as the poet has done. The idea behind the “pseudocode” was to show that the poet’s disassembly of the keyword could be digitally programmed so that any word could be input to keyword, and the output of the poem would adhere to the same order of permutations no matter how many letters in the word.

It would appear that the poet, although not a computer programmer, has used future computer programming logics, whether he realized it or not. Or did the tech industry borrow from our poet? A discussion for another day.

To his closing comments, we can pose the question of agency. If Cummings is not consciously coding this poem in whatever nascent fashion, and it is highly improbable that he would be doing so in 1935, then where is the locus of agency here? Is a coding process yet to be formally articulated already in progress and operant here? As in the leaping grasshopper and thus in the graceful tap dancer as well, does inscape lend itself to digitalization? Is the outward expression of an inward, dynamic self-programmable?

The numerical sequence at work here is thus comparable and translatable to the software running a program. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, software constitutes “the logic of what lies beneath” (20). Here, the operations of that logic play out in a more visible fashion than is customary in Chun’s depiction of software. It is more in line with Galloway’s concept of code as “a machine for converting meaning into action” (166). Performative rather than simply descriptive, Cummings’ poem enacts its subject. It is encoded in what Chun describes elsewhere as “a very special language” (22). She offers Galloway’s pronouncement, cited earlier, in driving home her point: “Code is the only language that is executable….code is the first language that actually does what it says” (165).

Towards the end of the poem, the equation “spun=flash,” is an allusion to the flash routine Draper perfected, an acrobatic fusion of ballet and dance, a style dance critic John Martin praised in noting that Draper had “chosen tap dancing as a medium for art rather than for hoofing.” The critic goes on to note: “The arms served a definite function in the guidance and propulsion of the body, there was a kind of vertical unity between the feet and the rest of the body” (Cited by Hill, 191). This encoding of tapping and action can be expressed both analogically

;d

;;a:

nC.eda:Nci;ddaanncciinn

(GIY)

and digitally

;1 ;;2: 34,512:34 6; 112233446677 (8 9 10)

Not surprisingly, given our programmer’s analysis, a strict set of numerical, “combinatorial” operations lies behind the poem’s fanciful, seemingly arbitrary arrangements. Grammatical symbols (semi-colons, colons and commas) are employed as beat markers (comparable to the use of the ampersand in denoting beats). The poem’s repetition and spacing of letters serve the same functions as movement indicators found in tap dancing protocols, as set forth by Sara Pechina (101):

Digitizing the poem demonstrates how Cummings has followed a very methodical process in creating the poem’s special effects, here the choreographing of dance steps.

As it turns out, a strict set of mathematical, “combinatorial” operations lies behind the poem’s fanciful, seemingly arbitrary arrangements, particularly helpful in sorting through the more jumbled arrangement of its middle section. A similar logic of transposition, shift, and reversal governs the order of operations in both works. In contemporary terms, we would identify the relationship between these two poems as involving a function call. Here, a called (or inner) function defining one poem/program’s operations is invoked by another’s calling (or outer) function. Given that “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” is numbered thirteenth and “float” forty-eighth in the collection, we might label “float” as the subroutine of a program initiated by “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r.”

4. Is It in the Cards?

We can also find it instructive to move from digital expressions underlying the operations of the poem to an overview and appreciation of its “visual aesthetics.” In describing how “punctuation marks … highlight the structural disorganization of the poem,” Eva Maria Gómez-Jiménez advocates the same strategy: “the text has to be looked at from a distance and as a single object, rather than as a poem to be read aloud” (201). As an encryption program, the poem is laid out visually as though it had been written with a Cardan grille, a device used for encrypting messages and dating back to the Renaissance. The Cardan grille had variously sized, randomly placed rectangular apertures cut into it. The encrypter placed the card over a sheet of paper, writing the secret message in the apertures. Removing the card, the encrypter would fill in the blank spaces with an innocuous-sounding message:

TRIUMPHS APPLY TO THOSE WHO ARE CAPABLE 
OF ADJUSTING TO THE CHALLENGES SOME FOLKS 
CREATE TO MEASURE SUCCESSFUL AGE 
INHIBITED BEHAVIORS EVERYONE ENCOUNTERS 
DUE TO DEFICITS IN THIS COGNITIVE RECALL OF 
SELECT INFORMATION OF CARDINAL ORDER 
MIMICKING JUST A RANGE OF A NONCE USAGE

Once this message was sent, the recipient at the other end would have the same card and would place it over the message, the apertures now revealing the disguised message:

Fig 11. The secret message displayed by employing the Cardan grille.

The analogy to Cummings’s poem seemingly stops short here, as its blank spaces are not filled in. Counting the mostly scanty lines of the poem, however—fourteen of them—we recognize that there is an underlying, invisible “content” or structure here: the sonnet, though it is disguised by the poem’s asymmetrical, spotty arrangement. Imagining a Cardan grille placed over the poem reveals a coded “message” revealing its sonnet structure. Here, the coding process has been turned inside-out, the text message on the surface and the hidden message concerning the poem’s form encoded. Had the blank spaces been filled in with “filler” content, the poem would have been more easily recognized as a sonnet; however, we might simply be left with an innocuous statement about a grasshopper, with none of the dynamics involved in deciphering the poem. We would certainly be missing the scattering effect achieved by encrypting a message like this…

The Cardan grille application also reveals that the poem is not a simple cipher; even if we imagine we are looking through the apertures of a card placed over the “sonnet content” of the poem, we would have to deal with digital (coded) as well as analog text. The digital text is comprised of the three subkeys of “grasshopper,” surrounded by analog (though scattered) text. Plain text or source code (the readable characters of data in a file) and object code (machine-readable text) are in tension here. The unconventional use of “dislocated” commas, periods, semicolons, colons, and an exclamation point scattered throughout the text also suggests a vacillation between the analog and digital. “How have they been re-coded?” Readers must wonder. The three forms can likewise be viewed as supplying an algorithmic formula for calculating functions. Indeed, each one provides instructions to its surrounding text as the poem moves—is executed—from an initial state through a series of successive states to terminate in an ending state (“;grasshopper;”). The three subkeys govern the sequence of operations that define the software program being run.

Another card must be dealt in our investigation. To understand Cummings’s codework more completely, we must move from the Cardan grille analogy to one represented by the Jacquardian punch card, a movement in effect from the analog to the digital. We have established how the digitized key word (“grasshopper”) reveals the poem’s programmatic, digital operations as reflected in the variant forms/functions of its three expressions. Unlike the simple coding provided by the Cardan grille, the encoding of punch cards lends itself more readily to digital operations, the critical insight Lovelace made in connecting the operations of the Analytical Engine to those of Jacquard’s loom: “These cards contain within themselves the law of development of the particular function that may be under consideration, and they compel the mechanism to act accordingly in a certain corresponding order” (Web 141).

________

For the purpose of illustration, the poem can be likened to the punch cards driving the operations of Jacquard’s loom and proposed for the operations of the Analytical Engine. The poem’s three sections, coded through r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r / PPEGORHRASS / gRrEaPsPhOs, can be compared to the function calls of a series of three punch cards. As Babbage informs us of his own Engine, it “first computes and punches on cards its own tabular numbers” (Jacquard’s Web 91). Converting these alphabetical formulations to digital expressions—Babbage’s “tabular numbers”—has allowed us to perceive more clearly those operations at work. Lovelace’s explanatory description of the Engine as weaving algebraical patterns in the same fashion as the Jacquard loom wove designs offers for our purposes a further means for visualizing the operations of Cummings’s poem. What might the poem look like executed on a Jacquard loom?

To begin with, the poem would need a warp through and upon which its pattern could be woven. The default sonnet here—implicit rather than explicit—functions as the warp or frame of the poem, comparable to the longitudinal, stationary threads through which the transverse weft material is drawn in the loom’s over-and-under process of creating a pattern. The weft or “filler thread” in this analogy comprises the words and phrases woven into the sonnet frame’s “warp.” The digital cross-stitching noted above also appears at the phrase or word level at several points in the poem. As noted earlier, the hyphens in “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” function like stitching to connect the letters. The interlacing of lower-case and upper-case letters in the formations “rIvInG” and “gRrEaPsPhOs)” suggests the up-and-down, over-and-under motions of a loom’s shuttling process. Finally, the over-and-under action of the loom is suggested in the interlacing of “rearrangingly” and “become”: “rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly.”

In their draft books, weavers would sketch out patterns to be used in fashioning the punch cards. They would visualize the threaded hooks’ operations and, as in the far right side of the figure below, would draw tables indicating the placement of the cards’ holes (the zeros in the various grids). If the rod passed through a hole in the card, the equivalent of “on,” its hook was engaged and contributed to the pattern’s construction. Rods deflected by the card, the equivalent of “off,” could not pass through and thus were not part of that phase of the weaving process. A binary code!

Figure 12. A page from a weaver’s draft book. Unknown. Weaver’s Draft Book (1805). Creative Commons. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.

These notations, in turn, would be transferred over to punch cards that would direct the loom’s operations:

Figure 13. Representation of a Cardan grille

Imagining that the poem was “woven” from an underlying diagram that determined the weft and warp as it appears on the page, we can think of the blank spaces of the poem, the missing elements of a default sonnet structure, as representations of those places on the punch card where the threaded hook was prevented from penetrating the “page.” The letters of the poem have been “threaded” into the page as directed by the holes in the card. In Jacquard’s system, each card determining one row of design. A “punched in” version of the poem mimics the formatting found in these cards:

Fig 14. Illustration of the poem as the product of a punch card.

Each subkey, with its encoding of a digital arrangement, is analogous to the operations of a punch card governing the poem’s design. Thus, just as one card in Jacquard’s scheme deterrmined one row of design, so does each subkey determine the rows of the poem’s design. Like the code poets’ own productions, Cummings’s poem mixes analog and digital (coding) elements and displays them on the surface of the text. Where “r-p-” differs from Jacquard’s setup is that the poem includes both the pattern and also the cards producing that pattern (the three subkeys) in its design. In effect, it thereby enacts what Raley qualified earlier as “the art of the code, in which the code used to produce the work seems to infiltrate the surface, the former domain of natural languages.”

Interestingly enough, there has been some renewed interest lately in the connections between weaving and coding. In an article entitled “Weaving Paved the Way for Computer Coders,” Emiliano Rodriguez Mega and Lexi Krupp describe a workshop designed by Francesca Rodríguez Sawaya and Renata Gaui: Weaving to Code, Coding to Weave. As visual designer Sawaya explains, the goal of the workshop is to bridge the divide between crafters and coders. Observing that “weaving paved the way for coders,” she notes parallels between the two operations: “Computers talk about binary systems…We talk about ones and zeros but if you go back to weaving, you go up or down with your threads, and that’s basically going one… zero… one… zero… one… one… zero… one.”

Operationally, via the interactions between microfragments, words, and phrases, “r-p-” and its loom-like operations seem patterned after those of the Analytical Engine, as described by Lovelace:

It must be evident how multifarious and how mutually complicated are the considerations which the working of such an engine involve. There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising a mutual influence. (Lovelace 710)

The “sets of effects” in this instance are the operations of the three subkeys, which, operating independently, nonetheless exert a mutual influence on each other as the poem proceeds. The over-and-under/under-and-over permutations of the poem’s weft require, to borrow Nänny’s formulation, a “reading process [which] follows lines of motion that provide a diagrammatic icon of the elusive, haphazard jumps and flights of a grasshopper” (134). These lines of motion result in a complicated pattern of reading, at times shuttling right to left and then reverse shuttling left to right. While computationalists’ claims that the mind might be mechanizable still hang in the balance, “r-p-” demonstrates how words, properly placed and displaced, can make the mind move in a mechanized, loom-like fashion.

Demonstrating his own designs on the poem, Nänny finds a “poempicture” outlined therein. A veritable connect-the-dots representation of its outline, Nänny’s static representation is reductive and falls far short of what Cummings has actually achieved (view Nänny’s design: https://www.e-periodica.ch/digbib/view?pid=spe-001:1985:2#138). The mind at work here, an Analytical Engine in its own right, deserves a better rendering of its operations. In her translation of “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,” Lovelace describes how the Engine itself does not think but rather executes “the conceptions of intelligence” (689). Referring to the Jacquard loom, she likens these conceptions to the information punched and programmed into cards that direct the operations of the loom. Receiving “the impress of these conceptions,” the cards would then “transmit to the various trains of mechanism composing the engine the orders necessary for their action” (689). What “r-p-” demonstrates is a mind in the process of programming and transmitting a code for constructing the dynamic operations of its subject. Code poetry in motion, “r-p-” is a software program for running an executable file designated as grasshopper.exe.

Postscript

There is much speculation these days about what we might achieve by developing a mind/machine interface. In a recent essay, “Thought-Reading Machines and the Death of Love,” Jason Pontin references Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thought experiment, which begins with the proposition that everyone has a box with something in it called a “beetle.” Pontin continues:

Denying the possibility of private language, the philosopher wrote, “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.” Wittgenstein meant that we learn a word by observing the rules governing its use, but no one sees another person’s beetle: “It would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box,” or nothing at all. An apparently intractable fact of life is that our thoughts are inaccessible to one another. Our skulls are like space helmets; we are trapped in our heads, unable to convey the quiddity of our sensations.

Pontin proceeds to discuss the work of researcher Mary Lou Jepsen, whose company, Openwater, is undertaking a project to holographically record and analyze the image patterning and very thought processing of individuals, a project straight out of a Black Mirror episode. In effect, Pontin maintains, she “wants to show me the beetle inside your box, and you the beetle inside mine.”

While it will be interesting to see what emerges from her investigations, the imagery will most likely fall short of what Cummings offers in “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” a poem that operates like a three-part series of punch cards directing—Analytical Engine-style—the operations of the Jacquard loom. The poem should be imagined spun from the shuttling action of hooked rods, spinning cog wheels, and the clatter of leaping typewriter keys: a digital grasshopper woven out of software and threadware into the algebraic patterns of Ada Lovelace’s flowers and leaves.

Footnotes

1. Further references to “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” as the poem’s title will be abbreviated to “r-p-“

2. Poets perform a similar charting in writing the sestina, with its juggling of numerically marked end-words from stanza to stanza (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3, and so on.) Quite aptly, practitioners of this form were sometimes called jongleurs (jugglers).

3. The following is excerpted from Claude Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication. He writes: “To give a visual idea of how this series of processes approaches a language, typical sequences in the approximations to English have been constructed and are given below. In all cases we have assumed a 27-symbol ‘”alphabet,’” the 26 letters and a space” (14). The following are Shannon’s desriptions and examples of the six different levels that comprise the “Series of Approximations to English” (14-15).

1. 1. Zero-order approximation (symbols independent and equiprobable)
   XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGHYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJQD.
2. 2. First-order approximation (symbols independent but with frequencies of English text).
   OCRO JLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESEBYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL
3. 3. Second-order approximation (digram structure as in English).
   ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE SEACE CTISBE. (13)
4. 4. Third-order approximation (trigram structure as in English).
   IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BIRS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE.
5. 5. First-order word approximation. Rather than continue with tetragram,…, n-gram structure it is easier and better to jump at this point to word units. Here words are chosen independently but with their appropriate frequencies.
   REPRESENTING AND SPEEDILY IS AN GOOD APT OR COME CAN DIFFERENT NATURAL HERE HE THE A IN CAME THE TO OF TO EXPERT GRAY COME TO FURNISHES THE LINE MESSAGE HAD BE THESE.
6. 6. Second-order word approximation. The word transition probabilities are correct but no further structure is included.
   THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER THAT THE CHARACTER OF THIS POINT IS THEREFORE ANOTHER METHOD FOR THE LETTERS THAT THE TIME OF WHO EVER TOLD THE PROBLEM FOR AN UNEXPECTED.

4. Encoding of “float”:

[poemword] = “float”

/* NOTE POEM LINE 1 GENERATION */

[var_decrement] = 0

[var line1#] = 1

[var_line1_text] = “”

LOOP WHILE [var_decrement] < [poemword]length

[newword] = [poemword]character#[var_line1#] to [poemword]character#([var_line1#] -[var_decrement])

[var_line1_text] = [var_line1_text] + [newword]

[var_decrement] = [var_decrement] + 1

END LOOP

/* NOTE – POEM LINE 2 GENERATION */

[var_increment] = 0

[var_line2#] = 2

[var_line2_text] = “”

LOOP WHILE [var_increment_line2] < ([poemword]length – [var_line1#])

[newword] = [poemword]character#[var_line2#] to [poemword]character#([var_line2#] + [var_increment])

[var_line2_text] = [var_line2_text] + [newword]

[var_incremen] = [var_increment} + 1

END LOOP

/* NOTE – LINE 3 WORD 1 GENERATION */

[var_increment] = 0

[var_line3_word1] = “”

LOOP WHILE [var_increment] < ([poemword]length – [var_line1#])

[newword] = [poemword]character#([poemword]length – [var_increment]) to [poemword]char-acter#[poemword]length

[var_line3_word1] = [var_line3_word1] + [newword]

[var_increment] = [var_increment] + 1

END LOOP

[var_line3_word1] = [var_line3_word1] + [poemword]character#[var_line1#]

/* NOTE – LINE 3 WORD 2 GENERATION */

[var_line3_word2] = [poemword]character#([var_line2#] to [poemword]character#[poemword]length

/* NOTE – LINE 3 WORD 3 GENERATION */

[var_line3_word3] = [poemword]character#[var_line1#] to [poemword]character#[var_line2#]

/* NOTE – LINE 3 WORD 4 GENERATION */

[var_line4_word4] = [poemword]character#([var_line1#] + [var_line2#]) to [poemword]character#[poemword]length

/* NOTE – POEM LINE 3 GENERATION */

[var_line3_text] = [var_line3_word1] + ” ” + [var_line3_word2] + ” ” + [var_line3_word3] + ” ” + [var_line3_word4]

/* DISPLAY POEM */

DISPLAY [var_line1_text]

DISPLAY [var_line2_text]

DISPLAY [var_line3_text]

Works Cited

• Chiaverini, Jennifer. Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace. Dutton, 2017.
• Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT P, 2011.
• Cox, Geoff, Alex McLean, and Adrian Ward. “The Aesthetics of Generative Code.” Generative Art 00, international conference, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, 200. www.generative.net/papers/aesthetics/. Accessed 10 Mar. 2019.
• Cramer, Florian. Digital Code and Literary Text. Research Gate, 2019. https://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/digital_code_and_literary_text.html Accessed Sept. 17, 2019.
• Cummings, E.E. Complete Poems (1904-1962). Edited by George J. Firmage, Norton, 1991.
• Espen, Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• Essinger, James. Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age. Melville House, 2014.
• —. Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Invention of the Information Age. Oxford UP, 2004.
• Friedman, Norman. E. E. Cummings: The Art of his Poetry. Johns Hopkins UP, 1960.
• Galloway, Andrew. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. MIT P, 2004.
• Gómez-Jiménez, Eva Maria. “Unconventional patterns in the experimental poetry of E. E. Cummings: A stylistic approach to punctuation marks.” Language and Literature, vol. 26, no. 3, 2017, pp. 191-212. SAGE, doi:10.1177/0963947016686606.
• Grunman, Bob. “The Importance of Technical Innovation in the Poetic Maturation of Cummings.” Spring, no. 13, 2004, pp. 74-89.
• Harwood, Graham. “London.pl.” runme.org/feature/read/+londonpl/+34/. Accessed 6 Nov. 2018.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 67-90. Project Muse, doi:10.1215/03335372-25-1-67.
• Hill, Constance Valis. Tap Dancing in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
• Leech, Geoffrey. Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Routledge, 2013.
• Lovelace, Ada. “Notes by the Translator.” Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage. By L.F. Menabrea. Scientific Memoirs, vol. 3 (1842). London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1843, pp. 691-731.
• Lovelace, Ada, translator. Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage. By L.F. Menabrea. Scientific Memoirs, vol. 3 (1842). London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1843, pp. 666-690.
• Mathur, Aditya. Private Key Encryption and Network Security. Uploaded 27 Oct. 2012, scribd.com/document/111275631/Network-Security. Accessed 19 Nov. 2018.
• Mega, Emiliano Rodriguez and Lexi Krupp “Weaving Paved the Way for Coders.” New York University Journalism Projects. https://nyujournalismprojects.org/pixel/weaving-paved-the-way-for-computer-coders/. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.
• Montfort, Nicholas. Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (London: The MIT Press, 2016), 92.
• Moe, Aaron M. “Autopoesis and Cummings’ Cat.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 110-20.
• Nänny, Max. “Iconic Dimensions in Poetry.” On Poetry and Poetics, vol. 2 of SPELL: Swiss Papers in Language and Literature, edited by Richard Waswo, Gunter Narr, 1985, pp. 111-135. E-periodica, doi:10.5169/seals-99839.
• Pechina, Sara. “Steps in Time: An Exploration of Tap Dance Education.” 8/29/2016. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1657&context=stu_hon_theses
• Pontin, Jason. “Thought-Reading Machines and the Death of Love.” Wired Magazine, 16 Apr. 2018, www.wired.com/story/ideas-jason-pontin-openwater. Accessed 30 Jun. 2019.
• Raley, Rita. “Interferences: [Net-Writing] and the Practice of Codewriting.” Electronic Book Review, 8 Sept. 2002, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/net.writing. Accessed 30 Jun. 2019.
• Risam, Roopika. “The Poetry of Executable Code.” Jacket 2, 5 Apr. 2015, www.jacket2.org/commentary/poetry-executable-code. Accessed 30 Jun. 2019.
• Tartakovsky, Roi, “E. E. Cummings’s Parentheses: Punctuation as Poetic Style.” Style, vol 43, no. 2, 2009, pp. 215-247. Proquest, doi:220126366.
• Webster, Michael. “Cummings’s Silent Numerical Prosody,” Media Inter Media: Essays in Honor of Klaus Cluver, vol. 3, 2009, pp. 423-38. Amsterdam: Brill and Rodopi. 426. doi: https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1163/9789042028432_021
• —. “Plotting the Evolution of a r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r.” Spring, vol. 20, 2013, pp. 116-42. https://www.academia.edu/29917786/Plotting_the_Evolution_of_a_r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

Michael Millner (bio)

Abstract

Neoliberalism often operates by privatizing what was once public and by turning questions of moral value into questions of market finance. This essay expands our understanding of these operations by examining the way neoliberalism takes hold at the most intimate level—the level of feeling. It argues that the field known as behavioral economics has helped to produce the neoliberal subject as a person of feeling. While it shows the alignment of behavioral economics with neoliberalism, the essay also suggests how the field might put its observations to work in very different ways.

“The hot hand is bunk.”

LeBron James’s Miami Heat was playing a tight NBA championship series with Tim Duncan’s San Antonio Spurs in June 2013. I had just offered a rather inept analysis of the Heat-Spurs matchup, simply as a way of continuing a cocktail conversation on a subject about which I knew next to nothing. “The Heat will win if LeBron gets the hot hand” was all I could muster. To which my friend countered, “The hot hand is bunk.” In retrospect, I see this exchange as my introduction to one of the hegemonic principles of our moment.

One thing I thought I knew about basketball was that in the final few seconds of a close game you look to get the ball to the player with the so-called hot hand—the player with the flow, who is completely in the zone, hitting everything from everywhere. In one way or another, the idea of the hot hand seems to apply to almost any athletic contest, but especially to basketball, a game characterized by a fluid stream of infinitesimal, instantaneous decisions and movements of great complexity by a group of players essentially untethered from playmaking coaches (who have only so much control over the back-and-forth stream of action). It makes a kind of folk sense that talented players might suddenly be able to put all this complexity together, if only for a few minutes, through a rare synchronicity of mind and body—and shoot the lights out. You better get them the ball while it lasts.

But my acquaintance in this conversation—not incidentally, it seems to me now, a law professor of the economics and law persuasion—proceeded to blow up that folk wisdom. He set out for me Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky’s debunking of the hot hand, which originally appeared in 1985 in the journal Cognitive Psychology. It is worth noting that Tversky was the Israeli psychologist who, with his close friend and later Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, laid the foundation for the field known as behavioral economics through a series of extraordinary experiments and observations in the 1970s and 1980s. As Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky explain (writing in this case without Kahneman), the sense that a basketball player has the hot hand derives from the common tendency to misperceive a particular experience involving probabilities. People tend to see significant coordination in small numbers of sequential events where more careful statistical reasoning would show much less coordination. For instance, in a paradigmatic example, naïve weekend gamblers may believe they are on a hot streak when they’ve tossed three or four good rolls of the dice, but, of course, their odds of getting a good roll haven’t changed at all (each roll is distinct with exactly the same odds). The dice rollers are simply experiencing a statistically expected repetition of good rolls, which exists in any significant sequence of rolls. The problem is even easier to see when discussing coin flips. We know that coin flips are essentially random and if we flip a coin a very large number of times it will land nearly 50 percent of the time “heads” and 50 percent of the time “tails.” But within this large number of flips, there may be sequences of several “heads” in a row (or several “tails”). In the case of coin flips, we might be intrigued by such repetitions but we tend not to significantly misperceive the probability of these sequences (we don’t seriously talk of hot streaks in coin flipping) because the coin flip is so clearly understood as random. But in the case of more complex activities, like a series of basketball shots, we do often fall into such misperceptions. The hot-hand essay relies on empirical evidence to argue that a series of successful shots by an individual player during a couple of minutes in a single game is best understood as a statistically expected sequence of successful shots—not evidence of a hot hand—within the context of the player’s season-long shooting average. Put slightly differently, but to the same end: the next jumper that the player takes doesn’t have any significantly greater chance of going in than his or her average from the field determined by a large number of shots across a number of games. As Tversky, Vallone, and Gilovich found by running various experiments and by closely observing real-game shooting statistics, the laws of probability do a better job of predicting the next shot than does a sense of the hot hand. So the best thing for the coach to tell the team in the final seconds of a nail-biter is to get the ball to the player with the best shooting percentage across the season.¹

In my experience, debunking the hot hand tends to conjure up disbelief in just about everyone, and in die-hard sports junkies this disbelief can turn quickly to outright hostility. Indeed, a part of me simply couldn’t believe it either when I watched the Heat and the Spurs in 2013—and perhaps still doesn’t want to believe it today. For both the player and audience, the experience of the hot hand is so intense, feels so accurate and real, and is associated so deeply with an altered state of mind and body, that it’s nearly impossible to relinquish it simply on account of a statistical analysis. The apparent naturalism of the hot hand, as well as the emotional investment it conjures, is at the heart of the argument put forth by Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky. Their point is not simply that we typically misunderstand statistical reasoning and probabilities—a fact unsurprising to anyone who has taken a stats course—but that those misunderstandings actually feel just right, are again and again our regular initial response, and are almost impossible to shake, even after we fully understand the logical probabilities. We feel in our bones a truth that is an illusion.

In this essay, I’m interested in this feeling of certainty. And not just this feeling, but other closely associated feelings that arise in response to gambles, calculations, or predictions we make under pressure. One of the striking observations of behavioral economics (the hot-hand essay from 1985 is foundational in the field) is that we often feel our way through probabilistic decisions. Whom to throw the ball to for the final shot? What retirement fund manager to choose? How much money to borrow for an education? What insurance contract to purchase? Such questions are only the starting points in our nearly daily encounters with probabilities. In a neoliberal world ever more characterized by the privatization of risk and the financialization of everyday life, we contend with probabilities relentlessly. We have become what the political theorist Ivan Ascher calls “homo probabilis” (85 and passim). And I will add to Ascher’s helpful conceptualization that homo probabilis is, counterintuitively in many respects, a man of feeling (or more generally, a person of feeling). Behavioral economics has played a considerable role in the theorization of this new person of feeling, a role that has had mass appeal and influence. Behavioral economics has popularized particular ideas of the subject, reason, and agency, which call for interrogation. I will argue that behavioral economics has helped produce homo probabilis as a person of feeling, and that the field’s theorization and instrumentalization of affect around probabilities is in league with neoliberalism. But, in the end, I will also argue that ideas about what may be called “probabilistic affect” shouldn’t be completely critiqued away, but rather redirected towards ends very different from those valued by neoliberals.

This argument will unfold by first outlining the contours of homo probabilis—that is, the neoliberal subject—and by emphasizing the importance of understanding subjects who feel their way through probabilities. This subject isn’t natural—it had to be made—and the two middle sections of the essay examine how that making began with the Chicago School economists in the early 1960s and continued through the rise of behavioral economics in the 1970s through 1990s, culminating with its recent popularity. The account offered runs against behavioral economics’s history of itself as a radical break from the Chicago School. My description of behavioral economics also presents the field as developing a theory of affect that it takes to describe natural experience. “Affect” is not a term behavioral economics itself uses, but application of the term—highly developed in the humanities and in sectors of the social sciences—helps provide a critical perspective on behavioral economics. The penultimate section of the essay presents this theory of affect as ideological and aligned with neoliberalism, while the final section suggests different directions we might move in, putting the observations of behavioral economics to work.²

Who Is Homo Probabilis?

Ivan Ascher uses the term homo probabilis to distinguish the older idea of economic man—homo œconomicus—from the newer, neoliberal subject—homo probabilis, or speculative man. The older idea of homo œconomicus, so important to classical economics from Adam Smith onward, sees the individual as a partner in exchange. This individual partners with others in exchange so as to maximize his utility—in the language of economics, the term “utility” refers to his needs and wants. In doing so, this classically liberal subject is thought of as free, agential, and rational. But for the neoliberal subject, homo probabilis, the central activity is not exchange but investment, and that investment is often an investment in himself, that is, in his own human capital. Using a memorable phrase, Michel Foucault calls this new neoliberal subject an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital” (226). Like an entrepreneur, the neoliberal subject invests capital in an enterprise, and that enterprise is himself. These investments are risky, and like all investments require consideration of probabilities. However, Foucualt writing in 1979 could not foresee the rise of financialization and the intensification of privatization that have made playing the probabilities ever more complex, becoming one of the primary characteristics of homo probabilis.

In Portfolio Society, Ascher explains that homo probabilis is a fairly recent creation—or, perhaps better put, a fairly recent necessity. In the last forty years, homo probabilis has been cultivated in relation to the rise of a society backed by financialization (what Ascher calls a “portfolio society,” or a society that is viewed as an investment portfolio that balances risk with potential returns). With the dismantling of the security provided by more socialized forms of education, retirement, health care, and living assistance, the neoliberal homo probabilis has been compelled to securitize itself in financial markets. This subject seeks its security by turning itself into a kind of security that can be bought and sold, aggregated and spun off, complete with futures contracts and other kinds of derivatives. Homo probabilis has little choice but to take risks in the market: student debt for education and 529 plans for the education of future generations, 401K investments in retirement, a 30-year loan in the mortgage market, 3-to-6-year financing in the auto loan market, various insurance contracts, and often significant credit card debt (necessitated by slow wage growth). This subject is also managed in terms of risk in the market. Among other things, homo probabilis is a credit score with associated hazards to banks and credit card issuers, an age and gender with associated risks for health insurers, a collection of points with associated probabilities to auto insurers, and, if this person is an immigrant, a collection of data associated with dangers to national security and a panoply of additional concerns.³ This subject speculates in all these markets when it makes decisions about its future—its human capital—while simultaneously being the object of speculation in these markets. Ascher notes that homo probabilis is what some political theorists have recently begun to refer to as a “dividual” (89).⁴ A “dividual” is no longer a subject that is “not divisible,” but one who is divided into parts, separated into data about this and that, and aggregated into pools of other subjects with similar data. A dividual is a means, not an end. This dividual subject, so entwined with speculation and probabilities, invests in itself as the means of collecting dividends and in the hope of having, say, a retirement and medical care in the future—or simply a future in the future.

There is much more to Ascher’s important book, but for now it will suffice to say that it helpfully expands the baseline definition and history of neoliberalism through an examination of financialization and the subject that emerges, homo probabilis. But this subject didn’t simply emerge—it was made, as Ascher well knows: “this neoliberal Homo probabilis, this ‘entrepreneur of the self’ or this investor on which today’s capitalist mode of prediction depends, does not exist in the wild: it has to be bred” (106). And the central question may not be how this subject was made, but why it has had such an astonishing grip—so strong that it has not been broken by economic meltdowns, wide disparities between the 1% and the 99%, a deep sense of precarity in health care and education, and other tribulations fairly easily traceable to the new political economy that began to develop in the early 1970s. As William E. Connolly notes, “most [accounts of neoliberalism] may not come to terms sharply enough with the subjective grip the state, media, and neoliberal combine exerts on the populace even after it has been rocked” (23). The strength of the grip is in part explained by the making of homo probabilis in very intimate, affective ways. Homo probabilis, as we will see, is constructed by behavioral economics as a very particular kind of feeling subject.

History: Toward “A Colossal Definition”

Behavioral economics outlines an array of theories about the everyday, intimate, affective operations of homo probabilis, and through both mainstream media popularity and the advancement of multiple policy initiatives, the field has put those theories into practice to shape homo probabilis. Perhaps no other body of research has thought so thoroughly about the routine, nearly automatic processes we use to make decisions about the future, to calculate risks, to understand, forecast, and analyze data—all the skills that will make one a good homo probabilis and all things that we do affectively as often as we do rationally, according to behavioral economists. But before turning to behavioral economics per se, I want to spend a moment examining its prehistory, where we can first see neoliberalism’s interest in affect and emotion. This history will be nothing like the history that behavioral economics presents of itself. The economic behaviorists often represent their findings as a break from the rational choice theory articulated by the Chicago School economists of the 1950s and 1960s—Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and others. For instance, in the bestselling Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, perhaps the most influential book of policy suggestions derived from work on cognitive misperceptions, economist Richard Thaler and legal policy scholar Cass Sunstein mock the idea of a “species” of “Econs” who are “Mr. Spock”-like and believe in an old-fashioned rational agent (7, 22). In The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, the account of Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary and tumultuous friendship and the work it produced, Michael Lewis paints the two psychologists as outsider hero-geniuses who deconstruct the idea of rational choice. The rational actor is what gets undone in The Undoing Project.⁵

From one perspective, this notion of a radical break rings true. The work in behavioral economics deeply complicates the standard economic model of an individual who maximizes utility through decisions made about exchanges with others. That model understands the individual as guided only by payoffs determined rationally. That rationality is unaffected by emotion, the framing/context of decisions, or the difficulty individuals have predicting the future—all areas that behavioral economics has focused upon. As postwar economists “constructed their new approach to economics upon the foundation of utility,” economist George Lowenstein explains, “they rapidly became disillusioned with utility’s psychological underpinnings and sought to expunge the utility construct of its emotional content [developed by philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill]” (426). This is certainly true in the main, if we think of emotions as passions that might upset reasoning. But even at the University of Chicago, ground zero for rational choice theorizing, and especially in the work of Gary Becker (“the most radical of the American neo-liberals,” as Foucault remarks [269]), there was interest in something like feeling or emotion from the beginning of the reconstruction of the economics discipline in the post-World War II era.⁶ Regarding this interest, there are two central points to make—one about human capital and utility and another about rationality.

Becker’s idea of “human capital”—a transformative idea in twentieth-century economics—was essential to expanding the notion of what might be considered a utility so as to include aspects of life that are hard to pin down as rational, like satisfaction and wellbeing. A bank account, a stock portfolio, and an assembly line traditionally count as capital because they might produce income or other useful yields. Forms of human capital, including “[s]chooling, a computer training course, expenditures on medical care, and lectures on the virtues of punctuality and honesty” are “capital too,” Becker explains, “in the sense that they improve health, raise earnings, or add to a person’s appreciation of literature over much of his or her lifetime” (15-16).

That rational agents might trade in “appreciation of literature” or the “virtues” of certain values (or the satisfactions of motherhood, another area of interest to Becker and the Chicago School) ranks as a significant expansion of the traditional idea of utility. Foucault in his remarkably prescient 1979 Collège de France lectures on “American neo-liberalism” calls such emotional payoff “psychical income” (244). In the case of the mother-child relationship, the child benefits from the mother’s investment in obvious ways that maximize utility—better care and education lead, potentially, to a better income—but the mother also benefits: “She will have the satisfaction a mother gets from giving the child care and attention in seeing that she has in fact been successful” (244), as Foucault explains, summarizing the Chicago School position. When such “satisfaction” can be incorporated into economic analysis, an economic rationality is implemented all the way down—the human at a very intimate level is a homo œconomicus. “[T]he generalization of the economic form of the market beyond monetary exchanges,” Foucault remarks, “functions in American neo-liberalism as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior” (243). Economics can be applied to the most private of realms.

The rationalization of “psychical income”—like a sense of virtuousness, appreciation, or satisfaction that may become an object of economic analysis—is only part of Becker’s proto-neoliberal project. What Foucault calls Becker’s “colossal definition” (269) involves significantly expanding the notion of rationality to incorporate affective response. Foucault observes that Becker’s idea is in essence a new conception of labor. The Chicago School replaces older classical understandings of labor, as well as the Marxist understanding of labor, with a new interpretation of it as essentially decision making (or “choice,” as the Chicago School proponents like to say)—and decision making, ultimately, involves affective response. As Foucault puts it, the Chicago School inspires economists to take up

the task of analyzing a form of human behavior and the internal rationality of this human behavior. Analysis must try to bring to light the calculation—which, moreover, may be unreasonable, blind, or inadequate—through which one or more individuals decided to allot given scarce resources to this end rather than another. (Italics added, 223)

Labor takes the form of “calculation,” and the object of study for the new Chicago School economics is essentially the study of how decisions are made using “internal rationality” and how calculations lead deciders to “allot given scarce resources” in a market.

But what exactly is “internal rationality” for Becker? In the traditional economic view, individuals, firms, and markets are deemed rational because they consistently maximize the utility function. A “calculation” that is “unreasonable, blind, or inadequate” doesn’t sound like a form of rationality under any definition—economic, philosophical, or commonsensical. But Becker develops just this position in his 1962 essay “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory” (Foucault’s point of reference). Here Becker enters the fray over what might count as rationality in economic theory and how economic theory might approach the “impulsive,” irrational behavior of individuals and firms (“Irrational Behavior” 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12). He says that his purpose in this essay is “not to contribute yet another defense of economic rationality” but rather to argue that “economic theory is much more compatible with irrational behavior than had been previously suspected” (1, 2). Specifically, Becker reasons in his technical analysis that economic theory is not best understood in terms of rationality but in terms of “systematic” (4, 5, 11, 12), “consistent” (1, 3, 7, 8, 13) responses to the environment. Becker concludes that “[s]ystematic responses might be expected, therefore, with a wide variety of decision rules, including much irrational behavior” (12). “Rational conduct,” Foucault writes, explaining Becker’s view, “is any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a non-random way, in a systematic way, and economics can therefore be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables” (269). “Homo œconomicus,” Foucault summarizes, “is someone who accepts reality”—that is, accepts those “environmental variables”—in a regular, predictable way. Foucault calls Becker’s take on rationality “a colossal definition, which obviously economists are far from endorsing” (269). It is “colossal” in the sense that so much calculation and decision-making fall under the definition of “internal rationality,” which isn’t logical rationality, or even the more narrowly defined rationality of neoclassical economics, but rather the systematic, predictable, and nonrandom response to an environment. Foucault also suggests, in terms that again seem accurately predictive, that this notion of rationality will require a new kind of “environmental psychology” (259). Becker’s “colossal definition,” Foucault explains,

has a practical interest, if you like, inasmuch as if you define the object of economic analysis as the set of systematic responses to the variables of the environment, then you can see the possibility of integrating within economics a set of techniques, those called behavioral techniques. (270)

That was then—1979. Foucault doesn’t have much more to say about these “behavioral techniques” beyond quickly gesturing toward B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism and remarking on the techniques’ impersonal application (they are “brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players” [201]). But since 1979, many economists, psychologists, and even the general reading public, it seems, have been willing to accept Becker’s “colossal definition.” I am suggesting here that Foucault is describing in Becker, avant la lettre, the form of rationality developed more fully by behavioral economists. From this perspective, behavioral economics looks more like a reformist project, not a radical break from the Chicago School economists. In the next section, I will turn more fully to this new rationality and its emphasis on affect.

Theory and Policy: The Project in Probabilistic Affect

Foucault foresaw in 1979 the development of what would eventually become a mainstream project, as evidenced by the popular consumption of books and other media that investigate our “systematic responses to the variables of the environment” and suggest in turn various “behavioral techniques.” A list of such mainstream work would include Daniel Kahneman’s overview of his and Tversky’s research, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which has remained in the top ten of the New York Times Business Best Sellers List since its publication in 2011. Lewis’s The Undoing Project climbed to number four on the New York Times Best Seller List a few weeks after its publication. Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge has been a best seller since its publication in 2006, and its policy influence has been considerable. Sunstein served in Barack Obama’s administration as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, where, by his own account, he implemented dozens of nudge policies.⁷ All of these books call upon a great deal of specialized research and make it available to a general audience. I will refer to this threading together of technical research and popular outreach as “the project in probabilistic affect.” It deserves to be called a project because it has a set of policy aims. I also want to give it a name because I want to describe it in terms different from those that behavioral economics would use to describe itself. In doing so, I emphasize its affectual dimensions and its particular constructed-quality (rather than its universal naturalness) as a project that serves specific ends and that could possibly take a different form.

First let me describe the project in probabilistic affect without focusing on the criticisms I want to make (to which I’ll turn in the next section). The project stems from two different but related fields of psychological research: the psychology of decision-making and the psychology of cognitive dual processing. Both have been important to the field of behavioral economics. As we have already begun to see, the former finds that in many different instances, but especially when involving probabilities, our decisions are guided by feeling rather than what would traditionally be called rationality. The latter—the psychology of cognitive dual processing—provides a theory of affect that matches up well with and underwrites the research on probabilistic decision making. Both of these areas of research are applied through a number of policy suggestions, especially those put forth by Thaler and Sunstein in Nudge. Let me explain each of these areas of work in a little more detail, focusing on how together they produce and instrumentalize the project in probabilistic affect.

The psychology of decision-making is vast, but the findings most often repeated in the popular literature of behavioral economics involve bets, gambles, and other games of probability and risk. Experimental subjects aren’t very good at these calculations, at least from the perspective of maximizing their utility. They make irrational decisions (“nonstandard” decisions, in the parlance of economics), which often seem based on a feeling or impulse rather than on rational analysis. Importantly, they make the same mistakes consistently. Some examples of the research:

• • The gambler’s fallacy, where after rolling several good rolls of the dice, you expect a bad roll (or vice versa), on the theory that the odds in a game of chance must even out. In reality, you are operating more on inclination than on rational analysis. The probability of each roll is exactly the same (as almost everyone knows) and, as with the hot hand, any large number of rolls can exhibit strings of good/bad rolls. However, the intuitive-feeling decision that events are connected and your luck will change is hard to shake. That feeling affects experts who should know better and who are not playing games of chance. Researchers have shown that even experienced immigration judges are susceptible to the gambler’s fallacy when deciding asylum cases, as are bank loan officers when making decisions about mortgages, and professional baseball umpires when calling balls and strikes.⁸

• • Loss aversion, where you feel a loss much more intensely than you feel a gain. In lab experiments, subjects will characteristically risk losing $100 on a 50/50 coin flip only if they might win $200. From the perspective of the standard model of utility maximization, it is irrational to require so much surplus upside before you are willing to risk a downside. But because you dread a loss so much more than you appreciate a gain (about twice as much, it seems from the laboratory experiments), you consistently respond to risks in skewed ways, following your initial felt response more than your rational analysis. Loss aversion shapes many everyday decisions facing homo probabilis: goods bought for discounted trial periods are hard to give up when the trial ends; stocks are sold in panic at relatively minor losses; more resources are sunk into lost causes in the hope of avoiding further losses.⁹

• • The endowment effect, closely related to loss aversion, where you irrationally endow something you own with more value than you place on the same object on the open market. In the well-known experiments on this effect, participants who are given coffee mugs or pen packets (to keep as their own) typically require twice as much payment to sell their mugs or pens than they would spend to buy the mug or pens in the first place. Standard economic thinking finds it illogical to attach yourself to a mug (or a house, job, or plan for the future) so much more intensely simply because you’ve owned it for a few minutes.¹⁰

• • Predictions/projections of the future, where you are terribly and consistently bad at thinking logically about the future, and instead follow your nose and trust your feelings. There are many different varieties of this problematic relationship with the future. Overconfidence in the ability to predict the future has been shown in surveys about health, where individuals on average underestimate the possibilities of future hospitalizations. Just about everyone knows that it will take longer to finish a complex project than predicted, even as this knowledge doesn’t make one less susceptible to bad predictions about the completion date (so powerful is the intuitive sense of how the future will unfold). In field observations, CEOs and employees alike overestimate the prospects of their companies, irrationally staying highly invested in company stock, and stock traders overestimate the precision of their information about companies and make bad trades. The standard theory of economic utility doesn’t take account of such systematic overconfidence. And akin to overconfident predictions are many other kinds of prediction problems. For example, people tend to project current states into the future in ways that again and again prove wrong (yet they continue to make such projections). One of the key findings in studies of wellbeing is that individuals often believe a certain event will bring happiness or unhappiness in the future, but then it doesn’t. For example, in studies assistant professors report that they will be very unhappy in the future if they do not receive tenure and very happy if they do, but when the event occurs, there isn’t much change in reported levels of happiness. This misperception of future states plays mischief with the standard model of economic utility, which assumes that one can predict what will be satisfying in the future.¹¹• Framing, where your decisions are shaped by the way they are presented, even when you know the decisions are presented from a particular perspective. It is perhaps not surprising that the framing of a choice will play some role in the decision. For instance, when subjects are presented the same gamble in somewhat different ways (with different framing), they make very different decisions in a predictable manner. What is more surprising is just how much individuals underestimate the influence that the framing of a decision has on the decision. Research has shown the ways experimental subjects’ decisions are shaped by framing even when they know that the presentation of their choices is being manipulated. Often, however, it is very difficult to recognize the framing, as is the case in our world of media and information saturation, which taxes our limited capacity for attention. Instead of responding logically to all the available data in complex, information-saturated choices, laboratory and field subjects tend to attach themselves to the most recent and the most familiar information. The standard model of utility does take account of incentives and the interestedness of buyers and sellers, but not how much we allow ourselves to be pulled and coaxed hither and thither, even when we recognize the manipulation.¹²

All of these examples touch on probabilities—how we evaluate risk and make decisions about the future—and all of these examples suggest that we often act irrationally when it comes to probabilities—that we make such decisions by feeling rather than by calculative deliberation in relation to maximizing utility. We feel something in the ownership of the mug, we sense the hot hand, and we just know that the way we feel now will be the way we feel in the future. It is also important to recognize that these responses are not random one-offs, but are generally consistent and systematic. The findings indicate that humans are not simply irrational in these respects, but systematically irrational (and thus rational in Becker’s sense of economic rationality, as a systematic response to one’s environment). From a distance and with adequate time for deliberation, we can all recognize the irrationality, but in the moment such decisions feel just right.

There is in these findings a notion of affect, if not a full-blown and fully articulated theory. In outlining this point more fully, it is worth taking a moment to distinguish affect from emotion. As Brian Massumi says, “affect” frequently indexes a force that is “irreducibly bodily and autonomic,” rather than stemming from our beliefs, desires, or mental relations with the world (like emotions) (28).¹³ Affects don’t so much mediate, frame, or shape decisions (the way our emotions might), as much as they are the basic response upon which the decision is made: get the ball to the player with the hot hand; a series of good outcomes must be followed by a bad result; avoid losses more than appreciate gains; if it’s not working, sink more resources into it; if it looks like it will bring unhappiness in the future, it will bring unhappiness in the future. These are affective responses rather than emotional responses. It is thus salient that it’s hard to put a name to the intense response that many have to the hot hand, for instance. We have names for emotions, which derive from our somewhat discernible beliefs, desires, and mental representations of the world, but we don’t often have names for affects. Possibly a “gut reaction” or “reflex,” a “sensation” or “perception,” an “impulse”? These possibilities don’t name feelings so much as different kinds of responses to a choice or situation, responses that are feeling-related in that they reference a bodily reaction, rather than one based in reason. In other words, they index, without precisely naming, affect.

We now come to the second field of psychological research, dual processing. If the research on decision-making only gestures toward a theory of affect, the work on dual processing, important to a great deal of the key ideas of behavioral economics, provides a much more elaborate account. The dual-processing view splits cognitive processing into two very different systems or types often called System 1 and System 2 (or Type 1 and Type 2). Decisions made with System 1 are involuntary, intuitive, and uncontrolled; they are made without deliberation or rationalization. They are also made very quickly. System 1 isn’t exactly natural and nonconscious because in it one does learn rules through practiced nurture—like 2 + 2 = 4—but it often feels natural and nonconscious. It also is a fait accompli: it is hard to change or control System 1—it is what it is, and it accepts the environment it encounters, reacting to it automatically. We use System 1 when we respond to something with disgust, turn to a loud and sudden sound, or do highly practiced activities like drive a car on an open, straight road. We also frequently use System 1 when we say “get the ball to the player with the hot hand,” or when we rashly hold onto a Bitcoin investment after it loses half its value. System 1 has systematic reactions to probabilistic situations, but it’s just not very good at probabilities. Because it is automatic, and because its decisions feel nonconscious and natural, System 1 can be closely associated with the way we think of affect.

Decisions made with System 2 are the opposite in many respects from decisions made with System 1: they rely on logic, deliberation, and working memory, and thus require effort. We use System 2 when we reason out complex math problems, or identify hard to see patterns, or evaluate probabilities consciously and deliberately. System 2 isn’t affective, but rationalist. Because System 2 requires effort and the use of working memory (the kind of memory needed to do long division in one’s head), it is a limited resource requiring considerable energy and focus. The two systems have different time signatures: if System 1 decisions are fast, then System 2 decisions are slow (hence, the title of Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow).

The second key point to make about the dual-processing structures concerns the relationship between System 1 and System 2. They are in many instances understood as being in conflict with each other. System 1 says “get the ball to the player with the hot hand,” and System 2 says that the hot hand is bunk if you carefully examine the probabilities. However, the relationship is more complex than a pure, diametrically opposed conflict, in that the two systems are understood as working together while still in opposition. Jonathan Evans and Keith Stanovich, two preeminent researchers of dual processing, refer to the relationship as “default-interventionist”: “Default interventionismallows that most of our behavior is controlled by Type 1 [or System 1] processes running in the background. Thus, most behavior will accord with defaults, and intervention [from System 2] will occur only when difficulty, novelty, and motivation combine to command the resources of working memory” (236-37). Many of the policy suggestions developed out of the findings of behavioral economics employ this default-interventionist conceptualization of System 1 and System 2.

A nudge policy typically overrides or corrects System 1 decision making by figuring out how to allow System 2 interventions and make them easier. From the perspective of nudge theorists like Thaler and Sunstein, when System 1 encounters certain areas of experience—like probabilities—it needs to be restrained and guided by the slower, more effortful system in order to achieve rational outcomes. A “nudge” is a policy that provides a gentle prod or a soft push in a particular direction, not by directing or explicitly forcing, but by shaping the decision-making environment, by jiggering the “rules of the game” (to use Foucault’s previously quoted phrase describing the new “behavioral techniques”). A nudge policy isn’t a mandate or a demand, and it doesn’t provide a direct incentive like a financial fine or a tax refund. Importantly, in Thaler and Sunstein’s conceptualization it doesn’t significantly limit choices. In their view, a nudge seeks to leave open potential choices while using frameworks and structured environments to nudge an individual’s behavior toward specific decisions. (Some critics of nudges, as we will see, have found this delimiting of possible choices in turn limiting of agency and autonomy, but Thaler and Sunstein emphasize that nudge policies try to limit choices as little as possible.) Some nudges use “defaults,” like the popular nudge that automatically enrolls individuals in retirement accounts. Policy makers frequently combine this nudge with another one in which the default retirement account is low-cost and routinely rebalances according to the owner’s proximity to retirement. A similar default strategy is used when automatic enrollment plans nudge utility consumers into slightly more expensive but more environmentally beneficial “green” electricity plans. Users can always opt out of a default nudge—they can choose to invest their retirement in their own way or to continue with the established mix of coal, oil, and gas energy—otherwise it wouldn’t be a nudge under Thaler and Sunstein’s definition, but a mandate. Another category of nudge doesn’t work with defaults but shapes the decision environment when a “choice architect” (3) arranges choices in specific ways. For example, if a cafeteria is organized so that the French fries are slightly more difficult to reach and the salad is up front, it might lead to healthier decisions by molding availability while allowing all options to remain available. As Thaler and Sunstein explain, “A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions” (3). Most (perhaps all) of the nudges that Thaler and Sunstein discuss involve managing and correcting for our difficulties with probabilities. Default enrollment, automatic investment allocation, and choice architectures of various sorts find their rationale in the difficulty that humans have with calculating the present’s probable relationship to the future. But whether a default nudge or a choice-architecture nudge, the System 1 affectual response to probabilities is guided towards System 2 ends. Nudges turn non-rational, affective responses into responses that better match up with the rational, standard model of utility.

I don’t want to underestimate either the technical expertise (and brilliant creativity) or the pragmatic value of this three-prong project in probabilistic affect (the psychology of nonstandard decision making, the psychology of cognitive dual processing, and the development of nudge policies). We are better off recognizing the hot-hand fallacy in our evaluation of a potential retirement fund manager, and we are well served by understanding our propensity to irrationally endow with value, say, our current job or marriage, and it’s also certainly a good idea to appreciate the tendency to irrationally risk more and more on lost causes. But we should also ask, at what costs the pragmatic gains of the project are purchased.

Critiques: “Someone Who Accepts Reality”

There are a number of established criticisms of the project I’ve just laid out. I will not belabor the more technical critiques internal to psychological research, which have questioned the differences between naïve experimental subjects and experienced decision makers, the extrapolation of individual behavior to behaviors of markets, and the reproducibility of various laboratory studies. More aligned with my discussion here are broader criticisms of nudge policies like the critiques by the legal theorist and philosopher Jeremy Waldron. Waldron speculates that nudges affront the autonomy and even the dignity of individuals because they rely on a “choice architect”—”an elite who kn[ow] the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people) to use” (21). “There’s a sense underlying such thinking,” Waldron goes on to say, “that my capacities for thought and for figuring things out are not really being taken seriously for what they are: a part of my self” (21). Waldron is particularly interested in the claim that nudge policies are not interested in people learning from their mistakes and thus practicing a kind of agency and autonomy. Sunstein for his part (writing without Thaler in this case) has directly responded to Waldron’s argument by offering survey data that suggest just how much people approve of and even appreciate many kinds of low-cost, unobtrusive, pragmatic nudges that they feel improve their lives—hardly an affront to dignity in Sunstein’s view if so many people find nudging useful (7).

If questions of morality and of the autonomy of the self trouble Waldron, the political theorist John McMahon is concerned with the ideological work of behavioral economics. In an argument akin, in part, to the one I’m offering, McMahon sees behavioral economics as a “technology of neoliberal governance” (146) and outlines several ways that it furthers neoliberalism’s valuing of the market and the market’s diffusion into all aspects of life and policy. “Behavioral economics problematizes not the market itself, only the assumptions made about the actors on the market, whose behavior is then measured against the truth of the market,” McMahon explains. Behavioral economics “seeks not to challenge or defy the market but to provide tweaks so as to better assimilate all to the market” (146). We have seen this dynamic in nudge interventions in and corrections of System 1 “mistakes” that aim to produce more systematic (if not quite rational) actors who will better invest in retirement funds and other parts of the “portfolio society” that Ivan Ascher describes. As I have suggested here, behavioral economics isn’t so much a break from the initial American theorists of market-based social policy—like Gary Becker and the Chicago School—but should be understood as an effort to reform and thus continue fundamental aspects of their thinking.

But if behavioral economics is a “technology of neoliberal governance,” why is it so popular? This question returns us to William Connolly’s challenge to consider the “grip” that neoliberalism seems to hold on the contemporary moment, especially in light of its manifold failures. Part of the answer is that behavioral economics offers specific tools with which to address the neoliberal order’s demand that each of us becomes a homo probabilis. To some degree humans cannot escape thinking probabilistically, but the necessity of such thinking has surely intensified for people in the economically developed world over the last forty years. Behavioral economics provides specific tools for living in this kind of new world—for being a homo probabilis. Those tools are also grounded in experimental psychological science and seem to be closely connected to natural ways of being. This sense of naturalness is attractive and reassuring, but it can obscure questions about the forces behind the intensification of probabilistic thinking in everyday life.

The attachment to the project of behavioral economics also stems from the familiarity of its mode of operating. It functions along the lines of a century of self-help and therapeutic mass culture. In this well-established model, the self is understood as fractured and conflicted; it can only be put back together with the proper therapy, with various self-care products and regimes, with an idealized love. The project in probabilistic affect follows the same design: as we’ve seen, the deficiencies of the System 1 part of the subject (it is often wrong and conflicted, especially when it comes to probabilities) mean that it’s in need of an intervention in order to achieve its better System 2 self. It seems appropriate, even wise, to put guardrails in place in order to achieve a more ideal rationality. In this schema, the typical indicators of fractured selfhood—anxieties, addictions, and destructive desires—are replaced with System 1’s systematic irrationality and wayward affects in relation to probabilities. Note that the fracturing is still located at a very intimate level—the level of affect. The typical solutions to fracturing and conflict—good love or a sense of wholeness and wellbeing—are replaced with the achievement of System 2 rationality. Part of the popularity of the recent decision-making books is that they repeat the established form of therapy culture.

But there is reason to wonder if this neat scheme of conflict and repair isn’t more of a construction than it often appears to be in work on behavioral economics. The concept of System 1 and System 2 processing has produced significant and complex debates among cognitive psychologists, which are often ironed out in the writings by behavioral economists. Some of the complexities of these debates are outlined in a series of highly technical articles in Perspectives in Psychological Science from 2013. The current debates are wide-ranging and fundamental, and include questions like the following: Is dual processing actually better conceived as one process? Are the two processes associated with two different parts of the brain or with multiple different parts of the brain (thus perhaps suggesting multiprocessing rather than dual processing)? And is it accurate to understand the relationship between System 1 and System 2 as “default-interventionist” (where System 1 defaults continually run in the background with necessary interventions from System 2 as needed), or is the relationship better described as “parallel-competitive” (where the two systems operate simultaneously in competition with each other)?¹⁴ These criticisms frequently extend beyond calling for alteration in, amendments to, or further research into the theory of dual processing: instead, they often advocate abandoning it. Gideon Keren concludes his criticisms: “two-system theories offer a good story—one that ‘pleases the mind,’” but “[a]fter two decades in which two system models have blossomed yet added little if any new insights, the time is probably ripe to divert our scientific efforts into new and more promising avenues” (260-61).¹⁵

It is impossible to adjudicate these debates here, but my point is that the dual-processing understanding of cognition is far from settled science. Significantly, the further one gets from the psychological research literature in the technical journals—and the closer one gets to the mass-cultural, best-selling presentation of these ideas—the more simplified and metaphoric the dual-processing structure becomes. In their 2008 Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein present dual processing as a given, but in Thinking, Fast and Slow Kahneman speaks of dual processing as a “metaphor” (13), as does Sunstein in more recent writing. While Sunstein and Kahneman seem to recognize the debates over dual processing, this recognition doesn’t dissuade them from using the idea to structure their arguments. Kahneman writes in the introduction of Thinking, Fast and Slow: “the labels of System 1 and System 2 are widely used in psychology, but I go further than most in this book, which you can read as a psychodrama with two characters” (21, see also 48). Similarly, Sunstein references the debates but says he thinks of the identification of System 1 and System 2 “as a helpful metaphor, not a reference to something concrete in the human brain” (5). It is difficult to know what to think of these descriptions of dual processing—as a metaphor and a psychodrama. These authors seem to use the term “metaphor” or the genre of “psychodrama” as synonymous with “generalization,” “idealization,” or “helpful fiction” in that System 1 and System 2 are generalizations or idealizations that are helpful to think with—”a good story,” in Gideon Keren’s words. Ironically, rational choice theory, from which behavioral economics is attempting to escape, is itself an idealization/generalization/fiction used as a thinking tool. As a metaphor dual processing may still be useful, but we may want to ask the kind of question humanities professors like me typically ask: “What is this particular metaphor in the service of?”

The answer I’ve been suggesting is that the dual processing metaphor underwrites a popular therapy-like framework so important to the instrumentalization of behavioral economics. Homo probabilis might need something more, but in light of the constantly risk-assessing life of homo probabilis, this therapy has its attractions. We find ourselves drawn to it because it takes account of the dividual nature of neoliberal experience, in that it sees the subject not as rational, agential, and free, but as reacting to an environment and making the best of it. Not only does this therapy framework jettison liberal principles that are difficult to maintain in the contemporary world (like rationality, autonomy, and freedom), it also provides a vision of the acting and feeling subject that makes sense of that jettisoning. This new subject is better off without a false confidence in its ability to be rational, agential, and free, and it is better off with the recognition that it needs help, guidelines, and nudges. In a world where economic crises have become ever more frequent,¹⁶ this idea of the subject serves as a kind of cushioning device. It posits a subject who can ride out these crises by following pragmatic rules rather than by battling for its agency and rationality against the current of neoliberal risk-taking and dividualism. The neoliberal, to recall Foucault’s description, “is someone who accepts reality” (269).

Redirecting Probabilistic Affect

Reading through the policy theorists who ground their work in behavioral economics and enthusiastic reports from the field of choice psychology in popular media, I am frequently reminded of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” The unnamed narrator of Melville’s story—a lawyer on Wall Street in antebellum New York—is a great nudger, if only his scrivener, the strange Bartleby, would allow himself to be nudged. Bartleby, however, famously refuses. Initially he refuses his mind-numbing job as a scrivener who repetitively copies documents and reads contracts, and eventually he declines to speak, eat, or even move. The generally kind and well-intentioned boss-narrator tries to nudge Bartleby to cooperate and participate in the law firm’s work by suggesting that Bartleby will be healthier, wealthier, and happier if he does so, if he would simply be reasonable. Variations on the word “reason” appear a dozen times in the story. But in agreeing to be nudged, Bartleby knows, on some level, he will be offering consent to a larger system or supposition—a system of reason and labor that is also a system requiring a particular kind of subject and sense of agency—and he prefers not to do that. Eventually, he prefers not to live at all.

Bartleby isn’t a neoliberal subject. He doesn’t live by risk, probabilities, and investments in his own human capital, as much as he lives by an older economy of factory-like regimentation that restricts his autonomy and freedom. He doesn’t live by the logics of twentieth-century therapy culture (although the lawyer-narrator does call upon the logic of sentimentalism, a nineteenth-century version of self-help). But I do think we can imagine a current-day Bartleby. He would say no to the policies derived from behavioral economics for a number of different reasons. They limit agency and prevent us from learning from our decisions because they so often operate as defaults and through difficult-to-discern choice architecture (as Waldron suggests). They seem like individualized solutions to large-scale, public problems—how to take care of an aging population or impending environmental catastrophe. They have not been able to confront the structural inequalities associated with race and gender. But perhaps the current-day Bartleby (who, like the nineteenth-century Bartleby, resists interpellation) would also say “no” to nudges because they underwrite and produce a particular kind of subject, one who is seen as in need of rules and nudges in order to be a better calculator of probabilities and thus a better inhabitant of neoliberalism.

Alternatively, it is difficult to see what our contemporary Bartleby might respond to with a “yes.” It’s an important question because we do need projects that go beyond critique. In imagining such a project, we might well want to pay close attention to the same kind of everyday reasoning, choice, and error that cognitive scientists and behavioral economists detect, if only we could take those lay responses in a different direction. What I’ve called the project in probabilistic affect has explained everyday experiences, but it has often been bent on correcting that experience toward a standard of rationality that will allow people to mesh better with markets. How might we use this knowledge to a different end?

A redirection might begin by exploring what is learned if we don’t correct what has been called System 1 responses. The scholarly investigation of affect in the humanities and the social sciences is diverse, but it takes as a central interest the breakdown of the long-held dichotomy between feeling and thinking, affect and reason. Affect is understood across an array of fields—by neuroscientists like Antonio Demasio and by philosophers like Martha Nussbaum (who have very different ideas of what affect is)—as inseparable from decision making and discerning interactions with our world. The choice psychologists and the behavioral economists inadvertently and unwittingly overlap with this work in the sense that they take seriously what was previously cast off as mere impulse or irrationality, and, importantly, they develop an understanding of that affect as nonrandom and systematic. But when it comes to the question of what to do with this affectual knowledge, the answer often given by behavioral economists has been to correct it into a different kind of knowledge. If instead we ask what these affective responses might teach us, we might find ourselves in a different place. For instance, what is the idea of the hot hand good for? Most of the limited work on this question focuses on its evolutionary importance. The hot hand requires few resources and limited information, and it is good at identifying short-term patterns quickly. For these reasons, it may have been evolutionarily selected. Rhesus monkeys, a recent study by the psychologist Tommy C. Blanchard and others suggests, use the hot hand to find food, and the strategy is particularly successful when encountering “clumpy resources” (280) in the environment (often the case when foraging for food) rather than randomly distributed resources. In other words, food tends to be lumped together in the wild because of environmental conditions that are hard to discern rationally, but the affectual draw to the hot hand experience might help identify these resources. This way of understanding the hot hand shifts the focus from the subject who is mistaken in his thinking to the environment, where something is different or changed and a new pattern has emerged. To put this shift in terms of basketball, the sense of the hot-hand might be used to identify a “clumpy resource” in, say, the form of an unrested, slightly injured, or hungover defensive player. It’s not that the offensive player is “hot,” but that the environment has changed. Such changes in the environment can be extremely difficult to identify rationally on the fly; the affective hot-hand sense might be better at noticing them. As the psychologist Gorka Navarrete notes, “From an ecological standpoint it is rare for one to observe sequential events that are completely independent of each other” (1), as in situations characterized by chance. How we might incorporate the knowledge available in hot-hand experiences (or the experience of loss aversion or the endowment effect) into our larger social structures remains an open question.

One of the most surprising findings in the behavioral-economy laboratory is that individuals are not as purely self-interested as the standard economic model of the rational agent has assumed. In one particularly simple lab experiment, called the Dictator Game, subjects will give away part of their holdings to anonymous others without social pressure. In addition, where the standard economic model suggests that self-interested people only work with as much effort as required by the market, in field observations people have worked harder for higher pay and gifts (and also have been less productive in response to lower pay and labor disputes). In these experiments and observations, individuals seem to have a social preference—a feeling for others—rather than a preference for pure self-interest. The literature on nudges, dedicated as it is to individual choice making, has thus far not been particularly interested in how to maximize this preference or affectual orientation to any great degree, when in fact it might well be one of the most important orientations for any society to maximize.¹⁷

A modern-day Bartleby might well say “yes” to further thinking about the knowledge available through so-called System 1 responses, finding them rich terrain for developing the social compact rather than responses to be corrected. Because these responses are nonrandom and predictable, they may serve as a foundation for policy, and because there seems to be at least a tendency toward social preferences, such policies might also tend toward the nonindividualistic and intersect with an ethics or might help provide a structure for public values. As Amanda Anderson has made us aware, recent attention to affect in the humanities has often ignored the need for both foundational structure and ethics (9–10). Our imagined Bartleby may also helpfully note that what we have been taught to think of as System 2 (and value as our goal) comes with its own deficiencies. Daniel Kahneman, often less sanguine about the policy uses of his findings than others who use his work, observes that System 2 misses things as it focuses its working memory and other deliberative energies on calculation and reasoning. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in The Invisible Gorilla discuss what is perhaps the most famous example of the shortcomings of System 2 dependence: about half of the viewers of a short video miss the appearance of a women in gorilla suit (clearly on screen for nine seconds) because they have been asked to count the number of times a ball is passed between players on one team while ignoring the other team. Kahneman notes about this experiment that “we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness” (24). In other words, appealing to System 2 as an interventionist corrective to System 1 may be little better than relying on the standard model of economic utility to describe or normalize human behavior. We may not want to discard System 2, but we may want to think carefully about its overvaluing.

The picture of the subject that begins to emerge from placing more emphasis on System 1 responses—more attention to social preferences, and less faith in System 2 deliberations—is very different from the picture of the subject that emerges in either liberal theory (agential, autonomous, rational) or neoliberal theories and policies (someone who accepts reality, a dividual who needs guidance). Within behavioral economics there are findings that might be put to work in very different ways than have thus far been used. What this essay’s observations recommend is not the dismissal of behavioral economics as a technology of neoliberalism, but a much-expanded project in probabilistic affect that redirects some of its findings, hopefully toward the unmaking of homo probabilis and toward a kind of new subject, a new “homo___________.”

Footnotes

1. The original hot hand essay has produced a considerable body of follow-up research and meta-analysis across a number of fields (and a number of sports and other activities). Most of this work supports the debunking of the hot hand, but some of this work debunks that debunking. For a helpful overview of at least a sample of the research, see Michael Bar-Eli, et al., “Twenty Years of ‘Hot Hand’ Research.”

2. For important accounts of neoliberalism and affect that serve as touchstones for this essay, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism and Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy. My essay also engages with the historiography and critique of neoliberal subject making, and it contributes to recent but still underdeveloped criticisms of behavioral economics as a technology of neoliberalism (this work is discussed in detail in the section “Critique: ‘Someone Who Accepts Reality’”). Because this essay offers a critical perspective on behavioral economics as popular psychology, I count as kin—if at times distant kin—works like Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will”; and Daniel Horowitz, Happier?

3. Ascher allows us to see the connections to an early form of capitalism when he explains that what we have seen in the last forty years is a new kind of “enclosure of the commons”—an “enclosure of the market” (85-107). If for Marx one of the foundational moments of capitalism’s development was the enclosure of land held in common by communities, resulting in the forced migration of people to the cities where they had little choice but to enter the labor force as supposedly “free labor,” then for Ascher one of the foundational moments of neoliberalism is the “enclosure” of welfare state programs (pension funds, state-sponsored medical care, public schooling), forcing people into markets (401Ks, private insurance, privatized public universities). Individuals, rather than communities as a whole, face risk. The switch to such limited and individualistic focused thinking is a continuation of the shift made by the Chicago School toward human capital and away from questions of large-framed constituencies of labor and capital. For complementary accounts of this recent history and the structuring of the neoliberal subject, see Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation,” and Wendy Brown’s reading of Foucault’s neoliberalism lectures in Undoing the Demos, 47-78.

4. The concept of the “dividual” is important to Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, as well as to others who often trace it back to Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” but a fuller account of its history and origins in anthropological research is provided by Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words, 101-124.

5. The break between traditional economic theory and behavioral economics is repeated in just about all the books about decision making and behavioral economics written for a popular audience. See for instance Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational. Ariely notes that “the very basic idea, called rationality, provides the foundation for economic theories, predictions, and recommendation, … [but] “wouldn’t it make sense to modify standard economics, to move it away from naïve psychology” (xx) that understands humans as acting rationally. For similar understandings of a break with traditional economics, see Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Sway, 17-19, and David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit, 6-7.

6. Michel Feher quips: “Becker largely remains a neoliberal theorist trapped in a utilitarian imagination. Thus his relationship to the neoliberal condition may one day be described as that of G. W. F. Hegel to Marxism—or, for that matter, as that of Moses to the Promised Land” (27).

7. I have already mentioned books written for a popular audience like Ariely, Predictably Irrational; Brafman and Brafman, Sway; and Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit. Other significant books in this niche of mainstream publishing include Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide; Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing; and Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice. Center and center-left news outlets like National Public Radio and the New York Times energetically update their audiences on the findings and arguments of the science of decision making and its economic ramifications through columns like “Economic View” and shows like “Freakonomics Radio.” TED Talks on the subject abound.

8. In these bullet points I have, of course, greatly simplified the discussion of these various findings, and I have concentrated on areas of research that are often repeated in the popular literature. One of the best technical overviews of the findings in behavioral economics is Stefano DellaVigna, “Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field,” and I have used DellaVigna’s work as a guide to the key academic papers (on the gambler’s fallacy, see 344-345). For field research on the gambler’s fallacy in immigration court cases, loan applications, and major-league umpiring, see Daniel L. Chen, et al., “Decision Making Under the Gambler’s Fallacy.” On the similarities and difference between the gambler’s fallacy and the hot-hand fallacy, see Peter Ayton and Ilan Fischer, “The Hot Hand Fallacy and the Gambler’s Fallacy.” Kahneman focuses on these problems with large and small numbers (109-118). Thaler and Sunstein discuss the gambler’s and the hot-hand fallacies in Nudge (27-31).

9. On the $100/$200 gamble, see Kahneman 284; the surrounding pages discuss loss aversion and associated issues in great detail (278-288). DellaVigna outlines the research on loss aversion (324-326), and the examples of some of its real-world consequences are taken from those pages. Thaler and Sunstein address loss aversion at several points (33-34, 122-123) and propose several investment and personal finance policies to correct for its mistakes.

10. For the foundational accounts of the endowment effect in the technical literature, see Richard Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice,” and Daniel Kahneman, et al., “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias.” DellaVigna discusses application of the endowment effect to understand behavior in housing, financial, insurance, and labor markets (328-335). Kahneman dedicates a chapter to the endowment effect (290-299), and Thaler and Sunstein present a number of policies to mitigate the endowment effect in retirement investing, such as default plans which automatically rebalance retirement funds by proximity to retirement (132).

11. DellaVigna offers an overview of the academic research on prediction and projection problems (341-344, 346-347), and the examples of the real-world consequences are taken from these pages. The work on future emotional states, like happiness, has been investigated by the psychologist Daniel Gilbert and made popular in his bestselling Stumbling on Happiness; see especially 113-117.

12. Kahneman frequently discusses framing; see especially 363-374. DellaVigna discusses decision-making when the framing is well-known as well as decision-making under conditions of attention overload (347-360). In Thaler and Sunstein, the academic work on framing is essential to the conception of “choice architecture” (11-13, and passim) explained in this essay.

13. “Autonomic” refers to the autonomic nervous system. Massumi is one of the central proponents of affect as bodily and pre-personal, and, as such, a category wholly separate from emotion and feelings, which are personal and social in his view. But this particular understanding of affect, and what follows from it, are by no means accepted by all in the voluminous writings on the subject, and I don’t wholeheartedly accept Massumi’s position. Rather, I find that the distinction between affect and emotion/feeling is helpful in describing the experience of probabilistic decision making as it is discussed by Tversky, Kahneman, Thaler, Sunstein, and other behavioral economists. In these pages I will think of the behavioral economists as theorizing affect—even though they don’t use this term—in ways that overlap in some respects with the affect theorists proper, like Massumi. At various points throughout, I attempt to navigate some of the central debates in affect studies, although adjudicating these debates is not my purpose here. For a critical overview of affect studies (helpful for mapping the field as well as providing a specific argument about its shortcomings), see Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect.”

14. On the single-system position, see Arie W. Kruglanski, “Only One? The Default Interventionist Perspective as a Unimodel”; on the multi-system position, see Elizabeth A. Phelps, et al., “Emotion and Decision Making”; on “default-interventionist” and “parallel-competitive” theories, see Evans and Stanovich, “Duel Processing Theories” (227).

15. It may seem strange that the unconscious—so central to the understanding of the self and decision making in the humanities—plays no role in this account of System 1 and System 2, but that is certainly the case. Behavioral economics is little interested in the Freudian tradition. I’ve tried in this essay to focus on some of the problems with what behavioral economics does endorse rather than consider traditions that it ignores, but the absence of the unconscious calls for further inquiry.

16. There is little doubt that financial crises are more frequent than ever before. A 2017 Deutsche Bank report (a missive from the heart of the beast) found that “prior to the post WWII Bretton Woods system, financial crises existed, but the frequency was not as intense as the post Bretton Woods world [early 1970s to present]. Interestingly this period between the mid-1940s and early 1970s was the longest stretch without an observable financial crisis for 200-300 years” (Reid et al. 10).

17. DellaVigna offers an overview of research in social preferences (and the Dictator Game) (336-341). Thaler and Sunstein have little to say about social preferences but suggest two nudges focused on charitable giving that involve an automatic giving plan and a special credit card/account for charitable gifts (231-232).

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